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The Vietnam War was a long, costly and divisive conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam against South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.

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Read CNN's Vietnam War Fast Facts and learn more about the conflict between communist-led North Vietnam and US-supported South Vietnam.

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Two Days in October | Article

From the Collection: Vietnam War

They marched by the thousands, on campuses from coast to coast. At different times they chose different targets: the Pentagon, Presidents Nixon and Johnson, the draft, Dow Chemical. But the students all acted from a common belief that the Vietnam War was wrong. As that conflict escalated, the protests grew in strength, and some turned violent. They also triggered a backlash.

Courtesy: Wisconsin Historical Society

Getting Started
In many ways the student protests at the University of Wisconsin mirrored those taking place on campuses across the country. The first substantial demonstration, in October 1963, occurred when there were only American military advisers in Vietnam, and it opposed the government's support for Ngo Dinh Diem, the repressive president of South Vietnam. Some early antiwar events were organized by faculty, such as the teach-in on April 1, 1965, that future Chancellor William Sewell put together. It was the second such teach-in in the nation and came only a few weeks after the first American combat troops arrived in Vietnam. Some teach-ins involved only lectures and discussion; some combined theory with practical steps, such as the 15,000 who marched from the University of California at Berkeley towards the Oakland Army Terminal in October 1965.

Protesting the Draft
Demonstrations grew in 1966, spurred by a change in the Selective Service System's draft policy that exposed students in the bottom of half of their classes to the possibility that their deferments would be revoked and they would be drafted. Teach-ins changed to sit-ins - student take-overs of administration offices. A three-day event at the University of Chicago got national attention in May 1966, and University of Wisconsin students also staged their own occupation of an administration building that month. The Madison draft protest, which drew several thousand students to one rally, was peacefully resolved by a promise that the faculty would review the school's draft policy. But tensions rose at campuses like Cornell, where students tried to organize a national burn-your-draft-card movement; and Harvard, where protesters trapped Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in a police car and assailed him with questions about the war.

Anti-Dow Sentiment
As 1967 began, many antiwar students continued traditional forms of dissent, writing letters to the editor and taking out advertisements in campus publications. But even as antiwar student body presidents were meeting with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, other students were planning sit-ins tied to napalm-maker Dow Chemicals attempts to recruit on campus. The first anti-Dow protests took place in October 1966, with more than a hundred occurring at colleges nationwide within a year. University of Wisconsin students staged their first Dow-related sit-in in February 1967, and when Dow returned that October, the protests and police response marked the first time that a campus antiwar demonstration had turned violent.

Courtesy: Wisconsin Historical Society

Violence on Campuses
It would not be the last time violence broke out. Rough confrontations became much more common in the years that followed, culminating most horribly in the May 1970 shooting of 13 Kent State University students by National Guardsmen. Four of those Kent State students died. That event, combined with Nixon's invasion of Cambodia, led to protests at more than 1,300 college campuses, with some 500 closed by student and faculty strikes. ROTC facilities were attacked, and police and National Guard troops were dispatched to more than a hundred colleges. In August of that year, the antiwar protests at the University of Wisconsin took an ominous turn; a bomb destroyed the building holding the Army Math Research Center, killing one young scientist.

The Backlash
Since the first wave of teach-ins hit campuses, the American government had been working to get its side of the story out at universities. For example, it supported the American Friends of Vietnam, a pro-administration group that held a rally in June 1965 at Michigan State University. The group could never match the intensity or numbers of antiwar demonstrations. But the violent consequences of some of those protests helped trigger a backlash of support for the government and targeted corporations like Dow. A record number of University of Wisconsin students signed up for Dow interviews in the wake of the October 1967 bloodshed. Wisconsin legislation held hearings denouncing student protests. And local newspaper editorials overwhelmingly supported Dow and criticized the students. The pro-war group Young Americans for Freedom saw increased enrollment in its University of Wisconsin chapter. A right-wing student newspaper was founded, the Badger Herald. And polls after the Dow protests showed that large majorities felt the demonstrations were "acts of disloyalty" against the soldiers in Vietnam that hurt the larger antiwar cause.

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Protests and Backlash | American Experience | PBS

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As the Vietnam War esclated, protests grew in strength, some turning violent. They also triggered backlash.

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Kent State massacre: The shootings on a college campus 50 years ago changed the country

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Kent State massacre: The shootings on a college campus 50 years ago changed the country

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Joe Lewis was just 18 when he was shot twice by the Ohio National Guard on his college campus.

A freshman at Kent State University in Ohio, Lewis had saved money working at the post office during high school to pay for his first year of college. He loved the freedom college afforded, and in 1970, the campus was abuzz with the "excitement of being on the cusp of a new world," he said.

Lewis grew up on images of the civil rights protests and the Vietnam War and took part in anti-war protests when he got to the campus.

But in May, things escalated and then turned tragic.

Vehemently opposed to President Richard Nixon's escalation of the war into Cambodia, students at Kent State began protesting. On Friday, May 1, students demonstrated on campus and throughout the town of Kent. The next day, the Reserve Officers' Training Corps building on campus was set on fire - how the blaze started remains up for debate - and by the evening, Gov.Jim Rhodes, who was running for the Senate, called in the National Guard. That Sunday, in a press conference, the governor called the students "the worst type of people that we harbor in America."

By Monday, May 4, things reached a boiling point, and students weren't just protesting the war anymore but also the armed guards stationed on their campus with military-grade weapons. Lewis was among the estimated 2,000 people who gathered that afternoon in a demonstration beset by the "toxic waters of the 60s flowing together in one place," according to historian Howard Means, who wrote a book on the incident, "67 Shots: Kent State and the End of American Innocence."

"You had this combination of naive students, a politically ambitious governor, and a laissez-faire administration all deeply complicated by terrible leadership in the National Guard," Means said. As the National Guard ordered Lewis and his fellow students to disperse, they refused. The guardsmen used tear gas, but it proved largely useless because of the wind, and students threw rocks. While this was all happening, the important school administrators were out to lunch, Means said.

Then, the guardsmen, at least 60 yards from most of the students protesting, started firing. In 13 seconds, 61 to 67 shots were fired. Lewis was hit twice, four students were killed, eight others were injured, one of whom was permanently paralyzed, and the course of history was altered.

"I remember stopping, and there was absolute stillness," Lewis said of the moments after the shots. "Then, screaming and wailing and chaos. I didn't lose consciousness, I was in a state of shock."

Many details about the tragedy remain unknown, even today. Why exactly did the guardsmen start shooting? Were the guardsmen who later claimed they feared for their lives telling the truth when there was so much space between them and the students?

What is known is that in the immediate aftermath, public opinion largely sided with the National Guard, but the shooting accelerated the growing disapproval of the Vietnam War.

"It was definitely understood very quickly as an indication that things in the U.S. - on and off campus - were spiraling out of control," said Angus Johnston, a historian on student activism who teaches at the City University of New York.

Johnston called the Kent State shooting "a turning point in American history" for that reason. The report Nixon commissioned on campus unrest after it said that "a nation driven to use the weapons of war upon its youth is a nation on the edge of chaos" - and Americans were feeling the "chaos."

Days after the Kent State shooting, on May 15, there was a shooting at historically black Jackson State College in Mississippi during a protest against racism that students on campus were facing. Two students were shot and killed and 12 others were injured at the hands of the police.

The U.S. was "spiraling out of control," Johnston said, in a war it wasn't winning, and it was shooting its own students dead. Although the May tragedies certainly weren't the only time campuses saw violence, the dramatic photos of the Kent State shooting revealed to the American public what was really going on. The deaths of the students in Ohio (which got far more attention than those in Mississippi, in part, historians believe, because the students who died at Kent State were white) not only further divided a country already split over the war but also revealed that the divide was growing unsustainable.

Alan Canfora, a student who attended the Kent State protest, said the purpose of the demonstration - one that he never imagined would turn deadly - was "to send a message to stop the war." Canfora was captured in one of the most famous pictures from the day, holding a black flag while facing down the National Guard. He was holding the flag in mourning - one of his close friends from childhood had died in the war. Just a week before the protest, he had attended a funeral of someone else he knew who died in Vietnam.

Means, the historian, said he believes the message of Canfora and his fellow students was received. Kent State, he said, "unmoored Nixon," who just days before the shooting had called anti-war protesters "bums," to which a parent of one of the students killed that day famously replied, "My child was not a bum."

When the president's intelligence officials couldn't find evidence that the protest was stirred by outside agitators, Nixon was frustrated. The anger was coming from the students themselves - and it was only growing.

After the shooting, there was a nationwide student strike that saw 4 million turn out in response to the tragedy. As many as 100,000 students marched on Washington. Then, David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Neil Young released their protest song "Ohio" a month later, with the chorus "four dead in Ohio," after seeing the photos of the shooting. With lyrics that directly called out Nixon, the song was heard by the nation loud and clear.

A year after Kent State, the 26th Amendment was ratified, lowering the voting age to 18, which was seen as a massive win for students who until then were too young to vote for politicians who wanted to end the war but were old enough to be drafted.

Canfora, who was shot in the wrist that day 50 years ago and returns to the campus every year to mark the anniversary, is proud to have been there despite the tragedy.

"We helped stop the war," he said.

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13 seconds, 67 shots, 4 dead: 50 years ago, the Kent State shootings changed the country

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Joe Lewis was just 18 when he was shot twice by the Ohio National Guard on his college campus. A freshman at Kent State University in Ohio, Lewis had saved money working at the post office during high school to pay for his first year of college.

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Printable Version The Vietnam War had far-reaching consequences for the United States. It led Congress to replace the military draft with an all-volunteer force and the country to reduce the voting age to 18. It also inspired Congress to attack the "imperial" presidency through the War Powers Act, restricting a president's ability to send American forces into combat without explicit Congressional approval. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees have helped restore blighted urban neighborhoods.

The Vietnam War severely damaged the U.S. economy. Unwilling to raise taxes to pay for the war, President Johnson unleashed a cycle of inflation.

The war also weakened U.S. military morale and undermined, for a time, the U.S. commitment to internationalism. The public was convinced that the Pentagon had inflated enemy casualty figures, disguising the fact that the country was engaged in a military stalemate. During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States was wary of getting involved anywhere else in the world out of fear of another Vietnam. Since then, the public's aversion to casualties inspired strict guidelines for the commitment of forces abroad and a heavy reliance on air power to project American military power.

The war in Vietnam deeply split the Democratic Party. As late as 1964, over 60 percent of those surveyed identified themselves in opinion polls as Democrats. The party had won seven of the previous nine presidential elections. But the prosecution of the war alienated many blue-collar Democrats, many of whom became political independents or Republicans. To be sure, other issues--such as urban riots, affirmative action, and inflation--also weakened the Democratic Party. Many former party supporters viewed the party as dominated by its anti-war faction, weak in the area of foreign policy, and uncertain about America's proper role in the world.

Equally important, the war undermined liberal reform and made many Americans deeply suspicious of government. President Johnson's Great Society programs competed with the war for scarce resources, and constituencies who might have supported liberal social programs turned against the president as a result of the war. The war also made Americans, especially the baby boomer generation, more cynical and less trusting of government and of authority.

Today, decades after the war ended, the American people remain deeply divided over the conflict's meaning. A Gallup Poll found that 53 percent of those surveyed believe that the war was "a well intentioned mistake," while 43 percent believe it was "fundamentally wrong and immoral."

Copyright 2021 Digital History

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Printable Version The Vietnam War had far-reaching consequences for the United States. It led Congress to replace the military draft with an all-volunteer force and the country to reduce the voting age to 18. It also inspired Congress to attack the "imperial" presidency through the War Powers Act, restricting a president's ability to send American forces into combat without explicit Congressional approval.

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Selective Service-Drafting during Vietnam War

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Selective Service-Drafting during Vietnam War

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During the Vietnam War, young men gathered in college dorms and friends' homes to listen to live TV and radio broadcasts of the U.S. Selective Service System drawing lottery numbers to determine who would and would not be drafted. The 2010 issue of Vietnam magazine revisits those days in the article, " Live from Washington, It's Lottery Night 1969!!"

366 blue plastic capsules contained the birthdays that would be chosen in the first Vietnam draft lottery drawing on December 1, 1969. The first birth date drawn that night, assigned the lowest number, "001," was September 14.

How would YOU have done?

Find your birthday in the chart below to see what order you would have been called to service. Or: Check out our Today in History page for an interactive version of the chart!

How did Prominent Figures do?

*Some in this list, who were already serving and whose draft status had been resolved, were not affected by the draft lottery. Otherwise, every male aged 19 to 26 had a stake in the 1970 draft lottery, as it determined the order in which men with birth dates between 1944 and 1950 were called to report for induction in 1970. Some on the above list were already serving, received student or medical deferments, volunteered for other service, or for various other reasons were not drafted in 1970.

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The Vietnam War Selective Service Lottery and the U.S. Draft | HistoryNet

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During the Vietnam War, young men gathered in college dorms and friends' homes to listen to live TV and radio broadcasts of the U.S. Selective Service System drawing lottery numbers to determine who would and would not be drafted. The 2010 issue of Vietnam magazine revisits those days in the article, " Live from Washington, It's Lottery Night 1969!!"

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Written by William W. Riggs, published on July 30, 2023 , last updated on February 19, 2024

The Vietnam War was the product of Cold War dynamics between the United States and the Soviet Union. U.S. leaders defined the national interest as working toward the containment of Communist expansion globally and the prevention of the development of perceived Soviet surrogate states anywhere in the world.

Vietnam and U.S. fought over attempts to reunite North and South Vietnam

Vietnam was partitioned into North and South Vietnam as a result of international agreements and the creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, which established a military relationship between South Vietnam and the United States. These arrangements intensified the resolve of North Vietnamese leaders to pursue a strategy that would ultimately result in the unification of the two countries under Ho Chi Minh, the president of North Vietnam. U.S. strategy to prevent this included a chain of events that resulted in the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that presidents used to justify U.S. military escalation in South Vietnam.

Vietnam coverage inspired criticism of the war

At the time of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, U.S. military forces in Vietnam numbered less than 15,000. Under President Lyndon Johnson the numbers grew dramatically, and by 1966 more than 500,000 troops were deployed in the region. The war in Vietnam was the first to be televised, and broadcast reports showed coverage of the combat in which U.S. soldiers were taking part. This coverage, along with the nightly casualty reports, called into question whether U.S. military escalation had achieved the promised results.

On January 30, 1968, the North Vietnamese army overran Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, and launched a daring predawn assault on the U.S. embassy. On November 30, 1969, newspapers reported that U.S. Army troops had massacred several hundred men, women, and children in the remote village of My Lai. Much like the photos from Iraq depicting the abuse of prisoners in the Abu Ghraib prison by U.S. soldiers or news accounts of abusive interrogation tactics and extraordinary rendition of terrorist suspects, these images and reports inspired spirited criticism of the conduct of the war.

War protests resulted in government attempts to limit First Amendment protections

Despite the wider social activism that characterized the 1960s, the war in Vietnam quickly became the focus of major protests that resulted in increased government attempts to limit First Amendment protections. These efforts mostly dealt with the right to assemble and what constituted appropriate free speech criticism of the war. Opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam grew from many quarters, and student activism quickly gravitated to the anti-war movement when President Lyndon Johnson's administration announced in January 1966 that it would abolish automatic student deferments from the draft. The Students for a Democratic Society's (SDS) cries of "Make Love - Not War!" "Burn cards, not people!" and "Hell, no, we won't go!" became the rallying cries for a growing anti-war movement.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led anti-war protests

On April 4, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., made his most public and comprehensive statement against the war. Addressing a crowd of 3,000 people in Riverside Church in New York City, King delivered a speech entitled "Beyond Vietnam" in which he stated that the war effort was "taking the young black men who have been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem." Two weeks later, he led thousands of demonstrators on an anti-war march to the United Nations. The anti-war movement included not only students and civil rights groups, however, but also returning veterans, including John Kerry, who would go on to serve as a U.S. senator and was the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee. Kerry, a member of the Vietnam Veterans against the War, appeared before the Senate and publicly denounced his fellow Vietnam veterans as war criminals.

Vietnam news coverage led to Supreme Court decisions on classified documents

Although it can be argued that the anti-war movement and its protests were good drama, this was not the only form of protest inspired by U.S. involvement in Vietnam. A considerable body of litigation also emerged. Coincidentally, two major cases involved classified government documents that would come to be known as the Pentagon Papers. These documents outlined the government strategy and goals for the conduct of the war in Vietnam and included details that could be potentially embarrassing to the government if made public.

First was the case of New York Times Co. v. United States (1971). The New York Times had obtained a leaked copy of the Pentagon Papers, which it published in a series of articles. The documents suggested that the government had misled the American people about the war and was continuing to do so. The government issued an injunction against further publication of the documents, which the U.S. Supreme Court overturned. The Court found that this injunction constituted an illegal " prior restraint" in violation of free press guarantees. It thus affirmed, as Justice Potter Stewart explained later in a 1974 speech, that the First Amendment sought "to create a fourth institution outside the government as an additional check on the three official branches" (the executive branch, the legislature, and the judiciary).

In Gravel v. United States (1972), the Court further upheld the right of senators to read excerpts from the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record and also protected the rights of congressional staffers helping members with official duties under the Speech and Debate Clause. However, the Court found that the speech and debate clause did not protect members of Congress who sought commercial publication of the Pentagon Papers.

Anti-war protests led to symbolic expression cases

Many of the other cases that arose during the Vietnam War involved anti-war protests, many of which mixed verbal speech with symbolic expression. In United States v. O'Brien (1968) the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a man who burned a draft card in protest of the Vietnam War. In the process of finding that the government's interest in preserving the draft outweighed O'Brien's right of symbolic protest, the Court created a test that it still uses in cases dealing with symbolic speech. In contrast to O'Brien's conviction, in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), the Court upheld the right of high school students to wear black arm bands to protest the war.

In Watts v. United States (1969), the Court reversed the conviction of a young African American man who allegedly made threatening comments against President Johnson as a part of an anti-war protest, ruling that the man's statements were more rhetorical hyperbole than truly threatening. And although the case was not directly related to the war, the Vietnam era also marked the decision in Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) that indicated that the Court would not uphold laws suppressing speech that was not likely to result in imminent lawless action.
This article was originally published in 2009. William W. Riggs was a Professor at Texas A&M International University.

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The Vietnam War quickly became the focus of symbolic speech and major protests that resulted in increased government attempts to limit First Amendment protections.