An epilogue assesses the impact of the antiwar movement. Both activists and scholars disagree over its significance. Despite common misperceptions of the movement by the public, antiwar activists generally represented mainstream American political values. While the movement did not stop the war by itself, it imposed real limits upon presidential decisions to escalate American military expansion. Movement activists overwhelmingly waged peace using the tools of democracy to align the nation’s practice with its most righteous vision.

A liberal reformist core dominated antiwar activities through the end of 1966. That year the movement maintained a predominantly decentralized orientation, both lacking and resisting true national coordination. Primarily through grassroots activity, the movement incorporated new constituencies and provided alternative sources of information that challenged the government’s credibility. Antiwar activists pursued change largely through the established political system, but also in coalition building for mass demonstrations and draft resistance. Dissent within the government became more visible, which gave wartime dissent a degree of respectability. Protesting napalm production signified an early economic challenge, and the case of the Fort Hood Three exemplified cooperation between active-duty military and civilian antiwar activists. Despite continued growth and some impressive achievements, the movement also faced more significant government and right-wing opposition, and the war’s continued escalation left many activists feeling frustrated and alienated.

In 1965, an antiwar movement with disparate constituencies united uneasily in a loose coalition, but remained so amorphous that no single entity could provide either leadership or direction. Local actions built around teach-ins, the international days of protest, or as independent events, dominated antiwar activism that year. Peace liberals and pacifists pursued moderate actions such as lobbying, education and persuasion, legal and peaceful rallies, and picketing, while hoping for change through an international solution or the electoral process. Radicals and leftists connected the war with domestic injustice and questioned some fundamental assumptions about American power. Despite its limitations, organized dissent provided a significant enough challenge that the Johnson administration felt compelled to push back. Government officials mixed efforts to persuade public opinion with denigrating activists as communist-inspired or threatening protesters with military induction. President Johnson aimed his April negotiating proposal and a brief December bombing halt over North Vietnam at impressing his domestic critics as much as his foreign adversaries.

The Vietnam antiwar movement moved along mutually supportive paths; one within the formal political system and one outside. Dissent within the government expanded over time. Distinct elements of the outsider movement exerted greater influence at different points. Liberal reformers dominated until 1967 and after mid-1971, and intermittently during election campaigns and the fall 1969 Moratorium. Leftists were most evident during major coalition events of 1967 through the May Day demonstrations of spring 1971. Massive student protests in both 1968 and 1970 were ideologically ambiguous. Drawing encouragement and political leverage from the “outsider” movement, federal and state legislators and officials in the executive branch played their most significant role in collaboration with the activist core after 1971.

After President Lydon Johnson announces a massive increase in US troop levels in South Vietnam, American Catholics become more deeply engaged in debating the war, particularly in terms of morality. The radical Baltimore protest attracts attention to the Catholic antiwar movement.

Drawing on the burgeoning scholarship on the Global 1960s, this chapter argues that the Vietnam War was a key historic event that internationalized radical social movements. The war did so in three main ways. First, through the conflict, activists in different parts of the world formed a global public sphere. Opposition to the war helped to transcend Cold War and colonial divisions, but the political movements that emerged resonated differently through various parts of the First, Second, and Third Worlds. Second, resistance against the Vietnam War fostered internationalism by foregrounding the agency of the marginalized. The war featured a David versus Goliath competition between a presumably backward, peasant society against the mightiest military in the world. Third, the wars in Southeast Asia helped to internationalize antiwar resistance by illuminating the interconnectedness of various systems of inequality. Imperialism and colonization became part of the activist lexicon, utilized to interpret cultural, racial, class, gender, and other forms of exploitation. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the agency of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front in consciously cultivating these antiwar internationalist affiliates.

Nineteen sixty-eight was an exceptional year in which people across the world mobilized in protest against imperialism, authoritarianism, and Cold War hegemony. The “Global 1968” has come to represent an era of social and political transformation, and its meaning has been debated into the twenty-first century. This chapter provides an overview of two major events that challenged the bipolar world order in 1968 – the Tet Offensive and the Prague Spring – and explores how the Vietnam War and Vietnamese people influenced protest movements around the world in this historic year. The Vietnamese communist revolution became a global symbol of anti-imperialism and Third World self determination, while South Vietnamese dissidents carried out protests for freedom and democracy that mirrored uprisings in other parts of the world.

The connection between literature about war and humanitarianism is complex. The war novel tends towards a human rights ethos that demands accountability for war atrocities. These novels express antiwar views, whereas humanitarianism’s genealogy in the laws of war reflects an acceptance of war as inevitable. Humanitarian discourse deploys a narrative paradigm that sees human suffering in war through trauma. In fiction, it frequently foregrounds the role of doctors and nurses as witnesses to war’s suffering. The resulting attention to victims’ disempowerment effectively reinforces the global inequality of lives and is problematic. This chapter argues that postcolonial literature of war offers a counterwitnessing that exceeds the affective accounts of trauma narratives and foregrounds the breach in humanitarianism’s imperative to save lives. Postcolonial literature’s critical engagement with war centers on the achievement of radical equality and visibility of all lives.

This essay explores women’s antiwar activism in New York, California, and Kansas demonstrating the national breadth and regional diversity of pacifist and peace organizing. The essay identifies some of the individual women who raised their voices and pens against the war and includes some of the antiwar and pacifist organizations women created or joined including the Woman’s Peace Party, the People’s Council, and the Union Against Militarism. It argues that women of the First World War peace movement linked state-sanctioned violence in war with state-sanctioned violence against women, children, and the poor. Women thus contributed to the process by which the peace movement transitioned from defining peace as the absence of war to defining peace as the presence of social, economic, and political justice.