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Summary: Once More Into The Breach, Dear Readers!
Review: From the time I climbed back into civil society from my military duty, I stepped exactly into the vortex of the turmoil and raging debate over the so-called anti-war movement. In this well-written and eminently readable book, author Melvin Small precisely captures the tenor of the times, and recapitulates the ongoing arguments against our misguided and massively tragic military adventure in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. Small is well qualified for such a discussion; as an active academic he has lectured on the subject for over thirty years. He is also a noted author on different aspects of the Vietnam war, having penned several books related to Nixon's prosecution of the war, Johnson's conflicted but ever deepening commitments to the war, and the roles of anti-war doves in the overall history of the war. Given the fact that the war in Vietnam represented a new milestone for the history of our republic, the first time that an absolute majority of its citizens were actively against the war in one fashion or another, it is an absorbing history that reveals just how such massive public antipathy for the war was either ignored or spun politically by the media and the policymakers in order to continue their active pursuit of the country's war goals. Small carefully describes and explains exactly where the loci of dissent were to be found, and much more importantly, why. For although the revolutionary levels of active opposition to the war never actually ended the war, which dragged on for more than a decade, it did indeed profoundly influence the conduct of the war. From its import in President Johnson's decision not to seek a second term to Nixon's own involvement in the Watergate imbroglio, the political import of the high levels of active dissent to the war played a major part in how the government proceeded to conduct the war, and in the way it was explained and justified publicly. Another endlessly absorbing aspect to the book is its treatment of the entire anti-war movement itself, tracing it from its origins in the civil rights and free speech movements to its eventual dissolution as the war spun down in the mid 1970s. One of the most amazing things we learn is just how little heed the elected leaders paid to public opinion on the one hand, yet at the same time recognizing the power of public antipathy to the war as a constraint they increasingly had to recognize in their machinations, especially under the Nixon administration, when anti-war views were held to be both unpatriotic and traitorous. Gee, does any of this stuff sound familiar? This is a wonderful book that one can learn a great deal about concerning the nature of the anti-war movement in the 1960s, and the wide variety of people who manned the barricades against the war with such consistency and energy for so long a period of time. I recommend this book. Enjoy!
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