Voices of Revolution: The Dissident Press in America

The self-assurance won so dearly by the victory in World War II began to fade from the American consciousness during the late 1940s, replaced by fear and anxiety. The pervasive Cold War mentality took hold as Eastern Europe came under the grip of communism and the Soviet Union flexed its muscles by detonating an atomic bomb. The most disturbing event of all was the fall of China in 1949. For despite huge infusions of American aid, the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek withdrew to the island of Taiwan, sacrificing mainland China to communist leader Mao Zedong. A few months later, the United States was again engaged in battle on foreign soil, this time in an effort to prevent Korea from joining the Communist Bloc. The Korean War lasted three years and claimed the lives of 54,000 American soldiers.

A military undertaking that ultimately would create an even darker chapter in American history—indeed, one of the bleakest on record—began to unfold in the early 1950s when President Truman, hoping to establish a democratic beachhead in Southeast Asia, sent military aid to a tiny French colony, 7,000 miles from the United States, known as Vietnam. By 1954, the French had withdrawn and Vietnam was divided in half—a communist government under Ho Chi Minh controlled the North; a purportedly pro-democracy government under Ngo Dinh Diem controlled the South. The American commitment continued, with President Eisenhower sending military personnel—the government called them advisers, critics called them imperialists in uniform. President Kennedy increased the U.S. military presence in Indochina, and President Johnson upped the stakes still higher in 1965 by committing massive American ground troops—within two years, the total exceeded 500,000.

Throughout these various stages of escalating involvement, mainstream American journalists supported the effort, serving as exuberant cheerleaders for the military. This devotion continued, according to scholars who have studied this highly controversial phenomenon, until January 1968 when the North Vietnamese orchestrated the Tet Offensive. Named for the lunar New Year holiday that coincided with it, this well-planned attack resulted in simultaneous assaults on more than 100 sites—virtually every city, town, and military base in South Vietnam. Most noteworthy was the enemy’s successful capture of the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon.¹

After Tet, the news media criticized U.S. involvement in Vietnam with a vengeance. The climactic moment came in late February when avuncular CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite counseled the viewing public that it was time for Americans to withdraw from Vietnam “not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”²

Although the Tet Offensive and mainstream news coverage of it unquestionably signaled a pivotal change in public opinion regarding the war, not all journalistic voices had been singing the praises of U.S. involvement before that point. A vociferous anti-war press had begun denouncing the war as early as 1954, with the chorus of criticism growing both in size and decibel level during the early and mid-1960s. Those dissident publications, which ultimately numbered several hundred, not only laid the groundwork for the seismic shift against the Vietnam War in early 1968 but also were a vital force in igniting and then fueling the massive Anti-War Movement that created a second major battlefield in the fighting: the homefront.³

Some of the earliest opposition to the war came in the mid-1950s from the pages of the Catholic Worker, the voice of pacifist Dorothy Day. The Worker was soon joined by I.F. Stone’s Weekly, the Washington-based newsletter penned by its iconoclastic namesake. Anti-war coverage received a major boost in early 1964 when the National Guardian began offering its readers the riveting immediacy of first-hand accounts reported by battlefield correspondent Wilfred Burchett. In the mid-1960s, the movement to end the war gained more momentum still when Ramparts magazine provided eye-popping investigative coverage—including the shocking revelations of a disillusioned American soldier and wrenching photographs of suffering Vietnamese children—showing that the fighting really was, as the anti-war press had been insisting for more than a decade, “The Dirty War.”⁴

One of the first journalists to question American military involvement in Southeast Asia was Dorothy Day, the legendary radical who still today is remembered as an archetype of political and social dissidence.

Born in Brooklyn in 1897, Day was a beautiful and charismatic young woman whose early life defined hedonism—promiscuity, abortion, attempted suicide, a child born out of wedlock. But then, when Day turned thirty and with her infant daughter’s well-being to consider, she changed the course of her life by converting to Roman Catholicism and founding, in 1933, the Catholic Worker newspaper.

Committed to social justice in many forms, the New York City monthly became the centerpiece of a social movement that quickly grew to include some 100 “houses of hospitality” that provided—and still provide today—free food and beds to the poor and the homeless in dozens of American cities. The Catholic Worker movement was grounded in the principles of racial equality, individual responsibility, and commitment to the teachings of God and the Catholic Church.

Throughout its long lifespan, the Catholic Worker—which continues to be published today—has always sold for one cent. The paper has never carried paid advertising, relying on the kindness and generosity of its supporters. “When we need money,” Dorothy Day explained, “we pray for it.”⁵

In 1954 and with a national circulation of 60,000, the Worker launched its pacifist crusade against the Vietnam War with a front-page editorial. Day had, for many years, expressed her displeasure with the U.S. government spending too much tax revenue on the military and not enough on social programs, and this criticism was the thrust of her pioneering article. “It is not Christianity and freedom we are defending, in the jungles of Vietnam,” Day wrote, “but our possessions.” Specifically, a third of the rubber coming from Indochina eventually wound up in the United States, Day argued, and America’s powerful military-industrial complex was determined that the supply would not be disrupted. It was rubber production rather than humanitarian concern, Day wrote, that had propelled the U.S. military into the obscure nation of Vietnam.⁶

As had been the case since Day had founded the Catholic Worker twenty years earlier, she was concerned primarily with the poor and the powerless. In this instance, that placed her focus on the Vietnamese workers and their exploitation by “the Godlessness of our Western materialism.” Every peasant—man, woman, and child alike—collected the sap from 200 to 400 rubber trees a day and received a mere forty cents for the back-breaking labor, the venerable editor wrote, and American industrialists had no intention of allowing that situation to change. Day possessed an unshakable belief that God watches out for the most vulnerable of His children, however, and was convinced that the peasants ultimately would triumph over the Western military invaders. “It is the poor of the world, it is the exploited, it is the dominated,” she wrote, “that will conquer.”⁷

The article was the first of a steady stream of anti-Vietnam War essays that dotted the pages of the Catholic Worker. One of the most powerful, titled “The Root of War,” denounced the “war-madness that is spreading with a furious contagion all over the world,” before going on to say that “of all the countries that are sick,” the United States was “the most grievously afflicted.” Repeating Day’s earlier indictment of the military operation in Vietnam as an example of America “exploiting other people,” the article contained such incendiary phrases as “immoral act,” “obsession with evil,” and “enormous act of murderous destruction.” The piece did not stop with name calling, however, but spelled out exactly what the United States had to do. “The first real step toward peace would be a realistic acceptance of the fact that our political ideals are perhaps to a great extent illusions and fictions to which we cling out of motives that are not always perfectly honest.”⁸

Besides accusing the nation’s leaders of duplicity, the Catholic Worker presaged a theme that would become a mainstay of the Anti-War Movement by pointing the finger not just at the generals but also at American politicians. “We will never get anywhere unless we can accept the fact that politics is an inextricable tangle of good and evil motives in which,” the paper stated point blank, “the evil predominate.”⁹

By the early 1960s, Dorothy Day was not the only aging renegade editor who was using a publication to speak out in opposition to the American military operation in Indochina; she had been joined by another dissident journalist of wide reputation.

Isidor Feinstein “Izzy” Stone, born in Philadelphia in 1907, worked for the Philadelphia Record and New York Post before gaining national attention as an investigative reporter for the liberal journal The Nation in the 1930s and 1940s. The impish Stone—he stood five-foot-seven and had a mischievous grin that seemed more like that of a boy than a man—was never satisfied merely to quote official sources, preferring instead to comb through public documents and then challenge the government’s version of the truth.

In 1953, he launched his anti-establishment I. F. Stone’s Weekly from his Washington, D.C., home. Stone was sometimes criticized for his sizable ego—symbolized by the gall of giving the newsletter his own name—but was far more often praised for his success at ferreting out the facts that the establishment press had missed.

Typical of the Weekly’s scoops was a 1958 story that accused the Atomic Energy Commission of lying when it said that underground tests had no effect beyond a very limited range. Stone then mobilized his mainstream journalistic contacts and forced the agency to admit that, in fact, the nuclear tests had wide impact far beyond the detonation site. That incident and others like it boosted the Weekly’s circulation above the 70,000 mark, transformed I. F. Stone into a folk hero for the American Left, and guaranteed that his newsletter would be read by the nation’s leading shapers of news and public policy.¹⁰

In the early 1960s, Stone turned his biting editorial commentary on American involvement in Indochina. At the same time that establishment news organizations were vilifying North Vietnam—the New York Times referred to the North Vietnamese army as “the encroaching Communist menace,” and the major television networks characterized them as “cruel, ruthless, and fanatical”—the Weekly filled its pages with criticism of the United States. Stone made reference to the country’s “swollen military budget,” “perilous delusions,” and “threats of destruction.”¹¹

Many essays in the Weekly broke new ground. One of the most significant came when Stone predicted that the U.S. military could not defeat the North Vietnamese, a startling and contentious statement in the wake of World War II and the Korean War. The Weekly called the war “a quicksand which could absorb a major share of our youth” and—in a statement that would reverberate for years to come—“a war that cannot be won.”¹²

Stone broke from the mainstream journalism pack on other points as well. In 1963, he made the observation—one that myriad journalists would repeat after the Tet Offensive five years later—that the U.S. military’s conventional tactics were futile in the unfamiliar terrain of Southeast Asia. Every time American fighters thought they had trapped a group of North Vietnamese soldiers, Stone wrote, the enemy guerrillas would suddenly “melt” into the jungle. “The greatest military power on earth is ineffective,” Stone wrote. “Never have so many armed with so much been able to do so little. Super power seems to have become super impotence.”¹³

Stone’s most stunning allegation came in 1963 and ultimately was confirmed by the release of the controversial Pentagon Papers in 1971: Leaders at the highest level of the U.S. government were sending young American men to their deaths in Southeast Asia not for humanitarian reasons, but for political ones. “Kennedy cannot afford to go into the campaign next year and face a Republican cry that under the Democrats we ‘lost’ Vietnam,” Stone wrote. “The national interest is to be subordinated to the convenience of the political leadership.”¹⁴

On a visual level, the most astonishing element of the war coverage in I. F. Stone’s Weekly during the early 1960s was the photographs of Vietnamese civilians. One unforgettable image showed a Vietnamese man cradling his young son in his arms. The boy, who was no more than a toddler, stared forlornly into the camera, pieces of skin dangling from his legs, arms, back, and face. Stone wrote that the boy had been burned by napalm, a deadly incendiary that American military leaders swore was used solely to destroy military sites and never was allowed to harm civilians. “We think it [the photo] tells a story every decent American should heed,” Stone said. “This is what we are doing to the innocent in Vietnam and Cambodia. We hope you find it revolting.”¹⁵

In early 1962, I. F. Stone’s Weekly called—in another statement that would be long remembered—for the withdrawal of all U.S. military personnel from Vietnam. After that initial demand, Stone repeatedly and with increasing ferocity urged American officials to negotiate an end to the war as soon as possible, with many of his pronouncements sounding almost identical to the words that Walter Cronkite would use—and that would shake the nation—in 1968. “It is becoming increasingly evident,” Stone wrote, “that the undeclared war in Vietnam can and will ultimately be settled only at the conference table.”¹⁶

Another influential anti-Vietnam War publication originally had been launched in 1948 to support the short-lived Progressive Party, which offered a far-left alternative to the Democrats and Republicans. National Guardian founder James Aronson was a disenchanted New York Times veteran eager to focus on issues of importance, regardless of their popularity. In the 1950s, the Guardian made a name for itself by spearheading a doomed campaign to save convicted spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg from execution and by reporting the early stages of the Civil Rights Movement.

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By publishing this poignant photograph in 1964, I. F. Stone’s Weekly provided early documentation of the effects that napalm bombing was having on Vietnamese children.

By 1963, Aronson had transformed his New York-based weekly into a militant voice in opposition to the war in Southeast Asia. Even though the U.S. government claimed only to be providing the South Vietnamese with “a few” military advisers, the newsweekly reported that the American forces had, in reality, swollen to more than 12,000 soldiers whose “advisory role” included leading daily strafing and napalm bombing missions. The Guardian also disclosed that at least sixty-six of the U.S. “advisers” had been killed.¹⁷

The single most salient point the National Guardian made, beginning in early 1963, was one that I. F. Stone’s Weekly had already made—but that the mandarins of the American press refused to admit for another five years—by stating, without so much as a hint of equivocation, that the United States would never win the war in Indochina. The Guardian did not make this weighty pronouncement quietly or subtly, but loudly and repeatedly. “The U.S. cannot win the war,” stated one piece; “Victory for the U.S. force is out of the question,” said another; “The end of the road in Vietnam will be military defeat,” insisted a third.¹⁸

In a piece labeled “Our ‘Dirty War,’” the Guardian articulated two reasons for its pessimistic stance vis-à-vis the war. First, as I. F. Stone also had pointed out, American soldiers were unable to fight the kind of guerrilla warfare that the North Vietnamese and rebel Viet Cong waged in the tropical jungles of their homeland. Second, U.S. forces lacked the support of the South Vietnamese people; rather than wanting the United States to help them become a democracy, the majority of the South Vietnamese wanted the Americans to leave—though Washington politicians claimed otherwise.¹⁹

On a broader scale, the most important contribution the National Guardian made was to provide its 25,000 subscribers with breaking news written by the only correspondent reporting from behind the battlelines for an American news organization. Wilfred Burchett was an Australian-born journalist whose articles made some of the most compelling war reporting ever written. Indeed, by early 1964, the Guardian was considered essential to the diet not only of the country’s leading activists but also of establishment politicians and military leaders.²⁰

For while the mainstream American media were characterizing North Vietnam as a backward country whose military was inept and ineffective against the mighty U.S. forces with their sophisticated tactics and advanced technology, Burchett painted a strikingly contradictory picture.

Particularly significant was his account of the North Vietnamese army’s 1964 assault on the U.S. airfield at Bien Hoa in South Vietnam. Mainstream American news media had pooh-poohed rumors that the enemy had triumphed, but Burchett provided concrete details that showed the reports were based on incontrovertible fact: The North Vietnamese killed three dozen American “advisers” and destroyed twenty-one B-57 jet bombers worth $25 million—without losing a single man or plane. The Guardian correspondent also documented that the North Vietnamese soldiers had received “great help from the local people,” thereby reinforcing the paper’s editorial stance that the South Vietnamese did not support the U.S. military operation in their country.²¹

Burchett reported similar American defeats at Loc Ninh, at Binh Gia, and in numerous hamlets along the Mekong Delta, while Guardian editor James Aronson highlighted the stories with such provocative headlines as “The U.S. myth about Vietnam” and “U.S. debacle in South Vietnam.”²²

So, by mid-February 1964, Aronson had ample support for the bold headline he stripped across the top of the National Guardian’s editorial page: “Get out of Vietnam!” In that stunning editorial, the paper used words virtually identical to those that the country’s most prestigious newspapers, news magazines, and television networks would begin using four and five years later. “The writing is on the wall for this U.S. mis-adventure in South Vietnam,” the Guardian wrote. “This is a war the U.S. cannot win. America will spill more blood, destroy more villages, wipe out more rice fields and buffalo, but that is about all.” The editorial ended with the statement that was fast becoming the mantra of the anti-war press: “The U.S. must get out and stay out of Vietnam.”²³

Throughout 1965, the Guardian continued its drumbeat of dissidence by exposing lies and deceptions that it laid at the feet of America’s military and political leaders. The list was long and reprehensible. One article reported that bloodthirsty U.S. pilots went unpunished after purposely aiming their bombs at North Vietnamese schools and hospitals—even though officials continued to insist that air attacks targeted military sites only. Another piece revealed that U.S. military brass had adopted a new strategy to bring the enemy to their knees; American planes were dropping bombs on North Vietnamese sanitariums for lepers and other persons with mental and physical disabilities. Still other stories reported that U.S. bombing targets in North Vietnam had been expanded to farms, markets, and residential districts and to irrigation dams and flood control dikes in the countryside—actions that, according to the Guardian, “could cost literally millions of lives.”²⁴

By 1965, dissident publications opposed to U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia had been raising their objections for more than a decade, and yet the American commitment to the war continued to escalate, with President Johnson sending 175,000 ground troops to Vietnam by year’s end. That was also the year that another anti-war publication, this one with a huge circulation, entered the picture.

Ramparts had been a lackluster intellectual Catholic journal that its youthful new editor, Warren Hinckle, was determined to transform into a high-profile muckraking magazine. Hinckle saw taking a stand against the Vietnam War as the perfect vehicle for gaining the national attention that could propel his San Francisco-based monthly, which at the time already had a circulation of 100,000, into the must-read publication he had in mind.

Hinckle launched his campaign against the Indochinese war in July 1965 with a devastating critique titled “The Vietnam Lobby.” The ten-page investigative piece offered the first detailed documentation that American involvement in Vietnam was not an impulsive response to communist aggression, as government officials claimed, but a deliberate and long-planned act of American imperialism. The article described how conservative Roman Catholic Cardinal Francis Spellman had groomed the future dictator of South Vietnam, Ngo Dinh Diem, at a New York seminary in the early 1950s and then had lined up support for him in U.S. government and intellectual circles. The Ramparts exposé also targeted mainstream press puffery that assured Americans that Diem’s regime was an Asian “miracle” and model of democracy—even though Diem was, in reality, totally corrupt. (Diem was involved in so much criminal activity that the United States eventually had to change course and oust him; he was assassinated, on CIA orders, in November 1963.)²⁵

Ramparts followed its opening anti-Vietnam War salvo with an even bigger blockbuster, this one a first-person perspective on the war from one of the American military’s own. On the cover of the February 1966 issue was emblazoned a photo of a formidable-looking Green Beret with his chest displaying a dazzling collection of medals and ribbons testifying to his bravery and patriotism. In the twelve-page piece that followed, former Master Sergeant Donald Duncan gave an insider’s view of the U.S. military in Southeast Asia that was both enlightening and bloodcurdling: American soldiers routinely tortured and killed civilians they suspected of helping North Vietnamese soldiers, white GIs treated African American soldiers with abuse and derision, the United States operated assassination squads to kill leaders in neutral Cambodia, and military officials consistently exaggerated the number of enemy soldiers they had killed—Duncan told of one incident that he was involved in that resulted in the deaths of six Viet Cong, which his superiors inflated to 250. Most shocking of all was Duncan’s revelation that the ranks of the Viet Cong that continually attacked American troops consisted primarily not of rebels from North Vietnam, but from South Vietnam—the very people U.S. forces were supposedly defending.²⁶

Many of the direct quotations in Duncan’s article, which Ramparts ballyhooed with full-page ads in major American papers, were nothing short of devastating. “Little by little, as all the facts made their impact on me,” Duncan wrote of his experience in uniform, “I had to accept that the position, ‘We are in Vietnam because we are in sympathy with the aspirations and desires of the Vietnamese people,’ was a lie.” Of his eighteen months of active duty in Southeast Asia, Duncan said, “We weren’t preserving freedom in South Vietnam. The whole thing was a lie.”²⁷

The January 1967 issue of Ramparts carried another gripping piece in which Dr. Benjamin Spock, the world’s most famous baby doctor and an outspoken critic of the war, talked about the one million Vietnamese children who had been killed or wounded. “Not many of them even get to hospitals, which are few and far between,” Spock wrote. “Materials for the adequate treatment of burns—gauze, ointments, antibiotics and plasma—are usually non-existent. Flies are in the wounds.” Even more heart-wrenching than the words were the sixteen pages of photos that ran with the article. Printed on glossy paper and in full color, the magazine brought the realities of the fighting home to readers as words could not. Pictures of children with burnt flesh and others with bandaged stumps where arms and legs should have been were silent witnesses to the grisly effects of napalm. One little girl had lost an eye, and another had so many open wounds on her face, the product of American shrapnel, that they obscured her other features. A young boy was so grotesque—his eyelids had been burned away and his chin somehow had become grafted to his chest so the boy had no neck whatsoever—that a reader instinctively turned the page quickly.²⁸

The stories and photos that Ramparts published between 1965 and early 1967 succeeded in providing editor Warren Hinckle with both the attention and the readership that he had hoped. Two years after Hinckle launched his anti-Vietnam War campaign, the magazine’s circulation reached 250,000, making it far and away the largest dissident publication in the country at the time—and simultaneously carrying the realities of the war to a significant slice of the American people.

During much of the time that the four dissident publications were reporting and denouncing the murder and mayhem that had become standard practice in Indochina, they were simultaneously helping to establish and to fuel the largest and most effective anti-war movement in U.S. history.

One early call for creating a movement to bring the war to an end came in I. F. Stone’s Weekly in 1962. In the piece, Stone proposed that such a movement be formed and then went on to stipulate that its first action be to investigate the war and thereby discover what Stone was sure would be incriminating documentation to pave the way for withdrawing American forces. The provocateur went on to stipulate exactly who the leaders of the embryonic movement should talk to. “There are plenty of returned Americans, military and civilian, to testify,” Stone insisted. “It is time the full truth about the war were told.”²⁹

Like the generations of dissident journalists who had preceded him, Stone was not satisfied merely to use the printed word to call for a new social movement, as he also became one of the first critics featured at what ultimately swelled into a gigantic wave of anti-war rallies that swept across the American landscape.

Stone was a featured speaker at the march that scholars now consider the first major public demonstration against the Vietnam War. That event in the spring of 1965 drew 25,000 protesters who encircled the White House and then walked to the grounds of the Washington Monument to listen to Stone. In his historic oration, the militant editor compared the anti-Vietnam War activists to the leaders of the American Revolution, telling them it was their patriotic duty to denounce their country’s military and political establishments, which Stone labeled “monstrous institutions.” Stone urged the demonstrators—about three-fourths of them were college students—to “go home and talk about these things.” Later that year, Stone devoted an entire issue of the Weekly to celebrating the rapid growth of the Anti-War Movement.³⁰

News reports written about that first demonstration made it abundantly clear that dissident publications would cover anti-war protests very differently than mainstream publications would. I. F. Stone’s Weekly and the other anti-Vietnam War voices promoted upcoming rallies in advance and then provided saturation coverage after the fact, including verbatim transcripts of the speeches that activists had made. Mainstream publications, on the other hand, preferred to focus on more superficial details. Several papers spent space squabbling about the exact number of people who participated in the first rally; even though the police had announced at a press briefing that the crowd numbered 25,000, the Washington Post and Washington Evening Star argued that the correct figure was 16,000, the New York Herald Tribune said 15,000, and the New York Times reduced the number to 10,000. But the most important detail, according to the titans of American journalism, was one that I. F. Stone’s Weekly never even mentioned: how the protesters were dressed and groomed. The Washington Evening Star reported a profusion of “tight pants” and “long hair,” the Herald Tribune thought it important to chronicle an abundance of “dark glasses,” “overalls,” and “‘beatnik’ outfits of oddly cut clothing,” and the Times, the nation’s newspaper of record, weighed in with the observation that the protesters sported an abundance of “blue jeans” and “beards.” The Washington Post felt compelled to report that, at one point during the rally, one of the 100 counter demonstrators yelled out: “‘Why don’t you take baths?’” ³¹

By this point in the mid-1960s, I. F. Stone’s Weekly was no longer alone among dissident journalistic voices in supporting the creation and growth of an Anti-War Movement.

Like Izzy Stone, Dorothy Day was so widely respected by the American Left that she was in demand as a speaker at early anti-Vietnam War rallies. Also like her fellow maverick, Day often reprinted the texts of her speeches in the publication she edited. “The word of God is clear in the New Testament and the Old,” Day told 30,000 listeners who gathered at Manhattan’s Union Square in late 1965. “Thou shalt not kill, Love your enemies, Overcome evil with good. To love others as He loved us, to lay down our lives for our brothers throughout the world, not to take the lives of men, women, and children, young and old, by bombs and napalm and all the other instruments of war.” Despite Day’s advanced age—she turned sixty-eight that year—and wide reputation as a pacifist, counter demonstrators heckled her by screaming “Moscow Mary! Moscow Mary!”³²

It was also in 1965 that Day made headlines nationwide when she, in an editorial in the Worker, urged every young man in America to refuse to serve in the armed forces. Making such a statement was highly risky because it was a direct violation of the federal law prohibiting any citizen from encouraging persons facing the draft to refuse service. Conviction would have meant a five-year prison sentence and a $5,000 fine, although Day was never prosecuted.³³

One of the National Guardian’s first statements on behalf of the nascent Anti-War Movement came in early 1964 when editor James Aronson stripped the headline “It’s time for a broad U.S. peace movement” across the front page. “There are many thousands of Americans,” Aronson wrote in the editorial that followed, “who are deeply committed and eager to act against the war.” After throwing his full support behind such a movement, Aronson went on to define its mission and activities, saying that anti-war activists should fight for disarmament, reduced military spending, and an end to the draft. The movement must, Aronson wrote, “oppose the military-industrial network profiting from arms production.”³⁴

Other Guardian pieces reinforced the importance of the Anti-War Movement. “The time is now for every concerned American to demand that the U.S. government withdraw its forces from South Vietnam,” one argued; “Unless we all unite in a great outcry of horror,” demanded another, “we shall not waken from the nightmare in time.” Many of the essays prescribed specific actions that would be necessary if the movement were to take fire. A typical directive told readers: “Write your representatives in Congress, speak out in your community and your organizations, urge your peace and civic groups, union locals, churches, schoolmates and friends to join your call. You can spark the organization of public meetings of protest, of letter-writing campaigns to your local newspapers, of delegations to your congressmen home for weekends.”³⁵

Because Ramparts published only in-depth investigative pieces, its editorial format was not conducive to promoting the Anti-War Movement—at least not directly. The muckraking magazine’s support, however, came blazing through in statements within its articles. The 1966 exposé about Sergeant Donald Duncan’s perspective on the Vietnam War, for example, included his thoughts about youthful demonstrators protesting the war even though they had never worn military uniforms. “I think they should be commended,” Ramparts quoted Duncan as saying. “I had to wait until I was 35 years old, after spending 10 years in the army and 18 months personally witnessing the stupidity of the war before I could figure it out. That these young people were able to figure it out so quickly and so accurately is not only a credit to their intelligence, but a great personal triumph over a lifetime of conditioning and indoctrination.”³⁶

The men and women involved in the anti-Vietnam War press paid a high price to pursue their crusade. Three of the nation’s most powerful communities—politicians, military leaders, and industrialists—all were determined to continue to reap the personal and financial benefits they received from the international conflict. In addition, the elected officials and top generals had no intention of becoming the first men in history to allow the United States to withdraw from a foreign war without full and complete victory. The country’s power elite, therefore, brought pressure on the dissidents to cease their journalistic campaign.

National Guardian editor James Aronson later spoke of some of the ways he and his co-workers suffered. Because few businesses were willing to buy advertisements in an anti-war newspaper, the staff members had to live on the same painfully low salaries that persons writing for previous generations of the dissident press had experienced. “Payless paydays” were frequent, Aronson recalled, and the only way most members of the staff were able to survive financially was by having supportive wives or husbands who made decent salaries in their jobs. Other problems were more difficult to overcome. Not only staff members but also their friends and relatives were repeatedly interrogated by FBI agents, and on many nights those same targeted individuals received phone calls at regular intervals for hours on end—when they answered the phone, the caller hung up. A friend at the telephone company confirmed that government officials tapped the Guardian’s telephones, and several reporters and editors had to endure annual audits by the Internal Revenue Service. Hate mail poured into the office, and the local postmaster supplied the federal government with the names of Guardian subscribers who then received intimidating phone calls and visits from FBI agents, resulting in hundreds of canceled subscriptions. On several occasions, metal scraps and tools mysteriously appeared in the presses at the plant that printed the paper, forcing costly repairs and production delays.³⁷

The Tet Offensive in late January 1968 was unquestionably the most significant military action in the war. The pivotal moment in the well-orchestrated assault came when a suicide squad captured the grounds of the supposedly impregnable new U.S. Embassy in Saigon, killing five American soldiers. That action ended after six hours, but heavy fighting continued for ten more days.

Tet’s repercussions were huge. Although U.S. forces soon reclaimed the ground taken during the offensive, the reaction on the homefront gave the enemy a psychological victory of monumental importance. Before Tet, U.S. officials had consistently told the American people that victory in Vietnam was imminent. In a major speech in Washington, D.C., two months before the attack, General William C. Westmoreland, commander of U.S. forces, had insisted, “We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.” The mainstream media had blindly echoed the same upbeat tune, with not a single major newspaper or television network calling for an end to the war. The Washington Evening Star’s coverage was typical, assuring its readers in November 1967, “The military war in Vietnam is nearly won.”³⁸

Tet changed all that. Dramatic televised images of the enemy’s takeover of the U.S. Embassy compound shocked both the American public and the mainstream media, which finally realized that they had been duped. Overnight, news organizations that previously had been happy to serve as handmaidens to the government suddenly became harsh critics. Before Tet, editorial commentary by television journalists had run four to one in favor of U.S. policy; after Tet, comments ran two to one against.³⁹

The American people quickly followed suit. In one of the most abrupt shifts in public opinion ever recorded, within six weeks after the Tet Offensive, one American in five switched from supporting the war to opposing it. So for the first time in the twenty years of U.S. involvement, a majority of Americans opposed the war. The surge of opposition led President Johnson not to seek reelection and to begin withdrawing troops, leaving a death toll of more than 58,000 Americans and some three to five million Southeast Asians.⁴⁰

While there is no question that the mainstream news media—particularly television—played an enormous role in hastening the end of the most controversial war in American history, by no means did negative coverage of U.S. involvement in Vietnam begin with Tet. For fourteen years before that climactic event, the anti-war press had been criticizing the war—loudly and relentlessly. What’s more, those dissident journalistic voices had played a leading role in igniting and then continuing to kindle an Anti-War Movement that became so robust and so widespread that it encompassed a powerful majority of the American public that the political elite could not ignore.

Week after week, month after month, year after year from 1954 until the last American soldier was helicoptered out of Indochina in 1975, the anti-war press devoted its energies to convincing the American people that the war was unconscionable. That effort began with the single pacifist voice of the Catholic Worker but gradually, during the early and mid-1960s, gained momentum as I. F. Stone’s Weekly, the National Guardian, and Ramparts joined the crusade and lifted the combined circulation of just the four publications discussed here to some 400,000—not to mention the several hundred other dissident voices spawned by this dauntless quartet.

The anti-Vietnam War press became an influence on American thought not solely because of its growing circulation but because of other factors as well. The earliest publications to oppose the war were edited by a pair of radicals who already had strong followings among American intellectuals, Dorothy Day and Izzy Stone. In addition, the courage that it took for the first publications to oppose U.S. involvement in Indochina—no small act in a nation that prided itself on never having lost a foreign war—attracted legions of independent-minded readers. It was also significant that the anti-war press, through the on-the-spot battlefield reports by Wilfred Burchett in the Guardian, provided information not available in other publications, including such breaking stories as the North Vietnamese victories at Bien Hoa, Loc Ninh, and Binh Gia, and the fact that the Viet Cong rebels included many South Vietnamese—the people the United States was supposedly fighting for, not against. Further, the anti-war press went beyond merely restating the government’s statistical body counts; the dissident publications looked at the human cost of the war through the suffering being inflicted on the Vietnamese people. Finally, the sensational articles in Ramparts, especially Sergeant Donald Duncan’s first-person exposé, made for reading that was both illuminating and riveting.

Perhaps the most remarkable legacy of the dissident anti-Vietnam War press is the degree to which the accusations and revelations that originally appeared in its pages ultimately were adopted by the mainstream American media. For after the Tet Offensive, it was as if the country’s leading journalists had simply combed through the back files of the anti-war press and then repeated the statements that had been published there five, six, and seven years earlier. It was not until February 1968, for example, that the Wall Street Journal told its readers that “the whole Vietnam effort may be doomed; it may be falling apart beneath our feet” and that “everyone had better be prepared for the bitter taste of a defeat”—revelations that I. F. Stone’s Weekly had been making since 1963. It was also in February 1968 that ABC television first reported that the reality of the fighting in Vietnam was “the exact opposite of what American leaders have been leading us to believe” and that CBS first stated that “the Viet Cong proved they could take and hold almost any area they chose”—revelations that the Catholic Worker had first made in 1961 and the National Guardian had made in 1964. Likewise, it was in February 1968 that Time, the country’s most prestigious news magazine, suggested that the South Vietnamese political leaders did not deserve the support the United States had been giving them—a position Ramparts had staked out in 1965. Finally, it was in late February 1968 that CBS, after anchor Walter Cronkite had returned from a trip to Vietnam, first called for the American military to withdraw from Southeast Asia—an editorial plea that I. F. Stone’s Weekly had been making since 1962.⁴¹