Todd Gitlin: Vietnam: the Old Business That Never Goes Away

Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the communications program at Columbia University, and a prolific author whose most recent book is a novel, Undying.

The overwhelmingly effective forces that ended the war were the North Vietnamese Army and the Viet Cong. Absent their military prowess—which meant also their political prowess—all the righteous demonstrations, the lobbies, the political swings, all of them would have failed to end the war. By the early months of the first Nixon administration, the dissolving armed forces certainly made it hard for the Pentagon to pursue the war in the manner to which they had become accustomed. But the air war continued, to enormously lethal effect, even as ground troops came home. Conceivably the air war could have been prosecuted, on the strength of the relatively unshattered Air Force, for years longer.

The protests and political pressures did succeed, at crucial junctures, in limiting the war. Of this there’s much evidence. (I included some  in a book called The Sixties.) The movement exercised, at crucial junctures, a life-saving veto force. In 1969, the movement successfully kept Nixon from a massive escalation (“Operation Duck Hook”). In 1970, the movement forced Nixon’s retreat from Cambodia. Real achievements, yes. War-enders, no....