Vietnam Protest Hippie HBT Shirt that is embroidered to the reverse a large multi colored Rainbow and on the top bar is painted HERE COMES THE SUN. To the front two Anti Vietnam pins including OUT NOW AUG. 5 VIETNAM: TODAY'S HIROSHIMA W.A.P.A.C. and PEACE NOW celluloid pins. Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War began with demonstrations in 1965 against the escalating role of the United States in the Vietnam War and grew into a broad social movement over the ensuing several years. This movement informed and helped shape the vigorous and polarizing debate, primarily in the United States, during the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s on how to end the Vietnam War. Many in the peace movement within the United States were children, mothers, or anti-establishment youth. Opposition grew with participation by the African American civil rights and second-wave feminist movements, Chicano Movements, and sectors of organized labor. Additional involvement came from many other groups, including educators, clergy, academics, journalists, lawyers, physicians such as Benjamin Spock, and military veterans. Their actions consisted mainly of peaceful, nonviolent events; few events were deliberately provocative and violent. In some cases, police used violent tactics against peaceful demonstrators. By 1967, according to Gallup polls, an increasing majority of Americans considered military involvement in Vietnam to be a mistake, echoed decades later by the then-head of American war planning, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Causes of opposition: The draft, a system of conscription that mainly drew from minorities and lower- and middle-class whites, drove much of the protest after 1965. Conscientious objectors played an active role despite their small numbers. The prevailing sentiment that the draft was unfairly administered fueled student and blue-collar American opposition to the military draft. Opposition to the war arose during a time of unprecedented student activism, which followed the free speech movement and the civil rights movement. The military draft mobilized the baby boomers, who were most at risk, but it grew to include a varied cross-section of Americans. The growing opposition to the Vietnam War was partly attributed to greater access to uncensored information through extensive television coverage on the ground in Vietnam. Beyond opposition to the draft, anti-war protesters also made moral arguments against U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In May 1954, preceding the later Quaker protests but "just after the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu, the Service Committee bought a page in The New York Times to protest what seemed to be the tendency of the USA to step into Indo-China as France stepped out. We expressed our fear that in so doing, America would back into a war." The moral imperative argument against the war was especially popular among American college students, who were more likely than the general public to accuse the United States of having imperialistic goals in Vietnam and to criticize the war as "immoral." Civilian deaths, which were downplayed or omitted entirely by the Western media, became a subject of protest when photographic evidence of casualties emerged. An infamous photo of General Nguy?n Ng?c Loan shooting an alleged terrorist in handcuffs during the Tet Offensive also provoked public outcry. Another element of the American opposition to the war was the perception that U.S. intervention in Vietnam, which had been argued as acceptable because of the domino theory and the threat of communism, was not legally justifiable. Some Americans believed that the communist threat was used as a scapegoat to hide imperialistic intentions, and others argued that the American intervention in South Vietnam interfered with the self-determination of the country and felt that the war in Vietnam was a civil war that ought to have determined the fate of the country and that America was wrong to intervene. Media coverage of the war also shook the faith of citizens at home as new television brought images of wartime conflict to viewers at home. Newsmen like NBC's Frank McGee stated that the war was all but lost as a "conclusion to be drawn inescapably from the facts." For the first time in American history, the media had the means to broadcast battlefield images. Graphic footage of casualties on the nightly news eliminated any myth of the glory of war. With no clear sign of victory in Vietnam, American military casualties helped stimulate opposition to the war by Americans. In their book Manufacturing Consent, Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky reject the mainstream view of how the media influenced the war and propose that the media instead censored the more brutal images of the fighting and the death of millions of innocent people. Polarization: If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read "Vietnam." — Martin Luther King Jr., 1967. The U.S. became polarized over the war. Many supporters of U.S. involvement argued for what was known as the domino theory, a theory that believed if one country fell to communism, then the bordering countries would be sure to fall as well, much like falling dominoes. This theory was largely held due to the fall of eastern Europe to communism and the Soviet sphere of influence following World War II. However, military critics of the war pointed out that the Vietnam War was political and that the military mission lacked any clear idea of how to achieve its objectives. Civilian critics of the war argued that the government of South Vietnam lacked political legitimacy, or that support for the war was completely immoral. The media also played a substantial role in the polarization of American opinion regarding the Vietnam War. For example, in 1965 a majority of the media attention focused on military tactics with very little discussion about the necessity for a full-scale intervention in Southeast Asia. After 1965, the media covered the dissent and domestic controversy that existed within the United States, but mostly excluded the actual view of dissidents and resisters. The media established a sphere of public discourse surrounding the Hawk versus Dove debate. The Dove was a liberal and a critic of the war. Doves claimed that the war was well–intentioned but a disastrously wrong mistake in an otherwise benign foreign policy. It is important to note the Doves did not question the U.S. intentions in intervening in Vietnam, nor did they question the morality or legality of the U.S. intervention. Rather, they made pragmatic claims that the war was a mistake. Contrarily, the Hawks argued that the war was legitimate and winnable and a part of the benign U.S. foreign policy. The Hawks claimed that the one-sided criticism of the media contributed to the decline of public support for the war and ultimately helped the U.S. lose the war. Author William F. Buckley repeatedly wrote about his approval for the war and suggested that "The United States has been timid, if not cowardly, in refusing to seek 'victory' in Vietnam." The hawks claimed that the liberal media was responsible for the growing popular disenchantment with the war and blamed the western media for losing the war in Southeast Asia as communism was no longer a threat for them. Early protests: Early organized opposition was led by American Quakers in the 1950s, and by November 1960 eleven hundred Quakers undertook a silent protest vigil – the group "ringed the Pentagon for parts of two days". Protests bringing attention to "the draft" began on May 5, 1965. Student activists at the University of California Berkeley marched on the Berkeley Draft board and forty students staged the first public burning of a draft card in the United States. Another nineteen cards were burnt on May 22 at a demonstration following the Berkeley teach-in. Draft card protests were not aimed so much at the draft as at the immoral conduct of the war. At that time, only a fraction of all men of draft age were actually conscripted, but the Selective Service System office ("Draft Board") in each locality had broad discretion on whom to draft and whom to exempt where there was no clear guideline for exemption. In late July 1965, Johnson doubled the number of young men to be drafted per month from 17,000 to 35,000, and on August 31, signed a law making it a crime to burn a draft card. On October 15, 1965, the student-run National Coordinating Committee to End the War in Vietnam in New York staged the first draft card burning to result in an arrest under the new law. Gruesome images of two anti-war activists who set themselves on fire in November 1965 provided iconic images of how strongly some people felt that the war was immoral. On November 2, 32-year-old Quaker Norman Morrison set himself on fire in front of The Pentagon. On November 9, 22-year-old Catholic Worker Movement member Roger Allen LaPorte did the same in front of United Nations Headquarters in New York City. Both protests were conscious imitations of earlier (and ongoing) Buddhist protests in South Vietnam. Government reactions: The growing anti-war movement alarmed many in the U.S. government. On August 16, 1966, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began investigations of Americans who were suspected of aiding the NLF, with the intent to introduce legislation making these activities illegal. Anti-war demonstrators disrupted the meeting and 50 were arrested. Shifting Opinion: In February 1967, The New York Review of Books published "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", an essay by Noam Chomsky, one of the leading intellectual opponents of the war. In the essay Chomsky argued that much responsibility for the war lay with liberal intellectuals and technical experts who were providing what he saw as pseudoscientific justification for the policies of the U.S. government. The Time Inc magazines Time and Life maintained a very pro-war editorial stance until October 1967, when in a volte-face, the editor-in-chief, Hedley Donovan, came out against the war.[9] Donovan wrote in an editorial in Life that the United States had gone into Vietnam for "honorable and sensible purposes", but the war had turned out to be "harder, longer, more complicated" than expected.[10] Donovan ended his editorial by writing the war was "not worth winning", as South Vietnam was "not absolutely imperative" to maintain American interests in Asia, which made it impossible "to ask young Americans to die for". Draft protests: In 1967, the continued operation of a seemingly unfair draft system then calling as many as 40,000 men for induction each month fueled a burgeoning draft resistance movement. The draft favored white, middle-class men, which allowed an economically and racially discriminating draft to force young African American men to serve in rates that were disproportionately higher than the general population. Although in 1967 there was a smaller field of draft-eligible black men, 29 percent, versus 63 percent of white men, 64 percent of eligible black men were chosen to serve in the war through conscription, compared to only 31 percent of eligible white men. On October 16, 1967, draft card turn-ins were held across the country, yielding more than 1,000 draft cards, later returned to the Justice Department as an act of civil disobedience. Resisters expected to be prosecuted immediately, but Attorney General Ramsey Clark instead prosecuted a group of ringleaders including Dr. Benjamin Spock and Yale chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr. in Boston in 1968. By the late 1960s, one quarter of all court cases dealt with the draft, including men accused of draft-dodging and men petitioning for the status of conscientious objector. Over 210,000 men were accused of draft-related offenses, 25,000 of whom were indicted. The charges of unfairness led to the institution of a draft lottery for the year 1970 in which a young man's birthday determined his relative risk of being drafted (September 14 was the birthday at the top of the draft list for 1970; the following year July 9 held this distinction). However, popular anti-war speculation that most American soldiers, as well as most of American soldiers killed, during the Vietnam War were draftees was discredited in later years, as the large majority of these soldiers were in fact confirmed to be volunteers