policy - The Black Vault

THE BDM CORPORATION
concluded that the antiwar demonstration did not succeed in dramatizing the
moral aspects of the war and that the presence of so many radical elements
gave the puolic a contorted image of the movement.38/
However, the "morality-of-the-war" issue was the point that seems
to have separated the antiwar movement from the rest of the American
people. Therefore, there is room to question t.:e wisdom of stressing that
very point as a strategy for expanding the political base of the ,oovement
among "middle Americans."39/
Studies have shown that the young and intellectual
elites were definitely persuaded that from 1965 on the war was an
immoral exercise of American imperialism.40/ Some extrapolated from this
belief to an indictment of the whole of the American political, social, and
economic system. However, the assumptions of the immorality of the war
never did reach wide acceptance outside those groups. j:stead, the growing
opposition to the war amorgc the general public, espe(..ally in 1967-1969
(see Chapter 1), was based on the simple conclusion that the war didn't
seem worth the price. Some measured the war in terms of the numbers of US
dead and wounded. Others assessed the war's value in terms of the enormous
resources being expended on it. Still others believed that the war was
dangerously dividing the nation. Although not out of a sense of moral
guilt, they concluded that the war had been a q.0stake.
Neither the youth leaders who
mobilized t.e demonstrations nor
the intellectuals tiho provided the rhetoric and the rationale for the
antiwar movement ware in positions to make political capital out of the
growing public disenchantment with the war. jurely the positions of the
early Teach-Ins in 1965 could have provided a non-radical base for tapping
that mainstream discontent, but by 1967-1968 the movement had moved far to
the left of what most Amoricans cons -dered politically acceptable.
As
the antiwar i ovement moved farther and farther to the left,
amid leadership struggles and the splintering and resplintering of organizations,
it became increasiily antiestablishment in its uirection.
Every
2-27
= 7 J4 - -C'M