 Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ms. Elizabeth Christian, President of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation. Good afternoon. On behalf of the Board of Trustees of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, I welcome you to the second day of the Vietnam War Summit. Controversy and debate is critical to the success of this summit. Last night, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said on this stage, in a statement that's bound to generate serious discussion that he does not blame U.S. policy for the quagmire and stalemate of the Vietnam War. Instead, he believes the massive split in public opinion about the war was what ultimately caused the conflict to end the way that it did. Today, we're going to explore the roots of that split, hearing from people who were uniquely involved in both widening the gap and in reporting it in the media. In our second session this afternoon, two legendary journalists will discuss the influence the media had in shaping our perceptions of the Vietnam War as it played out in newspapers, magazines, on the radio, and in evening news broadcasts. This unparalleled coverage brought the war's brutal reality and its ever-rising casualty numbers into our living rooms every night. Our third session this afternoon will feature two renowned photographers who will share their Pulitzer Prize-winning work documenting the war. They'll talk about how photography affected the way Americans literally saw Vietnam. But now for our first panel. We'll take a look at the divisions the war created throughout our country as the anti-war movement grew and support for the war eroded. It is my pleasure to introduce the participants and moderator for our first panel, The War at Home. Tom Hayden served 18 years in the California legislature and is the author of 20 books and many articles. He has spent more than 50 years in social movements beginning with the Freedom Rides of 1960. He was the founder of SDS, Students for a Democratic Society. He was a community organizer in Newark and was a controversial vocal and high-profile leader of the anti-war movement. Mr. Hayden has lectured and taught at Harvard's Institute of Politics, UCLA Labor Studies, and Scripps, Occidental, and Pitzer Colleges. David Marinus is an acclaimed journalist and associate editor at The Washington Post. He is author of six best-selling and award-winning books, including They Marched into Sunlight about the Vietnam War's Battle of Ong Thanh and an anti-war protest at the University of Wisconsin. David Marinus won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 1993 and has been nominated for the Pulitzer on three other occasions. Marilyn Young is a professor of history at New York University where she teaches courses on the history of U.S. foreign policy, the politics and culture of post-war U.S., as well as those on the history of modern China and the history and culture of Vietnam. She's the author of numerous books, including The Vietnam War's 1945 through 1990, for which she won the Berkshire Women's History Prize. Finally, Robert Shinken. Mr. Shinken is a acclaimed writer of stage, television, and film, and he will be moderating this afternoon's discussion. He's the author of 14 original full-length plays and the movie The Quiet American. He has won the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, the Writers Guild Award, and has been nominated for two Emmy Awards. Mr. Shinken adopted his own Tony Award-winning play All the Way about Lyndon Baines Johnson, and it will debut on the HBO Network next month. Thank you very much for joining us here today. I want to start off by thanking the LBJ Library and Director Mark Uptegrove for creating this extraordinary event, which is so much in line with LBJ's vision for the library and a conversation which I hope will be repeated all over this country. I was so moved by yesterday's panels, I know that everybody will have had their individual experience, but my takeaway, the thing that stuck with me, was a statement by Ms. Galloway, her very trenchant injunction to us all, hate the war, love the warrior. Hate the war, love the warrior. With that in mind, it is absolutely appropriate before we begin to acknowledge those veterans who are in our audience today, whether they served in Vietnam or any subsequent conflict. To you men and women, we thank you for your service to our country. And I also want to add to those individuals in the audience who participated in the anti-war peace movement, who by exercising their conscious constitutional rights, we thank you for your service to the country. Hate the war, love the warrior. I'm so pleased at the panelists we have here, people who represent a wide range of experience and politics, but who have all thought very deeply and passionately about these issues. The title of our panel, of course, is How the War Divided a Nation and Shaped an American Culture. Well, fortunately, we have 50 minutes, so we'll just whip that out and then get on to Iraq and settle the national debt. You know, when I think about Vietnam, it seems to me that it created for everyone an almost unendurable moral conflict. Presidents, privates, citizens, all. We are not here today to refight old battles, no matter how tempting that might be. And while I don't expect to be turning any swords into plowshares up here, what I think we all hope is that for a moment we will get beneath the rhetoric and really talk and engage in a muscular way with our history. And in doing so, come to a more complete and honest understanding of ourselves and of our nation. I truly believe that healing, real healing, only begins with such conversations. Our discussion will fall into two parts. The first will be about the anti-war peace movement and the second on its larger effect on the American culture. And I'm going to start with Marilyn here. I'm going to ask you to give us a little bit of context because it seems to me, and I am not a historian, let me say that right on the top, that there is a fairly muscular history in America of civil disobedience in regard to foreign wars, I think of Henry Thoreau in jail protesting the Mexican-American war or the draft riots in New York City during the Civil War. Maybe you would just give us a little context about the anti-war peace movement, which I'll hear and after refer to as the movement and save us a little bit of time. Okay, if you don't mind, people, I don't know how many of you were here last night, but I just want to correct something that Henry Kissinger said, because I think it's really important. Kissinger said that there had been no carpet bombing in Cambodia, that the United States had bombed along a narrow five-mile strip and had succeeded in its goal and reduced American casualties. So I looked it up because I knew that was wrong, but I wanted to get it exact. The United States dropped 2,756,941 tons of ordnance on Cambodia in 230,516 sorties on 113,716 sites. So just for the sake of historical accuracy. Now, some in the audience may feel that that was perfectly justifiable, but it wasn't a five-mile bombing strip. You asked about civil disobedience. Civil disobedience and indeed many of the tactics employed by the civil rights movement and then by the anti-war movement begins with the labor movement, really. I think civil disobedience certainly in terms of the Mexican-American War and several other conflicts, but the tactics developed by the labor movement sit-ins. When you took over a factory and just sat in it and as part of a protest, there were strikes, moratoria of various kinds. The knowledge of that didn't disappear, but it all went sort of underground in the 50s. When McCarthy so, or McCarthyism, so dominated American politics, their protest was really very, very difficult. All protesters were labeled communists, many were jailed. Protests during the Korean War, for example, one of the most unpopular wars the United States has fought, was barely visible. It was in Poles, but now out on the streets. So what I think happened is that the civil rights movement ignited really a mass movement in this country, North and South. And what started to happen is that a growing number of Americans realized that the country they thought they lived in, peaceful, just, honorable, didn't exist in terms of African American population and maybe never had. It was a kind of an easy recognition of the way in which the patriotic metanarrative that we all learned in school was inaccurate at the very least. The civil rights movement and what it brought to the front in terms of understanding and rewriting the history of the United States, the tactics, the bravery, the courage, all of that fed into very directly in terms of personnel, for one thing, Tom, I know, myself, into the anti-war movement. And by 1963, beginning in 1963 and then building steadily as the war itself built, the anti-war movement sort of took over. Yes, that's a... I'm so pleased that you brought us to the civil rights movement. And Tom, I don't know, everyone knows Tom, of course, as one of the leading voices of the anti-war movement. They may not be aware of his service in terms of civil rights. Tom was a freedom writer, one of those extraordinary individuals who put their bodies on the line in challenging Jim Crow and was beaten for it. And I wonder, Tom, if you could just, for a few minutes, just talk about this more precise connection between the civil rights movement and the anti-war peace movement. Thanks. Thank you for your welcome. I was a student editor at the University of Michigan and used to visit Austin to meet with people like Ronnie Duggar and Rob Burlage and my first wife Sandra Kasen. They were all involved in the anti-war movement after they were involved in the civil rights movement. I was conscripted to be a freedom writer at a bus terminal in Albany, Georgia. And I was told that I should be beaten up and not fight back. And my wife was told to stay away at a distance so that she could take scrupulous notes for the YWCA which employed her. The YWCA? Correct. And it was a time when Vietnam was a very distant object in my sight. We were more devastated by the Cuban missile crisis that had occurred when we were very young and traumatized so many people. But it was the civil rights movement. It was the young people from black communities in the south who first opposed the war, who first opposed the draft. They were being drafted in the largest numbers and sent directly to the battlefield in a disproportionate number as well. And this is 1960, 61, 62 mind you. It's not 68. And I think people like Cassius Clay became Malcolm X in people's minds. It was all one big black resistance. And Muhammad Ali was one of the ones that refused the conscription on religious grounds. But it was mainly a black movement that was rising among young people at the time. And I became a freedom writer and a civil rights activist and I was living in Atlanta and Vietnam was still some distance in my mind, although we quickly knew that 17,000 advisors were there. We immediately knew that the draft was coming. I went down to see my draft board and went to New York to an induction terminal and I'll never forget there's like a hundred naked 17-year-olds in the same place kind of shivering. And I was assigned one Y and I said Y1Y, Y1Y, what do you mean? And they said if the communists hit the beach you're going to be called up. So I was in a... Wait, which beach? Beach of course. Not Da Nang. I would be called up in case the war came home. It is so interesting this ironic juxtaposition of the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement of Vietnam, particularly here because President Johnson of course was a huge supporter of civil rights and did so much for civil rights and yet would find himself in opposition to a movement that had grown out of civil rights and indeed the civil rights movement will shortly take a sharp turn away and we're going to touch on that a little bit later. But I want to bring David into the conversation here if I may. You know, one of the things that is often talked about is the generation gap. That is this idea that there was an older generation, the greatest generation and their children or grandchildren who then became the counter-cultural revolution that there was some substantial difference in character or class or attitude or something and David's book which if you haven't read, I can't recommend enough, they marched into sunlight, talks about this in such a beautiful and compassionate way and I wonder if you would say a few words about that book and what you did with that because I think it really speaks to kind of what we're trying to get at here. I'll come at it a few years later than Tom, the book takes place in 1967 but it's when everything is still up in the air, it's before the Ted Offensive, it's before Walter Cronkite saying the Vietnam is a stalemate so nobody knows and it's before people know where the anti-war movement is going to end up. So there's that energy of not knowing at that point what's going to happen next. The generation gap in 1967 was not what it would become in 68, 69, 70 when I arrived at the University of Wisconsin campus in the fall of 1967 the largest membership group on campus was the young Republicans. There was a panty raid that got more coverage than the war. That fall. So but I was one of millions of kids from the post-war baby boom generation who were just coming of age then and it seemed like every week was a year that there was so much transformation and change through every week of that period starting for me in the fall of 1967 and so the event that two events that my book hinges on one is a protest at the University of Wisconsin against Dao Chemical Company the makers of Agent Orange and Napalm the other was a battle in Vietnam during the period when General Westmoreland was asking President Johnson for more and more troops if we just had enough troops like US Grant in the Civil War and went out and found the enemy held them in place and killed them we would win the war. These two events are going on at the same time in the book but both of these involve a beginning of what would become the generation gap because of what my generation saw as either deception or falsification or a belief that they were inculcated in during their younger years of America's greatness which seemed to fly in the face of what we were facing at that point but in 1967 it was just really in some sense although the Civil Rights Movement had been going on for a long time the mass movement you had many people like Tom maybe 300 or 400 University of Wisconsin who actually knew what was going on in Vietnam and were studying it and could talk about it in a very intelligent deeper historical way and then you had thousands of kids who were just starting to learn about it at that point. Again there's the irony here the protest against Dow at the University of Wisconsin and the charges laid against those students as being unpatriotic and of course as we now know Agent Orange has gone on to be one of the worst killers of those brave men and women who served in Vietnam. One of the connections and ironies you might say of the two very different it seems like they're completely different worlds and in what was going on in Vietnam but they're about the same thing but one of the connections which is both tragic and meaningful is that here were these students protesting against Agent Orange and Napalm holding a civil disobedient sit in at the commerce building and so many of the soldiers who survived the battle that I wrote about over the last 10 years have been dying of different bladder one after another all attributed to that year they spent in Vietnam in an area that was just overloaded with Agent Orange. I'm interested in taking a moment here to talk about why there was such passionate resistance to the war and to examine what I'm going to call four wellsprings of this we're not going to get too deep in the weeds here but it is important it is important to get the history right and all too often I feel that we kind of skate past things we sort of jump over so we're going to touch on four issues here I'm going to ask our panelists to respond to them the first one and all of these sort of fall under the heading of why are we here and you saw this lovely video this beautiful video has put together explaining yet again why we are here and so the first of that is this we made a promise promises were made and yet it seems to me that the United States made a lot of promises to a number of different people at different times and there is a certain selectivity about which promises we honored and which ones we didn't so I would like to just talk about that and focus it very narrowly on the United States what is your relationship with Ho Chi Man at the end of World War II we did have a relationship with Ho Chi Man so if I could just toss that out and we could do the panel maybe Marilyn you would like to speak to this can I just say one thing about the generation gap and that is that one of the earliest protests was a full page ad in the New York Times on the part of prominent ministers Fazdik, Niebuhr I remember the others, that was 63 so there was a whole grown up peace movement and maybe one has to distinguish between the peace movement and an anti-war movement they are certainly connected but there might be interesting differences as well as far as the United States and Ho Chi Minh Ho Chi Minh had set up in the mountainous region of northern Vietnam a station for opposing the Japanese and for broadcasting to the American Air Force the location of Japanese troops and so on so there was this relationship very early, it starts in the mid 40s so they were collaborating we were working together fighting the Japanese Ho Chi Minh was given a name Agent, I forget I think it was Agent 09 but it was Agent 09 and so on and the other thing that Ho did was there had been a downed pilot in that area and Ho Chi Minh and some of the other members of the Viet Minh which was the umbrella resistance to the Japanese and then later the resistance to the French it was certainly led by communists like Ho Chi Minh but it was also led by communists who were against the Japanese and against the French so it was a broad based organization and Ho led this pilot back a couple of hundred miles to where there was an American Air Base in China and there he met General Chennault and he asked Chennault for a picture of himself Chennault loved to give out pictures of himself and he asked him also for some cult pistols which were very popular because Westerns were very popular in Vietnam so Chennault wrote to Ho and also gave him several pistols which Ho brought back and distributed to each of the collaborating groups non-communist groups who were in the Viet Minh at the time at some point the police parachuted in something called the Deer Team which I believe Robert met them in their later years an odd set of circumstances I traveled through Vietnam with members of the Deer Team for another day and they trained Ho and Jop and the beginnings of a military movement that would act against the Japanese and then against the French when the war ended in 45 Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh and troops trained by the Americans but under the leadership of Jop moved to Hanoi and declared Vietnamese independence present was Archimedes Paddy and a number of other members of the Deer Team in fact Ho asked Paddy for help in translating the Declaration of Independence he had some difficulty with some words he wanted to get it right which he included in his in the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence in the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence Ho also wrote to Truman several letters saying we want your help we need help in developing economically we have been under French colonialism since the 1870s a very retrograde form of colonialism we need help in economics we need help in education help us and we will open to you trade, investment, whatever Truman never answered the letters later people claimed he never got them most historians believe he did get them and just didn't answer them and so Ho was just shut off from any possibility of American aid at that point but the relationship begins in the mid 40s and the French of course come back the decisions are made by the Allied Powers that the French will have their colonies back and thus begins the French-Indo-Chinese War Robert if I can add just one little memento to that there was a soldier that I wrote about named Clark Welch who was a company commander in Vietnam in the battle and survived the battle and he carried a Tommy gun and he had gotten from a Viet Cong soldier in an earlier battle and that was one of the dear teens Tommy guns going all the way back showing that connection that odd connection of over the decades at the end of the French-Indo-Chinese war an agreement is made reluctant Ho accepts a partition a temporary partition of Vietnam with the clear understanding that there will be an election a free election in ten years to determine this he's criticized the election was to be in two years Ho wanted it in six months his compromise was two years his compromise was two years he was criticized at the time for compromising but you have to understand the Chinese had several divisions which had entered northern Vietnam and Vietnam's historical enemy with China which goes back thousands of years Ho famously said I would rather smell French shit for the next 60 years than eat Chinese shit for the next thousand years he had a way with words he had a way with words and indeed you know the there was no election the promised election was not held and in America the French you know Chinese war results the French are driven out in less than 60 years and America enters so just set that aside for a second yes now I thought this panel was about the anti-war movement we only have a few minutes and I don't think it's worth rehashing the history that we already know about the 1940s not everybody to go back to the point of the panel with all due respect the anti-war movement partly started in France among people who were you know against the Vietnam war and against the Algerian war but when it started here to go to David's point the leadership quite quickly became veterans of the war the leadership of the American anti-war movement was veterans they were disabled veterans in hospitals or they were people who had actually killed communists and been wounded and came back to be attacked by their countrymen here as in the case of John Kerry being swift boated there were others who were very instrumental like John McCain and McCain and Kerry for all their differences were able to get the administration to diplomatically recognize Vietnam and end what could have been another cold war disaster and I came into this only because I met a veteran in Venice, California named Ron Kovic who later became a storyteller and central figure in a movie and he was born on the 4th of July he was fully disabled and I was teaching a class at a Catholic college in Los Angeles and I invited him to come and speak and he had the students just wrapped him he had that hippie look the classic veterans look and one thing he said was unforgettable could only have been said by a vet I lost my body but thank God I saved my mind so we have to understand the role of veterans as well as clergy as well as students as well as the Chicano moratorium it was not a monolithic movement it was comprised of many different groups not just a student led group by any means but it had one thing very much in common I think was since we couldn't vote of course that should not be forgotten we could be drafted but we couldn't vote on the politicians who were drafting us because of the panels of protest it was the nonviolent movement the teach-in movement on college campuses and so on but the it was kind of like reconstruction after the civil war in which the civil war ended because slaves walked away and became allied with the union army in this case students walked away veterans walked away intellectuals walked away draftees walked away until one marine historian I remember late in the war about 69 when it really turned terrible and ugly and awful said in a report that the war was going to end because the army was on the verge of collapse but it wasn't simply the army the campuses were all closed after Nixon invaded Cambodia there were more student strikes than any time in history one and a half million students participated in that? here's a numbers debate I think that future conferences need to study this because it's a mystery about why this anti-war happened I think it was a moral insult and there were concrete grievances like being drafted or being ordered around by a commander whatever it was but the political order disintegrated you had peace candidates for president for senate, republicans, democrats everything was a withdrawal because that was the only option and the country kind of recognized that things were coming to an end I think there was this real sense because I want to hear from David again I want to bring this around the rhetoric of the government about the war simply was at complete odds with the facts on the ground the facts as people understood them you wrote about this in your book David and there's some really extraordinary examples I wonder if you wouldn't mind sharing well this is the credibility gap that the soldiers endured where the soldiers in the battle that I write about walked into an ambush 140 soldiers 1200 Viet Cong waiting for them in the trees and in bunkers set up and because of the timing of this battle right when people wanted more troops and believed making the argument that it could win the war because of that the government, the military lied about what happened in the battle they declared it a victory they made up a body count and I found the military historian who came to the site of the battle a few days later interviewed all the soldiers because two famous people have been killed in the battle there was a American football player named Donald Holliter who was a major and the other was Lieutenant Colonel Terry Allen the son of a famous World War II General Terry Allen and two of Terry Allen's daughters are actually in the audience here today and suffering all of these decades because of that war but in any case the oral historian came and interviewed the survivors how long did you see one would say 10 another would say 11 one would say 12, 10, 11 that was how many were killed but they added them all up and said it was 140 and then General Westmoreland came to the evac hospital a few days later and met with some of the survivors and said to one Sergeant Barrow what happened and Sergeant Barrow said we were ambushed and Westmoreland said no you weren't ambushed they couldn't acknowledge that it was an ambush and that lie bothered the soldiers more than anything else it denied them of their integrity they knew what happened in the battle and the government lied about it and so whatever the politics of those soldiers were which ranged from anti-war to strongly supporting the war they all were angry at the government fabricating the reality of what happened to them that day it's easy to understand how the anti-war resistance spread with situations like this experiences like this over and over again particularly for our veterans community there's no question that the anti-war peace movement accomplished great things it did bring the war to an end and there are two presidents who stepped down as a direct consequence of it and yet as in all things there are opportunities missed there are regrets I was so moved Tom by a statement of yours that you've published online and that I believe you've asked the LBJ library to post on their website and it's both you say something there that startled me courage is something that one often associates with you but there's a an aspect of humility here that I had was quite moving and I'd like to quote you and ask you if you wouldn't mind to expand just a little bit on this you said and I'm reading from your post I personally regret my own part in many decisions that the peace movement made I find that it's just such a powerful and moving statement and I wonder if you would explain what that refers to or what that means for you well we all suffered PTSD we were all veterans in a sense of a common tragedy we were all led by officials that deceived us and divided us there's no comparison in my mind between the suffering that our troops had inflicted on them by these policies and the relatively minor casualties that the anti-war suffered there were eight suicides 28 people were shot by our own troops but there's no comparison there the commonality is that you can't go through a life you can't go through a war without regretting something I was just reacting to the fact that there are so many people who say they're proud of everything they did whatever it was that they did and I find in my many years in the legislature meeting with veterans some of them were very hard lying they wanted me expelled from the legislature of course and I couldn't agree with that suggestion but typically after a couple of hours of discussion the stereotypes kind of went back and I found myself almost telling war stories you mean about the anti-war movement well all veterans of something and I've talked to Chicago police about what they did to me and what I allegedly did to them speaking of Chicago 1968 the important point here is that at the height of those riots and the police coming in and the soldiers from Vietnam were being sent in what we're called daily dozers with concertina wire on the front of the jeeps to attack us with machine guns in the streets because they had been told by the FBI that Abby Hoffman was going to spread LSD into the waters of Lake Michigan and the black community in south Chicago was going to rise up as gorillas and take over the city during the convention but the important story is that the night before it's reached its climax troops were called up from Fort Hood to come to Chicago and to suppress us and there was a big meeting at Fort Hood 100, 200, 300 soldiers and they refused orders to go to Chicago and they were told you will be disciplined and treated harshly if you don't go to Chicago so they spent all night talking to their commanding officers but they're not going to Chicago and they worked out a compromise the commanders agreed that there would be no live ammunition as long as they made the appearance of going to Chicago and again the interaction between the veterans and the people who were veteran activists couldn't have been more compelling the irony and the complexity is very rich we have to start by admitting what you feel guilty or badly about and your former opponent has to listen very carefully and has to explain their side of it because there's two sides to everything this is the conversation that I hope continues nationally that we're starting here today to get to Forgiven Hill yes Forgiven Hill we're running out of time here and it's gone very quickly I would like to take just a little bit of what we have left to discuss the effect of the anti-war peace movement on American culture and I'd like to start with race since we're all pretty much acknowledging the importance of civil rights that influenced this movement how did the Vietnam War impact race and race relations in the United States I'd really like to open this up David do you want to start us off well there's a lot of contradictory things going on there on the one hand one could argue that the military is the best integrated institution in American life and certainly from after World War II when the military did start to desegregate through Vietnam and into the present the military has actually been an important factor in the rise of an African American middle class in America because of its meritocracy in some sense in other ways a lot of African American soldiers came back from Vietnam just as they had from World War II feeling that they'd fought for a country that was the whole Cold War concept was America is the beacon of liberty and freedom in the world and yet these were second class citizens in their own country so that brought the movement after World War II of blacks and certainly after Vietnam it intensified even more even as the black power movement was going through all the 60s coming home a lot of these African American veterans felt even more intensely disenfranchised from their country yes the moment that what I think of as the tipping point in Greeley, Mississippi where Stokely Carmichael will who has been arrested yet again that morning and then released just in time to make the night time rally this is on the Meredith march and he's going to leave himself with frustration and rage outrage and he will eventually lead the crowd in chance of black power it's this sort of tipping moment in the movement but he leads up to this he talks about a sign a handwritten sign he saw held by a young black man on the road that day which said no Viet Cong ever called me nigger and this really cuts to the heart a painful problem that African American soldiers and indeed minorities of all felt being sent abroad to fight on behalf of freedom of liberty and returning to a country in which they had only just recently in some cases gotten the right to vote well King's speech in 67 at the Riverside church really sums it up it's an extraordinary speech in which he brings together the movements of four civil liberties and civil rights and anti-war and he says it's a long and extraordinary speech it's online I urge you all to read it it's probably one of the great speeches of the last century and he said at one point that this was a time when there were what were called ghetto riots and uprisings but certainly rebellions in many many cities across the country and King said that he could not raise his voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first raised my voice against the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today and that was the United States and the speech I thought I think it had a tremendous impact on both parts of both movements I want to say something else and I don't know if my co-panelists will agree or how many of you will agree but the anti-war movement and the 60s as such are always named as the moment of the greatest division in American history since the Civil War which by the way was the last war fought on American soil but it seems to me that division and debate is essential in a democracy and you get unity education in fascist countries not in democratic ones division is about disagreement it's about arguing it's about what Tom was saying about listening I don't know about healing some things maybe can't ever heal that's a possibility but you can open the wound and examine it in fact if you don't open a wound and clean it it will never heal just skin grows over so I just want to say a word in favor of reasonable divisions about the policy and the course that America should take in the world democracy is a messy business one hopes exactly exactly that speech of Dr. King I'd like to Dr. King's turning point in the movement it's a turning point in the Johnson administration in his relationship to Dr. King sadly because the president views King's very clarion call for resistance it's an amazing moment in your play it's disloyal it's another tragic moment in a history full of tragic moments and opportunities lost how did the Vietnam war and the conflict affect the United States in terms of class or our awareness of class or class divisions we talk about one modest example the draft and the unfairness of the draft which targeted minorities so targeted white students or white individuals who were poor it would predominantly focus so there was a real class focus there that doesn't get talked about so I would like to just because I think there was significant movement in this regard in terms of our awareness of what we think of ourselves as a very egalitarian society but how true is that I don't think the draft is a modest part of it I think it's a very important part of it and I think that you know the contradictions the hypocrisy was there in the draft in terms of who could get out and why and not fight and I think that throughout the course of American wars you've seen class played out in different ways largely the working class fighting the wars that the upper middle class or the government is the policy makers are coming from a different class with some exceptions John Kerry speaking tonight being one Bob Kerry tomorrow and Senator Rob another but in a large degree I think that that tension has always been there and I think that it's both in many ways it's a negative and the largest being that so much the nation at any point is not affected by the policy in the war and could go on with its life without really dealing with it because it's just the working class fighting. I think it is go ahead John. My dad was a Marine and I was raised on a Marine base in San Diego and my assignment at age five was to walk the coast and look for Japanese battles that were going to attack and so I was part of the civil defense and you did a good job actually fairly well but I was only five the my favorite book was the history show there were no zero attacks on the west coast during Tom's watch close my favorite book as I grew older was from here to eternity by Jones and that was the story of the grunt my dad was a grunt he wasn't sent into combat my uncle was a grunt he was sent into combat and was killed by his own friendly fire was killed by his own machine gun but the story of the grunt is the story of BVAW the story of the class differences within our own military between poor working class all the way up to the officer corps in the larger society had the same differences I don't think I need to spell them out but I just wanted to draw attention to the role of the grunt at least that's what we called them in 1944 I think it is significant that Dr. King will eventually move after the speech the sentimental speech Riverside within a space of a few years to broadening his mandate to poor people's march no longer race based but class conscious and I very honestly have always thought and that's when he dies that's interesting I want to talk for a minute about another significant consequence of the war on American culture and that's the relationship between citizens and their government I think we have a very different relationship now or certainly before pre-Vietnam and post-Vietnam and we could just talk a little bit about that well I mean citizens learn that they have to check up on the government they rely on journalists when journalists are great they are truly great and if you read them closely then you can find out what's going on and when you find out what's going on you realize that the government does not always have your best interests at heart nor the best interests of many other Americans and you begin to question the slogan used to be well it was a very rude word I won't use but it was question authority was the polite way to put it questioning authority is essential not just in a political system but to growing up to being a full citizen you question authority doesn't mean you always have to combat it sometimes you're in agreement but you need to question and that need to question that came up I think it comes up in the civil rights movement initially and then it multiplies and multiplies and multiplies in the last 10 years I woke up every morning in a state of rage at my government because I could see what it was doing and what it was making its military do that wasn't an unimportant part of my teaching my professional life and my moral life and I want to say too that the anti-war movement with many veterans against the war formed a kind of community a shared culture of music music for sure you listen to the same music even though you weren't in Colorado you smoked the same dope and you went on the same marches culminating in 1971 with the huge march against the war the vets leading it and preceding it in 2003 of vets and then of the rest of the anti-war movement not very long thereafter and John carries great speech to Congress which I hope he quotes this evening and if he doesn't I have a copy you know there are we have just a few minutes left here I'd like to bring this up to the current moment the anti-war movement now many of them began as student movements I'm thinking specifically of Occupy Wall Street or hashtag Black Lives Matter how do these movements today what debt do they owe to the anti-war peace movement or don't in what ways do they echo one another what might they learn from the regrets that we have I'd just like to touch on that if we might David it's hard for me to say the younger people in these movements today what they know about history in the past so I don't true that I mean I think that a lot of it has to do with the disparities in income and race that are still evident from the time of the earlier movements but I'm not sure that all the people in these movements today are connecting to that I think they're more motivated by what they see in front of them the one similarity I would say is that that just as people in the anti-war movement of the 60s saw a disparity between what the government was saying and what the promise of America was versus the reality so too are people in the Black Lives Movement seeing that same disparity between this notion of a post-racial America versus what they're seeing in the reality of how young Black men are being treated by the police in the United States so I think there are parallels but I'm not sure that they see the senile of connection very interesting Marilyn what do you think I agree very much with what David said one of the big differences is the different social media makes and this is actually I think on the negative side is we used to meet endless meetings endless endless endless meetings and you had to stay because if you didn't you knew that somebody crazy might lead she just happened to go that way you stayed although I didn't go to Chicago but it was a decision but so with social media it's not visible you don't really argue face to face crowds can be gathered you can have a flash protest which are useful not against them but there's a because they're flash they're also a flash in the pan there's no staying power with Occupy they couldn't figure out a clean set of demands that could actually be responded to so it was a sort of you know kitchen sink collection of things that not every I mean some of the things I didn't agree with some I did but there were too many and there was no way to really follow up on them so it's I think this will change I think it's bound to change and Tom I don't know what do you think well just as the early civil rights movement and early feminist movement and the early anti-war movement shaped young Hillary Clinton the Occupy Wall Street movement has made it possible for Bernie Sanders so you don't know the outside inside effect but Bernie's campaign is absolutely a response to the collapse of the Wall Street dominated certainly hard to predict where this will go right this is this has been an extraordinary conversation and I want to thank our panelists David and Marilyn Tom I think I've just done a tremendous job here thank you you're welcome thank you Robert you had time for questions that's what I have for you democracy is messy hate the war love the warrior peace out thank you