THE FALL OFFENSIVE: TEN YEARS LATER
Debenedetti, Charles L.
REFLECTIONS The Fall Offensive: ten years later Charles L. DeBenedetti Like all great conflicts, the American-Vietnamese war ground to a conclusion through a bloody series of military offensives....
...Unlike any other conflict, however, the war turned in large part upon a generalized peace offensive that advanced with a popular force unknown in modern international politics...
...bombing of North Vietnam, and the initiation of the Paris peace talks — followed by the murders of Martin Luther King Jr...
...Religious leaders said America could reclaim its soul only through defeat...
...Ten years ago, in the greatest single expression of political protest in American history, millions of private citizens joined in countless public actions improvised for the October 15 Vietnam Moratorium and the November 13-15 Mobilization...
...Planning for the Fall Offensive was concentrated in two principal centers of the antiwar opposition...
...Sporadic street violence, led by SDS remnants, ricocheted through Washington over the Mobilization weekend...
...One encompassed the many political and religious liberals who established the Vietnam Moratorium Committee (VMC...
...But conditions changed radically after March 1968...
...The FBI, already well represented in the antiwar movement, stepped up its subversion of organized protest groups in a number of ways...
...More than 46,000 marchers, each carrying a vigil candle and a placard bearing the name of a GI killed in Vietnam or a devastated Vietnamese village, walked single-file in a thirty-eight-hour "March Against Death" past the White House and to Capitol Hill, where they placed the placards in wooden coffins set atop sawhorses...
...Conservatives were incensed...
...But the way was paved for the war's end when impressive numbers of unhappy citizens — pragmatists and moralists alike — concluded not only that the war "could not be won," but also that it could be lost...
...And that was what made the Offensive work...
...involvement in Vietnamese politics...
...For once, the turning point was not turned...
...Then conditions changed again in the spring of 1969...
...Inexorably, they resolved to mount one more attempt to mass popular opposition to the President's plans...
...The VMC took form in the spring of 1969 in suburban Boston among such former leaders of Eugene McCarthy's 1968 Presidential campaign as the wealthy envelope manufacturer Jerome Grossman and student activists Sam Brown and David Hawk...
...And they were right...
...Joined on November 15 by more than 600,000 marchers in Washington and another 300,000 in San Francisco, participants in the November Mobilization constituted the most tremendous concentration of popular peace sentiment in history...
...But still, few conceived the war to be losable...
...Unfortunately, it took Washington five more years to catch up with their lead...
...While smaller rallies took place in another half-dozen cities, one out of every two hundred Americans traveled to Washington or San Francisco to demand the immediate withdrawal of U.S...
...Negotiations in Paris showed no hint of progress...
...withdrawal...
...In fact, on November 15, there were more antiwar troops on the streets of Washington alone than there were U.S...
...It worked despite incredible obstacles...
...While Moratorium leaders hurried to organize their protest, the more radical antiwar elements eager to win Americans to socialist anti-imperialism met in Cleveland early in July and formed the New Mobe...
...decision at every other turning point in the war had been to intensify the violence...
...military presence in South Vietnam...
...It was the pragmatists who stopped it, those who thought the war was wrong not on moral grounds, but because it could not be won...
...But the general tone of the November action was as moderate as that of the Moratorium...
...Everyday relations between the VMC and the New Mobe were usually strained and often tense...
...While President Nixon professed indifference, Moratorium organizers collected the support of campus leaders and prominent liberals in a late-summer exercise that one termed "dial-a-movement...
...Subdued but sanguine, Seeger's sing-out most faithfully reflected the rank-and-file mood of the whole Offensive...
...After some initial bickering, organizers of the Cleveland meeting agreed to set aside the period from November 13 to 15 for a highly-symbolic "March Against Death" in Washington and for follow-up mass demonstrations in Washington and San Francisco that would emphasize the theme, "Bring the Troops Home Now...
...Radicals were angry...
...Officials of the CIA, expanding upon a two-year-old effort called "Operation CHAOS," began planting agents in antiwar organizations, in a move later acknowledged as the Agency's most naked intervention in domestic politics...
...Appealing first to campus leaders, organizers of the Moratorium issued a call early in June for a one-day fall "work-stoppage" in which people would suspend their normal activities in order to discuss the war and press for immediate U.S...
...In one brief moment, massed middle-class members of the world's most powerful society issued the most decisive, decentralized, and democratic declaration of a war's loss in Western memory...
...Yet antiwar partisans did believe that they could inspire enough disruption and disenchantment to make the war increasingly inexpedient...
...Unanimously, however, commentators and activists agreed that the two-pronged Offensive was the last of its kind...
...First, the power of the Fall actions killed plans being advanced under Henry Kissinger's direction with Nixon's approval to win Washington's war by destroying North Vietnam in "a savage, decisive blow...
...Leftists held that a U.S...
...It seemed minor in the context of the day's events, but it was the longest House debate on the war since the forty-minute passage of the Gulf of Tonkin resolution in August 1964...
...The discontent crystallized by the Fall Offensive, however, made the thought of losing a discussable, credible — even acceptable — prospect in the internal debate over Vietnam...
...The American air war in Indochina intensified...
...They resolved to tolerate neither...
...One called for its Washington agents to organize local black leaders behind the demand that antiwar activists pay them $500,000 for access to the city for the scheduled November Mobilization...
...If the first work-stoppage failed to halt Washington's prosecution of the war, the Moratorium planned to expand by one day a month until the Government finally perceived peace as its highest interest...
...combat deaths in Vietnam surpassed the toll of the Korean war...
...As a national opposition force, the antiwar movement bulged forward most dramatically in the spring of 1965 and during the fall and winter of 1967-1968...
...Whatever the mix of personal motives, the combined message of the Fall Offensive was clear: It demanded total withdrawal of U.S...
...In March, the number of U.S...
...The procession was the most moving sight in the country's longest war...
...For once, as Tad Szulc has written, Washington recognized that its "first political priority" was to outflank the domestic peace movement and not enlarge the war...
...troops and the "Vietnamiza-tion" of the war...
...Presidential candidacy in 1972...
...The Offensive hammered home the noisiest nonviolent expression of popular peace sentiment in history...
...Lyndon Johnson's withdrawal from the Presidency, the cessation of most U.S...
...The Fall Offensive originated in an antiwar movement that had emerged since 1963 among various groups of Americans at various times in various parts of the country...
...Plainly, as one of the founders of the Moratorium declared, the very purpose of the Fall Offensive "was to make the forces in power 'hurt...
...policy...
...Early in 1968, after the surprise Tet offensive caused domestic discontent to flare sharply, U.S...
...Surprised by the massive popular response to the Moratorium, the Nixon Administration moved on several fronts to blunt the Fall Offensive...
...troops from Vietnam...
...What was surprising was that it endured...
...More significantly, the Fail Offensive introduced into the U.S...
...Opposition legitimatized by the Moratorium even reached Capitol Hill, where Congress devoted four hours in the early evening of October 15 to a discussion of U.S...
...On November 3, the President announced in a major television address his determination to ignore demands for "precipitate" withdrawal and to persist in the phased withdrawal of U.S...
...Although they varied in tone and emphasis, these different arguments found a common ground of shared sentiment among the less articulate...
...Unsecured in any common politics or ideology, antiwar activism centered among those clusters of the disaffected — New Left sectarians, suburban housewives, anguished clerics, Democratic liberals, religious pacifists, nonviolent resisters, and colorful counterculturalists — who had the time and energy to protest a war that so deeply offended their moral sensibilities and inverted their agenda for a reformed America...
...With compromise peace prospects fading, the war stood at another turning point in the fall of 1969...
...From the start, New Mobe activists were at odds with VMC leaders over matters of strategy (nonviolent direct action versus electoral politics), tactics (mass demonstrations versus community organizing), and ideology (various radical critiques versus broad-spectrum liberalism...
...The movement possessed no leaders with visible national appeal (understandably, since no major national institution opposed the war until the Democratic Party halfheartedly backed George McGovern's Charles L. DeBenedetti is a professor of history at the University of Toledo...
...And that was what the Fall Offensive achieved...
...Peace provisionals enrolled in the Offensive did not stop the war, but they changed its course in two major ways...
...They knew that U.S...
...The peace movement did not stop the war," one liberal British journalist recently wrote...
...soldiers in Vietnam...
...debate over Vietnam the hitherto unthinkable notion that the war was losable...
...Indeed, in view of their many differences, the remarkable thing about the antiwar movement was not that it failed to stop the bloodletting...
...Every sign pointed to protracted conflict, and antiwar activists concluded during the spring that Nixon was no less determined than his predecessors , to maintain an anti-Communist government in Saigon at almost any price...
...It was the Fall Offensive of 1969, and our world is different because of it...
...Despite widespread fears of mass violence, almost one million people streamed into Washington and San Francisco in a three-day popular peace congress that began at Arlington National Cemetery at dusk on November 13...
...An unprecedented outpouring of people acted out of that belief in the Fall Offensive...
...and Robert Kennedy, urban black rioting, the tumultuous Chicago Democratic Convention, and the election of Richard Nixon on his promise to end the war — sent American society reeling and the antiwar movement into eclipse...
...There would be large-scale reactive and spontaneous demonstrations, like those that followed the 1970 Cambodian invasion and the 1972 mining of Haiphong and bombing renewal in the North...
...defeat would deal a necessary blow to global imperialism...
...Vice President Spiro Agnew slashed away at war protesters and the major communications media in an attempt to isolate war critics through a campaign of "positive polarization...
...They wanted out...
...withdrawal from Vietnam...
...As the last stragglers left Washington, news commentators commended the New Mobe for its successful struggle in self-control, while antiwar activists complained that the Offensive's very sobriety had only left Nixon more intransigent...
...In the fall of 1969, however, the warmakers were obliged, because of massed citizen dissidence, to choose Vietnamization over escalation...
...Perhaps the best expression of the Mobe's spirit was evident in mid-afternoon on the Mall, when folksinger Pete Seeger led the throng in a ten-minute chant of the opposition's anthem, "All we are saying/Is give peace a chance...
...Less formally, it was called the New Mobe...
...It was the pragmatists who stopped [the war]' Most antiwar leaders were not surprised...
...On all fronts, the Fall Offensive opened with a high risk of failure...
...What they agreed upon, however, was the need for an all-inclusive drive to mobilize the greatest weight of popular pressure behind the immediate goal — U.S...
...forces from Vietnam — either immediately or within a Congressionally mandated one-year deadline...
...officials concluded that the conflict was unwinnable as a war of attrition between American conscripts and Asian peasant guerrillas...
...Yet momentum in support of the November Mobilization only grew...
...But Washington did not hear...
...policymakers would not be deterred from securing an anti-Communist South Vietnam by opinion polls or moral suasion...
...Since 1950, American policymakers had employed any means necessary to maintain an anti-Communist South Vietnam out of their commitment to what Gelb and Betts have called "the imperative not to lose...
...Yet millions of Americans volunteered to take part in actions organized by people they did not know behind a demand that their Government resolutely opposed...
...They had little else in common...
...At least one million Americans devoted all or part of the day to antiwar activism in communities across the country...
...Even Nixon's initiation of gradual troop withdrawals promised the maintenance of a long-term U.S...
...and, as Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts have shown, the U.S...
...and they rejected the case for "honorable" withdrawal as a prescription either for endless war or for a Korea-like partition...
...But there would be no more mass middle-class actions that mixed a spirit of hope and political opportunity as did the Fall Offensive...
...Throughout the course of the antiwar movement, leading activists felt that their work in rousing extra-partisan constituencies of conscience and self-interest would not essentially determine the war's end...
...It also lacked any coherent form...
...leaders would be moved, as Daniel Berrigan remarked, only by reasons of the "iciest expediency...
...The other gathered about the groupings of students, leftists, feminists, pacifists, and welfare-rights organizers who made up that multi-issue radical reform coalition known as the New Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam...
...On M-Day, October 15, they toted up the results — and the results were fantastic...
...Liberals were apprehensive...
...They saw no further reason for U.S...
...Large groups of potential supporters were distracted by recurring campus strife (most notably at San Francisco State University) and the violent disintegration of the lodestar Students for a Democratic Society (SDS...
...Liberals thought the only important remaining question was how America could complete the quickest withdrawal without losing its self-respect...
...There would also be major rallies built around specific constituencies, like the 1971 Washington actions of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the disobedient May Day Tribe...
Vol. 43 • October 1979 • No. 10
