Legacy from the Vietnam Anti-War Movement
The following is an interview with Cliff Conner, a Vietnam Anti-War activist and former member of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) whose members were key organizers of the antiwar movement during the Vietnam war, by the French magazine, The International, February 2025.
The International: What does “April 1975” mean to you?
Cliff Conner: I remember it as the time that the American helicopters were taking off from the buildings in South Vietnam to escape from the North Vietnamese taking over the entire country. What it meant to us was that it was the end of the war and that the Vietnamese people had won and that the United States imperialists had lost the war. Now, you could look back at it and say, well, it wasn’t as clear a victory as might have been expected. The United States had bombed Vietnam mercilessly. One might ask, “How could the Vietnamese say they’d won?” But they did win. I visited Vietnam later and talked to some Vietnamese who had fought with the National Liberation Front (NLF), and also to American expatriates that were still living there. “How come the Vietnamese aren’t bitter against the United States for all the damage they did to Vietnam over ten years’ time?” And the answer I got was, well, the Vietnamese are not bitter against Americans today because the Vietnamese believe they won the war. And in fact, they did win the war, because their entire objective was not to allow the United States to conquer Vietnam and decide its future. And they were able to militarily accomplish that through tremendous struggle!
The International: What led American imperialism to acknowledge the defeat so suddenly in 1975?
Cliff Conner: It was what had happened on the ground. The whole of Vietnam had risen against the United States, and the United States was militarily defeated. But I will say one thing: the role that the American antiwar movement had in bringing the American government to the realization that it could not defeat Vietnam. Answering that I have to be very careful, because I don’t want it to seem as if I’m saying the United States antiwar movement won the war. It was first of all the extreme sacrifice of the Vietnamese people and their own struggles that militarily won the war. But I think the antiwar movement in the United States gave the Vietnamese freedom fighters a great deal of help and solidarity.
We started off in 1965 or 1966 with a very small movement against the war. It grew and grew and grew over ten years to the point where millions of Americans, whether they understood the justice of the Vietnamese people’s struggle or not, came to understand that the United States was not waging a just war.
It was an imperialist war even if most Americans wouldn’t have used that word. The Vietnam Anti-War movement, led essentially by young people, students on campuses, was able to influence tens-of-millions of Americans to oppose the war, then that in turn influenced the American G.I.s in Vietnam who themselves began to turn against their commanders. They would refuse to fight. They would go off into the woods and smoke pot.
The American government called this a “morale” problem. They said the troops’ morale in Vietnam was very low and they didn’t want to fight. Well, the reason they didn’t want to fight was that the antiwar movement had convinced a majority of the American population that this war was not for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, but a war to oppress them. It wasn’t a cause the American G.I.s wanted to die for.
The Vietnamese people fought back—they weren’t going to be defeated. So, at that point, when the American troops would no longer follow their commanders’ orders. The American government realized that it was all over. The war could not be won militarily.
The International: So, the antiwar movement started in universities, why? How did it develop? And what forms did it take?
Cliff Conner: The very first demonstration against the war in Vietnam that I remember, was in 1965, it was called by a very small socialist organization called the Workers World Party. It had split off from the Socialist Workers Party, which was the main Trotskyist organization in the United States at that time. It was one of the leading proponents of creating a Vietnam Anti-War mobilization. At the very beginning the antiwar movement consisted of a very small number of pacifists and socialists. The first demonstration was very small, it attracted maybe a few hundred people at most. The problem was that their focus wasn’t on stopping the war, but on condemning American imperialism, which didn’t have much of an appeal for most working people in the United States. Over the following years, the Workers World Party continued to call anti-imperialist demonstration. Every year the same few hundred people came to their demonstrations, and they never made any progress.
Meanwhile, over the next few years, in 1965, 1966, 1967, and 1968, the Socialist Workers Party called demonstrations. But these were not the same as the Workers World Party’s, they were explicitly focused on ending the Vietnam War, nothing else.
The SWP didn’t limit itself to calling demonstrations in its own name. We tried, and succeeded, in creating coalitions of organizations that opposed the war for many different reasons. There were pacifist groups, human rights groups, civil rights groups, young people who didn’t want to be drafted.... Anybody who wanted to stop the war was welcome—they didn’t have to be socialists or anti-imperialists. We were trying to use a strategy that Trotskyists called a “united front.”
And this strategy was successful. Soon the demonstrations grew in size from hundreds to thousands, and then tens, and hundreds-of-thousands!
The biggest response that calls for demonstrations against the war in Vietnam received was on college campuses, from students. And so, a student movement began to grow, and one of the main concerns of the student movement was to oppose the draft. At that time in the United States, young men between certain ages were subject to the draft; they could be sent to Vietnam to fight and die. The draft was supposedly universal, but wealthy families could afford to arrange for their sons to be granted deferments. The draft became very unpopular on college campuses, as you can imagine. And so, a major part of the early Vietnam Anti-War movement was a demand to stop the draft and to no longer force young people who didn’t want to fight in an immoral war and give their lives for a bad cause. But the general part of the antiwar movement was calling for an end to the war. That may seem straightforward and, among people who opposed the war, uncontroversial. But there were serious differences among the organizations who were mobilizing against the war.
The International: What were the different positions within the antiwar movement?
Cliff Conner: I would say that there were three main currents of opinion with regard to how to stop the Vietnam War.
The first was what might be called the “reformist” current. The people who were in this current saw the war in Vietnam as simply a policy choice that was made by American politicians. They had chosen to wage war against a small country in Southeast Asia, and they could change that policy. The job of the antiwar movement was to convince them to change that policy and stop the war. So, who were these “reformists?” Many were pacifists, and people who opposed war on religious grounds. Many were mainly adherents of the Democratic Party who in the United States are called “liberals.” Behind the scenes, the organizational framework of the reformist current was provided by the CPUSA, the American Communist Party. I don’t mean this in a conspiratorial sense. The CP members were an entirely legitimate part of the Vietnam Anti-War movement, but the leadership they provided was aligned with the Democratic Party. Their solution to ending the war was to elect Democratic Party candidates who claimed to be opposed to the war.
And that brings us to the second current of opinion, the one we, the SWP, represented and tried to lead. We knew that influencing the Democratic Party was not the way to end the war. We knew from long experience that the Democratic Party was the graveyard of social movements. The Democratic Party would try to lead the Vietnam Anti-War movement into ringing doorbells for liberal political candidates. They would use the antiwar movement as a way to get elected; and then they wouldn’t do anything to stop the war.
The alternative we wanted to offer was a “mass action in the streets” strategy based on the belief that the way to end the war was to build a mass movement of tens-of-millions of Americans by convincing them that the war was immoral, a bad cause, unjust in every way. And as I said before, this did indeed result in helping to end the war through the agency of the American G.I.s. It wasn’t Democratic Party candidates like George McGovern or Robert Kennedy, but the mass of the American people themselves that turned against the war, and “demoralized” the fighting force that had to actually fight the war.
The demonstrations got larger and larger, sometimes reaching massive proportions—half-a-million or a million protestors. A great deal of this activity was generated on the campuses of the United States, involving 2,000 to 3,000 universities, each one with a growing antiwar coalition. And they would drive the major national antiwar coalitions to call demonstrations for Washington, DC and San Francisco. Hundreds of thousands of students would show up and demonstrate and prove that the American people were not swallowing the government propaganda that this was a war fought to enhance the freedom of the Vietnamese people.
But there was a third current also contending for leadership of the movement, and although it wasn’t the most important, it was also promoting a false alternative to mass action, and it was necessary to fight against it. That was the “ultraleft” current, which consisted of small groups who claimed to be communist, anarchist, Maoist, and some claimed to be Trotskyist.
Even though those groups were not numerically significant, some were very militant, and well organized, and were capable of making a lot of noise. Their strategy was always confrontational. They wanted to confront the police and provoke them into violence against demonstrators. The problem was the confusion this caused among the millions of Americans who were beginning to turn against the war. Prowar politicians and media in the United States pointed to the small, confrontational actions in order to frighten ordinary Americans away from antiwar demonstrations.
The massive demonstrations that we called and led were not, in fact, at all confrontational. We did not want confrontation with cops. We did not want to lead antiwar demonstrators into violent confrontations where the cops would break people’s heads. That was not a strategy for protests that could attract millions of working people and other ordinary Americans. We knew that if that became the image of the antiwar movement, working people would not come out. That’s what we tried to avoid. And I think in the long run, we were successful. Although to this day, if you read histories of the Vietnam Anti-War movement, you’ll see echoes of that idea that the antiwar protesters were essentially violent and confrontational.
What would stop the war? Nothing but forcing the American government to bring the troops home. And that was our slogan “Bring the troops home now”—shortened sometimes to “Out Now”—that was the slogan that brought success.
Our ultraleft opponents complained, “Oh, that’s not militant enough. We need to end capitalism in the United States. Now!” Well, of course, we in the Socialist Workers Party were 100 percent in favor of ending capitalism in the United States. But that was obviously not on the agenda during the Vietnam War. During the war, the number one political issue was how to stop the war, and we thought the way to stop the war was to mobilize hundreds-of-thousands of people, sometimes millions of people, in the streets demanding “Out Now!”
One slogan that was constantly raised was for a general strike against the war now. There were some labor actions against the war that were very helpful, especially in San Francisco where the longshoremen from time to time would call a strike against loading war materials to be sent to Vietnam. Everybody who was against the war was in favor of that. But the idea to not call for stopping the war by bringing the troops home, but instead calling for stopping the war by a general strike of the entire labor force of the United States, was simply not a viable slogan.
It was obvious to us that if we called for a general strike, we might get a demonstration of 5,000 or 10,000 people. But if we called for bringing the troops home now, we might attract a demonstration of hundreds-of-thousands of people, perhaps a million or more in Washington, D.C.
And part of our job during the mobilizations was to fight for the mass action strategy against what the other two proposed.
The International: Were you personally confronted with the threat of the conscription?
Cliff Conner: No, I was a little bit older. Well, rather, I was married before the Vietnam war. At the beginning, in 1963 they were not drafting—conscripting—married men. And then a little later, I had children, and at that time they were drafting married men, but not married men with children. So it was just by luck that I happened to always be one step ahead of the draft. And by the time the Vietnam War actually started and conscription started for that, I was just barely over the age limit. I was never conscripted into the army, but people one year younger than me were, that’s why I was involved with students in the Anti-Draft Movement, even though I wasn’t personally threatened by conscription.
The International: Were young people trying to escape the conscription?
Cliff Conner: There were ways that people were trying to avoid being conscripted. At that time the military chiefs did not want gay men to be soldiers. So, some men who were not gay claimed to be gay to avoid conscription. That was before there was a gay rights movement so that was not necessarily a good idea! But it was something that people did to avoid being sent to Vietnam.
And another one was to claim physical disabilities. The most famous of those nowadays is the criminal who’s going to become our president in a few days. His family had a lot of money, so his father was able to hire doctors to swear that his son was physically unfit for military service. He claimed he had bone spurs in his heels and avoided conscription that way.
And finally, one way that people avoided conscription was moving out of the country, primarily to Canada. Several thousands of young men did that.
But most working-class young men were either drafted or were just lucky that their number wasn’t called. And those who were actually fighting in Vietnam tended to be such a normal, ordinary part of the population, that that’s why they began to be “infected” by the antiwar spirit when the antiwar movement reached massive proportions. They said, “We don’t want any part of this.” They were against the immoral war that they were being asked to die for.
The International: What happened to those who went to war when they got back? How were the war veterans treated?
Cliff Conner: This shouldn’t actually be a part of what we’re talking about, but it is because, shamefully, when the veterans from the war came back, they were not treated well by the people who sent them there in the first place. A false issue was created by the right-wing, pro-war media. They falsely claimed that when the Vietnam veterans returned home, the young people who had not gone to war, who had demonstrated against the war, harassed them by calling them “war criminals,” and things like that.
That was not true. That was not how the antiwar movement viewed the G.I.s. We did not hold the G.I.s to blame for the war crimes in Vietnam. They were for the most part young men who were forced to go there and fight against their will. They were given guns and sent out in the field to fight against Vietnamese soldiers with guns. And of course, they fought in defense of their own lives.
But we did not consider them to be the bad guys in this war. We considered the American G.I.s. to be victims, too. Most antiwar demonstrators saw the G.I.s in Vietnam as allies. I worked with antiwar GIs, for example, in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Antiwar G.I.s in the army were joining protests in uniform and this upset their officers so much that they put them in prison. We in the SWP organized a large protest movement against the victimization of American G.I.s who were being victimized for exercising their citizenship rights to protest against the war, which was their right even though they were in the army. We won a lot of those cases. We had lawyers representing them and that helped to create a significant movement among active GIs to protest the war, as well as movements of veterans who were against the war. These were quite large organizations, and they played a big role in ending the war.
The International: What particular role did Black Americans play during the Vietnam War.
Cliff Conner: I’m glad you mentioned that. The fact that so many of the G.I.s fighting in Vietnam were Black—I don’t know what the percentage was, but it was far greater than their percentage in the society as a whole. And because of that, there was a natural alliance here in the United States between the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam Anti-War movement. I happened to be in one of the places where that alliance was the strongest. It wasn’t geographically the strongest part of the antiwar movement, because it was in the South of the United States, and the South, as you probably are aware, tended to be politically more reactionary.
I lived in Atlanta, Georgia, and the first antiwar demonstrations we called in Atlanta attracted no more than a hundred people. But then they began to grow to be a couple hundred, three hundred, four hundred.... But the number of activists who organized the demonstrations was only maybe 20 or 30. Whereas in New York City, or on college campuses, you might have 50, 100, or 1,000 activists that, as time went by, could call and organize much larger demonstrations. But Atlanta was one of the centers of the civil rights movement. Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. had his main organization in Atlanta at the Ebenezer Baptist Church, of which he was the pastor. The civil rights organization was called the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—the SCLC. They had a large institution there with a lot of offices and a large staff. They reached out to us. By “us” I mean the Vietnam Anti-War movement. As early as 1965, Reverend King had begun speaking out publicly against the war. But in April 1967, he became one of the most powerful and prominent opponents of the war. You may remember that he, and Muhammad Ali, and Malcolm X—a lot of the Black leaders in the United States—began to speak out directly against the immorality of the Vietnam War. It was an imperialist war designed to crush an insurgency in a small country halfway across the world. The Civil Rights movement, and especially the radical wing of it, including Malcolm X and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, were attracted to the antiwar cause. So, in Atlanta, as I said, we collaborated closely with Reverend King’s organization and the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
One of the leaders of SNCC was Julian Bond. He was very active in the Vietnam Anti-War movement as well as the civil rights movement. Another major leader of Martin Luther King’s organization was Reverend Andrew Young, whom I got to know because he was very close to the antiwar movement. He offered us office space and some of the SCLC staff to actually help organize antiwar demonstrations. So, we had a very close relationship, but that was really just a reflection of the closeness of the two movements throughout the whole country.
The International: What are the traces that have been left in the collective memory of the American people regarding the war in Vietnam? What is the legacy of the movement?
Cliff Conner: That’s complicated. The movement had a powerful effect for many years. The war ended in 1975. The American ruling class was very upset for a long time about what they called the Vietnam Syndrome. The Syndrome was that the American people as a whole, the electorate, was not in favor of imperialist war anymore.
Although the word “imperialist” was never used very much, that was what the reality was. American troops were sent overseas to impose American corporate values and American foreign policy on small countries and large countries all over the world.
But the American people could no longer be counted on to support that. So, from 1975 to 2001, some 26 years, the Vietnam Syndrome played a major role in American politics. It didn’t stop American warfare around the world completely, but it did hold it down and kept it from being as effective as the ruling class wanted it to be.
Now, I’m sure you’re aware of what changed. That was the 11th of September 2001, when the World Trade Center was destroyed by Islamist radicals. The United States at that point began to use that attack as an excuse to launch major wars that have gone on, for a long, long time after that, at least 20 years and still continuing, although not as openly as they had been in Iraq and Afghanistan in particular, and many other parts of the Middle East.
Anyway, they were able to use that attack as an excuse to dismantle the Vietnam Syndrome and begin to undermine the idea among the American people that the American army is just an imperialist force. They said the Jihadist attacks demonstrated that we need the army. We need the American military. “The American military is our friend. It supports us. It defends us. We need it.” And so that was what began to undermine the Vietnam Syndrome. Today, I’d say it hardly exists at all.
We’ve found it very difficult to build a new antiwar movement against the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Although we could occasionally turn out hundreds-of-thousands of people, the vast majority of American people were convinced by the American government that they were being targeted by terrorists and that the terrorists were a major threat to our “national security.” They convinced the American public that we need the armed forces to do everything they are doing. So that’s the situation we’re in today.
There is an important legacy from the Vietnam Anti-War movement, but it needs to be revived. With regard to the mobilization on campuses against the genocide in Gaza, there has been some discussion of the parallels with the Vietnam Anti-War movement.
I feel it myself among students and other anti-Zionist protesters. I feel the similarity of the emotions and passion that the students have, the conviction that what’s going on Gaza is completely immoral. It may even be worse than what the United States did in Vietnam because what’s happening in Gaza is total genocide. Even before I became a socialist, I felt a powerful opposition to the Vietnam war. When I became a socialist, I realized the role of capitalism and imperialism, but it started with the instinctive disgust with the extreme immorality of the war. The main slogan at the beginning was, “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids have you killed today?” And I’m feeling echoes of that sentiment on campuses now, although the problem is that we don’t yet have a large enough movement among the American people to counter the genocide in Gaza.
We eventually did. By the 1970s, the Vietnam Anti-War movement had developed some real political power in the United States. We haven’t reached that level yet on the Gaza question, but I see the roots of it there, and I see that the heritage and legacy of the anti–Vietnam war movement can be helpful to the young people organizing against the genocide in Gaza.
—The International (France), February 2025