AN UNSETTLED PEACE 241The previous map shows us an official narrative of
the Vietnam War, one in which the United States
acted as a protector of democracy against a stealthy,
subversive, and well-funded enemy. This anti-war
map produced five years later squarely rejects that
view of the war.
President Johnson’s decision in 1965 to bomb
North Vietnam and to expand the ground war in
South Vietnam sparked massive opposition on the
home front. Initially, the anti-war movement was
largely limited to teach-ins and draft counseling on
college campuses, but by the end of 1967 a majority
of Americans considered the war a mistake. The
United States had deployed hundreds of thousands
of troops, and had dropped a bomb tonnage
exceeding that of all the theaters of World War II;
yet South Vietnam remained unstable. Even more
shocking to Americans at home was the Tet Offensive
of January 1968, a coordinated series of attacks
throughout South Vietnam that took US forces by
surprise. Though the offensive was a military failure
for the North Vietnamese, the news footage exposed
the frightening gap between the military’s optimistic
claims of progress and the chaos and confusion on
the ground. In February, the administration’s call for
additional troops confirmed fears of an unwinnable
war. More demonstrations followed, and President
Johnson stunned the nation in March by announcing
he would not run for re-election.
Johnson’s decision was just one moment in a year
of terrible domestic unrest, division, and violence.
In April, Martin Luther King, Jr.—now an opponent
of the war—was assassinated in Memphis. In June
Robert Kennedy too was assassinated, after his
victory in the California Democratic primary. And in
August the entire nation watched the Democratic
National Convention descend into chaos over the war,
both inside the hall and in the streets of Chicago. The
fragmentation of the party enabled Richard Nixon to
win the White House by campaigning on a platform
that included the end of American involvement
in Vietnam.
Nixon’s promise of “Vietnamization”—a pledge
to transfer responsibility for the war to the South
Vietnamese army—proved hollow, for in early 1969
the United States began secretly bombing Cambodia.
By the end of that year, Time, Newsweek, and Life
magazines had covered the terrible massacre at
My Lai, where in March 1968, American troops had
followed orders to murder hundreds of unarmed
Vietnamese civilians. The My Lai revelations outraged
REVOLT
National student strike map, 1970 the country, and served as a sobering sign that
something had gone horribly and intolerably wrong
with the American mission.
The opposition to the war remained strongest
on college campuses, reaching a fever pitch in
the spring of 1970. On April 30, President Nixon
announced air strikes to destroy the Cambodian
bases from which the communists were operating
against South Vietnam. Within two days, a National
Strike Committee had been organized in New
Haven, and another two days later eleven eastern
universities published an open editorial calling for a
nationwide student strike. They charged Nixon with
violating congressional jurisdiction by acting without
a declaration of war, and for perpetrating a “sham”
policy of Vietnamization that cynically cloaked an
expansion of the war into Cambodia.
In an era before digital communication, the
sheer pace of these efforts reflected an impressive
level of grassroots coordination and discipline
that is captured on this map. Most likely produced
by activists at Stanford, it locates more than one
hundred campuses where students had pledged to
boycott classes on May 6. In a way, the map is an
early effort at crowdsourcing, for it depended upon
campus activists to report their efforts to the leaders
of the movement.
The red imagery across the poster conveys the
four ambitious demands of the strike: withdrawal
from Southeast Asia, the impeachment of Nixon,
the release of imprisoned war protestors, and an
end to war-related activities on university campuses,
including military contracts and recruitment. In the
foreground an officer lies on the ground, while an
overturned army bus burns at left. Protestors fan out
across the map—as they had across the country—
while an American flag stands aflame at half-mast.
The editorial calling for the strike became front-
page news in the May 4 New York Times. That day
was tragically punctuated by the shooting of four
students at Kent State University by the Ohio National
Guard. The deaths at Kent State galvanized even
greater opposition to the war, and over the next week
hundreds of campuses erupted in protest. The sheer
volume of anti-war demonstrations convinced many
across the country that the war was unwinnable.
The ground invasion of Cambodia ended the
following month, and troop deployments declined
rapidly thereafter (even as the bombing of Laos and
Cambodia—and the war in Vietnam—continued).
As the administration brought the war to a close,
Congress passed the War Powers Act, an effort—
albeit unsuccessful—to rein in the power of
the executive in foreign policy.