I just caught up with the Andrew Sorkin movie about the Chicago 7 showing the anti-Vietnam activists at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 being prosecuted in federal court during the following year for having incited rioting. Sorkin did a good job making the plot coherent and showing the different points of view and Sorkin, as usual, punched up some telling lines, but I felt that the whole enterprise was wrongly focussed. The trial was just an anticlimax after the events that had happened in the previous year, the images of the actual riots much more profound than a trial that was so clearly a show trial that not even the prosecution didn’t want to pursue it and a judge so biased that there was no doubt about who was the bad guy. No contest on the issue of free speech versus authoritarianism. Sorkin tried to create some controversy by comparing Tom Haydn as the one who said that all the programs depend on what happens to the vote in opposition to Abbie Hoffman saying that the demonstrations were creating a cultural revolution. So the movie had a dramatic clash between the two ideologies: Haydn as a traditional political organizer and Hoffman as crafting a new way to do politics. But that wasn’t the larger issue. Sorkin showed Haydn, at the end of the movie, reading off the numbers of people who had been killed in Vietnam during the time of the Chicago 7 trial. That was what the war was about: its carnage and the attempt to stop that. That was the view all the characters in the film portrayed as the gravamen of the war. David Dellinger, one of the Chicago 7, had indeed been a conscientious objector on the grounds of being a Pacifist. Joan Baez, a fellow traveller of that time, said she was a Pacifist because she was against violence, though she demurred that non-violent resistance against Hitler would have had many casualties before the German people had blanched at the number of deaths.
That, for me, however, was not what the protests were about. It wasn’t the numbers of people who died. There were many people in equal or greater numbers who had died in the two World Wars and pretty much the same numbers who died in Korea which seemed to be wars that were necessary evils. What was wrong about Vietnam was that it was so wrongheaded: Vietnam was a nationalist rather than a Communist expansionist war; Vietnam had been a traditional enemy against China and so would not ally to that; the Vietnamese would not negotiate away their independence as if they were the UAW bargaining with Lyndon Johnson about what favors to trade off. The war had no useful purpose and so all the sacrifices in life and treasure were also unnecessary and I even argued that a modicum of sense would lead draftees to refuse to take up arms. They were not conscientious objectors on the immorality of war but, rather, selective objectors to the politics of the political war. Some might say that you can’t run a military if they pick and choose which war to support, but I thought that was a good way for the military to avoid going into war unless it was supported by the people, which was the case in American wars until Vietnam, something that was available to force against the war: there was a draft that made the war very personal. Was it worth dying for? That political pressure is not now available because after Vietnam there has been a volunteer army that does not require public approbation. The military are no fools, even if it took a generation for an all volunteer army to come up to its prior high standards for raw material and training. My strong provisio at the time was that draftees had the choice of refusing to serve by fleeing to Canada or finding some medical or other excuse to legally avoid serving, which happened to Dick Chaney, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, as well as to myself and my friends.
As I remember, I had so been shocked by the Chicago police gassing the legitimate protestors while protestors chanted "The whole world is watching", which was true enough in that the network stations had live reports of the gassing under klieg lights and the footage was indeed conveyed all around the world. Also, Martin Luther King, Jr. had been recently killed, and Bobby Kennedy a few months afterwards so that, ever since then, I would turn on the tv set as soon as I got home to see who had been assassinated now, the fad of assassinations moving past in that there have been no attempts at it since 1981, when Reagan was wounded by an assassin. So the trial of the Chicago 7 was just a side issue. I also remember Gene McCarthy bringing some of the demonstrators into the hotel so that they could shower off the teargas, while Hubert Humphrey was kissing the picture on the tv set in the same hotel when his wife Muriel made her appearance on the convention audience, as was customary for the wives of a probable nominee. That said it all. I remember Abe Ribbicoff, then a Senator who had been in the JFK cabinet, trying to rally the Kennedy forces behind George Macgovern, should something electric happen. Speaking at the podium, Ribicoff said “And if George McGovern is elected, there will be no fascists on the streets of Chicago”, at which the nearby delegate Mayor William Dailey, jumped up to say, “Get that Kike off the platform!” These were deep feelings made manifest in open television rather than behind closed doors. Assassinations had made a difference. Killing Robert Kennedy took the sails out of the anti-war movement. But the anti-war movement shouldered on. And, even so, the Democratic Coalition held together, despite the debacle of the convention, to come within half a percentage point of Humphrey winning the 1968 election, and he probably would have done at least as well as Nixon did in getting out of Vietnam.
I was very concerned about what Nixon would do and I was correct to be wary. The time Nixon used to de escalate the war took as long as the time it took to build it up and each half had about the same number of casualties. It was all very sad. I was considered a "Left McNamara-ite" in that it was time to get out of Vietnam because it was clear that the U.S. had lost the war. MacNamara said decades later that there wasn't sufficient expertise about Vietnam to show the war would fail, but that was just a lie. There were experts galore in campus “sit-down” discussions as they were called and in national debates who showed that the war wouldn't work, given the nature of the Vietnamese people and the inability of the U. S. to stand up to our puppet regime though I did wonder whether the overwhelming force that the US entered in 1965 made me wonder whether the US might pull it off even to no good purpose. What happened instead was that the war, which lasted for seven or eight years, seemed to me and my friends to have lasted forever.
Tom Haydn, erstwhile intellectual, just didn't agree with my "realpolitik" which is the point of view that nations maximize their interests against one another, no morality in it. As Henry Kissinger put it: nations have temporary alliances but permanent interests. That was my view in the Sixties because me and Barack Obama (him later) studied the same book when at Columbia, Hans Morgenthau’s “Politics Among Nations”. Vietnam was wrong because it made no sense. I have modified rather than contradicted my view in that nations also have to create alliances with those who have sympathetic affinities. That was the case with England and the US in World War II and even with Israel and the US ever since 1948 even though a US-Israel alliance contradicted the American self interest at least until recently.
Kissinger’s fear that the nation would collapse, like Weimar, if the United States had had a great defeat, or at least avoided having the defeat until after the American war was over, did not come to pass, partly because Kissinger had successfully managed to keep control of the South China Sea after the Vietnamese took over the entire country, thanks to the now forgotten Magsaysay Incident, where the US went after the Vietnamese for having attacked an American ship, and largely because most Americans aren’t interested in foreign policy. Vietnam has become a successful nation and has reconciled with the United States, preferring it as an ally to an ally with China, which is what the anti-war people had said all along. U. S. warships now visit Cam Ranh Bay, the giant naval establishment originally built by the Americans to make it a center of their war.
The real significance of the Vietnam War was that it changed the military. A conscripted army is unreliable because they can protest or vote against a war because the war doesn’t suit them. The military moved to an all volunteer army even though it took a generation to evolve into a professional force in that the original recruits to a volunteer army were poor in skills. The result meant that the US government had a free hand in engaging in warfare without much consideration of public opinion. That occurred with Kuwait, which Popi had a choice about that had been egged on by Margaret Thatcher, and in the Iraq War, whose figleaf was weapons of mass destruction that never happened and the real reasons for which remain unclear. The popular outcry against 9/11 would have supported a war against Afghanistan, but the political leaders were still so uncertain about popular support that they did not send in American troops to clear out Osama Bin Laden when they might have lest the American people was soured by the casualties. By and large, the military is allowed small wars, such as the one against ISIS, and there is no prospect of a large war, that one to be done through cyberspace rather than by soldiers.