policy - The Black Vault

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which was declining as the antiwar movement began to grow.
The movement
also drew strength from the radicalized American intellectuals who during
"the war years separated themselves from the liberal consensus which had
dominated their political perspectives since World War NtI. This is
principal theme of Vogelgesang's book, The Long Dark Night of the Soula
The connections of the antiwar movem'ýnt with these groups in American
society were its source of vitality, but at the same time they drove the
movement to the far left of the American political spectrum, weakening its
political effectiveness, and ultimately stifling its growth.
The antiwar movement that began in 1965 quickly drew to it radical
elements that grew increasingly powerful. The purpose of many of these
groups was not simply to end the war, but also to use the antiwar movement
as a wedge to force fundamental changes in US society. As their power
within the antiwar movement grew, those groups not only loaded the movement
with leftist political, economic, and social objectives, but hardened the
rovement with an image that was unacceptable to most Americans.
a
Because of
that image, the movement was unable to mobilize the general lack of support
the Vietnam War had among the American public after 1968 (See Chapter 1).
Whereas American people had become as a whole more antiwar, they had also
become even more antiprotester.
The limitations of the US antiwar movement were evident to those
who participated in it and those who sought to use it. Sam Brown, Coordinator
of the Vietnam Moratorium of 1969, recounted a significant meeting as
follows:
Z•k -2-25
When I visited the North Vietnamese and NLF representatives
in Paris last February (1969), they made it clear
that they had never counted on the American left to end
the war. Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, the foreign minister
of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (of the
NLF), remarked that she found student radicals very
sectarian and reluctant to touch political power. She
continued that the confused assortment of political
objectives on the left - from legalizing marijuana to
6 over throwing the government to providing free
abortions -dilutes the political impact of the peace
movement. The result, she suggested, is that the
r Vietnamese people and American soldiers carry the
Ar~