“How Many Hellroads Must a Man Walk Down?
Recent American Pro-Palestinian Campus Activism in Historical and Personal Perspective
As loyal readers know, as of Friday last The Raspberry Patch has completed Part I of The Age of Spectacle manuscript. We will continue with Part II soon, but as indicated last time we will first present a long-form essay entitled “How Many Hellroads Must a Man Walk Down?: Recent American Pro-Palestinian Campus Activism in Historical and Personal Perspective.” I plan to post both parts today before sundown, since ideally the essay should be read as a single long read. Part II of The Age of Spectacle will begin not this Friday but next, on October 11.
A small part of this essay has already appeared in a Raspberry Patch post as an addendum to Age of Spectacle material, in August 23’s Age of Spectacle, No. 19—the part relating to Randy Kehler. I ran that section on August 23 because I had just drafted it in the wake of Kehler’s death and the appearance of a misleading obituary in the Washington Post. (I’ll have more to say about the WaPo in a moment.) I did it in part because all writers appreciate a convenient hook, and because space was available for the purpose. If you read the August 23 post at the time and remember it you can always skip or skim this repeated text, or you can appreciate it perhaps in a fuller context by reading it again. Either way, I’ll never know.…
Before launching the first part of “How Many Hellroads Must a Man Walk Down?” I do have a few remarks about recent events in and around Israel. One reason is that the content of “How Many Hellroads Must a Man Walk Down?” is not entirely irrelevant to still-developing events in the Levant and reactions to them here in the United States, reactions increasingly affected by the building crescendo of our political season. But the essay does not dwell directly on these events, only tangentially.
That said, Raspberry Patch readers may use their free access to the archive to retreat back to the fourth post, of January 14, entitled “Lebanon Agonistes.” There you will find some pertinent background to what is happening in and around Lebanon right now that the mainstream U.S. press, print and broadcast, seems either uninterested or unable to provide. And so, as promised, to The Washington Post.
Yesterday’s paper (October 1) carried a 27-paragraph front-page story on Israel’s limited ground incursion into southern Lebanon without ever once mentioning UNSCR 1701 of 2006. That Resolution represented the Security Council’s unanimous judgment (or it would not have passed) that Hizballah must remove itself from southern Lebanon to beyond the Litani River. Unfortunately, that never happened and neither the Security Council as a group nor any subset of it, including the United States and its allies, lifted a finger to enforce it. All the while Lebanese sovereignty was being suborned and digested bit by bit by Iranian intrigues as part of Teheran’s effort to surround Israel with deadly missile-bearing terrorist groups and, at the same time, to wage a ceaseless Intra-Islamic Cold War against the Sunni Arab world—a world including two countries with peace treaties with Israel and a world with significantly more than two allies and varyingly useful associates of the United States.
Western countries get wrapped righteously around their axles over cross-border aggression (read: Russia and Ukraine) but they somehow manage to ignore similarly sovereignty-snuffing aggression that is less kinetic and more sub rosa. (Read—or re-read—“Lebanon Agonistes” for some depressing recent details…..) Then, when regional powers are forced to resort to self-help to do what the so-called international community did not deign to do, many of the “adult” powers of the West get all huffy about it, demanding that—in this case—Israel use a knife and fork instead of a Stihl chainsaw to butcher a monster. Hizballah, a wholly owned subsidiary of Iran and its IRGC, is now getting its ballahs handed to it by the IDF. Fine; but this should not have been a chore left to Israel to undertake alone, yet that is what the fecklessness of the haughty has brought about. It is churlish in the extreme for them to now complain about the aesthetics of the matter.
To its credit, the Biden-Harris Administration has mostly said and done the right things throughout the period since October 7, 2023, particularly so in recent days. Those who have criticized the Administration for being too meek and too fearful of entangling escalations—in the Ukraine-Russia set-to as well as in the Levant—have not, in my view, taken into full consideration the essential disappearance of the line separating domestic politics and foreign policy. We are now amid a proverbial October Surprise, and both the incumbent President and Vice-President understand, as so many outside analysts apparently do not, that if they lose the politics of the moment lurching toward November 5 than quibbles about policy and verve will quickly become just so much pointless noise.
Getting entangled or yanked into a shooting war with Iran over the next five weeks, for reasons having mainly to do with Binyamin Netanyahu’s own very self-interested political calculations, will not help the Harris-Walz campaign, even if everything goes swimmingly well militarily. Domestic politics in at least four, and maybe more, countries are festooned all over the clot of above-the-line-of-sight policy collisions that form the current war crisis.
But the Administration’s caution is apparently not nearly cautious enough for the editors of the Washington Post. As yesterday’s front-page article rolled over to page A12 one espied one of a few accompanying articles entitled “Israel probably used U.S.-made bombs in Nasrallah strike, visuals show.” Probably?! Where else would the IDF get ordnance of that sophistication, from Denmark or the DRC or maybe Thailand? The only purpose of this article was to persuade readers, in effect, that Israel’s action makes the United States complicit in an action that will harm the U.S. image and hence its interests in the region, so everyone should support Bernie Sanders’s efforts to truncate U.S. arms provision to Israel and use the supply relationship as a tool of U.S. diplomatic extortion.
Not what the article said, but what it was, what motivated an editor to assign and publish it, nauseated me. I’m no fan of the current Israeli Prime Minister and never have been, but I can distinguish Bibi’s parochial and bent interests from those of the State of Israel. Can the editors of the Washington Post do the same? And do they not realize that the vast majority of Hizballah’s victims over roughly the past four decades have been not Jewish Israelis but Sunni Arabs—not to mention 241 Marines and scores of Amcivs? Do they really not know that Nasrallah’s elimination evoked dances of joy in the streets of Irbid and other towns in Syria and elsewhere in the Sunni Arab world? Are they more pathetic than malicious or more malicious than pathetic? It’s hard to tell sometimes.
On a lighter note and last by way of prolegomenon, somehow my friend Claire Berlinski and I miscommunicated some months ago about the existence of The Raspberry Patch. Claire is the mastermind behind The Cosmopolitan Globalist, on whose editorial board I serve. I was certain I told her about starting up The Raspberry Patch just after New Year’s Day 2024, and she is just as certain I didn’t. Doesn’t matter; she knows now, has told her subscribers, said nice things about me, and re-issued my Jan. 14 “Lebanon Agonistes” backgrounder for her readers. As a result, several new Raspberry Patch subscribers have signed up. One or two even shelled out a few dollars in so doing. If you are among new Raspberry Patch subscribers headed here from The Cosmopolitan Globalist, welcome. If you are veteran Raspberry Patch readers, you should check out The Cosmopolitan Globalist if you don’t already know of it. Claire is a force of nature, indeed of almost hurricane intensity from time to time--but mostly benign. Actually, very benign.
* * *
How Many Hellroads Must a Man Walk Down?: Recent American Pro-Palestinian Campus Activism in Historical and Personal Perspective*
Planets sometimes line up metaphorically as well as astronomically. They do so propitiously when you win the lottery, annoyingly when a trouble triplet doubles as an interruption of your all too scarce serenity. Sometimes, however, they line up for no evident reason when events out there align with one’s personal life in here. My 1995 book Telltale Hearts: The Origin and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement and my 2009 book Jewcentricity: Why Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Just About Everything did just that thanks to the pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel campus upheavals of recent months.[1]
This alignment is cloying. Stubbornly resisted truths about the counterproductive consequences of violent protests now collide with myriad hoary exaggerations about Jews to send a bittersweet undercurrent running through my emotional veins. I have been forced to relive now-twinned frustrations concerning the febrile consistency of human nature: Most people tend to believe what they want to believe regardless of evidence or logic; and these days more than ever, it seems, they prefer pulse-raising exaggeration over mundane but more profound truth. The result of this twinning is depressingly predictable: Things will not end well and, possibly worse, sometimes they will threaten not to end at all.
Nonetheless, celestially speaking, a silver lining may abide. As anyone who has struggled to write a non-fiction book knows, valuable insights, even approaching wisdom, can occasionally come from these efforts. I refer to intellectual treasure, not royalties. (The royalty planets have never properly lined up for me.) Indeed, books on topics like those treated in Telltale Hearts and Jewcentricity often have aftermaths of two kinds: New material sometimes appears as a result of discussions after publication (I relate an example below); and the world has a way of furnishing new confirming examples of one’s arguments, if they are correct, even long after a book’s arc of notice drops below the horizon (I mention an example of that, too).
* * *
The basic thesis of Telltale Hearts is that, contrary to widespread self-preening urban legend nurtured during the quarter century preceding 1995, the antiwar movement did not shorten the Vietnam War or lead to U.S. de-escalation and eventual withdrawal from Southeast Asia. It probably had only a minor impact on the skein of politico-military developments during the time the movement was most radically active, but to the extent it did it did so counterproductively. The protests lengthened the war via a phenomenon known as the negative follower effect—a key theme in a 1973 book by John Mueller titled War, Presidents and Public Opinion.[2] The result was that more people got killed, Southeast Asians and Americans both, not fewer.
While Telltale Hearts’s core thesis was not entirely original to me—though the notion did occur before I discovered and read John Mueller’s opus—the book revived it from the dust of intellectual memory. Mueller was too far ahead of his time to affect the recrimination-heavy debate that followed the ugly April 30, 1975 fall of Saigon. Thanks in part to a quarter century’s worth of since-minted hindsight, I also interpreted the thesis through a broad cultural analysis absent from the then-extant literature, adding an original secondary thesis: However modest its impact on the ebb and flow of war, the antiwar movement mightily advanced the mainstreaming of countercultural themes at home, a development with anything but a trivial impact. It wasn’t what the antiwar movement demanded that ended up making a difference, but how and for what imagined reasons it demanded it.
Plenty of wiser heads understood at the time that the campus-centric protests of the mid-to-late 1960s and very early 1970s—especially at their most explicitly anti-patriotic, obscenity-laced, violent, and disruptive—aided the Johnson Administration and later the Nixon Administration in managing ruffled public opinion over the war. Far more Americans loathed the antiwar movement than had misgivings about the war and its managers. Having bought time using the negative follower effect as currency, these two administrations proceeded to lay down the policy traces they did, for better or for worse. Policy failure so profound that it could not be ignored even despite the blinding blandishments of groupthink is what eventually caused the government’s change of heart, not attempts to levitate the Pentagon or other forms of stoned-out New Left shenanigans.[3]
If one appreciates irony as the art form of a coldblooded historical process, the pairing of a search-and-destroy U.S. military strategy in Vietnam that was counterproductive with the counterproductivity of the antiwar movement arrayed in opposition to it is really hard to beat. If Edgar Allan Poe had written “The Gift of the Magi” it might have turned out feeling as depressing as the O’Henry original was uplifting.
As a generation passed, the granularity of wartime political consciousness gave way to cascades of selectively amnesic wishful thinking. At the time, handicapping how antiwar movement antics might shift the domestic political calculus looking to the 1968 election, and then the 1972 election after it, was understood to be a complex business given the molten ambivalence of public opinion about the war. All that complexity washed away in the minds of most movement veterans who became certain in retrospect that “democracy in the streets,” to cite the title of one self-congratulatory mid-1980s memoir among several, all of them redolent of narcissistic hubris, changed the collective mind of the nation, thus forcing an end to the war.[4]
That revisionism, however, failed the most elemental logical test: Had the antiwar movement really been as broadly efficacious as its aftermyth claimed in transforming the mentality of the nation, that surely would explain why Democratic nominee George S. McGovern trounced Richard M. Nixon in the 1972 presidential election.[5] Ahem: There was no changed mind of the nation. The nation never repudiated the goal of the war, only blanched at the rising costs. Insofar as the war became more problematic to the American public as time passed and U.S efforts failed to achieve victory, the fact that Vietnam was the first televised war had far more to do with shaping opinion than anything the antiwar movement did.[6]
No matter how in-your-face they may be, facts are powerless to leverage egos so laden with ideological flapdoodle that they become rationally immovable—especially when those egos, and the heroic stories they told themselves and younger others as the years rolled on, represented the vanguard of a new and enticing countercultural edge promising blameless hedonism and affluent ease to the upwardly mobile scions of a burgeoning middle class.
The years continue still to roll but the Vietnam antiwar movement aftermyth has, if anything, grown even stickier. A textbook quality example is Harrison Smith’s August 9, 2024 Washington Post obituary of Randy Kehler.[7] Kehler is the antiwar pacifist, a leader of the War Resisters League who headed the WRL’s diadem-in-the-crown San Francisco office, who inspired Daniel Ellsberg to leak to the New York Times what became The Pentagon Papers.[8] Harrison describes that 1971 leak as having “galvanized the antiwar movement,” among other things. That statement may be true at the outer margin of reality, but it is false as intended and as most WaPo readers were likely to understand it.
By June 1971, when Ellsberg’s leak became public, the radical phase of the antiwar movement was exhausted. The last big gasp of that phase was the October-November 1969 Moratorium demonstrations, which had included both centrist and radical elements in its organizing group. The Moratorium coalition split after those demonstrations and by early spring 1970 two groups competed for leadership of the movement: the re-centered Moratorium and the new Mobe, now called The People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice.[9]
With the sharp if temporary escalation of the war in April-May 1970 with the bombing of Cambodia and Haiphong Harbor—an act of hopeful coercive diplomacy by a Nixon Administration seeking a route out of the war for the United States via what was called Vietnamization—most American campuses exploded in rage. Certainly the Penn campus did; I was there, a second-semester freshman. Classes were suspended, exams cancelled, and, not incidentally, the Weather Underground consolidated itself and started making bombs. But the movement as a whole nevertheless shifted back toward the center from whence it had departed after mid-1965. It did so partly because the inside-the-system mainstreamers against the war realized that antiwar radicalism had been counterproductive to mobilizing opinion against the war. By mid-1971, between the Weather Underground going radically feral along with the Afro-American shard of the radical antiwar core in the form of the Black Panthers, nothing much remained of the more radical organizational directorate.
So when the Moratorium then tried to gin up large demonstrations during the spring 1971 semester, without the radicals delivering the crowds, they mostly fizzled. By 1973, after the Nixon Administration ended the draft on January 27 of that year, the antiwar movement’s increasingly deflated balloon came to resemble a flattened used condom; ergo: The movement had had its fun but, alas, it was unproductive.
Why did this happen? Two reasons mainly.
First, it had become clear that the Nixon Administration sought to wind down the U.S. combat role in the war without losing it, and in 1972 its main strategic resource to that end became public: the diplomatic opening to China that, in theory at least, was supposed to restrain Soviet support for North Vietnam and thus provide lubrication for diplomacy. But second, by 1970 at the latest, the surge of recreational drugs had arrived at scale in American youth culture, and many Sixties radicals, now with a few more years behind them, moved on to other delights and causes. No one saw the transition gaining traction more clearly than Tom Wolfe in his classic The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test:
A very carnival! And it wasn’t politics, what he said, just a prank, because the political thing, the whole New Left, is all of a sudden like over on the hip circuit around San Francisco, even at Berkeley, the very citadel of the Student Revolution and all. Some kid who could always be counted on to demonstrate for the grape workers or even do dangerous things like work for CORE in Mississippi turns up one day—and immediately everyone knows he has become a head. . . . [H]e now has a very tolerant and therefore withering attitude toward all those who are still struggling in the old activist political ways for civil rights, against Vietnam, against poverty, for the free peoples. He sees them trapped in the old “political games,” unwittingly supporting the oppressors by playing their kind of game and using their kind of tactics, while he, with the help of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite regions of human consciousness. . . . .[10]
A last word on Smith’s contribution to the Vietnam aftermyth: He refers matter-of-factly to the Pentagon Papers having “revealed years of government lies and deceptions.” The Pentagon Papers was a classified secret history of the war ordered written in 1967 by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Note: McNamara was one of the movement’s primary bad guys; but had he not ordered the history written, there could have been no leak of it. Why the order?
The document, running some 7,000 pages, was assembled from the trove of memoranda and other documents in possession of the U.S. Government because McNamara wanted to understand what had preceded his tenure so he could make better sense of the mess he had inherited. Not surprisingly, the research effort revealed no shortage of poor intelligence, misperceptions, sheer stupidities, incoherence-producing bureaucratic power plays, and “shaped” CYA-style messages mainly from the Defense Department and the CIA to the White House. Some of this language then poured forth into public statements, some of which, in turn, were launched into the public domain to palliate an increasingly restless Congress and electorate.
To depict this normal if desultory process as wholly “government lies and deceptions” is to engorge the corollary myth of the “deep state,” formerly called “the military-industrial complex,” that has now migrated with alacrity from Left to Right. Who thinks that if current Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin or his successor were to order a secret review of U.S. policy with regard to Russia from the eve of its 2014 seizure of Crimea--or going as far back as Russia’s 2008 rape of Georgia--to the outbreak of war in Ukraine in February 2022 and beyond, the result would have a much different tone?
Of course the presumption that all politicians lie is common urban legend in the United States today, and not only in the United States. Max Hastings, a British journalist who wrote a book about the Vietnam War, recently opined as follows:
It has become a cliché to shrug that we now inhabit “the post-truth age.” But we shouldn’t idealize the past. In the pre-post-truth age, which covered everything from the dawn of time, kings and priests, then politicians, lied to their peoples. FDR lied. John F. Kennedy lied. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon lied prodigiously, and so too did Ronald Reagan—remember the Iran-Contra scandal?[11]
This is cynicism misplaced, and misplaced for a reason obvious to anyone who has worked in government at relatively high levels. Public statements by high officials are uttered under the shadow of a constant multiple-audience problem, to wit: To share strategic judgments publicly with the American people is also to share them with adversaries who may profit from knowing them. Marketing information in an inherent part of strategic behavior, so sometimes the plain truth can be injurious to the national interest if it is unfurled in public. Two examples: In 1941 FDR sent the USS Reuben James on a mission knowing it would probably be sunk by a German U-boat with substantial loss of life; that was the only way, he believed, to move public opinion toward supporting a war he believed necessary, but could not yet say so out loud. Churchill let the Germans bomb and substantially destroy Coventry Cathedral in June 1942 without issuing any warning to the nearby population because he did not want the Germans to know that the Brits had broken top-secret German “Enigma” military codes. He could not admit that at the time, for stakes far more strategic than a cathedral were to hand. Were these and many other far less dramatic wartime equivocations simple lies, as the Harrison Smiths and Max Hastings of the world would have you believe? It takes a genuinely inexperienced fool to think so.
A former Marine, Daniel Ellsberg did understand all this. He also deeply distrusted and flatly disliked antiwar radicals, but Kehler, a self-anointed pacifist saint, was different: He was not angry, obscene, violent, or volubly anti-patriotic. He was not a Communist, avoided the exertion of waving North Vietnamese flags, and refrained from taking blotter acid as a routine recreational aid. Ellsberg swooned, thus becoming the modal historical whistleblower, his iconic deed serving as the default justification praising all the oath-breaking Mannings and Snowdens out there, whatever their motives and however much damage they did.[12]
It is fair to say that Randy Kehler’s role in the publishing of The Pentagon Papers provided a boost to the by-then re-centered antiwar movement—though Harrison makes no distinctions about antagonistic tactical tendencies within the movement nor suggests any; but to what palpable end exactly? What did the “galvanized” antiwar movement then actually achieve?
Short answer: Nothing. Alas, the Kennedy-Johnson Administration that had presided over the vast majority of the so-called lies and deceptions was already gone. The newly galvanized movement, on the other hand, did play an important role in making George S. McGovern the Democratic nominee for President in 1972. But it was McGovern’s massive defeat that then enabled the second Nixon Administration to further draw out the war for another roughly five and a half miserable years, getting lots more people killed for the sake of what ultimately became a failed exercise in coercive diplomacy. Had the U.S. Government rapidly exited its combat role after President Lyndon B. Johnson’s throw-in-the-towel national television address of March 31, 1968, as some wiser heads in the Democratic Party then favored—including one of the Party’s foremost hawks, Scoop Jackson—the reputational damage would not have been nearly as severe as that caused by the calamitous, highly telegenic fall of Saigon in late April 1975.
The truth is that the U.S. government exited combat in Vietnam the same way it entered: The Government led, and the people followed. The manner of entrance if not the entrance itself was a mistake, and the latter amounted to an admission of that mistake. In between the human wreckage qualified as countless folly, and it reverberated for years to come. It is impossible to prove, but it may even be that the Carter Administration’s unwillingness to prevent Islamist fanatics from seizing control of Iran in 1978-79 was a “Vietnam Syndrome” effect; certainly, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who resigned over an attempt to use force to free American Embassy hostages in Iran, was a poster-child victim of said syndrome. All that was of course nothing new in the tapestry-fashioned annals of human history. It was deeply disturbing all the same.
* * *
The thesis of Jewcentricity was similarly simple as that of Telltale Hearts. Exaggerations about Jews and Judaism, which are legion for reasons examined in the book, fall into a two-by-two matrix defined on one axis by positive versus negative exaggerations and on the other by non-Jews and Jews voicing them. So the four quadrants are: (1) negative exaggerations by non-Jews; (2) positive exaggerations by non-Jews; (3) negative exaggerations by Jews; (4) positive exaggerations by Jews—in other words, antisemitism, philosemitism, Jewish self-hatred, and Jewish chauvinism. The argument is that all four quadrants are historically interactive such that no one quadrant can be understood fully without reference to some or all of the other three. That includes anti-Zionism, which is often (but not always) a species of antisemitism in secular political manqué.
So here we are in early autumn 2024, ruffled by the recent aftermath of pro-Palestinian protests bathed in Jewcentric exaggeration of several kinds, one kind of which will be predictably counterproductive to the Palestinian cause. Dov Zakheim, a student at Columbia during the 1968 upheavals, put the truth about the 2024 version this way back in May:
[I]n contrast to what took place in 1968, the Columbia protesters . . . harassed Jewish students who identified with Israel, at a minimum calling them supporters of genocide and often using far more repulsive epithets. It is highly doubtful that such behavior, coupled with property damage and the disruption of campus activities, has actually helped the Palestinian cause. Many Americans have sympathized with the Gazans whose homes have been bombed, who have been displaced and who have suffered from shortages of food and medical care. But the violent campus protests, like the blocking of bridges across the country, are certain to alienate all but the most committed supporters of the Palestinians in general and Hamas in particular. And Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his right-wing cabinet allies are certain to benefit most from any shift in public opinion away from support of Gaza’s populace.[13]
If that emanation of the negative follower effect isn’t attention-arresting enough, consider that had the protests and their court of mayhem resumed and endured long enough into the onrushing fall semester, they might have significantly aided Donald Trump’s re-election as President via the same negative follower effect that helped elect Richard Nixon to the Oval Office twice: once in November 1968 and again in November 1972.[14] Thankfully, fall semester protests have been very muted compared to last spring’s, although they may recrudesce now that the fighting has spread out from Gaza. Still, the pro-Hamas outrage outside Union Station in Washington on July 24, 2024, in which the American flag was replaced with a Palestinian flag and burned along with an Israeli flag, certainly harmed the Palestinian cause.
To follow the negative-follower-effect one step further: The far Left protests outside the Democratic National Convention in—where else?—Chicago in mid-August 2024 should have had the effect of communicating to independent and varyingly confused voters, some of them drugged by Fox News and One America into thinking that Democrats are all Communists, that the very unpopular themes being paraded about outside the Convention meant that those were themes not popular inside the Convention. All else equal, that was good for the Harris-Walz ticket that needed and still needs to campaign toward the center, particularly in a moment when Nick Fuentes was trying to take the Trump campaign hostage so as to prevent it from campaigning toward the center. Too bad the Chicago protests weren’t larger and more over-the-top than they were.
* A small and by now aged sliver of this essay appeared as “Waltzing Down the Road to Hell,” Quillette, May 27, 2024.
[1] Published, respectively, by St. Martins/Macmillian Press and John Wiley & Sons.
[2] (John Wiley, 1973). Mueller’s copious research and analysis reflected the writing style of political science at that time (and still): completely bloodless. (Not that Mueller lacks style or grace: He danced well and even wrote a book about Fred Astaire!) Wiley published Mueller’s book as well as mine and, as it happened, he served as a reader for my submission. That’s how we got to know each other and, despite our different styles and views on some issues, we got along well enough to work successfully as author (him) and editor (me) on essay projects in subsequent years.
[3] My view of the war can be gleaned from three essays as well as from Telltale Hearts: “Aftermyths of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement," Orbis, Fall 1995 (reprinted in Current, March 1996); and “That Lousy War: Explaining Vietnam,” First Things, December 2000 and “Mythed Opportunities: The Truth About Vietnam Antiwar Protests,” Center for the Study of America and the West, Foreign Policy Research Institute, June 1, 2020.
[4] The reference is to James Miller, Democracy Is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago (Harvard University Press, 1987).
[5] For those who need a reminder (or had yet to be born), Nixon won the electoral voted of 49 states and garnered around 60 percent of the popular vote. McGovern won only Massachusetts and, for what little it was worth, the District of Columbia. That is a true, genuine, throbbing trouncing.
[6] A great deal was written at the time about the impact of television on popular opinion. For one postwar summation, see Michael Mandelbaum, “Vietnam: The Television War,” Daedelus 111:4 (Fall 1982), pp. 157-69.
[7] Smith, “Peace activist who inspired leaker of Pentagon Papers,” Washington Post, August 9, 2024, p. B4.
[8] David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest appeared 20 months after the leak, in November 1972, and it gathered far more readers than The Pentagon Papers did. The reason was obvious; The Pentagon Papers read like the unedited bureaucratic copy it was, while Halberstam was a talented writer. But The Best and the Brightest could not have been written—at least not the way it came out—had it not been for Ellsberg’s leak.
[9] An accurate contemporary description of the state of play inside the antiwar movement is Francine du Plessix Gray, “The Moratorium and the New Mobe,” The New Yorker, January 3, 1970.
[10] That’s page 356 in the dog-eared paperback you’re likely to find somewhere. You could look it up.
[11] Hastings, “Rising misinformation: From Russia’s war propaganda to America’s post-truth crisis,” BizNews, August 19, 2024.
[12] Harrison mentions in passing an add-on to the aftermyth of the antiwar movement: a 1997 docu-hagiography of the Kehler-Ellsberg connection, entitled “An Act of Conscience,” narrated by the ubiquitous no-opposition-to-the-left Hollywood character Charlie Sheen.
[13] Zakheim, “Campus riots undermine the Palestinian cause, but Netanyahu’s allies undermine Israel’s,” The Hill, May 3, 2024. See also Hamza Howidy, “Message From a Gazan to Campus Protesters: You’re Hurting the Palestinian Cause,” Newsweek, April 26, 2024, quoted in Jeremiah Johnson, “Caring Isn’t Enough,” American Purpose, May 17, 2024.
[14] Truth to tell, Vietnam and the antiwar movement probably had only a knock-on impact in the November 1968 election; a more powerful negative follower effect issued from the somewhat related—in the electorate’s mind, anyway—Black Power movement, then in full fulmination mode in the shadow of the Newark summer riots following the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.