Vietnam, Protest, and Counterculture 483Kerry’s words, though powerful, were ultimately empty, for in Paris
Kissinger was playing politics and in Vietnam Nixon was making war. As for
Lieutenant Calley, he had become something of a folk hero to the political
right, with Charlton Heston and other celebrities sponsoring a defense fund
for him. After his conviction, Calley spent three days in military prison until
Nixon released him into House Arrest; three years later he was paroled and
now runs a pawn shop in Columbus, Georgia. In the village of My Lai, there
are a number of memorials to the victims of the slaughter there.
The War at Home and the Counterculture
While dissent within the military was vitally important, the civilian antiwar
movement is far better known. Over the course of almost a decade of fighting,
millions of Americans opposed the Vietnam War. Beginning with small pro-
tests on college campuses and elsewhere in 1964, to the public protests that
began shortly after that, through the often- huge demonstrations in the later
1960s, the antiwar movement was an important factor in any discussion of
Vietnam.
The movement began among young people and intellectuals–professors,
writers, journalists, theologians, and such–and spread beyond that into all cor-
ners of American life. While the media often portrayed the antiwar protests as
dominated by hippies and Communists, the typical demonstrator was probably
a middle- class Caucasian with strong political or moral reservations about the
war. The anti-Vietnam War movement emerged from various sources, espe-
cially in the “Ban the Bomb” campaign of the 1950s and 1960s, among the
“Beatniks” in cafes, and in SDS, which organized the first large-scale resis-
tance to the war. In 1964, after the Tonkin incident, SDS held the first antiwar
demonstration and about 25,000 showed up to criticize the war. At around
the same time, over 3000 students participated in the first “teach-in”–a series
of debates and lectures about Vietnam with supporters and critics of the war–
at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and in May 1965, 122 colleges,
linked by phone to Washington D.C., took part in the biggest teach-in to that
point. Many young men started burning their draft cards or committing acts
of civil disobedience against selective service offices or other government
installations. For instance, protestors in Oakland blocked trains carrying troops