Protests - Part 12

 Vietnam War Demonstrations

1967 was the "summer of love" in San Francisco.  Lyndon Johnson was President, and he had gotten the U.S. into a ground war in Vietnam in 1965.  These demonstrators were protesting against the Vietnam War and the draft, including this guy in the San Francisco Civic Center Plaza fountain.

This 1968 anti-war protest on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York was a project of artist Yayoi Kusama (second from left), known as the "polka dot queen."  Her art consists of putting polka dots on everything (including the protesters).

January 19, 1969.  Richard Nixon had been elected, but the Vietnam War continued.  This was a "counter-Inaugural ball" to protest Nixon and the war.

Things kept getting worse.  On May 4, 1970, students at Kent State University were protesting the Vietnam War's expansion into Cambodia.  Four of the protesters were shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard.  Five days later, 100,000 people, including those above, demonstrated in Washington, D.C. against the Kent State shootings.

Nixon tried to counter the anti-war movement by holding a pro-war rally on the National Mall in Washington on July 4, 1970, called the Honor America Day demonstration.  Thousands of Nixon supporters were bussed in for the rally.  However, a counter-demonstration occurred, including these demonstrators in the Reflecting Pool on the Mall.  Police tried to break up the counter-demonstration with tear gas, which then drifted over Nixon's crowd, and that was the end of the Honor America Day rally.

This photo, taken by LIFE photographer Bill Eppridge, was labeled "Anti-War Demonstration, Washington, D.C."  It was only dated 1970, so I don't know which anti-war demonstration this is.

Another photo by Bill Eppridge of a 1970 anti-war demonstration, Washington, D.C.

On May 5, 1971, an anti-war demonstration was held on the Capitol steps in Washington.  According to the caption, police arrested the protesters when they refused to move from the Capitol steps.  Looking back, it seems so innocent now, compared to the scene fifty years later when Trump supporters broke into the Capitol and attempted to overthrow the government.

By 1972, young American men were still being drafted to fight and die in Vietnam.  This is a group of protesters at the Republican Convention in 1972 when Richard Nixon was re-nominated.

After the Paris Peace Accord cease-fire was negotiated in 1973, American troops were withdrawn.  In August, 1974, Nixon resigned in disgrace under threat of impeachment.  In April, 1975, after the North Vietnamese had taken most of South Vietnam and were about to take Saigon, Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, finally ended the Vietnam War by ending all American aid to South Vietnam and pulling out the remaining Americans.

It was an unwinnable war that the U.S. had been fighting for ten years without the support of the South Vietnamese people.  Fifty years later, exactly the same thing happened in Afghanistan.  Will we never learn?