Of course I agree with Edwin Moise, who in referring to previous
postings in this thread, including my own, advised precision in word usage
when discussing the issue of foreign or outside "influence" on the Vietnam
antiwar movement.  In the context of this thread, I had taken the word
"influence" to mean "the power to produce an effect," and I understood
"effect" to mean "significant effect."  Moise seems to emphasize influence
as "sway" over beliefs.  Still, I should have been more exact.
        Having said that, I want to emphasize that Moise reinforces and
elaborates the point I originally tried to make; he writes: "What the U.S.
government failed to find, despite prolonged effort, was control or
direction of major antiwar organizations, or a level of influence verging on
control, by Moscow, by the Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA), or by Hanoi."
The above statement is true despite the presence of the CPSU, PL, and SWP in
"the movement."
        Moise does suggest, however, that Hanoi influenced or swayed the
antiwar movement in the realm of belief; for example, the belief of some in
the antiwar movement that the NLF was more independent of the Political
Bureau in Hanoi than it was in actuality.  I submit, however, that this
belief was not necessarily the result of Hanoi's influence on or sway over
the antiwar movement.  It was more the result of a lack of access by
Americans, including Southeast Asian experts, to sufficient information
about the internal history of the Vietminh and relations between Hanoi and
southern cadres during the Diem period.  On the other hand, this belief was
informed by the correct appreciation that the war in the South was in part a
civil war between the Vietnamese, especially one between southern parties
(it was, of course, also a war brought on by outsiders, including the United
States).
        In any event, this generalized belief on the part of some in the
movement -- that the southern insurgents in the fifties and sixties had
their own views of what was to be done and how they should act -- was closer
to the truth than the U.S. government's official line that the war was the
result of "North Vietnamese aggression," which itself was supposed to be
proxy aggression on behalf of international communism centered in Moscow or
Beijing.  To be more precise, while Moise calls attention to both fallacies,
some fallacies are more fallacious than others; namely, the latter more than
the former.
        Finally, at some point in this discussion we must come to grips with
and be more precise about what was the antiwar "movement."  It was not only
the product of "leftist politics," as Moise phrases it or seems to suggest.
Between roughly 1963 and 1975, it was a loose, shifting, evolving coalition
of (a) several types of liberals, (b) several types of pacifists, and (b)
several types of leftists, plus a scattering of people in the center, some
politicized members of the counterculture, and a few on the right-of-center.
Most "members" of the movement may have been left of center, but the
movement was not wholly Left (as in left-of-liberal).  Some were "activists"
in the sense of being street demonstrators, but many chose other and more
traditional forms of protest or witness.  The movement consisted of men and
women, young, middle aged, and old, and also people from all walks of life
(in differing proportions), including some members of congress and
presidential administrations.
        I, following historians Charles DeBenedetti and Charles Chatfield,
accept sociologist Charles Tilly's definition of "movement" as appropriate
for the antiwar movement: "A social movement is a sustained interaction in
which mobilized people, acting in the name of a defined interest, make
repeated broad demands on powerful others via means that go beyond the
current prescriptions of authority."  This implies that a movement is
different from a party in that it has no permanent or formal leadership, no
rigid dogma or platform, and no structural hierarchy.
        Applied to the evidence we have about the antiwar movement, Tilly's
definition means that the "repeated demands" (for an end to the war) made on
powerful others" (the U.S. government) through unconventional means
(demonstrations, vigils, civil disobedience, citizen lobbying, draft
resistance, letter-writing campaigns, teach-ins, and so on) emerged from the
grassroots, not from the influence of foreigners.  The movement was large,
decentralized, nationwide (except that it had only small pockets of support
in the South), patriotic, overwhelmingly nonviolent, and motivated by
American-rooted ideals and principles.  Its members questioned the motives,
cost-effectiveness, wisdom, and morality of the war.
        Yes, there were some among the millions in the active movement who
behaved badly or who irked the so-called Silent Majority, but that doesn't
indict the whole movement.  (Many counter-demonstrators and agents
provacateurs behaved very badly, but that shouldn't indict all supporters of
the war.)  Some segments of the movement disapproved of some of the actions
of some of the other segments.
        By 1972, even select conservatives in Congress (and in the
administration) who had supported the war told Nixon that he had to end it;
that is, accept the Paris Agreement despite Thieu's opposition to it.  In
that sense, they, too, became part of this amorphous "movement," while the
majority of Americans, as indicated in polls between 1971 and 1972, had
become opponents of the continuation of the war.

Jeff Kimball, Miami University

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