How does current antiwar activism compare to that of the Vietnam era, and what effect has it had?
Activism is much higher than it was in the ’60s. You hear the opposite. People say, “Well how come we don’t have a 1960s style anti-war movement,” [but] people have completely forgotten that anti-war protest was so limited in the ’60s. Most people don’t even know that John F. Kennedy attacked South Vietnam outright in 1962. That was war, but there was no protest. You could barely get three people in a room to talk about it. It was years before a protest developed. In October 1965, when there were already hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops in South Vietnam and the country had been destroyed, we had the first national day of protest in Boston. It was broken up by counter protests, and to the applause of liberal press. At any comparable stage, the protest is far higher right now than it was in the ’60s. It did develop in the late ’60s into a significant enough force to truly influence policy, as has already happened with Iraq. That’s part of the reason there are constraints on the exten
