The opinion of the citizens of the United States began to change as time passed and incidents took place. The government misled the people, the people became dissatisfied with the current situation and families were torn apart. As American got sucked deeper into the war, Americans wanted to get out more badly. The growth of anti-war movements was caused by a mixture of different factors.
The decline of support for the Vietnam War mainly started in 1968. Although antiwar movements in the United States had been occurring before, the Tet Offensive opened the eyes of countless people. General Westmoreland had assured the public that the war was going to come to a swift end soon, that there was "light at the end of the tunnel". But on January 30th 1968, the National Liberation Front and the People's Army of Vietnam attacked various major cities in South Vietnam including Saigon and the US embassy there. The goal of the Tet Offensive was to ignite and encourage the people of South Vietnam to overthrow their government and to put pressure on the US to withdraw their troops. Even though the Tet Offensive was a brutal military defeat for the communists, over half of their troops were killed; there were weighty effects on the reliability of the government. Americans were shocked. They now realized that if even the American Embassy wasn't a safe place to be, nowhere in South Vietnam was. Citizens of American began to question if the government knew what they were doing and if the Vietnam War was a war that could be won.
As the United States sank deeper into the war, the government started using methods of warfare that concerned citizens. The My Lai Massacre was the result of soldiers frustrated at their inability to complete their search and destroy mission. Instead they killed hundreds of unarmed citizens, mainly women, elders and children. Although the government tried to cover it up, the news eventually spread like wildfire. People were shocked and disgusted. Initially, the government reported that they had killed a hundred enemy soldiers. The My Lai Massacre motivated a good number of people to join peace movements. The number of US casualties also had an effect on popular opinion. In 1965, towards the beginning of the war, the causality rate was at 2,000 people but in three short years the numbers grew to 14,000.
Students played a huge role in antiwar movements across America. In he 1960's, the civil rights movement had was in full swing. In 1959, the Students for a Democratic Society was formed. Many students from universities across the country joined and marched against the war. After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1965, most of these rallies were to protest against conscription. Some students burned their draft cards and thousands of people fled to Canada. The Draft Resistance Movement was formed to assist those who wanted to avoid being drafted. Protesters were often labeled "communist", "campus bum", "cowards" and "traitors". The number of antiwar protests increased and sometimes these marches became violent. In Chicago, August 1968, the Democratic National Convention as interrupted by thousands of police officers attacking protests who were outside with clubs and tear gas. In May of 1970, National Guards shot four students at Kent State University, Ohio. This ignited numerous college campuses protests across the States. Two more students lost their lives at a protest in Mississippi at Jackson State University. A group of construction workers in New York City beat students at another antiwar rally. As a result, 100,000 people gathered to protest against the students, claiming they were rich, spoiled kids that were protesting while the poorer, working class or African Americans were dying in Vietnam.
As the war dragged on, antiwar marches and protests intensified and at times became violent. At the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968, thousands of city police officers attacked antiwar protesters gathered outside the convention hall with clubs and tear gas. The most infamous and tragic incident occurred in early May 1970 at Kent State University in Ohio, where National Guard troops called in to calm the scene ended up firing on a crowd, killing four students. The killings touched off protests at hundreds of college campuses across the United States; many of these also turned violent, and two more students were killed in mid-May at Jackson State University in Mississippi. The antiwar movements brought tension between classes. Some people tried to get desk work jobs in the military, doing paperwork or typing things to avoid being on the front line. The majority of soldiers fighting in the war were young people with little education from lower-class families. The deaths at protests made political decision making difficult. Congress tried passing laws that limited the Presidents power.
By the mid-1960's, television was how the American public got their source of news. In 1964, 58% of Americans got most of their news from television. And by 1972, that number rose to 64%. Media had a huge effect on the popular opinion of US citizens. Before the Tet Offensive took place, the media supported the effort at Vietnam. Reporting of military victories and progress. At that time, there was no military censorship which meant that journalists could follow soldiers to the front lines and report their observations without going through the government. During the Vietnam War was the first time the horror of war was brought into the living rooms of Americans. The American public could now watch Vietnamese villages being burned to the ground, families and children being killed and body bags of American soldiers being sent back home. The images seen on their television sets looked nothing like a victorious war. Television coverage of Vietnam began to increase with the Tet Offensive. Images of My Lai dominated stations. Although television allowed more people to access news, the television coverage was often misleading. The complexity of war cannot me understood in thirty minutes over dinner. For example the Tet Offensive was a huge defeat for the North but still played out as a huge defeat by television stations. In addition the famous photograph taken by Eddie Adams of "General Nguyen Ngoc Loan executing a Viet Cong prisoner in Saigon". Nguyen Van Lem was the captain of a Viet Cong assassination platoon and had just murdered wives, children and relatives of police offers in the South. But anyone who saw this picture taken out of context would have serious doubts about those in control in South Vietnam. Eddie Adams later said, "The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapon in the world. People believe them, but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths. What the photograph didn't say was, 'What would you do if you were the general at that time and place on that hot day, and you caught the so-called bad guy after he blew away one, two or three American people?" 1
As the war progressed, public opinion in the United States became very polarized. Although support for the Vietnam War was at 85% in 1954, it fell with the increasing number of anti-war protests. Some people remained very supportive of the war and firmly believed that if the South fell to communism, Domino Theory would take effect. Some began to question the motives behind the US government's involvement in Vietnam. The entered claiming to be fighting for freedom, democracy and independence but the regime they were supporting in South Vietnam was anything but a democracy and therefore it was immoral to support them. Some believed that the Vietnam War lacked clear objectives. The Vietnam War had diverted large chunks of America's money elsewhere. At its peak in 1968, the United States of America was sending 2 billion dollars a month to finance the Vietnam War.
The United States invested everything into the war and the people could not see why. The vast majority of the public couldn't see the reasons behind fighting the Vietnam War and therefore could not see why they should sacrifice the lives of American soldiers and invest so much money. With the increase of media coverage on the Vietnam War, the people soon realized how disillusioned they were about the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War cost 58,000 American's their lives and still has effect on domestic politics in the United States.
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1. Interview from Time Magazine (found from Wikipedia.org)
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