THE PEOPLE’S PEACE TREATY

JAY CRAVEN, DOUG HOSTETTER, AND BECCA WILSON

In December of 1970, the three of us went to Vietnam—to make peace.¹

We were part of a 15-member delegation of American student leaders who traveled to wartime Vietnam to meet with our Vietnamese counterparts, to explore and confirm common and agreed-upon terms for peace. The trip came about under the auspices of the U.S. National Student Association (NSA) which, following the U.S. invasion of Cambodia in late April 1970, fielded interest from the Saigon Student Union to explore the idea of a “people-to-people peace treaty.” Our delegation consisted primarily of student body presidents and college newspaper editors; though racially diverse, the group included just two women.

Despite grave risks to their own safety, the South Vietnamese students asserted that the U.S. war on Vietnam must stop, and felt confident they could identify necessary conditions for a just peace: the total withdrawal of U.S. troops and the end of the U.S.-imposed government in South Vietnam. They believed that the government in South Vietnam, led by President Nguyen Van Thieu and Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky, had been installed by the United States, did not represent the people of Vietnam, and had no interest in a negotiated peace. The U.S.–backed Thieu-Ky regime banned protests and brutally suppressed dissent; it had jailed not only hundreds of opposition leaders, but tens of thousands of ordinary people it considered dangerous subversives. Most of these political prisoners were routinely tortured. In spite of this highly repressive political atmosphere, the South Vietnamese student leaders proposed to conduct discussions with students from North Vietnam, the National Liberation Front for South Vietnam, and the United States to demonstrate the shared conviction that a negotiated solution was possible.

The National Student Association delegation poses with Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, 1970.

Photo courtesy of Doug Hostetter.

The South Vietnamese students were not alone in thinking that continued war offered only prolonged suffering and division. The American war in Vietnam had been raging since the massive deployment of U.S. troops in 1965, but its roots actually went back nearly two decades to the French neocolonial occupation of Vietnam, which the Truman and Eisenhower administrations bolstered, advised, and helped finance.

U.S. support for the French persisted right through the decisive battle of Dien Bien Phu, when the French were defeated by forces loyal to Ho Chi Minh, the Vietnamese leader whom American officials knew would be elected if the terms of the 1954 Geneva Accords ending the French occupation of Indochina were ever implemented. The Accords called for a temporary North–South division of Vietnam pending elections in 1956 to reunify the country, terms the U.S. opposed, but had agreed to abide by. Indeed, the Pentagon Papers reveal how U.S. operations to undermine the Geneva Agreements began within 10 days of their signing, through cross-border operations, infiltration, and a massive propaganda campaign, using leaflets to frighten Vietnamese and drive them south. U.S. Senator Wayne Morse, an early opponent to the war, spoke of how, at a 1956 Senate committee briefing, U.S. intelligence officials testified that Ho Chi Minh was expected to win 80 percent of the vote if the elections promised in Geneva were held. So, with the silent assent and active covert support of the Eisenhower administration, Ngo Dinh Diem, the new U.S.–backed prime minister of South Vietnam, refused to hold the elections promised in Geneva.

Over the next 15 years, the U.S. gradually stepped up its military involvement in Vietnam, beginning with sending advisors to train Diem’s army and conduct espionage, subversion, and covert actions. Soon after taking office in 1961, John F. Kennedy approved counterinsurgency plans for Vietnam, and sent in 1,300 additional advisors. In 1962, the U.S. Air Force began using Agent Orange to defoliate areas used by insurgent forces. By the time of JFK’s death in 1963, 16,000 U.S. military advisors and Special Forces personnel were operating in South Vietnam.

The war quickly escalated during the Lyndon Johnson administration. On August 4, 1964, Johnson assured Congress that the U.S. had “no military, political, or territorial ambitions in the area,” and that “we still seek no wider war.” But the very same day, he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam in retaliation for what turned out to the fraudulent claim that its navy had attacked U.S. ships in the Tonkin Gulf.

By 1965, LBJ had deployed 200,000 troops to Vietnam, and authorized a massive bombing campaign that would continue for the next three years. That same year, the first campus teach-ins on the war were held at U.C. Berkeley and the University of Michigan. Within a few years, the war had become hugely polarizing issue in the United States. By 1968, half a million American soldiers were fighting in Vietnam—and the U.S. antiwar movement had grown exponentially larger and broader, with veterans now a visible presence in most protests. The war had been brought home.

By 1970, the year our peace delegation traveled to Vietnam, the U.S. occupation of Vietnam had not succeeded—in spite of America’s legendary military supremacy and the lethal power of its high-tech arsenal. Indeed, despite its determination and publicly stated confidence that the United States would prevail in Vietnam, the Johnson administration suffered a major shock to its public relations image during the 1968 Tet Offensive, when National Liberation Front and North Vietnamese soldiers overran many provincial towns and even made substantial incursions into the major South Vietnamese cities of Hue and Saigon, where insurgents even breached the walls of the U.S. embassy.

The Tet Offensive was followed by a concerted push by the U.S. peace movement to get American politicians to negotiate an end of the war that would withdraw all U.S. troops. Peace activists were optimistic and felt the time was right to bring the war to an end. In April 1967, Martin Luther King had declared his strong opposition to the war in a powerful speech at New York City’s Riverside Church. In 1968, U.S. Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy declared their candidacies for president and attracted a tidal wave of support for their promises to quickly end the war.

But within just a few months of the January 1968 Tet Offensive, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated and Eugene McCarthy’s candidacy foundered in the chaos resulting from the killings and Lyndon Johnson’s announcement that he would not seek re-election. The Democratic Party closed ranks around the candidacy of Johnson’s loyal and equivocating vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Fed up with LBJ’s repeated lies, and angered by the Democratic Party’s failure to commit to quickly ending the war, peace activists staged demonstrations that resulted in a police riot at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Activists were then blamed for the Chicago conflagration, and the subsequent showcase trial of the Chicago 8 gave further fuel to the frustration of American youth who were being drafted to fight a war in which few of our generation had faith. And, on the Republican side, presidential candidate Richard Nixon’s declaration, during the 1968 campaign, that he had a “secret plan for peace” resulted in an escalation of the air war. Although he managed to withhold this information from Congress and the American people for several months, soon after taking office in 1969, Nixon launched intensive B-52 carpet bombings against Cambodia, an immense air assault on mostly civilian areas that would continue for the next four years.

The growing exasperation of young people found a potent outlet during the fall of 1969 when millions of people came together for widespread antiwar actions and mobilizations. Teach-ins and demonstrations took place across the United States in October 1969 and, just a month later, nearly half a million people converged on Washington, D.C., for a march organized by the Vietnam Moratorium Committee. This march became the largest antiwar protest in American history.

Nixon publicly claimed he was indifferent to these massive protests, but later revelations demonstrate this was untrue. “Pentagon Papers” author Daniel Ellsberg first revealed in 1974 his conviction that the massive peace protests in the fall of 1969 had halted White House discussions about plans for an unprecedented late 1969/early 1970 escalation of the war, code-named Operation Duck Hook—an escalation that would have entailed intensive bombing of the North’s population centers and its extensive dike system, plus the mining of its rivers and harbors. Also under consideration was a ground invasion of North Vietnam and use of nuclear weapons. (In support of his assertions, Ellsberg cited a variety of sources, including Nixon White House aides Jeb Stuart Magruder and Dwight Chapin.) Moreover, government documents released in recent decades confirm, according to historian Tom Wells and other scholars, that the antiwar movement “exerted a critical influence on Nixon’s decision to forgo Operation Duck Hook, thereby helping prevent bloodshed and human misery in Vietnam on an unspeakable scale.”2

But antiwar leaders would remain unaware of their movement’s impact for quite a few years. In the meantime, many activist leaders grew increasingly demoralized, as it appeared our large, highly visible movement was having little effect on the course of the war. Nixon talked tough and called out police and National Guard troops against demonstrators, while building his enemies list and increasing surveillance and harassment of people in all walks of life who opposed the war. Then, in late April 1970, Nixon expanded the war into Cambodia, triggering massive and immediate student sit-ins and demonstrations at colleges and universities across the country. These actions then intensified into an unprecedented U.S. national student strike in response to the May 1970 killings of student protestors—four students gunned down by National Guardsmen at Kent State (Ohio) University, and two students killed by police and state troopers at Jackson State (Mississippi) University. At least 450 campuses were shut down by strikes and protests involving more than four million students.

By this time in May of 1970, the negotiations between the U.S. and the Vietnamese in Paris had been going on for two years, but had only reached agreement on the shape of the table and the composition of the negotiating teams. These talks were intended to find a resolution for the war among each of the warring parties: The United States and its ally, the Republic of Vietnam (RVN), led by Thieu and Ky, controlled part of South Vietnam. On the other side, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV, or North Vietnam) and the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG), which represented the National Liberation Front (NLF) of South Vietnam, controlled large parts of the countryside in contested South Vietnam. It was this group, the NLF/PRG, which the U.S. disparagingly called the Viet Cong, or V.C., that constituted the chief enemy to U.S. forces, since they led the resistance to the American occupation and controlled much of South Vietnam. The central U.S. military policy of “pacification” was aimed at driving Vietnamese people out of these NLF-controlled rural areas into refugee camps in the heavily-fortified coastal areas, which the Americans and their South Vietnamese allies controlled.

It was against this backdrop of static peace talks, intensive war in South Vietnam, and escalation of that war into Cambodia that, during the summer of 1970, the U.S. National Student Association (NSA) Congress decided that if the adults in government would or could not negotiate a peace treaty with the PRG and North Vietnamese, we students would take steps to do what we could. Meeting in August at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, the NSA Congress overwhelmingly approved a resolution endorsing bold antiwar action in the fall and declaring that “if the war is not ended by May 1, 1971, NSA will commit itself to a concerted expansion of massive non-violent action including civil disobedience at the local, regional, and national levels.”

Shortly after the resolution passed, the Congress voted that NSA would send a delegation of U.S. student leaders to Vietnam, to discuss terms for peace with Vietnamese student leaders from the South (both the U.S.-supported Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front) and the North (Democratic Republic of Viet Nam).

The suggestion of a student-drafted peace treaty was initiated by the Saigon Student Union and the South Vietnam National Student Union. These groups consisted of elected student leaders from Saigon and other urban areas controlled by the U.S.-sponsored Thieu regime. Eventually, as anti-Thieu sentiment in South Vietnam grew more widespread and open, the student unions allied with other South Vietnamese peace groupings, including Buddhist leaders, trade unions, and the Women’s Committee for the Right to Live, led by prominent South Vietnamese lawyer and writer Madame Ngo Ba Thanh.

At first, NSA discussions focused on the idea of a peace treaty conference of student leaders that would meet in Geneva, to draw attention to the aborted 1954 Geneva Agreements. But organizers faced logistical roadblocks, as it was soon apparent it would be nearly impossible for student leaders to get official permission to leave South Vietnam for this kind of meeting. Some consideration was then given to meeting in Bangkok, Thailand, but, again, logistics proved impossible. Finally, organizers decided to send U.S. student leaders first to Saigon and then Hanoi—to more fully experience conditions in Vietnam and to facilitate a communications bridge helping to link South Vietnamese student activists with student leaders representing the DRV and NLF.

In the months following the NSA Congress, veteran U.S. peace activists, including Chicago 8 defendants Rennie Davis and Dave Dellinger, had several discussions with Vietnamese diplomats in Paris that addressed the planned “people’s peace treaty” trip. Saigon contacts were handled by the NSA from their office on S Street in Washington. Initial trip-related tasks were coordinated by newly elected NSA president David Ifshin3, former student body president at Syracuse University, and NSA communications director Frank Greer.⁴

Within a few weeks of the NSA Congress in St. Paul, Ifshin found himself increasingly engaged with the NSA’s fraternal counterpart in South Vietnam—the activist Saigon Student Union (SSU), which had recently become increasingly bold and militant. In early June, just weeks after the nationwide campus strikes in the U.S. sparked by the Kent and Jackson State killings, South Vietnamese student leaders chanting, “we die for peace, not for war,” led a march following the funeral of a Buddhist nun who had immolated herself as a “torch for peace.” In early July, Saigon student leaders for the first time issued a public statement demanding immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops, an end to U.S. support for the Thieu regime, and asserting that only the Vietnamese people themselves could decide the terms for peace. Three days after the student proclamation, President Nguyen Van Thieu publicly vowed to kill those demanding immediate peace, saying, “I am ready to smash all movements calling for peace at any price because I’m still much of a soldier…. We will beat to death the people who are demanding immediate peace.”⁵

At dawn on September 20, the U.S. NSA office received a call for help. Saigon was on the line. A Saigon Student Union representative told David Ifshin that when the SSU’s Fourth National Conference had convened on August 30, police had arrested 117 students as they rallied peacefully to protest U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew’s visit to Saigon. Men in U.S.-made helicopters had hurled tear gas at the crowd, and police had brutally clubbed scores of fleeing protestors. Although most of those arrested on August 30 had since been released, four popular student leaders, including SSU President Huynh Tam Mam⁶, remained in prison and had been repeatedly beaten and tortured. They feared being killed. The caller said SSU activists had launched a hunger strike “to the death” to bring attention to the plight of the four imprisoned leaders, and that students all over South Vietnam were fasting with them. The caller asked if the NSA would issue a general appeal to American students for expressions of solidarity with the four, and bring pressure to bear to get them released.

Three days after the phone call, Ifshin and 25 student body presidents launched a 10-day NSA solidarity hunger strike and vigil in Lafayette Park, across from the White House. Two days after the NSA fast ended, the four Saigon student leaders were released.

In October, once our Vietnam contacts and travel plans began to gel, NSA officers met with State Department officials who assured them that the U.S. government would facilitate our obtaining visas from the RVN for our travel to South Vietnam to meet with the Saigon Student Union and South Vietnam National Student Union. Discussions with North Vietnamese diplomats in Paris also yielded assurances that visas would be provided by the DRV for travel to North Vietnam to meet there with students from the North Vietnamese Student Union and students representing the NLF.

Most members of the People’s Peace Treaty delegation began arriving in Washington, D.C., during the third week in November. NSA leaders and delegation members were elated and encouraged that, for the first time, civilians representing each of the warring parties could be joined in common cause. We were pleased by the assurances of travel access to South Vietnam, but also mindful that in advocating U.S. withdrawal as well as peace and reconciliation with people from North Vietnam and the NLF-controlled areas of South Vietnam, South Vietnamese student leaders were risking their very lives.

During pre-trip briefings with scholars and U.S. peace movement leaders who had recently travelled to Paris and Saigon, our delegation learned that a dramatic political transformation was underway in urban South Vietnam. Not only students and Buddhists, but war veterans, teachers’ groups, trade unions, prominent professionals, even formerly anti-communist or neutralist Catholic leaders and politicians were speaking out for peace and forming coalitions. Most unprecedented, these new alliances were in agreement that peace could only occur once (1) all U.S. forces withdrew from the South, and (2) the U.S. ceased its support for the Thieu–Ky regime.

Rennie Davis gave us a rundown of a significant turning point: In late September, only a day after the NSA had received the distress call from the Saigon Student Union, a conservative Catholic member of the South Vietnamese National Assembly, Ngo Cong Duc, had sent shockwaves across Saigon when he held a press conference to reiterate the demands first made by the South Vietnamese student unions: immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces, an end to U.S. support for the Thieu–Ky regime, and political settlement based on negotiations between all Vietnamese warring parties. A wealthy Mekong Delta landowner and editor-publisher of Saigon’s largest daily newspaper, Duc had been elected just three years earlier on an anti-Viet Cong platform. And now he was not only publicly acknowledging the existence of a popular revolt against the Thieu–Ky regime, he was tacitly admitting he supported it; and he was presenting a formal peace proposal in harmony with the latest offer from the PRG side of the Paris Talks, which outlined a roadmap for negotiated settlement between the NLF/PRG and the broad anti-Thieu forces that Duc represented.

On the logistical side, our delegation’s hopes for a seamless peace expedition were soon dashed. Although the initial response of the State Department was very positive, their tone suddenly changed once they learned that North Vietnamese diplomats in Paris had welcomed the NSA initiative, and had assured our contacts that visas would be provided for our delegation. Just several weeks before our group was to leave, the State Department informed NSA officers that the visas for student delegation to travel to South Vietnam could no longer be taken for granted. Then travelers returning from Southeast Asia informed us that everyone who listed “student” as their occupation on visa applications was now being denied a visa to enter South Vietnam. It was clear. Our travel to South Vietnam would be blocked.

National Student Association leaders suddenly faced the dilemma that the entire purpose of the Vietnam trip, to forge a peace treaty with representatives from each of the parties to the war, was now in jeopardy. The question was how our mission could still be advanced. After extensive deliberations, organizers decided we should try to send New School graduate student Doug Hostetter into Saigon. Doug, a Mennonite and conscientious objector, had worked as a development and literacy aide in Vietnam and he spoke fluent Vietnamese.

We weren’t confident this idea would work—but in the end, Doug accomplished his mission. He managed to slip into Saigon undetected, and met with South Vietnamese student leaders to discuss and ratify the Peace Treaty.

After Doug’s rounds of meetings and a peace treaty signing in Saigon, on December 12 he joined the rest of our delegation in Hanoi, where we and our Vietnamese counterparts met to review, and sign, the slightly revised Saigon-initiated document. The first phase of our mission had been accomplished. We were thrilled—and deeply moved.

Still, the NSA delegation was worried about how the U.S. government would react to our announcement that we had signed a People’s Peace Treaty between students in the U.S., Saigon, Hanoi, and even students who were living in the parts of South Vietnam that were controlled by the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam.

The exact genesis of the treaty is difficult to reconstruct. But we are fairly certain that ideas for the content of the treaty had first been articulated in communications between the Saigon Student Union and NSA leaders, and later during discussions between U.S. antiwar leaders (including Rennie Davis and NSA officer Larry Magid) and Vietnamese diplomats in Paris. But the actual treaty language evolved gradually, as each of the student entities weighed in. Jay Craven remembers first seeing draft language prior to our departure for Hanoi, in a document provided by former Cornell University professor Bob Greenblatt who indicated it had been written by well-known essayist, cultural critic, and political philosopher Dwight MacDonald, best known for his early work at Time magazine and Fortune and, later, at The New Yorker, The Partisan Review, and The New York Review of Books. Greenblatt said that MacDonald closely followed diplomatic developments at the Paris Peace Talks and had consulted with writer Susan Sontag, who had traveled to North Vietnam in 1969 and written her insightful and thought-provoking book, Styles of Radical Will, from which a section, Trip to Hanoi, was then published on its own. (It’s also likely that the Greenblatt–MacDonald draft was at least partly inspired by Ngo Cong Duc’s peace proposal, which had been reprinted in full in the November 5, 1970 issue of the New York Review of Books, with an introduction authored by Greenblatt, Rennie Davis, and Richard Falk.)

Revisions to the initial document came about during student meetings on both sides and through further discussion with peace movement leaders and Vietnamese envoys involved with the Paris Peace Talks. While Nixon administration officials called for an unconditional ceasefire and the release of U.S. POWs, American students and peace movement leaders asserted that U.S. POWs would only be released when the U.S. government committed to a firm date for the withdrawal of its troops.

The Thieu–Ky regime opposed participation by the NLF/PRG in any new post-war government, but South Vietnamese students believed building a coalition government should involve all Vietnamese parties sincerely committed to peace and reconciliation. North Vietnamese and NLF/PRG students asked for terms that respected Vietnamese sovereignty and enabled the Vietnamese, free of foreign influence, to determine the future of their country. (This had been promised by the 1954 Geneva Agreements, after the French occupation had failed, but U.S. obstruction, in the form of overt and covert military intervention, prevented implementation.) The North Vietnamese and NLF/PRG students also asked that the Treaty call for self-determination for all nations caught up in the war, including Laos and Cambodia.

So, while there were many hands and voices that contributed to the final document, the terms of the treaty were not complicated. The People’s Peace Treaty synthesized multiple ideas and concerns into a document that clearly and directly articulated the steps toward peace through negotiation. Each party agreed that it outlined a reasonable path by insisting, foremost and unequivocally, on an end to the U.S military occupation.

Truth be told, the terms finally ratified in the January 1973 Paris Agreement very closely resembled the People’s Peace Treaty, which became the diplomatic blueprint for the end of the war. We chose to act when we did because we saw that there was already a basis for this agreement. We simply felt that we could wait no longer.

As students, we were proud that despite considerable efforts by the U.S. and South Vietnamese governments to sabotage our efforts, we had accomplished our task. We had successfully drafted a four-page treaty with students from all regions of Vietnam that spelled out agreed-upon conditions for peace in Vietnam. With politicians and diplomats failing to make progress, we demonstrated that it could be done. And we were confident that the document in our hands would become a powerful tool to educate the American people that a just peace was possible.

We decided that the most secure, effective way to announce the People’s Peace Treaty would be to present it at a press conference in Paris, on our way back to the United States. To prevent interdiction by the CIA7 or U.S.-allied police, as Doug Hostetter had encountered in Laos on his way to North Vietnam, we decided to fly to Paris via the Aeroflot flight from Hanoi to Moscow, a 23-hour ordeal on a Russian turbo-prop, with stops in Vientiane, Karachi, Tehran, Tashkent, and other capitals of the Republics of the Soviet Union along the way.

From Moscow we flew to Paris, where we held a press conference, announcing to the world that we had in-hand an innovative and living document, a “people’s peace treaty” that had been agreed to by U.S. and Vietnamese students representing each political constituency. Our message to the United States and the world: peace in Vietnam was possible if we could only act on former president Dwight D. Eisenhower’s declaration that “people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it.”

We returned to the United States with a mission to spread word of the People’s Peace Treaty and to seek support and ratification by student bodies at colleges and universities, political leaders, city councils, unions, national, regional and local antiwar coalitions, and anyone and everyone we could meet and engage. We also planned to use the Peace Treaty as an organizing tool for announced plans to petition Congress to accept its terms. If the nation’s elected officials failed to do so or to move toward a negotiated end to the war, our plan, in concert with other peace activists, Vietnam veterans, and organizations from across the country, was to stage massive non-violent civil disobedience in Washington during the first days of May 1971. Our slogan: “If the government won’t stop the war, the people will stop the government.”

The timing for this initiative was perfect, coming just months after the demonstrations against Nixon’s moves into Cambodia and the subsequent Kent and Jackson State killings. U.S. colleges and universities were teeming with students who opposed the war and were tired of inaction, as peers continued to be drafted and sent to fight in a war that fewer and fewer Americans supported. The call for massive civil disobedience in May of 1971 struck a resonant chord—that we could and must raise the social/ political costs to the Nixon administration for continuing to attack and occupy Vietnam.

Support and mobilization for the People’s Peace Treaty began immediately on our return from Vietnam and Paris. By March of 1971, there were People’s Peace Treaty offices in 12 cities. City councils, including Cambridge, Massachusetts; Berkeley, California; and Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan, endorsed the treaty. Student body presidents at 300 U.S. colleges and universities had signed the treaty and, at 10 schools, there had been campus-wide referenda supporting the Treaty. By April 21, 1971, the national People’s Peace Treaty office had received word that 188 more U.S. colleges and universities would vote on the Treaty by the end of the school year.

Peace organizations from across the country also endorsed the Treaty. Among them: The Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars, American Friends Service Committee, Chicago Peace Council, Clergy and Layman Concerned about Vietnam, Los Angeles Peace Action Council, National Lawyers Guild, New University Conference, People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and Women Strike for Peace.

Prominent members of the U.S. cultural, academic, and religious community also offered their public endorsement, among them Coretta Scott King, Reverend Ralph Abernathy, U.S. Congressman Herman Badillo, civil rights activist Julian Bond, Congressman John Conyers, and black activists Ericka Huggins and Bobby Seale. Supporters also included religious leaders such as Rabbi Belfour Brickner, Reverends Daniel and Phillip Berrigan, Malcolm Boyd, William Sloane Coffin, Robert MacAfee Brown, Bishop Robert DeWitt, Bishop William Davidson, Bishop Paul Moore, Bishop Tomas Gunbleton, Richard McSoreley, Sister Elizabeth McAlister, Father James Groppi, Sister Margaret Traxler, and Sister Joques Egan.

Cultural supporters included folksingers Joan Baez and Judy Collins; cartoonist Jules Feiffer; actors Rock Hudson, Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Jennifer Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, and Julie Harris; Hollywood producer Bert Schneider (Five Easy Pieces, Easy Rider); feminist leaders Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Kate Millet; comedian Godfrey Cambridge; writers Denise Levertov, Mitchell Goodman, Cleve Gray, Francine du Plessix Gray, Robert Jay Lifton, I.F. Stone, Studs Terkel, Paul Sweezy, and Dalton Trumbo; and activist and baby doctor Benjamin Spock.

Prominent academics included Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Kenneth Kenniston, Ashley Montagu, Eric Segal, and Nobel Prize laureates George Wald and Salvadore Luria.

Antiwar leaders included Kay Camp, Rennie Davis, Dave Dellinger, Daniel Ellsberg, Richard Fernandez, David Hawk, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, William Kunstler, Stewart Meacham, Sidney Peck, Amy Swerdlow, Cora Weiss, George Wiley; union activists Abe Feinglass, Henry Foner, Mo Foner, and Patrick Gorman; and Vietnam veteran leaders Tim Butz and Al Hubbard.

By the end of April 1971, U.S. Congressional Representatives Bella Abzug, Herman Badillo, Shirley Chishom, Bill Clay, John Conyers, Ron Dellums, Parren Mitchell, and James Scheuer had introduced into the U.S. Congress a Concurrent Resolution:

Expressing the sense of the Congress with respect to the People’s Peace Treaty

Whereas the efforts to attain a negotiated settlement of the Indochina conflict at the Paris Peace Talks have been unsuccessful for many months; and

Whereas a direct equitable solution to the war is now possible; and Whereas the principles of the People’s Peace Treaty form the basis for a just and honorable end to the war in Indochina;

Now therefore, be it

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate concurring), That it is the sense of the Congress that the People’s Peace Treaty embodies the legitimate aspirations of the American and Vietnamese peoples for an enduring and just peace in Indochina.

4/29/71

The People’s Peace Treaty became such a powerful presence on U.S. campuses and in communities that, in March 1971, the U.S. State Department felt it necessary to issue a statement on the People’s Peace Treaty in GIST, its reference aid on U.S. foreign relations primarily used by government officials.

A page from the original copy of the People’s Peace Treaty.

Courtesy of Doug Hostetter.

After a winter and spring of education and organizing across the country, the peace movement’s focus shifted to spring actions in Washington, as hundreds of thousands of people converged. This “spring offensive” began on April 16th, when Vietnam Veterans Against the War staged “Dewey Canyon III,” five days of actions that were named after two short U.S. military incursions into Laos that were carried out in February of that year.

The seeds for this veterans’ mobilization were planted a few months earlier, in Detroit, when hundreds of vets convened at a rented Howard Johnson’s for a long January weekend of dramatic testimony focused on their actions as combat soldiers in Vietnam.

Led by Gold Star mothers, more than 1,100 Vietnam vets marched to Arlington Cemetery, where they planned to lay wreaths on the graves of American soldiers killed in Vietnam. But they arrived to find the gates locked. They laid their wreaths at the gates and departed. They performed guerrilla theater, attempted to surrender themselves at the Pentagon as war criminals, and listened to testimony on possible solutions to the war at Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings that included a provocative round of testimony by Vietnam veteran and former Navy officer John Kerry.

The vets camped on the National Mall where they were evicted through a court injunction that was overturned by the Washington District Court of Appeals—then quickly reinstated by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger. Despite orders to arrest the camping veterans, U.S. Park Police refused to do so, and the encampment continued. Then, on Friday, April 23rd, more than 800 veterans assembled in an unprecedented action to, one-by-one, toss their Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts, and other war medals onto the steps of Congress. The nation paused.

On the following day, April 24th, more than 500,000 people rallied in Washington for the largest antiwar demonstration in U.S. history. Thousands remained in Washington for the planned May Day actions, 35,000 of them camped in West Potomac Park until they were dispersed on the morning of May 2nd by a battalion of police in riot gear, tossing tear gas as they cleared the park. Activists retreated to churches, homes, and college dorms—and they set out early the next morning to act on their carefully planned designs for civil disobedience aimed at stopping the normal functioning of Washington government.

Opposed by more than 10,000 troops ordered into the nation’s capital, including soldiers airlifted by helicopter transports onto the Washington monument grounds, May Day protestors impeded government operations on May 3rd as police resorted to mass arrests to prevent even more disruption. The White House ordered government employees to report for Monday morning work in waves, starting at 3 a.m., to prevent dense knots of traffic that protestors could more easily obstruct. And the government deployed legions of police who suspended normal procedures to arrest and herd protestors and more than a few innocent bystanders into a fenced holding pen next to the RFK Stadium in downtown Washington. By 8 a.m., more than 7,000 protestors had been arrested.

On Tuesday, several thousand protestors converged on the offices of the U.S. Justice Department, to protest the mass arrests. As Attorney General John Mitchell stood on his office balcony smoking a pipe, more than 1,000 were taken to D.C. jails. And on Wednesday, May 5th, protestors culminated their actions by taking the People’s Peace Treaty to the steps of the Capitol and demanding its ratification. Small bands of demonstrators also posted copies of the Treaty on the doors of government and congressional offices. Police took more than 1,000 people into custody, bringing the total number of arrests to 12,614, making the May Day seizures the largest mass arrest in U.S. history.

The May Day actions were creative, fluid, militant, and disruptive, but protestors maintained their commitment to non-violence and no one was hurt. Most of the arrests were determined later to be illegal—and only 79 convictions were delivered against protestors. The government convened a federal grand jury to seek indictments against May Day leaders, but activists they called refused to testify. That, combined with the government’s weak case on the mass arrests resulted in the suspension of the grand jury investigation.

White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman discussed the Capitol action with President Nixon in the Oval Office on May 5th, the day the action took place.

PRESIDENT: How’s he’s do[ing]—great? What was the situation today? Did they have any more actions?

HALDEMAN: Uh, there’s gonna be a, they’re going to…

PRESIDENT: March on the Capitol?

HALDEMAN: Uh,…be at the Congress at noon when the thing…

PRESIDENT: (Unintelligible)

HALDEMAN: Well, that’s the plan, uh, whether they do it never can quite sure. But they, they’ve followed the plan pretty much up to now. It’s (tape noise) the theory is they’re gonna…

PRESIDENT: Demonstrate up there, at the Capitol?

HALDEMAN: From twelve noon until the People’s Peace Treaty is signed, you see, they’re demanding that the Congress sign this. This is this peace treaty that they’ve signed with North Vietnam. (Laughs)

PRESIDENT: Hmm. (Tape Noise)

HALDEMAN: They’ve got no (tape noise) special permit. Best estimate is 2,000 demonstrators. Trouble very likely.

PRESIDENT: Good.

HALDEMAN: They’ve planned two meetings tonight to plan demon…

PRESIDENT: That was last night.8

About May Day, then-CIA director Richard Helms is quoted in Joe Allen’s book, Vietnam: The (Last) War the U.S. Lost (2008), as saying, “It was obviously viewed by everybody in the administration, particularly with all the arrests and the howling about civil rights and human rights and all the rest of it…as a very damaging kind of event. I don’t think there was any doubt about that.”

It is impossible to know the full and precise impact that the 1970 People’s Peace Treaty had on public opinion, the government, or the U.S. negotiators in Paris. We do know that during the first two years of the U.S. peace talks with the Vietnamese in Paris, negotiators accomplished very little. We also know, thanks to now-declassified White House documents held at the Lyndon Johnson Presidential Library, that representatives of the 1968 Nixon presidential campaign worked behind the scenes with the South Vietnamese Thieu-Ky regime to sabotage Lyndon Johnson’s progress in the Paris Peace Talks, in order to facilitate Nixon’s election. Johnson was apparently close to agreeing to a bombing halt that could create an opening for a ceasefire and a framework for lasting peace, but encountered unexpected resistance from the South Vietnamese. Johnson learned of Nixon’s back-channel sabotage through wiretaps, but equivocated about acting on this knowledge, fearing that disclosure of the wiretaps would sully his own reputation. Finally, Johnson was apparently persuaded that to charge Nixon so close to an election that Nixon was likely to win would compromise Nixon’s effectiveness as president and damage the overall credibility of the U.S. government. So, the war continued.

An additional complication to the negotiations surfaced during the Nixon administration, when, in debt to South Vietnamese President Thieu for collaborating in his behind-the-scenes maneuvers during the 1968 election, Nixon was limited in how far he could push the Thieu government. This became especially problematic during the final rounds of talks during the summer and fall of 1972, when, according to various authoritative accounts, Thieu dug in his heels and proved intractable to the Nixon team.

It was only two years after the signing of the People’s Peace Treaty and the sustained actions of non-violent civil disobedience by returning soldiers, students, and others that the U.S. government finally reached full agreement with the Vietnamese and signed the Paris Peace Accords that led to the end of U.S. involvement in that war. During the spring of 1971, the People’s Peace Treaty was distributed as a pamphlet and poster and was republished and summarized in student newspapers as well as underground and alternative publications all over the country. It became the leading instrument used to educate hundreds of thousands of Americans that it was possible to end the Vietnam War on terms that were fair and negotiable. Mainstream media carried a few news stories mentioning the Treaty, but did not report on what the document actually said. According to historian Charles DeBenedetti, the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice promoted the People’s Peace Treaty “virtually without media coverage.”9

It is tragic that the Nixon administration chose to pursue war on Vietnam for those two additional years, rather than heed our call to embrace the People’s Peace Treaty. This document, which had the overwhelming backing of the U.S. peace movement, and which earned widespread support among American college and university students, was entirely ignored by the administration. If they paid any attention to it at all, Nixon’s right-wing cohorts harassed U.S. student leaders and jailed South Vietnamese students who participated in the innovative Peace Treaty initiative. And they dismissed the Treaty as “communist-inspired.” In fact, its contents were entirely compatible with the terms that Nixon’s negotiators eventually agreed to in 1973.

In 1971 and 1972, Nixon chose to intensify his high-tech air assaults as he pursued his “Vietnamization” program, which then-U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Ellsworth Bunker cynically dubbed “changing the color of the bodies.”¹⁰ During the 12-day 1972 Christmas Bombings, alone, the United States lost 43 airmen, killed in action, with another 49 taken prisoner. The Vietnamese government documented 1,624 of their civilians killed. And if you look at the entire last two years of the war, U.S. National Archives & Records indicates that 3,173 U.S. soldiers were killed. South Vietnamese (RVN) government records show that during that same period, 45,688 ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) soldiers were killed. North Vietnamese and National Liberation Front casualties were estimated at 23,581.

In the four years between Nixon’s sabotage of Johnson’s 1968 peace efforts and the time, just prior to the 1972 election, when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger declared “peace is at hand,” more than 20,000 U.S. troops died in Vietnam,11 more than 100,000 were wounded, and more than a million Vietnamese were killed. Total American soldier deaths in Vietnam were 58,209. Total Vietnamese deaths during the war are now estimated at three million.¹²

Nothing, militarily or politically, was gained through those final destructive years of the war. And now, four decades later, with the U.S. positioned as Vietnam’s largest trading partner, it is worth reflecting on why we fought this brutal, immoral, and costly war. It is also worth considering how the U.S. and Vietnamese student peace movements and the People’s Peace Treaty helped show the way forward by breaking through the political obstacles placed in our way by a government that sought to mystify the peace process, distort the motivations of the “other side,” obfuscate their own intentions, demonize those pushing for peace, and repress dissent while escalating the killing. Massive bombing attacks and search-and-destroy missions against small villages that returning U.S. soldiers compared to the My Lai massacres (where more than 500 unarmed civilians were slaughtered in South Vietnam by the U.S. army) were routine practice.

The social impact of the war, here and in Vietnam, continues to resonate. More than 50,000 U.S. soldiers deserted during the war, and more than 60,000 resisted the draft by going to jail or fleeing to Canada and other countries. The U.S. government’s own National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study (NVVRS) estimates that 30 percent of Vietnam veterans—or 800,000 men and women—have struggled with often debilitating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as a result of their combat experience. At home, the social fabric frayed to the breaking point, resulting in the greatest social and political polarization since the U.S. Civil War—a divide that continues to resonate today.

The People’s Peace Treaty sought to simplify the basic conditions and understandings that were needed to move away from continued war and toward peace, independence and self-determination for Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia—so that the people of those devastated lands could finally be free to rebuild their shattered societies and forge their own futures. It also sought to provide a basis for re-unification at home and a chance to start healing the wounds of war.

At a time when political leaders in the United States and South Vietnam were insisting that only further war could bring peace, the People’s Peace Treaty, drafted and signed by Vietnamese and U.S. students, demonstrated that peace was already possible.