policy - The Black Vault

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portion of the American intellectual community.
Opposition to the bellicosity
of Goldwater had been one of the major factors that had recommended
Johnson. Once it had fallen from grace with tne intellectuals, the Johnson
administration never recovered. Every effort by the administration to
buttress its position was rejected by the intellectuals as misleading. For
instance, the State Department's White Paper on February 27, 1965 meant as
a
seventy-one page expose of North Vietnamese infiltration brought this
response from the New Republic editors:
The best that can be said about the State Department's
White Paper on Vietnam is that it is entirely unconvincing.
The worst is that it is contradictory, illogical
and misleading. It has a desperate purpose: to
prepare the moral platform for widening the war.25/
The strength of the antiwar movement was provided by the youth of
the college campuses, but they were dependent upon intellectuals like
Wilhelm Reich, Eric Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, and Paul Goodman for putting
the conflict in universal perspective. As the movement spread from campus
to campus in 1965 it gathered to it spokesmen like Anatol Rapopport,
Kenneth Boulding, and Arnold Kaufman who were leaders of the original Ann
Arbor Teach-in, yet whose views varied considerably.
The rupture between the American intellectual community and the
Johnson administration poisoned the 1965 White House Festival of the Arts
•..•" ;staying
and pushed the controversy regarding the war beyond the boundaries of
polite behavior. Individual artists invited to the festival joined in a
common front of opposition to the president's war policy and refused to
attend. Johnson was furious. He blamed hostility toward hi,, policies on
the fact that he was a Southerner and declared that the intellectuals would
never give him a chance no matter what he did "Some of them insult me by
away and some of them insult me by coming."'26/
The intellectuals continued to provide themes to the young
activists through 1965 and into the first doldrum of the antiwar movement
in 1966. The turn of the youth to resistance rather than protest in 1967
provided a fresh outburst of expressions by intellectuals in support of
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