Military police keep back protesters during a sit-in outside the Pentagon on October 21, 1967.
During John F. Kennedy’s presidency, Vietnam was flying below the radar of most Americans, although by the time of his assassination he had boosted the number of military advisors in Vietnam from fewer than a thousand to more than sixteen thousand; a monk had self-immolated in Saigon protesting the treatment of Buddhists by the regime of the Catholic Ngo Dinh Diem; and President Diem himself had been overthrown and killed in a military coup aided and abetted by the American CIA. The Malcolm Browne photograph of the burning monk was given worldwide circulation, and the coup against Diem likewise made headlines in most of the world’s newspapers.
As 1964 began, with Lyndon Johnson in the White House, undercurrents of discontent began to rumble across America. In May, the socialist Progressive Labor Movement organized the first significant street demonstration against the Vietnam War; hundreds of students and organizers marched from Times Square to the United Nations headquarters in New York City. A few days later, a dozen young men in New York burned their draft cards. Largely ignored by the public because of its socialist roots, the early antiwar movement would spread to college campuses the following year and eventually to mainstream America. In August, the Gulf of Tonkin incident—in which the US military and the Johnson administration alleged that North Vietnamese gunboats attacked a US Navy destroyer off the coast of North Vietnam on August 2 and again on August 4—led to the congressional resolution of the same name, intensified bombing of North Vietnam, and a sudden growth of antiwar sentiment.*
Trying to manage the increasingly vexatious conflict in Southeast Asia was not Johnson’s only concern. Chief among the unfinished business of Kennedy’s abbreviated presidency was the civil rights bill that he had sent to Congress in June 1963. Despite opposition by a number of Southern members, the bill was brought to the House floor in October and was passed and sent to the Senate.
In Lyndon Johnson’s first address to a joint session of Congress, less than a week after Kennedy’s assassination, Johnson said, “No memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” Johnson, a Southerner, had committed himself to the most far-reaching civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. His fellow Southern Democrats in the Senate were no less committed to killing the bill.
A slightly weakened compromise bill was brought to the Senate floor, where a Southern bloc of eighteen senators filibustered against it for fifty-seven days, until Majority Whip Hubert Humphrey rounded up enough votes to end the filibuster and bring the bill to a vote. It passed 73–27, cleared a House-Senate conference committee, and was approved by both House and Senate. On July 2, forty-eight hours before the nation’s birthday celebration, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law.
(Most historians agree that Kennedy, the elite Yankee, probably could not have gotten the Civil Rights Act, or the Voting Rights Act, through Congress. It required the consummate political skills, and the Southern heritage, of LBJ to reach the goals that Kennedy had set.)
The act drove five Southern Democrat states into the arms of the more conservative Republican Party in the November election, but neither the political defections nor the threat of a wider war in Vietnam, precipitated by the Gulf of Tonkin incident, prevented Johnson from being elected to his own full term as president by a landslide in November. In what could be seen as a classic irony, Johnson campaigned as the antiwar candidate against the strident hawkishness of his Republican opponent, Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona. The famous—or infamous—television campaign ad known as the “Daisy Girl” ad suggested that if elected, Goldwater would somehow bring on a nuclear holocaust.
President Lyndon Johnson moves to shake hands with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. while others look on at the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.
As the ad begins, the viewers see a little girl standing in a field, counting as she plucks petals from a daisy. The girl’s counting is replaced by the ominous sound of a missile launch countdown, and at zero the screen lights up with a nuclear explosion and a mushroom cloud. The voice of Lyndon Johnson intones, These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die. It aired only one time, during NBC’s Movie of the Week on September 7, 1964, but it caused an immediate storm of protest whose impact reverberated throughout the nation on election Tuesday. Johnson and his running mate, Sen. Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, captured 60 percent of the popular vote and 90 percent of the Electoral College votes, at the time the most lopsided electoral victory in the history of the presidency.
But during the next four years, dramatic events in Vietnam and at home would discourage Johnson from seeking a second term and would produce another chance at the White House for Richard Nixon.
“President Johnson’s decision to sacrifice himself on the altar of peace and national unity is an act of statesmanship which entitles him to the American people’s deepest respect and sympathy.” So wrote the editors of the Los Angeles Times, voicing a view shared by many in the immediate aftermath of Johnson’s historic speech of March 31, 1968. Praise of the president’s actions was even more widespread after Hanoi announced on April 3 that it would accept the American offer to begin preliminary peace talks. Infused with fresh hope that the Vietnam War might at last be brought to an end, a mood of near exhilaration temporarily gripped the American people. In New York, throngs of well-wishers cheered the president during a visit for the investiture of Archbishop Terence Cardinal Cooke, while on Wall Street the stock market recorded its greatest single-day gain to that date.
For Lyndon Johnson, there must have been more than a touch of irony in that transitory moment of renewed popularity. Barely three years had passed since he stood at the apex of power and prestige, after his stunning electoral victory. With the Democratic Party in firm control of both houses of Congress and the economy booming, his dream of creating the Great Society on the foundations of Kennedy’s New Frontier had seemed well within reach. During his State of the Union address on January 4, 1965, the House chamber had thundered with applause as Johnson laid out his agenda for the future: to extend federal aid to education and medical aid to the elderly, to eradicate poverty and refurbish the cities, and to cut excise taxes and ensure equal rights for all. “This, then, is the State of the Union,” the president had concluded, “free, growing, restless, and full of hope.”
Only one major problem confronted Johnson as he set out to transform his social vision into reality: the war in that “damn little piss-ant country,” as he privately referred to Vietnam. Despite the commitment of more than twenty-two thousand American military advisors, the might of some twelve thousand American bombing missions, and the influx of thousands of tons of American war materiel, the struggle against the Communists in Southeast Asia was going badly. Even more disquieting from Johnson’s point of view, it was becoming a political liability. Public opinion polls taken at the end of 1964 revealed that fully 50 percent of the public was dissatisfied with the administration’s handling of the war, though the same surveys also indicated sharp disagreement over what course the president should follow. During the election campaign, Johnson himself had seemed undecided, promising not to widen the war or “send American boys to do what Asian boys ought to do for themselves,” while at the same time vowing never “to yield to Communist aggression.”
By early 1965, however, it had become clear that the time for such ambivalence had passed. With the threat of a decisive Communist victory in South Vietnam growing more imminent with each passing day, Johnson would have to make “harder choices,” special assistant McGeorge Bundy advised him. He would have to choose between “escalation and withdrawal,” between using “our military power to force a change in Communist policy” and applying “all our resources along a track of negotiation, aimed at salvaging what little can be preserved.” Fearful that he would be vilified by the Republican right if he “lost” South Vietnam to the Communists and confident that the nation would tolerate the war as long as its costs remained relatively modest, Johnson opted to raise the American stakes in Southeast Asia by stepping up the bombing of North Vietnam and sending US combat troops to the South. In so doing, he set in motion forces that would divide the nation, shatter his plans for the Great Society, and ultimately deprive him of the presidency itself.
From the outset, there had been dissenting voices. Eminent journalist Walter Lippmann—who had helped popularize the term “cold war,” feuded with Johnson and repeatedly warned that there could be “no military solution” to the Vietnam conflict—was one. (Lippmann had a mixed record as a prophet; he insisted in 1959 that Cuba had “no real prospect of becoming a Soviet satellite state.”) Senators Wayne Morse of Oregon and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, the only members of Congress to vote against the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, were others. When the Marines went ashore at Da Nang in the spring of 1965, however, public opposition to the deepening American involvement in Vietnam rapidly expanded and intensified.
University students were among the first to register their protest. Beginning in late March at the University of Michigan, activists at more than a hundred colleges and universities boycotted classes and staged a series of “teach-ins” to discuss the war and its implications. Others, seeking to express their dissent more directly, left their campuses to participate in the mass antiwar rallies that took place in New York on April 15 and in Washington, D.C., two days later. In Berkeley, California, the newly formed Vietnam Day Committee organized similar demonstrations during the spring and later attempted to block troop trains heading into the Oakland Army Terminal, the point of departure for many Vietnam-bound GIs.
Antiwar demonstrators gather in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on October 21, 1967. Behind them is the Washington Monument, and in the distance, the Capitol Building.
Swelling the ranks of the student protesters were many clergymen, educators, and civil rights leaders, as well as members of such liberal, middle-class organizations as the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE) and the American Friends Service Committee. A product of the earlier “ban the bomb” movement, SANE mounted the largest single antiwar protest of the year when it attracted thirty thousand marchers to Washington, D.C., on November 27. Led by pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, socialist Norman Thomas, and Coretta Scott King, the wife of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the demonstrators carried placards demanding an end to US bombing in Vietnam and a supervised cease-fire.
In 1966, the antiwar movement continued to gain momentum, as more and more ordinary citizens began to question the American commitment to South Vietnam. In late January, a group of one hundred Veterans and Reservists to End the War in Vietnam picketed the White House to protest the resumption of US air strikes over North Vietnam after a thirty-seven-day bombing pause. Several days later, five thousand American scientists, seventeen of them former Nobel Prize winners, petitioned the president to review US chemical and biological warfare in Southeast Asia.
Serious doubts about the war also began to surface in Congress, prompting the Senate Armed Services Committee to initiate in early February 1966 an “investigation” of the administration’s Vietnam policy. Under the chairmanship of Sen. J. William Fulbright, the distinguished Arkansas Democrat, the committee set out to find answers to basic questions surrounding military strategy, troop deployments, bombing policy, and peace negotiations. A longtime friend and legislative ally of Johnson, Fulbright had been instrumental in steering through Congress the August 1964 Southeast Asia (Tonkin Gulf) Resolution, empowering the president “to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force,” to defend the freedom of South Vietnam. Like many of his colleagues, however, Fulbright had become increasingly irritated by Johnson’s highhanded use of that authority to escalate the war without consulting the legislative branch. Although Secretary of Defense McNamara and JCS chairman General Wheeler refused to testify before the committee, Fulbright pressed on with the inquiry, calling on a parade of high-ranking government officials to defend the administration’s position.
During an anti-Vietnam demonstration in Washington, D.C., US Marshals bodily remove a protester amid the outbreak of violence at the Pentagon.
Martin Luther King Jr. addresses a large peace demonstration against the Vietnam War at the United Nations Plaza in New York City, April 15, 1967.
Jeffrey Hahn grew up a Christian Scientist in a politically conservative family that voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. By then, Jeff had graduated from Newton (Mass.) High School and enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania. He was very clear on his life goals—he wanted to become a university professor. Sometime after the 1964 election, which Lyndon Johnson won by a landslide, Hahn began dating a Quaker girl who took him to a civil rights rally at the Convention Center in Philadelphia. It was the first time in his life he had sung “We Shall Overcome.”
As a student, Hahn read US senator J. William Fulbright’s 1966 book, The Arrogance of Power, which disputed the justification of the Vietnam War. A Southern Democrat and segregationist, Fulbright nonetheless supported the creation of the United Nations and opposed McCarthyism, and started the foundation that bears his name, which offers fellowships to a wide variety of scholars. Hahn also read journalist Bernard Fall’s book on Vietnam, Hell in a Very Small Place: The Battle of Dien Bien Phu. He was seeing the grim images—and the body bags—being sent back from Vietnam. By the time he enrolled as a graduate student in Russian studies at Duke University in the fall of 1966, he had turned 180 degrees from his parents’ political leanings and was ready to rebel against the war.
The final straw for Hahn was the death of his high school friend Danny Kent, who had enlisted for Officer Candidate School and been killed in Vietnam.
“It had become clear to me that the Vietnam War was costing the US lives and money and no one had offered a good reason for being there,” Hahn said, “except that it was anticommunism.” Hahn had studied the containment theory of diplomat/historian George F. Kennan, who advocated building a strong circle of allies around the Soviet Union to contain its expansion rather than confront it militarily. “The containment theory should not have been applied to the Far East,” Hahn believes, “because the Soviets were already ‘contained’ by China.” Far from being a monolithic Communist bloc, as many in the US believed, the USSR and China had been divided by the famous Sino-Soviet Split, which became public knowledge in 1961 when China denounced Soviet communism as “revisionist.”
“By the mid-1960s, US policymakers should have known that the Soviets and the Chinese had more differences in national security interests than points of ideological commonality,” said Hahn. They should have also seen that Ho Chi Minh, who had sought the help of every US president since Woodrow Wilson to win Vietnam’s independence, was much more of a nationalist than a Communist. “If we had really wanted to stop communism in Southeast Asia,” Hahn said, “we would have let Ho Chi Minh win.”
By 1967, Hahn was following Minnesota Democratic senator Eugene “Clean Gene” McCarthy, who announced in November that he would run for president on an antiwar platform. Then came 1968. First, the assassination of Martin Luther King. Then in March, McCarthy stunned President Johnson by nearly upsetting the incumbent president in the New Hampshire primary, demonstrating how divided Democrats were over the war. By the end of the month, Johnson had taken himself out of the race. Then came the murder of Robert F. Kennedy, the tumultuous Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the election of Richard Nixon.
The antiwar movement at Duke was small in 1967, but it grew as the war escalated, and when Nixon sent US troops into Cambodia in 1970, the movement exploded on campuses all over America. At Kent State in Ohio, four students were shot to death by National Guard troops. At Duke, the outspoken Jeff Hahn became the leader of the university’s protest movement. He led door-to-door canvassing in Durham to get signatures on a petition in support of the McGovern-Hatfield amendment, which would have required the US to end all combat operations in Vietnam by the end of the year. He convinced the university president, Terry Sanford, the former governor of North Carolina, later a US senator) to help him recruit one hundred prominent North Carolinians to lobby the US Congress. They chartered a plane, flew to Washington, D.C., and knocked on the doors of the North Carolina congressional delegation, with special attention given to the state’s senators, Sam Ervin and B. Everett Jordan, asking for support of McGovern-Hatfield (which ultimately was defeated in the Senate). “Pretty heady stuff for a young grad student,” Hahn said.
Hahn himself was not drafted. He was awarded a National Defense Education Act Fellowship, aimed at creating a corps of highly trained specialists in areas thought useful to the national defense—in Hahn’s case, this was Soviet communism. “Many of my college peers went to grad school to avoid the draft,” Hahn said. “I went to grad school because I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life, and that was to become a professor of Russian studies. The deferment was incidental for me.”
Hahn taught Russian studies at Villanova University for thirty-seven years before retiring in 2008. Looking back on his years as a protester, Hahn said he is “terribly proud” of what he did.
In the end, the month-long hearings failed to produce any concrete results, since few congressmen were prepared to challenge the president directly or to cut off funds for the war. Nevertheless, by providing an open forum for a debate over American policy objectives in Vietnam, the nationally televised proceedings made dissent more respectable, thus paving the way for a herd of nearly fifty “peace candidates” in the November 1966 congressional elections. Though all were defeated, some drew significant support, including Robert Scheer, the editor of the radical journal Ramparts, who received 45 percent of the Democratic primary vote in California’s 7th District. Moreover, as journalist Andrew Kopkind observed in the New Republic, opponents of the war could find a “measure of hope” in the election of a “minibloc” of dovish Republicans, including Sens. Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Charles Percy of Illinois, and Edward Brooke of Massachusetts.
In the meantime, mass demonstrations against the war continued to proliferate, culminating in the largest antiwar rally in US history—a march by three hundred thousand Americans in New York City on April 15, 1967. Six months later, on October 21, a much smaller but equally determined group of protesters gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., to hear speakers condemn the war amid signs demanding that President Johnson “Bring Home the GIs Now!” As the last speeches came to an end, an estimated thirty thousand demonstrators linked arms, crossed the Arlington Memorial Bridge, and marched on the Pentagon. Met by a line of military police as the protesters approached the main entrance to what they called “the center of the American war machine,” several hundred of them attempted to break through and race up the steps. The troops responded with tear gas and truncheons, inflicting dozens of injuries as they drove the surging crowd back. After a second charge met with the same result, the demonstrators fell back and held a nightlong candlelight vigil. By the time the protest came to an end the following afternoon, seven hundred people had been arrested and twice that number reported as casualties.
Although the motives of the protesters varied, from the ideological radicalism of the student “New Left” to the religious pacifism of the Quakers, the principal target of much early antiwar dissent was the same. As monthly draft calls shot up to meet the demands of the expanding US war effort—from 13,700 in April 1965 to nearly thirty thousand in August 1967—protest against administration policy increasingly took the form of protest against the Selective Service System. In addition to counseling potential inductees to resist conscription, antiwar activists picketed local draft boards, staged “sit-ins” at military induction centers, and publicly burned their own draft cards. Congress swiftly retaliated by stiffening the penalties for such acts and extending the range of punishable offenses. But even the vigorous enforcement of the new laws could not curtail the steady growth of the antidraft movement.
For all the publicity they generated, however, those who actively resisted the draft remained a small, if vocal, minority. Faced with the prospect of conscription, most draft-age males either accepted their lot or found other ways to avoid military service. Many took advantage of the long-standing system of exemptions and deferments instituted by the SSS to “channel” the nation’s youth in “socially desirable” ways.
Local draft boards could, for example, craft their own definitions and grant exemptions for “family hardship” or “critical occupational skills” and to issue deferments to ministers, farmers, and college students “making satisfactory progress toward a degree.” Other young men took their cases to court, drawing on the expertise of a growing number of draft-law specialists to establish their credentials as conscientious objectors or to challenge the procedures employed by their local boards. Still others contrived to fail their pre-induction physical exams by artificially elevating their blood pressure, aggravating old sports injuries, or simulating more serious disorders.
Though the military did its best to discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate cases, in the end, more than one-quarter of all prospective conscripts were disqualified from military service for medical reasons. Each year, another third obtained exemptions or deferments, while 5 percent avoided serving in Vietnam by enlisting in the National Guard or the reserves, as relatively few guardsmen or reservists were called up to active duty in Vietnam (relatively few: nearly six thousand reservists and 101 guardsmen were killed in Vietnam). Since the classification system by design allowed the better educated and better off to not serve, those actually inducted into the military tended to come from working-class families earning less than $10,000 a year. Inductees typically lived in cities or small towns rather than suburbs and had no education beyond high school. According to one 1968 study, a high school dropout from a low-income family faced a 70 percent chance of serving in Vietnam, whereas the corresponding odds for a college graduate were only 42 percent. Once in Vietnam, moreover, draftees were more likely to be assigned to combat roles than those who enlisted voluntarily, and consequently they suffered a higher casualty rate. Of the total number of US forces that served in Vietnam, one-quarter were draftees. They accounted for 30.4 percent of all combat deaths.
The social imbalances of the Vietnam War military became even more glaring following the introduction of Project 100,000 in 1966. Heralded as a Great Society program designed to “rehabilitate the subterranean poor,” especially young African Americans, the project quickly evolved into a vehicle for funneling underprivileged and unemployed youths from the streets of America to the battlefields of Indochina. By lowering the minimum intellectual and physical standards for induction, recruiters eventually brought more than 350,000 men into the military under the program. Of that total, 41 percent were black, and 40 percent served in the infantry. A Pentagon study later determined that the “attrition-by-death” rate of Project 100,000 soldiers was nearly twice as high as that of Vietnam-era veterans as a whole. Overall, however, the number of black soldiers who died in Vietnam amounted to 12.5 percent of the total, while draft-age black men comprised 13.5 percent of the total of draft-age males in the US. (Not all the black soldiers in the American military were draftees, and nearly a third of the enlistees chose to serve in one of the combat arms—infantry, armor, or artillery.)
Rather than answer the call to arms, thousands of American men refused to go to war. Some fled the country to avoid the draft or even went to prison for violating Selective Service laws. More than 170,000 won the classification of Conscientious Objector (CO) after showing their moral opposition to service. One of the COs was James Quay of Pennsylvania. His wrote this essay in 1987.
I was supposed to register at my local Selective Service board when I turned eighteen—September 26, 1964—but I forgot. Didn’t go for three weeks. It was no big deal. I never considered not registering, and they didn’t think my being late meant anything. That wouldn’t be true later.
In my junior year in high school, I applied to become a candidate to the US Military Academy and took and passed all the necessary tests. I changed my mind before the selection was made, because the only degree offered at West Point was a bachelor’s in science and I didn’t want to limit my options. I already had an inkling that West Point might be confining in other ways, but I don’t remember having any moral objection to entering the military. As it was, I never had to decide: my congressman named me only first alternate.
What turned a candidate to West Point in 1963 into a conscientious objector by 1967? My growing awareness during those years of the enormous destruction being visited upon the people of North and South Vietnam by the American military. I knew there was plenty of suffering caused by “the other side,” but because of the massive technological resources America alone possessed, the US had the capacity to inflict horrific damage far beyond anything available to its enemies in Vietnam. Regardless of whether Vietnam was two countries or one, or whether Ho Chi Minh was a Communist aggressor or a popular nationalist, I came to feel that the destruction America was causing was incompatible with any proper American objective in Vietnam. During the Tet Offensive, an American artillery officer said of the village of Ben Tre, “It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it.” That phrase crystallized what I felt about the war. If we were killing Vietnamese and destroying Vietnam in the name of freedom, who and what would be left to be free?
My very first demonstration could not have been more American. In May 1967, an official from the South Vietnamese embassy came to speak at a hall at Lafayette College, where I was a junior. A dozen people I knew stood in front with signs that read “Stop the Bombing.” I was not one of them. For this, they were surrounded by hundreds of fraternity boys and subjected to hours of water-and-ink bombs and verbal abuse. The campus police were strangely absent. A rally was organized to support the right of free speech; my first antiwar demonstration was really for the First Amendment.
Fortunately for me and for all antiwar protesters, this country has a long tradition of resistance to authority. The tradition of conscientious objection is even older, arriving with the first Quakers in 1635. James Madison, one of the architects of the US Constitution, proposed making objection to war a constitutional right. Conscientious objection is as American as cherry pie. You see how fortunate I was. I could oppose American policy in Vietnam secure in the knowledge that I was upholding the finest American ideals. It was not I who was betraying America, it was Lyndon Johnson and his government.
My claim to conscientious-objector status was not based on traditional religious beliefs. In fact, I was interviewed earlier by my college’s alumni magazine as an example of an agnostic. Until 1965, you could be released from military service only if you could demonstrate that your opposition to participation in war was by reason of “religious training or belief.” But in 1965, the Supreme Court had ruled that a person could not be denied CO status simply because he did not belong to an orthodox religious sect. It was enough, the high court ruled, if the belief that prompted your decision occupied the same place in your life that the belief in a traditional deity occupied in the life of a believer.
I knew I objected to the war in Vietnam. What I had to discover was the ultimate source of that objection and describe it for myself and for the five ordinary Americans who comprised draft board number 90 in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the space provided on Special Form 150. The first question on that form was, “Do you believe in a Supreme Being?” There were two boxes: YES/NO. I checked YES. Second item: “Describe the nature of your belief which is the basis of your claim and state whether or not your belief in a Supreme Being involves duties which to you are superior to those arising from any human relation.” Here is part of what I wrote:
Because I believe that from man all awareness and order come, because I believe that each man is a divine being striving to become more divine, and because I believe that divinity manifests itself only through the love and justice of human relationships, I believe that human relationships are the highest relationships. Therefore there are no duties which to me are superior to those arising from human relations.
I made a point to get letters of support not only from people who agreed with my position but from those who disagreed as well, including the dean and the president of my college, who surely didn’t appreciate the trouble I was causing them but who could confirm that I was sincere. I filed for conscientious-objector status on the first day of spring, 1968. I did not know what I would do if the draft board refused my claim. I did know I would not enter the military. I felt I was prepared to go to prison rather than flee to Canada, but, fortunately, I never had to find out. On June 14, Flag Day, my draft board informed me that I had been classified I-0, a conscientious objector.
Three days later, I began working for the New York City Department of Social Services, where a conscientious objector I knew was performing his alternative service, and I was given a case-load of families in central Harlem. My draft board informed me that they did not expect to receive a call for draftees until the fall, which meant I could sit it out and possibly not be called. Instead, I volunteered for two years’ alternative service. When I was called for a physical examination in September, I informed my draft board I would not appear, which meant I would be passed automatically. All around me, young men were going to war or to prison, and I did not want to avoid service. I remember telling people at the time that twenty years into the future, if my children asked what I had done during the Vietnam War, I did not want to tell them that I had gotten out on a technicality. It is now twenty years later, and my son knows that his father is one of 170,000 who were granted CO status during the Vietnam War and one of ninety-six thousand who completed the two years of alternative service.
The Lafayette newspaper reports on antiwar protests at Lafayette College in May 1967, when antiwar protester Jim Quay attended the school. Protesters were subjected to water bombs and other abuse by their fellow students. Quay was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, one of many who performed alternate service in the US instead of going to war.
The racial inequities of the draft explain in part why antiwar sentiment consistently ran higher among African Americans than among whites. Already engaged in a domestic struggle to end legal discrimination in the South and de facto segregation in the North, the leaders of the civil rights movement had refrained from challenging US foreign policy goals throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s. But as the Vietnam War began to take a toll on black youth, as well as on the antipoverty programs of Johnson’s Great Society, many came to regard the conflict as an obstacle to further social progress. The more radical activists, like Black Power advocate Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Huey Newton of the Black Panther Party, were in the forefront of the opposition by early 1966.
By early 1967, even the moderate leaders of the civil rights movement had turned against the war. “A time comes when silence is betrayed,” proclaimed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in a sermon at Riverside Church in New York City on April 4, 1967. “That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.” Reminding his audience that only a few years before, the Johnson administration had declared a “war on poverty” at home, King traced the course of his own disillusionment with the undeclared war in Vietnam. “I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle plaything of a society gone mad on war,” King asserted, “and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—my own government.”
King’s claim that the rising costs of the war had compromised the dream of the Great Society was not without foundation. Despite President Johnson’s belief that the nation was “rich enough and strong enough” to fight a two-front war—against poverty at home and communism abroad—by early 1967, the American economy was beginning to show signs of strain. Faced with the threat of runaway inflation, which had been triggered by the sharp and unanticipated increase in military expenditures over the previous eighteen months, Johnson was forced to choose between raising taxes and cutting domestic spending. Politically unpalatable as both alternatives were, in August 1967 the president put before Congress a request for a 10 percent income-tax surcharge. By that point, however, dissatisfaction with Johnson’s social reform agenda had become so widespread that congressional conservatives were in a position to demand a quid pro quo. If the president wanted a tax hike, they insisted, he would first have to make deep cuts in social spending. Although Johnson ultimately agreed, by then even the combination of increased federal revenues and decreased expenditures could not cool down the overheated US economy.
Opposition to the administration’s domestic policies had, in fact, mounted steadily since 1965. Troubled by the recurrent outbreak of urban riots, the growth of black radicalism, and the perceived excesses of some federal antipoverty programs, many white Americans had become convinced that the government was moving too far, too fast in its efforts to remedy long-standing social problems. The so-called white backlash was especially pronounced among blue-collar workers, many of whom came to see themselves as victims of a system that had someone else’s interests at heart. Forced to endure the dislocations of a rapidly changing society—crime, inflation, rising taxes, and disintegrating neighborhoods—they fought back by resisting desegregation of their schools and communities and by withdrawing their support from liberal politicians whose social programs rarely addressed their own needs.
More complicated were the attitudes of working-class whites toward the war in Vietnam. On one hand, blue-collar workers were among the more visible and vocal supporters of the war effort, as evidenced by the seventy thousand longshoremen, carpenters, seamen, and mechanics who marched down Fifth Avenue in New York City in May 1967. Carrying banners reading “Down with the Reds,” “God Bless Us Patriots,” and “Support Our Boys,” they denounced the antiwar protesters and called upon the government to “escalate, not capitulate.” On the other hand, they were well aware that their own sons were bearing a disproportionate burden of the fighting and dying in Southeast Asia. Though they deeply resented those who avoided the draft and they regarded much antiwar protest as treasonous, as time went on and casualties multiplied, many working-class parents came to share the dissenters’ view that the war was a mistake. Unlike the organized peace movement, however, their opposition was not so much ideological or moral as pragmatic, based on the conviction that the price they were paying was simply too high. As one Long Island construction worker put it after watching the funeral procession of a local boy killed in Vietnam: “The whole damn country of South Vietnam is not worth the life of one American boy, no matter what the hell our politicians tell us. I’m damn sick and tired of watching these funerals go by.”
The pattern of gradual disillusionment with the war was also evident in the popular press. Like most Americans, the journalists who covered the war initially backed the US commitment to Vietnam, believing that it was in the nation’s interest to “contain” the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. As UPI correspondent Neil Sheehan later recalled, when he first arrived in Saigon in 1962, he was convinced that the US was helping the South Vietnamese “to build a viable and independent nation-state and defeat a Communist insurgency that would subject them to a dour tyranny.”
According to the correspondents themselves, the American government was largely responsible for undermining faith in the war effort. In their zeal to put the best face on all political and military developments, US officials in Washington and Saigon repeatedly provided information that was at odds with the reporters’ own observations or with intelligence gleaned from other sources. Early on, for example, correspondents were told that American forces were only “advising” the South Vietnamese, even though the reporters saw them fighting and dying. Similarly, battles in which ARVN forces were routed by the Viet Cong were described as victories in official briefings. “No responsible US official in Saigon ever told a newsman a really big falsehood,” recalled John Mecklin, chief of the US Information Service. “Instead there were endless little falsehoods.”
As a result, a “credibility gap” soon emerged between the US government and the Saigon press corps. That gap would widen over time. The skepticism of the correspondents manifested itself in increasingly critical accounts of the war effort that often directly contradicted what the Johnson administration was saying back in Washington. In many instances, however, their negative accounts were either buried on the back pages or revised by editors who preferred to rely on official Pentagon assessments, frequently expressed in the hard, quantitative language of enemy body counts, kill ratios, weapons captured, and hamlets pacified. “We were largely at the mercy of the administration then,” said Peter Lisagor, then Washington bureau chief of the Chicago Daily News. “There was a tendency to believe them more because they were supposed to have the facts, and we were inclined to accept an official’s word on something as cosmic as war.”
Eventually, however, the flood of pessimistic dispatches from the war zone became too overwhelming to ignore. Though few correspondents went so far as to challenge the legitimacy of the US presence in Vietnam, by the summer of 1967 many had come to the conclusion that the war was not being fought effectively, that the pacification program was failing, and that South Vietnam was still far from becoming a viable nation-state. “Everyone thought I was against the war,” recalled Charles Mohr, who resigned his post as Time’s Saigon correspondent after his managing editor ordered him to rewrite a story that claimed the war was being lost. “I just thought it wasn’t working. I didn’t come to think of it as immoral until the very end.”
Troubled by the growing perception that the war was a “stalemate,” the Johnson administration launched an all-out public relations campaign in the fall of 1967 “to get the message out” that “we are winning.” Under the direction of National Security Advisor Walt W. Rostow, who was also chief of the White House Psychological Strategy Committee, government officials inundated the major news media with an endless stream of charts, graphs, statistics, and previously classified documents showing “steady progress” on every front in the struggle against the Vietnamese Communists. Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk offered equally optimistic appraisals in televised appearances on weekly news shows as well as in private chats with favored reporters. The campaign reached its high point in mid-November, when the president summoned Gen. William Westmoreland, ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, and pacification chief Robert W. Komer from Saigon to confirm the administration’s assessment. “I am absolutely certain that whereas in 1965 the enemy was winning, today he is certainly losing,” Westmoreland asserted in an address before the National Press Club on November 21. “We have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.”
As Johnson had hoped, the administration’s “success offensive” brought to a halt the steady erosion of popular support for the war. Opinion polls conducted toward the end of the year showed a 7 percent increase in approval of the president’s handling of the war since the preceding August. Even more striking was the shift in the public’s perception of US “progress” in Vietnam. Between July and December 1967, the percentage of people who thought the US was “losing ground” or “standing still” plummeted, while those who thought that the Americans were “making progress” rose from 34 percent to more than 50 percent.
Then came Tet in 1968. With the outbreak of the Communists’ cataclysmic, countrywide offensive in late January 1968, public confidence in the American war effort suffered a grievous and ultimately fatal blow. Confronted with evidence of the enemy’s capacity to mount coordinated, surprise attacks on a massive scale, many Americans found it difficult to believe the administration’s claims that the US was “winning” the war. Nor could they place much faith in General Westmoreland’s sanguine prediction that “the end” had “come into view.” By mid-February, two weeks after the offensive began, popular disapproval of the president’s Vietnam policy had reached an all-time high of 50 percent; by the end of the month the figure was 58 percent. More telling still, only one out of three Americans now thought that the United States was “making progress” in Vietnam, and one in four believed that the allies were “losing ground.”
The judgments rendered by the nation’s leading news organizations reinforced the verdict reflected by the polls. “After three years of gradual escalation, President Johnson’s strategy for Vietnam has run into a dead end,” wrote the editors of Newsweek, expressing a view held by many Americans in the wake of the Tet Offensive. Not only had the US military buildup in Vietnam failed to quell the Communist insurgency, but the government of South Vietnam remained a “political morass,” riddled with corruption and unable to earn the allegiance of its own people. What was required was “the courage to face the truth”—that “the war cannot be won by military means without tearing apart the whole fabric of national life and international relations.”
Although President Johnson initially resisted the press’s assessment, in the end he had no choice but to accept it. Having lost the trust of his “fellow Americans,” as he always called them, he knew that he could no longer govern effectively. Not only had a majority of the public repudiated his Vietnam policies, but by mid-March 1968 Johnson could not even count on the continuing support of his own political party. Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s startling showing in the New Hampshire primary and Sen. Robert Kennedy’s subsequent entrance into the presidential race made it clear that Johnson faced a bitter fight for the Democratic nomination. By announcing on March 31 his intention to relinquish the presidency, Johnson hoped at once to salvage a measure of his own personal authority and to restore a semblance of unity to a nation increasingly divided against itself.
Yet such was not to be. On April 4, 1968, the day after the North Vietnamese rekindled hopes for peace by accepting Johnson’s offer to begin negotiations, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee. For thirteen years, the charismatic leader of the black civil rights movement, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, eloquent speaker, and moral teacher had stood as a symbol of nonviolent social reform. Now, with tragic irony, his murder by white ex-convict James Earl Ray became the occasion for the most widespread racial violence in the nation’s history. Within minutes after learning of King’s death, crowds of angry African Americans began roaming the streets of many major cities, breaking windows, looting stores, and setting fire to white-owned businesses. Black colleges seethed with rage while urban high schools across the country closed down in the face of violent racial confrontations. In Baltimore, Detroit, and four Southern cities, overwhelmed local officials were forced to request the assistance of the National Guard, while in Chicago regular Army troops had to be called in after entire blocks of the West Side ghetto went up in flames. All told, 169 cities reported incidents of racial violence in the wake of the King assassination, resulting in some $130 million in property damage, nearly 24,000 arrests, and 43 deaths, 36 of them black.
Residents watch as buildings burn in downtown Washington, D.C., during riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.
King’s death was not the only reason for violence that spring. Three weeks later, on April 23, a coalition of radical white and black students at Columbia University in New York City seized a number of administration buildings, signaling the advent of a new phase in the politics of student protest. At issue were the university’s decision to construct a new gymnasium in Morningside Park, a city-owned plot of land in the adjacent Harlem neighborhood, and its affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA), a multimillion-dollar consortium founded in 1955 to test weapons and military strategy. Led by members of the local chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and in loose alliance with the Students’ Afro-American Society (SAS), the protesters demanded that the administration abandon its allegedly racist “land-grab” policies and end its “complicity” in the Vietnam War. When university officials failed to comply, the students moved in and occupied Low Library, the main administration offices at Hamilton Hall, and several other campus buildings. After a week of inconclusive negotiations, punctuated by a series of violent clashes between allies and opponents of the occupiers, on April 29 President Grayson Kirk called in the New York City police to clear the buildings. Crashing through a set of makeshift barricades, the police stormed Low Library, bludgeoned the students with fists and nightsticks, and then dragged them downstairs to waiting paddy wagons. A second occupation several weeks later produced even bloodier results, as students and police engaged in what amounted to hand-to-hand combat throughout the campus.
By the time it ended in late May 1968, the rebellion at Columbia had resulted in nearly 900 arrests, 180 injuries (34 to police), and the suspension of 73 students. It had also spawned similar demonstrations at hundreds of other campuses, including forty major confrontations, and provoked a torrent of criticism against the new politics of “direct action.” While President Johnson condemned the Columbia militants as “young totalitarians,” the editors of Fortune warned its readers that the new generation of student activists sought to instigate a revolution—“not a protest … but an honest-to-God revolution.” Mark Rudd, the leader of the Columbia SDS “action faction,” could only agree. “Liberal solutions … are not allowed anymore,” he declared. “We are out for social and political revolution, nothing less.”
Yet if militant African Americans and student radicals had abandoned their faith in peaceful political change, the vast majority of Americans were still committed to working within the system. For those seeking to bring the Vietnam War to an end, President Johnson’s unexpected withdrawal from the presidential race had opened a new range of possibilities. Suddenly it seemed that what had not been gained through protest in the streets might be achieved through the ballot, particularly after Senator McCarthy followed his astonishing performance in New Hampshire with a decisive victory in the April 2 Wisconsin primary.
But the other Democratic antiwar candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, was to steal the thunder from McCarthy’s single-issue candidacy. Although his tardy entrance into the race had produced charges of opportunism, not even his enemies within the party could deny that he was a political force to be reckoned with. In part because of his name, in part because of his gift for stirring oratory, and in part because of his capacity to reach the disaffected and the dispossessed, Kennedy had an appeal that extended far beyond that of any other national political figure. His campaign entourage included members of the Eastern establishment who had served under his brother as well as former members of the SDS. He enjoyed strong support among urban African Americans and also, remarkably, among working-class whites. And he promised not only to end the war in Vietnam, but to heal the wounds that the war had inflicted on the American nation.
Recognizing that he would have to “win through the people,” Kennedy launched his campaign with an exhausting whirlwind tour of sixteen states in twenty-one days. Everywhere he went, the people responded, wrote one reporter, with “an intensity and scope that was awesome and frightening”—clutching at his coat sleeves as he moved through ghetto neighborhoods, chanting his name as he delivered his impassioned indictments of the Johnson administration’s policies. The results at the polls were equally dramatic: victory in Indiana on May 7; victory in Nebraska on May 14. Then, after losing the Oregon primary to Senator McCarthy by six percentage points on May 28, Kennedy moved on to California. With its large bloc of delegates and “winner take all” rules, the June 4 California primary loomed as the crucial test of who would challenge the Johnson-Humphrey forces at the Democratic convention in August.
Senator Robert Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, address constituents and the press at the Ambassador Hotel after his California primary victory, moments before his assassination.
Kennedy won. In his victory statement at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, the New York senator told cheering campaign workers that their success had proved that “the violence, the disenchantments with our society, the divisions … between blacks and whites, between the poor and the affluent, or between age groups or on the war in Vietnam” could be overcome. Then, as he left the dais to hold a press conference in another part of the building, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, a Palestinian Arab angered over Kennedy’s support for Israel, suddenly raised a revolver and fired one shot into the senator’s head and two more shots into his chest. Sirhan kept firing, wounding five other people, as members of Kennedy’s entourage struggled to wrest the .22-caliber pistol from his grip. Kennedy clung to life through many hours of desperate efforts by skilled doctors to save him, but was finally pronounced dead at 1:44 a.m. on June 6, nearly twenty-six hours after the shooting.
His candidacy had for a time brought together many of the disparate elements of a perilously fragmented nation. An assassin’s bullet had destroyed the hope for national reconciliation shared by Kennedy’s followers. One of them, speechwriter Jack Newfield, formerly a member of SDS, put it this way: “We had already glimpsed the most compassionate leaders our nation could produce, and they had all been assassinated. And from this time forward, things would get worse. Our best political leaders were part of memory now, not hope.” Although it is impossible to know what might have happened had Kennedy lived, it is certain that the nation’s divisions deepened after his death. Later that summer, the Democratic Convention in Chicago was to dramatize just how divided America had already become.
Senator Robert Kennedy lies semiconscious in his own blood after being shot in the head and chest while busboy Juan Romero tries to comfort him.
In the words of the presidential candidate nominated at the 1968 Democratic Convention, “Chicago was a catastrophe. My wife and I went home heartbroken, battered, and beaten. I told her I felt just like we had been in a shipwreck.” While its participants knew the convention would be a struggle, none could predict just how disastrous it would be for the Democratic Party and, indeed, for the nation.
Robert Kennedy’s death had all but assured that the nomination would go to Vice President Humphrey, but his accession to the party’s leadership would not be unopposed. In the weeks that followed the assassination, Sen. Eugene McCarthy’s campaign gained fresh momentum, propelling him to victory in the June 18 New York primary and bringing a substantial influx of much-needed money. A small boomlet of support also began to gather around Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, after family members and aides of Robert Kennedy gave him their endorsement. There was even talk in some party circles of a possible convention draft for Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, Bobby’s younger brother.
Nor were the politicians the only ones planning to exert their influence on the proceedings of the convention. Under the leadership of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War, a number of antiwar groups were hoping to rally as many as half a million protesters in Chicago while the delegates met. Members of the outlandish Youth International Party, or Yippies, also planned to be in attendance and hold their own mock convention, culminating in the nomination of “Pigasus,” a live pig, as their party standard bearer. Far more serious were the intentions and objectives of the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the man who had succeeded Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Determined to remind the Democratic Party of the broken promise of the Great Society, Abernathy had decided to bring a group of poverty-stricken Americans to the doors of the convention hall as part of his recently launched Poor People’s Campaign.
Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley speaks from the floor of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Daley was criticized for his aggressive handling of the antiwar demonstrations that took place during the convention.
Fearing the worst, Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago prepared for the onslaught by placing the entire metropolitan police force of twelve thousand on weeklong, twelve-hour shifts. More than five thousand Illinois National Guardsmen were also deployed to the city, while an additional 7,500 regular Army troops were placed on twenty-four-hour alert. The convention site itself was especially well fortified, its main entrance barricaded with barbed wire and chain-link fencing and its approaches guarded by some two thousand police.
As it turned out, Daley’s well-publicized security measures, together with his refusal to grant marching permits, dissuaded large numbers of would-be demonstrators from going to Chicago. The ten thousand youthful protesters who did eventually arrive, however, were among the more committed apostles of the antiwar movement. Though most had no intention of provoking violence, some clearly expected a confrontation. “To remain passive in the face of escalating police brutality is foolish and degrading,” one young activist told a reporter. “We’re going to march and they’re going to stop us,” said another. “How can you avoid violence?”
Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic presidential nominee, addresses the Democrats’ tumultuous convention.
And violence there was. On Sunday, August 25, the eve of the convention, and again the next night, riot police moved in with nightsticks and tear gas to disperse demonstrators who had encamped in Lincoln Park in defiance of an 11:00 p.m. curfew. The protesters then moved on to Grant Park, where they began laying plans to march on the amphitheater. As darkness fell on Wednesday evening, August 28, a crowd of at least five thousand gathered in the park across from the Conrad Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue, the city’s central thoroughfare. There they remained until some caught sight of Reverend Abernathy and his supporters from the Poor People’s Campaign, the only group that had been granted a legal permit to march. Beckoned by shouts of “Join us!” several thousand antiwar protesters surged forward, crossed a small bridge to Michigan Avenue, and fell in behind Abernathy’s motley train.
Inside the convention hall, meanwhile, a bitter battle over the Vietnam plank of the Democratic Party platform was coming to a head. Although by that point Senator McCarthy had all but conceded the nomination to Humphrey, a large bloc of antiwar delegates from New York, California, Wisconsin, and several other states were determined to put their stamp on the party’s official policy. Based on a minority report hammered out at the platform committee hearings the previous week, the dissidents’ position called for “an unconditional end to all bombing of North Vietnam,” the mutual withdrawal of all US and North Vietnamese forces from South Vietnam, and a “political reconciliation” between the Saigon government and the Viet Cong leading to a coalition government. By contrast, the majority plank recommended a gradual reduction of the US troop presence “as the South Vietnamese are able to take over larger responsibilities” and a cessation of bombing only “when the action would not endanger US lives.” As speaker after speaker rose to defend his respective position, the debate turned increasingly acrimonious. Even before the final tally was read—1,567 in favor of the majority plank, 1,041 for the minority—the New York delegation began singing “We Shall Overcome,” while spectators in the gallery chanted “Stop the War! Stop the War!”
As a result of the fight over the Vietnam plank, the nomination balloting was delayed until late in the evening. It was nearly 11:00 p.m., in fact, when Mayor Joseph Alioto of San Francisco stood before the convention to nominate Hubert Humphrey as the Democratic presidential candidate. Barely had Alioto begun to speak when CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite received news of a bloody clash between police and demonstrators outside the convention hall. “There has been a display of naked violence in the streets of Chicago,” Cronkite declared, as he interrupted the convention proceedings to show a tape of events that had actually taken place more than two hours before. Ordered to halt and disperse the demonstrators who had set out from Grant Park, a phalanx of helmeted riot police had intercepted the marchers at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Balbo shortly before 8:00. When the protesters refused to move, the police first made a series of peaceful arrests, then charged into the crowd with their nightsticks flailing. While some of the demonstrators fought back, many fell limp and began screaming, “The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!”
An unidentified bystander points accusingly at Illinois National Guardsmen as they stand guard at Grant Park early on August 28, 1968, following a large-scale confrontation with protestors. Seven hundred troops were ordered into the park, across the street from Democratic National Convention headquarters at the Conrad Hilton Hotel.
After several violent confrontations with police, demonstrators gather at Chicago’s Grant Park to prepare to march on the Democratic National Convention, August 28, 1968.
As Chicago policemen swing nightsticks, a man scrambles over fallen park benches to escape a mêlée in Grant Park on August 29, 1968. Other demonstrators on the run can be seen in background.
As scenes of the violence appeared on television sets throughout the convention hall, the nominating process was soon overwhelmed by a series of angry denunciations of Mayor Daley and the Chicago police. The crescendo of criticism reached its peak when Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut rose to deplore the “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago,” a choice of words that brought a stream of obscenities from the mayor himself. “How hard it is to accept the truth,” Ribicoff replied, staring down at Daley from the podium. “How hard it is.”
The formal balloting that followed proved anticlimactic, as Humphrey outdistanced his only serious challenger, Senator McCarthy, by more than one thousand votes. For Humphrey, the nomination was a bitter prize indeed. The tumultuous Chicago convention had left the party he proposed to lead deeply, perhaps hopelessly divided, with only eight weeks to go before the general election. To defeat his formidable Republican challenger, Richard Nixon, who held a fifteen-percentage-point lead in the polls, he would have to use that time to bring the Democrats back together. In the process, he would also have to convince the electorate that he could restore unity to America by bringing peace to Vietnam.
Chicago police (at center), backed up by the National Guard (in foreground), move against a large group of demonstrators on August 28, 1968, in a view from the Conrad Hilton Hotel, headquarters of the Democratic National Convention.
*The alleged August 4 attack, the veracity of which was dubious at best even then, was completely denied by North Vietnam’s wartime military leader, Vo Nguyen Giap, in a 1995 meeting with former US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. “What happened on August 4?” McNamara asked. “Absolutely nothing,” Giap replied.
