Bring the Boys Home Now! Antiwar Activism and Withdrawal from Vietnam-and Iraq

Abstract

In 1968, three years after Lyndon Johnson's escalations made the Vietnam War an American war, the United States began the long process of extricating itself from the conflict. The war dragged on for Americans until 1973 and resulted in nearly 20,000 more U.S. combat deaths and hundreds of thousands of more Vietnamese military and civilian deaths—despite the declared intentions of both major-party presidential candidates in 1968 to end the war, and despite the fact that a majority of Americans that year told pollsters they believed entry into the war had been a mistake. With the endgame in sight in 1968, if not earlier, and with critics of the war on the streets and in the halls of Congress providing a variety of rational, dovish options, why did the United States hang on for so long? And what can the failure of those calling for a speedy withdrawal from Vietnam tell us about more recent events, where an even larger majority of Americans opposed the war in Iraq and, for several years, called for a speedy withdrawal?