Why We weren't in Vietnam

...Garfinkle offers only two pieces of evidence...

...Garfinkle advances two other theses: that "the real causes" of 1960s radicalism "lay in the generic difficulties of coping with the revolutionary social life of post-World War II America...

...This set the stage for decades of battles between the new liberalism of McGovern, Carter, and Clinton and the new conservatism of Reagan and Gingrich...

...Therefore, those of us who were weaned on the civil rights struggle were predisposed to believe ill of our country and also to see political issues in Manichean terms, two characteristics that became hallmarks of 1960s radicalism...

...But you do not have to accept any of Garfinkle's main arguments to enjoy and profit from his painstaking reconstruction of the history of the antiwar movement...

...That is why the polls Garfinkle cites showing the unpopularity of the antiwar movement miss the point...

...In Telltale Hearts: The Origins and Impact of the Vietnam Antiwar Movement (St...

...The Republican congressional revolution may again reshape American politics, but for the last 25 years we have been living in the shadow of the 1960s...

...Many of us joined it...

...The civil rights issue was unusual in another way, as well: It boiled down to a clear choice of right and wrong, whereas most policy issues involve many shades of gray...

...Though this would seem to refute Garfinkle's thesis, he discounts it by arguing that "the antiwar movement succeeded . . . only to the extent that antiwar sentiment became reliberalized through the Democratic Party...

...Well perhaps, but so what...

...His most recent book, The Imperative of American Leadership, will be published by AEI early next year...

...Speaking of the "self-doubts of the liberal American political class of that time," he says: Many government leaders . . . privately accepted the criticisms of their most pernicious adversaries, or were emotionally influenced by their passion if not their content...

...For those who were close to the scene, it is fun revisiting the arguments between Norman Thomas and David Dellinger, the brief triumph of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers party as the leader of mass antiwar demonstrations, and the final break-up of SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) at a convention that pitted doctrinaire Maoists against a somewhat less doctrinaire faction calling itself the Up-Against-the-Wall Motherfuckers...

...But the political activism of many, I would guess most, New Leftists was smiled upon by their parents, whether old radicals or just liberals...

...We came of age during the emergence of the civil rights movement...

...Martin's Press, 370 pages, $24.95), Adam Garfinkle offers a new take on the central force of the 1960s, the antiwar movement...

...and Weiss's more important inheritance was a family tradition of admiration for the Soviet Union...

...Garfinkle, a resident scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, aims to show that, far from having caused or even hastened America's withdrawal from Vietnam, the antiwar movement had the opposite effect...

...But if Garfinkle is wrong and the antiwar movement was the motor driving American withdrawal, then its effects on American life, however large, pale in comparison to its consequences for the Indochinese: the slaughter of millions and the imposition of totalitarianism on them all...

...He seems to assume that the thinking of the public is ideologically linear, that dislike of the antiwar movement would translate into support of the war...

...The American liberalism shaped by Roosevelt and Truman, which was anchored in blue-collar precincts, and which gave us the welfare state, internationalism, and civil rights laws, was killed off in the 1960s...

...And this may be true even of those New Leftists who had difficult relations with their parents...

...Although it may be possible to distinguish antiwar liberals from radicals, it was all one movement...

...Most likely, their generally liberal sensitivities connected them more firmly to the protesters' fierce emotions than to the "silent majority" that supported staying the course or escalating the war...

...Who can doubt that Johnson's relish of his office was dimmed by the revilement to which he was subjected, the ubiquitous pickets chanting, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today...

...Since the war was a mistake, as Garfinkle sees it, the "utterly normal contours of American politics," he argues, would have compelled disengagement...

...The antics of the radical antiwar movement," he says, "deterred more Americans from opposing the war sooner because they were afraid of the company they would have to keep...

...and that "the main impact of the antiwar movement was not felt in Southeast Asia but in the United States...

...Nor do I find convincing Garfinkle's main thesis-that the antiwar movement impeded rather than impelled America's withdrawal from Vietnam...

...In addition to the legacy of their parents' radicalism, another unique experience shaped the 1960s radicals, of whom I was one...

...He characterizes the League for Industrial Democracy (from which SDS sprang) as growing out of progres-sivism, but it was basically a Socialist party front...

...Nonetheless, as Garfinkle tells us, Small concluded that the movement was instrumental in securing U.S...

...withdrawal...

...The firmness of its grip has been demonstrated anew by Bill Clinton, who campaigned as a different kind of Democrat but has governed as one who cut his teeth in the movement and bears its indelible imprint...

...He attributes the origins of Vietnam protest largely to a group he labels "new pacifists," but they were mostly old radicals...

...And, building on the McCarthy campaign, the movement succeeded as well in making the Democratic party its own...

...If the antiwar movement did not impel American withdrawal from Vietnam, then of course its main impact would have been here rather than there...

...Anyone who was around the New Left knows that many of its members, especially among the core activists and leaders, were the progeny of 1930s radicals...

...Oddly, very little of the book after the first chapter is devoted to proving the case...

...And for even more of us, the civil rights struggle was the first public issue that we followed...

...Thus did its extreme segments flame out, but the movement they left behind triumphed, choking off U.S...

...Eugene McCarthy, whose campaign became the vehicle for the antiwar movement...

...He has undertaken prodigious research (he is a few years too young to have experienced most of it firsthand...

...To advance his second thesis, Garfinkle argues that "overwhelmingly in the case of the New Left, the young radical had difficult relations with parents and family...

...Joshua Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, was national chairman of the Young People's Socialist League from 1968 to 1973...

...But, for many, wanting the antiwar movement to go away only made them want the war to end and made them impatient with the officials who had gotten us into this mess...

...But Rothman and Lichter do not show that such friction occurred "overwhelmingly," only that it was somewhat more common among radical youngsters than among their non-radical peers...

...He bases this on the research of Stanley Rothman and Robert Lichter, authors of Roots of Radicalism...

...Many ordinary citizens worried, too...

...Did the youth of the 1960s as a whole have more friction with their parents than the apolitical youth of the 1950s or 1980s...

...And it was not only Johnson who was affected...

...This last point, however, is nothing but a corollary of his first thesis...

...In the last pages of his book, Garfinkle offers a cogent speculation that goes far toward refuting his own case...

...But this natural process was inhibited by reaction against the antiwar movement...

...Garfinkle echoes the conventional description of New Leftism as a generational revolt...

...Besides inner doubts and disappointments, the other factor that contributed to Johnson's decision to withdraw from the election and de-escalate the war was the surprising showing in the New Hampshire primary of Sen...

...Whatever Johnson administration officials may have told interviewers, it was Johnson himself, as Garfinkle shows tellingly, who made the crucial step toward capitulation in Vietnam when he withdrew from the 1968 election and announced conciliatory gestures toward Hanoi...

...Garfinkle tells us, for example, that the radical "Mobilization" and the liberal "Moratorium" shared a building...

...From the perspective of maturity, it is possible to see that America's terrible injustice to its black citizens was a great anomaly for a country whose record in so many other respects was worthy of pride...

...That was the meaning of the 1968 slogan "Neat and clean for Gene...

...And he mentions the liaison with Hanoi established by Cora Weiss, whom he describes as heir to the Helena Rubinstein cosmetics empire, when in fact the firm was Faberg...

...Of course, you might make much the same point about the 1980s or the 1950s, but the 1960s stand out as a decade of particularly intense cultural and political convulsions...

...Indeed, he underestimates across the board the influence of old Leftism of various stripes...

...He cites polling data showing that many Americans were more opposed to the antiwar movement than to the war...

...And to the extent that such familial friction existed, what does it explain...

...As for the cultural legacy, hemlines have dropped back from the record heights they reached in the 60s, but the rates of illegitimacy, divorce, and recreational drug use have just kept climbing...

...As Garfinkle notes, Johnson recorded in his memoirs that "all the advisers expressed deep concern about the divisions in our country...

...Many of the same individuals who participated in "radical" demonstrations "reliberalized" to canvass voters for McCarthy...

...Garfinkle mentions "red diaper babies" but belittles their importance...

...aid to the governments of South Vietnam and Cambodia, serving those nations up to the Communists...

...The New Left offspring of old Left parents rejected their parents' ideologies, and to that extent they were rebelling, but whether they knew it or not, they had absorbed much of their outlook from their parents...

...And he refers to a book by Melvin Small, who relates that an array of former high officials in the Johnson administration told him that the antiwar movement had no impact on their decisions...