October 15 and 16 of 1965 saw some of the first major Vietnam War Protests in the United States. These began, perhaps predictably, in Berkeley, California, where about 10,000 protestors marched to the military base in Oakland. Similar protests took place on 5th Avenue in New York City, in Philadelphia, in Boston, and in Ann Arbor.
These events were just a taste of what was to come. Within months, three people in the United States, two Quakers and a member of the Catholic Worker movement, burned themselves alive in protest of the war. Later Vietnam War protests, of course, would grow much larger as involvement in Southeast Asia divided the nation more and more.
I don’t think I have much to add that most of my readers don’t already know when it comes to the Vietnam War in the United States. US military efforts in Southeast Asia were unsuccessful. The lies given to the public, and at times the troops fighting, were multilayered. (Readers should obtain a copy of The Pentagon Papers should they wish to see some of the evidence with their own eyes.) The cost in human suffering, both for US troops and the people of Vietnam, was prodigious.
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Impact of Vietnam War Protests
Not only did the war divide the nation as no event had done in a century, it fractured the confidence that many Americans had in the honesty of their government. When I used to teach about the last few decades of US history in my college classes, this is the point in the semester I introduced my students to the concept of the “credibility gap”—the difference between what the US government claims it is doing and what regular people believe the government is doing.
Although most of that was still in the future in October of 1965, the Vietnam War protests that took place in that month proved a harbinger of things to come for the next decade.
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