a speech about vietnam

• History Classics
• Your Profile
• Find History on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on YouTube (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on Instagram (Opens in a new window)
• Find History on TikTok (Opens in a new window)
• This Day In History
• History Podcasts
• History Vault

This Day In History : April 4

Changing the day will navigate the page to that given day in history. You can navigate days by using left and right arrows

Martin Luther King Jr. speaks out against the war

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr ., head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, delivers a speech entitled “ Beyond Vietnam ” in front of 3,000 people at Riverside Church in New York City. In it, he says that there is a common link forming between the civil rights and peace movements. King proposed that the United States stop all bombing of North and South Vietnam; declare a unilateral truce in the hope that it would lead to peace talks; set a date for withdrawal of all troops from Vietnam; and give the National Liberation Front a role in negotiations.

King had been a solid supporter of President Lyndon B. Johnson and his Great Society , but he became increasingly concerned about U.S. involvement in Vietnam and, as his concerns became more public, his relationship with the Johnson administration deteriorated. King came to view U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia as little more than imperialism. Additionally, he believed that the Vietnam War diverted money and attention from domestic programs created to aid the Black poor. Furthermore, he said, "The war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home…We were taking the Black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem."

King maintained his antiwar stance and supported peace movements until he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, one year to the day after delivering his "Beyond Vietnam" speech.

Also on This Day in History April | 4

Radio host don imus makes offensive remarks about rutgers' women's basketball team, hank aaron ties babe ruth's home run record, world trade center, then the world's tallest building, opens in new york city, microsoft founded, movie critic roger ebert dies.

This Day in History Video: What Happened on April 4

Wake Up to This Day in History

Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. Get all of today's events in just one email featuring a range of topics.

By submitting your information, you agree to receive emails from HISTORY and A+E Networks. You can opt out at any time. You must be 16 years or older and a resident of the United States.

More details : Privacy Notice | Terms of Use | Contact Us

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated

Allies drive back germans in second battle of the somme, "operation babylift," transporting south vietnamese children, starts in tragedy, president harrison dies—32 days into office, first detective story is published, maya angelou is born, "ben-hur" wins 11 academy awards, dirigible crash kills 73 in new jersey, north atlantic treaty organization (nato) pact signed.

The most comprehensive and authoritative history site on the Internet.

Dr. Martin Luther King’s ‘Beyond Vietnam’ Speech

On the evening of April 4, 1967, civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King lent his full-throated oratory to a growing chorus of opposition to the rapidly expanding American role in the Vietnam War . King’s sharp rebuke of U.S. policy and call to protest brought him into direct conflict with President Lyndon B. Johnson , who was an ally of King’s in the struggle for equal rights for African Americans.

From the pulpit of New York’s Riverside Church, King eloquently speaks of breaking “the betrayal of my own silences” and goes on to reveal the “seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision.”

With this pivotal address, the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize winner sought to bridge the movement for civil rights and justice to the antiwar movements: “I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission—a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for ‘the brotherhood of man.’”

One year later, April 4, 1968, King was assassinated in Memphis.

Related stories

Portfolio: Images of War as Landscape

Whether they produced battlefield images of the dead or daguerreotype portraits of common soldiers, […]

Jerrie Mock: Record-Breaking American Female Pilot

In 1964 an Ohio woman took up the challenge that had led to Amelia Earhart’s disappearance.

10 Pivotal Events in the Life of Buffalo Bill

William Frederick Cody (1846-1917) led a signal life, from his youthful exploits with the Pony Express and in service as a U.S. Army scout to his globetrotting days as a showman and international icon Buffalo Bill.

The One and Only ‘Booger’ Was Among History’s Best Rodeo Performers

Texan Sam Privett, the colorfully nicknamed proprietor of Booger Red’s Wild West, backed up his boast he could ride anything on four legs.

Martin Luther King Jr. Online

Back to Top | Add to Favorites! Home | Biography | MLK Day | Speeches | Pictures | Audio | Video | Music | Quotes | Store

Copyright Info

Vietnam War

May 11, 1961 to April 30, 1975

Four years after President John F.  Kennedy  sent the first American troops into Vietnam, Martin Luther King, Jr., issued his first public statement on the war. Answering press questions after addressing a Howard University audience on 2 March 1965, King asserted that the war in Vietnam was “accomplishing nothing” and called for a negotiated settlement (Schuette, “King Preaches on Non-Violence”).

While King was personally opposed to the war, he was concerned that publicly criticizing U.S. foreign policy would damage his relationship with President Lyndon B.  Johnson , who had been instrumental in passing civil rights legislation and who had declared in April 1965 that he was willing to negotiate a diplomatic end to the war in Vietnam. Though he avoided condemning the war outright, at the August 1965 annual  Southern Christian Leadership Conference  (SCLC) convention King called for a halt to bombing in North Vietnam, urged that the United Nations be empowered to mediate the conflict, and told the crowd that “what is required is a small first step that may establish a new spirit of mutual confidence … a step capable of breaking the cycle of mistrust, violence and war” (King, 12 August 1965). He supported Johnson’s calls for diplomatic negotiations and economic development as the beginnings of such a step. Later that year King framed the issue of war in Vietnam as a moral issue: “As a minister of the gospel,” he said, “I consider war an evil. I must cry out when I see war escalated at any point” (“Opposes Vietnam War”).

King’s opposition to the war provoked criticism from members of Congress, the press, and from his civil rights colleagues who argued that expanding his civil rights message to include foreign affairs would harm the black freedom struggle in America. Fearful of being labeled a Communist, which would diminish the impact of his civil rights work, King tempered his criticism of U.S. policy in Vietnam through late 1965 and 1966. His wife, Coretta Scott  King , took a more active role in opposing the war, speaking at a rally at the Washington Monument on 27 November 1965 with Benjamin  Spock , the renowned pediatrician and anti-war activist, and joined in other demonstrations.

In December 1966, testifying before a congressional subcommittee on budget priorities, King argued for a “rebalancing” of fiscal priorities away from America’s “obsession” with Vietnam and toward greater support for anti-poverty programs at home (Semple, “Dr. King Scores Poverty”). King led his first anti-war march in Chicago on 25 March 1967, and reinforced the connection between war abroad and injustice at home: “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home—they destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America” (“Dr. King Leads Chicago”). A few days later, King made it clear that his peace work was not undertaken as the leader of the SCLC, but “as an individual, as a clergyman, as one who is greatly concerned about peace” (“Dr. King to Weigh Civil Disobedience”).

Less than two weeks after leading his first Vietnam demonstration, on 4 April 1967, King made his best known and most comprehensive statement against the war. Seeking to reduce the potential backlash by framing his speech within the context of religious objection to war, King addressed a crowd of 3,000 people at Riverside Church in New York City. King delivered a speech entitled “ Beyond Vietnam ,” pointing out that the war effort was “taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem” (King, “ Beyond Vietnam ,” 143).

Although the peace community lauded King’s willingness to take a public stand against the war in Vietnam, many within the civil rights movement further distanced themselves from his stance. The  National Association for the Advancement of Colored People , for example, issued a statement against merging the civil rights and peace movements. Undeterred, King, Spock, and Harry  Belafonte  led 10,000 demonstrators on an anti-war march to the United Nations on 15 April 1967.

During the last year of his life, King worked with Spock to develop “Vietnam Summer,” a volunteer project to increase grassroots peace activism in time for the 1968 elections. King linked his anti-war and civil rights work in speeches throughout the country, where he described the three problems he saw plaguing the nation: racism, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. In his last Sunday sermon, delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968, King said that he was “convinced that [Vietnam] is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world” (King, “Remaining Awake,” 219). Nearly five years after King’s  assassination , American troops withdrew from Vietnam and a peace treaty declared South and North Vietnam independent of each other.

Branch,  At Canaan’s Edge , 2006.

“Dr. King Leads Chicago Peace Rally,”  New York Times , 26 March 1967.

“Dr. King to Weigh Civil Disobedience If War Intensifies,”  New York Times , 2 April 1967.

“Dr. Martin Luther King: Beyond Vietnam and Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” 90th Cong., 2d sess.,  Congressional Record  114 (9 April 1968): 9391–9397.

Garrow,  Bearing the Cross , 1986.

King, “ Beyond Vietnam ,” in  A Call to Conscience , ed. Carson and Shepard, 2001.

King, Excerpts, Address at mass rally on 12 August 1965, 13 August 1965,  MLKJP-GAMK .

King, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” in  A Knock at Midnight , ed. Carson and Holloran, 1998.

(Scott) King,  My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. , 1969.

“Opposes Vietnam War,”  New York Times , 11 November 1965.

Paul A. Schuette, “King Preaches on Non-Violence at Police-Guarded Howard Hall,”  Washington Post , 3 March 1965.

Robert B. Semple, Jr., “Dr. King Scores Poverty Budget,”  New York Times , 16 December 1966.

• world affairs

The MLK Speech We Need Today Is Not the One We Remember Most

M ost Americans remember Martin Luther King Jr. for his dream of what this country could be, a nation where his children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” While those words from 1963 are necessary, his speech “Beyond Vietnam,” from 1967, is actually the more insightful one.

It is also a much more dangerous and disturbing speech, which is why far fewer Americans have heard of it. And yet it is the speech that we needed to hear then–and need to hear today.

In 1963, many in the U.S. had only just begun to be aware of events in Vietnam. By 1967, the war was near its peak, with about 500,000 American soldiers in Vietnam. The U.S. would drop more explosives on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia than it did on all of Europe during World War II, and the news brought vivid images depicting the carnage inflicted on Southeast Asian civilians, hundreds of thousands of whom would die. It was in this context that King called the U.S. “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

Many of King’s civil rights allies discouraged him from going public with his antiwar views, believing that he should prioritize the somewhat less controversial domestic concerns of African Americans and the poor. But for King, standing against racial and economic inequality also demanded a recognition that those problems were inseparable from the military-industrial complex and capitalism itself. King saw “the war as an enemy of the poor,” as young black men were sent to “guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

What King understood was that the war was destroying not only the character of the U.S. but also the character of its soldiers. Ironically, it also managed to create a kind of American racial equality in Vietnam, as black and white soldiers stood “in brutal solidarity” against the Vietnamese. But if they were fighting what King saw as an unjust war, then they, too, were perpetrators of injustice, even if they were victims of it at home. For American civilians, the uncomfortable reality was that the immorality of an unjust war corrupted the entire country. “If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned,” King said, “part of the autopsy must read Vietnam.”

In his speech, which he delivered exactly one year to the day before he was assassinated, King foresaw how the war implied something larger about the nation. It was, he said, “but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality … we will find ourselves organizing ‘clergy and laymen concerned’ committees for the next generation … unless there is a significant and profound change in American life.”

King’s prophecy connects the war in Vietnam with our forever wars today, spread across multiple countries and continents, waged without end from global military bases numbering around 800. Some of the strategy for our forever war comes directly from lessons that the American military learned in Vietnam: drone strikes instead of mass bombing; volunteer soldiers instead of draftees; censorship of gruesome images from the battlefronts; and encouraging the reverence of soldiers.

You can draw a line from the mantras of “thank you for your service” and “support our troops” to American civilian regret about not having supported American troops during the war in Vietnam. This sentimental hero worship actually serves civilians as much as the military. If our soldiers can be absolved of any unjust taint, then the public who support them is absolved too. Standing in solidarity with our multicultural, diverse military prevents us from seeing what they might be doing to other people overseas and insulates us from the most dangerous part about King’s speech: a sense of moral outrage that was not limited by the borders of nation, class or race but sought to transcend them.

What made King truly radical was his desire to act on this empathy for people not like himself, neither black nor American. For him, there was “no meaningful solution” to the war without taking into account Vietnamese people, who were “the voiceless ones.” Recognizing their suffering from far away, King connected it with the intimate suffering of African Americans at home. The African-American struggle to liberate black people found a corollary in the struggle of Vietnamese people against foreign domination. It was therefore a bitter irony that African Americans might be used to suppress the freedom of others, to participate in, as King put it, “the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments.”

Americans prefer to see our wars as exercises in protecting and expanding freedom and democracy. To suggest that we might be fighting for capitalism is too disturbing for many Americans. But King said “that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we … must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin … the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society.” Those words, and their threat to the powerful, still apply today. For the powerful, the only thing more frightening than one revolution is when multiple revolutions find common cause.

The revolution that King called for is still unrealized, while the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism” are still working in brutal, efficient solidarity. He overlooked how misogyny was also an evil, but perhaps, if he had lived, he would have learned from his own philosophy about connecting what seems unconnected, about recognizing those who are unrecognized. Too many of today’s politicians, pundits and activists are satisfied with relying on one-dimensional solutions, arguing that class-based solutions alone can solve economic inequality, or that identity-based approaches are enough to alleviate racial inequality.

King argued for an ever expanding moral solidarity that would include those we think of as the enemy: “Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view … For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.”

This was the dream of King’s that I prefer–the vision of a difficult and ever expanding kinship, extending not only to those whom we consider near and dear, but also to the far and the feared.

Nguyen is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer . His latest collection is The Refugees

More Must-Reads From TIME

• The 100 Most Influential People of 2024
• Coco Gauff Is Playing for Herself Now
• Scenes From Pro-Palestinian Encampments Across U.S. Universities
• 6 Compliments That Land Every Time
• If You're Dating Right Now , You're Brave: Column
• The AI That Could Heal a Divided Internet
• Fallout Is a Brilliant Model for the Future of Video Game Adaptations
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

50 Years Ago, MLK Delivers A Speech With Dark Vision Of The World

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King delivered one of his most politically charged speeches from Harlem's Riverside Church. In "Beyond Vietnam," he not only condemns the Vietnam War, but also compares American tactics to those of Nazis. His speech paints a dark vision of the world, a contrast to the optimistic speech he had delivered 4 years earlier, "I Have a Dream."

ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:

Fifty years ago today, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the Riverside Church in New York City. It was 1967. The U.S. was fighting a war in Vietnam. And Dr. King delivered a fierce attack against the U.S. government. It's often thought of as his most controversial speech. In it, he questioned what Vietnamese people must have made of the forces descending on their country.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them just as the Germans tested out new medicines and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe?

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

It was notably darker in tone than the "I Have A Dream" speech which was delivered four years earlier. He warned about an American military creep beyond Southeast Asia and forecasted a grim future.

KING JR.: The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. And if we ignore this sobering reality...

KING JR.: And if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing clergy and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

SIEGEL: His anti-war stance had consequences. After this speech, 168 newspapers denounced King. President Lyndon Johnson rescinded an invitation to the White House.

MCEVERS: But in delivering this speech called "Beyond Vietnam," King cemented his legacy as an activist not only for American civil rights but for human rights around the world.

Copyright © 2017 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

About  Search

Richard Nixon

Address to the nation on the war in vietnam.

Good evening, my fellow Americans:

Tonight I want to talk to you on a subject of deep concern to all Americans and to many people in all parts of the world-the war in Vietnam.

I believe that one of the reasons for the deep division about Vietnam is that many Americans have lost confidence in what their Government has told them about our policy. The American people cannot and should not be asked to support a policy which involves the overriding issues of war and peace unless they know the truth about that policy.

Tonight, therefore, I would like to answer some of the questions that I know are on the minds of many of you listening to me.

How and why did America get involved in Vietnam in the first place?

How has this administration changed the policy of the previous administration?

What has really happened in the negotiations in Paris and on the battlefront in Vietnam?

What choices do we have if we are to end the war?

What are the prospects for peace? Now, let me begin by describing the situation I found when I was inaugurated on January 20.

--The war had been going on for 4 years.

--31,000 Americans had been killed in action.

--The training program for the South Vietnamese was behind schedule.

--540,000 Americans were in Vietnam with no plans to reduce the number.

--No progress had been made at the negotiations in Paris and the United States had not put forth a comprehensive peace proposal.

--The war was causing deep division at home and criticism from many of our friends as well as our enemies abroad.

In view of these circumstances there were some who urged that I end the war at once by ordering the immediate withdrawal of all American forces.

From a political standpoint this would have been a popular and easy course to follow. After all, we became involved in the war while my predecessor was in office. I could blame the defeat which would be the result of my action on him and come out as the peacemaker. Some put it to me quite bluntly: This was the only way to avoid allowing Johnson's war to become Nixon's war.

But I had a greater obligation than to think only of the years of my administration and of the next election. I had to think of the effect of my decision on the next generation and on the future of peace and freedom in America and in the world.

Let us all understand that the question before us is not whether some Americans are for peace and some Americans are against peace. The question at issue is not whether Johnson's war becomes Nixon's war.

The great question is: How can we win America's peace?

Well, let us turn now to the fundamental issue. Why and how did the United States become involved in Vietnam in the first place?

Fifteen years ago North Vietnam, with the logistical support of Communist China and the Soviet Union, launched a campaign to impose a Communist government on South Vietnam by instigating and supporting a revolution.

In response to the request of the Government of South Vietnam, President Eisenhower sent economic aid and military equipment to assist the people of South Vietnam in their efforts to prevent a Communist takeover. Seven years ago, President Kennedy sent 16,000 military personnel to Vietnam as combat advisers. Four years ago, President Johnson sent American combat forces to South Vietnam.

Now, many believe that President Johnson's decision to send American combat forces to South Vietnam was wrong. And many others--I among them--have been strongly critical of the way the war has been conducted.

But the question facing us today is: Now that we are in the war, what is the best way to end it?

In January I could only conclude that the precipitate withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam would be a disaster not only for South Vietnam but for the United States and for the cause of peace.

For the South Vietnamese, our precipitate withdrawal would inevitably allow the Communists to repeat the massacres which followed their takeover in the North 15 years before.

--They then murdered more than 50,000 people and hundreds of thousands more died in slave labor camps.

--We saw a prelude of what would happen in South Vietnam when the Communists entered the city of Hue last year. During their brief rule there, there was a bloody reign of terror in which 3,000 civilians were clubbed, shot to death, and buried in mass graves.

--With the sudden collapse of our support, these atrocities of Hue would become the nightmare of the entire nation--and particularly for the million and a half Catholic refugees who fled to South Vietnam when the

Communists took over in the North. For the United States, this first defeat in our Nation's history would result in a collapse of confidence in American leadership, not only in Asia but throughout the world.

Three American Presidents have recognized the great stakes involved in Vietnam and understood what had to be done.

In 1963, President Kennedy, with his characteristic eloquence and clarity, said: "we want to see a stable government there, carrying on a struggle to maintain its national independence.

"We believe strongly in that. We are not going to withdraw from that effort. In my opinion, for us to withdraw from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Viet-Nam, but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there."

President Eisenhower and President Johnson expressed the same conclusion during their terms of office.

For the future of peace, precipitate withdrawal would thus be a disaster of immense magnitude.

--A nation cannot remain great if it betrays its allies and lets down its friends.

--Our defeat and humiliation in South Vietnam without question would promote recklessness in the councils of those great powers who have not yet abandoned their goals of world conquest.

--This would spark violence wherever our commitments help maintain the peace--in the Middle East, in Berlin, eventually even in the Western Hemisphere.

Ultimately, this would cost more lives. It would not bring peace; it would bring more war.

For these reasons, I rejected the recommendation that I should end the war by immediately withdrawing all of our forces. I chose instead to change American policy on both the negotiating front and battlefront.

In order to end a war fought on many fronts, I initiated a pursuit for peace on many fronts.

In a television speech on May 14, in a speech before the United Nations, and on a number of other occasions I set forth our peace proposals in great detail.

--We have offered the complete withdrawal of all outside forces within 1 year.

--We have proposed a cease-fire under international supervision.

--We have offered free elections under international supervision with the Communists participating in the organization and conduct of the elections as an organized political force. And the Saigon Government has pledged to accept the result of the elections.

We have not put forth our proposals on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. We have indicated that we are willing to discuss the proposals that have been put forth by the other side. We have declared that anything is negotiable except the right of the people of South Vietnam to determine their own future. At the Paris peace conference, Ambassador Lodge has demonstrated our flexibility and good faith in 40 public meetings.

Hanoi has refused even to discuss our proposals. They demand our unconditional acceptance of their terms, which are that we withdraw all American forces immediately and unconditionally and that we overthrow the Government of South Vietnam as we leave.

We have not limited our peace initiatives to public forums and public statements. I recognized, in January, that a long and bitter war like this usually cannot be settled in a public forum. That is why in addition to the public statements and negotiations I have explored every possible private avenue that might lead to a settlement.

Tonight I am taking the unprecedented step of disclosing to you some of our other initiatives for peace--initiatives we undertook privately and secretly because we thought we thereby might open a door which publicly would be closed.

I did not wait for my inauguration to begin my quest for peace.

--Soon after my election, through an individual who is directly in contact on a personal basis with the leaders of North Vietnam, I made two private offers for a rapid, comprehensive settlement. Hanoi's replies called in effect for our surrender before negotiations.

--Since the Soviet Union furnishes most of the military equipment for North Vietnam, Secretary of State Rogers, my Assistant for National Security Affairs, Dr. Kissinger, Ambassador Lodge, and I, personally, have met on a number of occasions with representatives of the Soviet Government to enlist their assistance in getting meaningful negotiations started. In addition, we have had extended discussions directed toward that same end with representatives of other governments which have diplomatic relations with North Vietnam. None of these initiatives have to date produced results.

--In mid-July, I became convinced that it was necessary to make a major move to break the deadlock in the Paris talks. I spoke directly in this office, where I am now sitting, with an individual who had known Ho Chi Minh [President, Democratic Republic of Vietnam] on a personal basis for 25 years. Through him I sent a letter to Ho Chi Minh. I did this outside of the usual diplomatic channels with the hope that with the necessity of making statements for propaganda removed, there might be constructive progress toward bringing the war to an end. Let me read from that letter to you now.

"Dear Mr. President:

"I realize that it is difficult to communicate meaningfully across the gulf of four years of war. But precisely because of this gulf, I wanted to take this opportunity to reaffirm in all solemnity my desire to work for a just peace. I deeply believe that the war in Vietnam has gone on too long and delay in bringing it to an end can benefit no one--least of all the people of Vietnam ....

"The time has come to move forward at the conference table toward an early resolution of this tragic war. You will find us forthcoming and open-minded in a common effort to bring the blessings of peace to the brave people of Vietnam. Let history record that at this critical juncture, both sides turned their face toward peace rather than toward conflict and war."

I received Ho Chi Minh's reply on August 30, 3 days before his death. It simply reiterated the public position North Vietnam had taken at Paris and flatly rejected my initiative.

The full text of both letters is being released to the press.

--In addition to the public meetings that I have referred to, Ambassador Lodge has met with Vietnam's chief negotiator in Paris in 11 private sessions.

--We have taken other significant initiatives which must remain secret to keep open some channels of communication which may still prove to be productive. But the effect of all the public, private, and secret negotiations which have been undertaken since the bombing halt a year ago and since this administration came into office on January 20, can be summed up in one sentence: No progress whatever has been made except agreement on the shape of the bargaining table. Well now, who is at fault?

It has become clear that the obstacle in negotiating an end to the war is not the President of the United States. It is not the South Vietnamese Government.

The obstacle is the other side's absolute refusal to show the least willingness to join us in seeking a just peace. And it will not do so while it is convinced that all it has to do is to wait for our next concession, and our next concession after that one, until it gets everything it wants.

There can now be no longer any question that progress in negotiation depends only on Hanoi's deciding to negotiate, to negotiate seriously.

I realize that this report on our efforts on the diplomatic front is discouraging to the American people, but the American people are entitled to know the truth-the bad news as well as the good news-where the lives of our young men are involved.

Now let me turn, however, to a more encouraging report on another front.

At the time we launched our search for peace I recognized we might not succeed in bringing an end to the war through negotiation. I, therefore, put into effect another plan to bring peace--a plan which will bring the war to an end regardless of what happens on the negotiating front.

It is in line with a major shift in U.S. foreign policy which I described in my press conference at Guam on July 25. Let me briefly explain what has been described as the Nixon Doctrine--a policy which not only will help end the war in Vietnam, but which is an essential element of our program to prevent future Vietnams.

We Americans are a do-it-yourself people. We are an impatient people. Instead of teaching someone else to do a job, we like to do it ourselves. And this trait has been carried over into our foreign policy.

In Korea and again in Vietnam, the United States furnished most of the money, most of the arms, and most of the men to help the people of those countries defend their freedom against Communist aggression.

Before any American troops were committed to Vietnam, a leader of another Asian country expressed this opinion to me when I was traveling in Asia as a private citizen. He said: "When you are trying to assist another nation defend its freedom, U.S. policy should be to help them fight the war but not to fight the war for them."

Well, in accordance with this wise counsel, I laid down in Guam three principles as guidelines for future American policy toward Asia:

--First, the United States will keep all of its treaty commitments.

--Second, we shall provide a shield if a nuclear power threatens the freedom of a nation allied with us or of a nation whose survival we consider vital to our security.

--Third, in cases involving other types of aggression, we shall furnish military and economic assistance when requested in accordance with our treaty commitments. But we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense.

After I announced this policy, I found that the leaders of the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea, and other nations which might be threatened by Communist aggression, welcomed this new direction in American foreign policy.

The defense of freedom is everybody's business--not just America's business. And it is particularly the responsibility of the people whose freedom is threatened. In the previous administration, we Americanized the war in Vietnam. In this administration, we are Vietnamizing the search for peace.

The policy of the previous administration not only resulted in our assuming the primary responsibility for fighting the war, but even more significantly did not adequately stress the goal of strengthening the South Vietnamese so that they could defend themselves when we left.

The Vietnamization plan was launched following Secretary Laird's visit to Vietnam in March. Under the plan, I ordered first a substantial increase in the training and equipment of South Vietnamese forces.

In July, on my visit to Vietnam, I changed General Abrams' orders so that they were consistent with the objectives of our new policies. Under the new orders, the primary mission of our troops is to enable the South Vietnamese forces to assume the full responsibility for the security of South Vietnam.

Our air operations have been reduced by over 20 percent.

And now we have begun to see the results of this long overdue change in American policy in Vietnam.

--After 5 years of Americans going into Vietnam, we are finally bringing American men home. By December 15, over 60,000 men will have been withdrawn from South Vietnam including 20 percent of all of our combat forces.

--The South Vietnamese have continued to gain in strength. As a result they have been able to take over combat responsibilities from our American troops.

Two other significant developments have occurred since this administration took office.

--Enemy infiltration, infiltration which is essential if they are to launch a major attack, over the last 3 months is less than 20 percent of what it was over the same period last year.

--Most important--United States casualties have declined during the last 2 months to the lowest point in 3 years.

Let me now turn to our program for the future.

We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable. This withdrawal will be made from strength and not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.

I have not and do not intend to announce the timetable for our program. And there are obvious reasons for this decision which I am sure you will understand. As I have indicated on several occasions, the rate of withdrawal will depend on developments on three fronts.

One of these is the progress which can be or might be made in the Paris talks. An announcement of a fixed timetable for our withdrawal would completely remove any incentive for the enemy to negotiate an agreement. They would simply wait until our forces had withdrawn and then move in.

The other two factors on which we will base our withdrawal decisions are the level of enemy activity and the progress of the training programs of the South Vietnamese forces. And I am glad to be able to report tonight progress on both of these fronts has been greater than we anticipated when we started the program in June for withdrawal. As a result, our timetable for withdrawal is more optimistic now than when we made our first estimates in June. Now, this clearly demonstrates why it is not wise to be frozen in on a fixed timetable.

We must retain the flexibility to base each withdrawal decision on the situation as it is at that time rather than on estimates that are no longer valid.

Along with this optimistic estimate, I must--in all candor--leave one note of caution.

If the level of enemy activity significantly increases we might have to adjust our timetable accordingly.

However, I want the record to be completely clear on one point.

At the time of the bombing halt just a year ago, there was some confusion as to whether there was an understanding on the part of the enemy that if we stopped the bombing of North Vietnam they would stop the shelling of cities in South Vietnam. I want to be sure that there is no misunderstanding on the part of the enemy with regard to our withdrawal program.

We have noted the reduced level of infiltration, the reduction of our casualties, and are basing our withdrawal decisions partially on those factors.

If the level of infiltration or our casualties increase while we are trying to scale down the fighting, it will be the result of a conscious decision by the enemy.

Hanoi could make no greater mistake than to assume that an increase in violence will be to its advantage. If I conclude that increased enemy action jeopardizes our remaining forces in Vietnam, I shall not hesitate to take strong and effective measures to deal with that situation.

This is not a threat. This is a statement of policy, which as Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces, I am making in meeting my responsibility for the protection of American fighting men wherever they may be.

My fellow Americans, I am sure you can recognize from what I have said that we really only have two choices open to us if we want to end this war.

--I can order an immediate, precipitate withdrawal of all Americans from Vietnam without regard to the effects of that action.

--Or we can persist in our search for a just peace through a negotiated settlement if possible, or through continued implementation of our plan for Vietnamization if necessary--a plan in which we will withdraw all of our forces from Vietnam on a schedule in accordance with our program, as the South Vietnamese become strong enough to defend their own freedom. I have chosen this second course. It is not the easy way. It is the right way.

It is a plan which will end the war and serve the cause of peace--not just in Vietnam but in the Pacific and in the world.

In speaking of the consequences of a precipitate withdrawal, I mentioned that our allies would lose confidence in America.

Far more dangerous, we would lose confidence in ourselves. Oh, the immediate reaction would be a sense of relief that our men were coming home. But as we saw the consequences of what we had done, inevitable remorse and divisive recrimination would scar our spirit as a people.

We have faced other crises in our history and have become stronger by rejecting the easy way out and taking the right way in meeting our challenges. Our greatness as a nation has been our capacity to do what had to be done when we knew our course was right.

I recognize that some of my fellow citizens disagree with the plan for peace I have chosen. Honest and patriotic Americans have reached different conclusions as to how peace should be achieved.

In San Francisco a few weeks ago, I saw demonstrators. carrying signs reading: "Lose in Vietnam, bring the boys home."

Well, one of the strengths of our free society is that any American has a right to reach that conclusion and to advocate that point of view. But as President of the United States, I would be untrue to my oath of office if I allowed the policy of this Nation to be dictated by the minority who hold that point of view and who try to impose it on the Nation by mounting demonstrations in the street.

For almost 200 years, the policy of this Nation has been made under our Constitution by those leaders in the Congress and the White House elected by all of the people. If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this Nation has no future as a free society.

And now I would like to address a word, if I may, to the young people of this Nation who are particularly concerned, and I understand why they are concerned, about this war.

I respect your idealism.

I share your concern for peace. I want peace as much as you do. There are powerful personal reasons I want to end this war. This week I will have to sign 83 letters to mothers, fathers, wives, and loved ones of men who have given their lives for America in Vietnam. It is very little satisfaction to me that this is only one-third as many letters as I signed the first week in office. There is nothing I want more than to see the day come when I do not have to write any of those letters.

--I want to end the war to save the lives of those brave young men in Vietnam.

--But I want to end it in a way which will increase the chance that their younger brothers and their sons will not have to fight in some future Vietnam someplace in the world.

--And I want to end the war for another reason. I want to end it so that the energy and dedication of you, our young people, now too often directed into bitter hatred against those responsible for the war, can be turned to the great challenges of peace, a better life for all Americans, a better life for all people on this earth.

I have chosen a plan for peace. I believe it will succeed.

If it does succeed, what the critics say now won't matter. If it does not succeed, anything I say then won't matter.

I know it may not be fashionable to speak of patriotism or national destiny these days. But I feel it is appropriate to do so on this occasion

Two hundred years ago this Nation was weak and poor. But even then, America was the hope of millions in the world. Today we have become the strongest and richest nation in the world. And the Wheel of destiny has turned so that any hope the world has for the survival of peace and freedom will be determined by whether the American people have the moral stamina and the courage to meet the challenge of free world leadership.

Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism.

And so tonight--to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans--I ask for your support.

I pledged in my campaign for the Presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge.

The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed; for the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris.

Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that.

Fifty years ago, in this room and at this very desk, 1 President Woodrow Wilson spoke words which caught the imagination of a war-weary world. He said: "This is the war to end war." His dream for peace after World War I was shattered on the hard realities of great power politics and Woodrow Wilson died a broken man.

1 Later research indicated that the desk had not been President Woodrow Wilson's as had long been assumed but was used by Vice President Henry Wilson during President Grant's administration.

Tonight I do not tell you that the war in Vietnam is the war to end wars. But I do say this: I have initiated a plan which will end this war in a way that will bring us closer to that great goal to which Woodrow Wilson and every American President in our history has been dedicated--the goal of a just and lasting peace.

As President I hold the responsibility for choosing the best path to that goal and then leading the Nation along it.

I pledge to you tonight that I shall meet this responsibility with all of the strength and wisdom I can command in accordance with your hopes, mindful of your concerns, sustained by your prayers.

Thank you and goodnight.

Note: The President spoke at 9:32 p.m. in his office at the White House. The address was broadcast on radio and television.

On November 3, 1969, the White House Press Office released an advance text of the address.

Richard Nixon, Address to the Nation on the War in Vietnam Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/240027

Filed Under

Simple Search of Our Archives

Report a typo.

Speeches of the Vietnam War

Grades 9-12 | Historical Analysis | Source-Based Source Lexile® : 1110L-1350L | Learning Standards

The Vietnam War, a war pitting Communist North Vietnam and its allies against South Vietnam and its allies, including the United States, lasted from 1955-1975, spanning four different presidents. During that time, each president (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon) made many speeches to the citizens of the United States, attempting to both keep them updated on the situation and assure them that peace was on the horizon.

Read each of the passages below, consisting of one speech per president during that time period. The first speech is from a press conference in 1954, in which President Eisenhower explains his "Domino Theory". The second speech was given by then Senator John F. Kennedy in 1956 regarding the conflict in Vietnam. The third speech was given during a press conference in 1965 by President Lyndon B. Johnson, regarding the rationale for keeping America in the conflict in Vietnam. The final speech was given by President Richard Nixon in 1973, informing the nation that peace had been found in Vietnam.

After reading each speech, write an essay analyzing the progression to peace in Vietnam from president to president. In your analysis, consider how each president viewed the conflict in Vietnam and what steps each was enacting to begin to bring peace to that nation and bring American soldiers back to the United States. Include support from each passage in your analysis.

President Eisenhower Explains the Domino Theory, Press Conference, April 7, 1954 (excerpt) (Primary Source)

Q. Robert Richards, Copley Press : Mr. President, would you mind commenting on the strategic importance of Indochina to the free world? I think there has been across the country some lack of understanding on just what it means to us.

The President: You have of course, both the specific and the general when you talk about such things.

First of all, you have the specific value of a locality in its production of materials that the world needs.

Then you have the possibility that many human beings pass under a dictatorship that is inimical to the free world.

Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the "falling domino" principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.

Now, with respect to the first one, two of the items from this particular area that the world uses are tin and tungsten. They are very important. There are others, of course, the rubber plantations and so on.

Then with respect to more people passing under this domination, Asia, after all, has already lost some 450 million of its peoples to the Communist dictatorship, and we simply can't afford greater losses.

But when we come to the possible sequence of events, the loss of Indochina, of Burma, of Thailand, of the Peninsula, and Indonesia following, now you begin to talk about areas that not only multiply the disadvantages that you would suffer through loss of materials, sources of materials, but now you are talking about millions and millions and millions of people.

Finally, the geographical position achieved thereby does many things. It turns the so-called island defensive chain of Japan, Formosa, of the Philippines and to the southward; it moves in to threaten Australia and New Zealand.

It takes away, in its economic aspects, that region that Japan must have as a trading area or Japan, in turn, will have only one place in the world to go - that is, toward the Communist areas in order to live.

So, the possible consequences of the loss are just incalculable to the free world.

https://facultystaff.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/DominoTheory.html

Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy at the Conference on Vietnam Luncheon in Washington, D.C., June 1, 1956 (Primary Source)

It is a genuine pleasure to be here today at this vital Conference on the future of Vietnam, and America's stake in that new nation, sponsored by the American Friends of Vietnam, an organization of which I am proud to be a member. Your meeting today at a time when political events concerning Vietnam are approaching a climax, both in that country and in our own Congress, is most timely. Your topic and deliberations, which emphasize the promise of the future more than the failures of the past, are most constructive. I can assure you that the Congress of the United States will give considerable weight to your findings and recommendations; and I extend to all of you who have made the effort to participate in this Conference my congratulations and best wishes.

It is an ironic and tragic fact that this Conference is being held at a time when the news about Vietnam has virtually disappeared from the front pages of the American press, and the American people have all but forgotten the tiny nation for which we are in large measure responsible. This decline in public attention is due, I believe, to three factors:

• First, it is due in part to the amazing success of President Diem in meeting firmly and with determination the major political and economic crises which had heretofore continually plagued Vietnam. (I shall say more about this point later, for it deserves more consideration from all Americans interested in the future of Asia).
• Secondly, it is due in part to the traditional role of American journalism, including readers as well as writers, to be more interested in crises than in accomplishments, to give more space to the threat of wars than the need for works, and to write larger headlines on the sensational omissions of the past than the creative missions of the future.
• Third and finally, our neglect of Vietnam is the result of one of the most serious weaknesses that has hampered the long-range effectiveness of American foreign policy over the past several years - and that is the overemphasis upon our role as "volunteer fire department" for the world. Whenever and wherever fire breaks out -- in Indochina, in the Middle East, in Guatemala, in Cyprus, in the Formosan Straits -- our firemen rush in, wheeling up all their heavy equipment, and resorting to every known method of containing and extinguishing the blaze. The crowd gathers -- the usually successful efforts of our able volunteers are heartily applauded -- and then the firemen rush off to the next conflagration, leaving the grateful but still stunned inhabitants to clean up the rubble, pick up the pieces, and rebuild their homes with whatever resources are available.  

The role, to be sure, is a necessary one; but it is not the only role to be played, and the others cannot be ignored. A volunteer fire department halts, but rarely prevents, fires. It repels but rarely rebuilds; it meets the problems of the present but not of the future. And while we are devoting our attention to the Communist arson in Korea, there is smoldering in Indochina; we turn our efforts to Indochina until the alarm sounds in Algeria -- and so it goes.

Of course Vietnam is not completely forgotten by our policy-makers today -- I could not in honesty make such a charge and the facts would easily refute it -- but the unfortunate truth of the matter is that, in my opinion, Vietnam would in all likelihood be receiving more attention from our Congress and Administration, and greater assistance under our aid programs, if it were in imminent danger of Communist invasion or revolution. Like those peoples of Latin America and Africa whom we have very nearly overlooked in the past decade, the Vietnamese may find that their devotion to the cause of democracy, and their success in reducing the strength of local Communist groups, have had the ironic effect of reducing American support. Yet the need for that support has in no way been reduced. (I hope it will not be necessary for the Diem Government -- or this organization -- to subsidize the growth of the South Vietnam Communist Party in order to focus American attention on that nation's critical needs!)

No one contends that we should now rush all our firefighting equipment to Vietnam, ignoring the Middle East or any other part of the world. But neither should we conclude that the cessation of hostilities in Indochina removed that area from the list of important areas of United States foreign policy. Let us briefly consider exactly what is "America's Stake in Vietnam":

• First, Vietnam represents the cornerstone of the Free World in Southeast Asia, the keystone to the arch, the finger in the dike. Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, the Philippines, and obviously Laos and Cambodia are among those whose security would be threatened if the Red Tide of Communism overflowed into Vietnam. In the past, our policy-makers have sometimes issued contradictory statements on this point -- but the long history of Chinese invasions of Southeast Asia being stopped by Vietnamese warriors should have removed all doubt on this subject.
• Moreover, the independence of a Free Vietnam is crucial to the free world in fields other than the military. Her economy is essential to the economy of Southeast Asia; and her political liberty is an inspiration to those seeking to obtain or maintain their liberty in all parts of Asia - and indeed the world. The fundamental tenets of this nation's foreign policy, in short, depend in considerable measure upon a strong and free Vietnamese nation.
• Secondly, Vietnam represents a proving ground of democracy in Asia. However we may choose to ignore it or deprecate it, the rising prestige and influence of Communist China in Asia are unchallengeable facts. Vietnam represents the alternative to Communist dictatorship. If this democratic experiment fails, if some one million refugees have fled the totalitarianism of the North only to find neither freedom nor security in the South, then weakness, not strength, will characterize the meaning of democracy in the minds of still more Asians. The United States is directly responsible for this experiment -- it is playing an important role in the laboratory where it is being conducted. We cannot afford to permit that experiment to fail.
• Third and in somewhat similar fashion, Vietnam represents a test of American responsibility and determination in Asia. If we are not the parents of little Vietnam, then surely we are the godparents. We presided at its birth, we gave assistance to its life, we have helped to shape its future. As French influence in the political, economic, and military spheres has declined in Vietnam, American influence has steadily grown. This is our offspring -- we cannot abandon it, we cannot ignore its needs. And if it falls victim to any of the perils that threaten its existence -- Communism, political anarchy, poverty, and the rest -- then the United States, with some justification, will be held responsible; and our prestige in Asia will sink to a new low.
• Fourth and finally, America's stake in Vietnam, in her strength and in her security, is a very selfish one -- for it can be measured, in the last analysis, in terms of American lives and American dollars. It is now well known that we were at one time on the brink of war in Indochina -- a war which could well have been more costly, more exhausting, and less conclusive than any war we have ever known. The threat to such war is not now altogether removed from the horizon. Military weakness, political instability, or economic failure in the new state of Vietnam could change almost overnight the apparent security which has increasingly characterized that area under the leadership of Premier Diem. And the key position of Vietnam in Southeast Asia, as already discussed, makes inevitable the involvement of this nation's security in any new outbreak of trouble.

It is these four points, in my opinion, that represent America's stake in Vietnamese security. And before we look to the future, let us stop to review what the Diem Government has already accomplished by way of increasing that security. Most striking of all, perhaps, has been the rehabilitation of more than ¾ of a million refugees from the North. For these courageous people dedicated to the free way of life, approximately 45,000 houses have been constructed, 2,500 wells dug, 100 schools established, and dozens of medical centers and maternity homes provided.

Equally impressive has been the increased solidarity and stability of the Government, the elimination of rebellious sects and the taking of the first vital steps toward true democracy. Where once colonialism and Communism struggled for supremacy, a free and independent republic has been proclaimed, recognized by over 40 countries of the free world. Where once a playboy emperor ruled from a distant shore, a constituent assembly has been elected.

Social and economic reforms have likewise been remarkable. The living conditions of the peasants have been vastly improved, the wastelands have been cultivated, and a wider ownership of the land is gradually being encouraged. Farm cooperatives and farmer loans have modernized an outmoded agricultural economy; and a tremendous dam in the center of the country has made possible the irrigation of a vast area previously uncultivated. Legislation for better labor relations, health protection, working conditions, and wages has been completed under the leadership of President Diem.

Finally, the Vietnamese army -- now fighting for its own homeland and not its colonial masters -- has increased tremendously in both quality and quantity. General O'Daniel can tell you more about these accomplishments.

But the responsibility of the United States for Vietnam does not conclude, obviously, with a review of what has been accomplished thus far with our help. Much more needs to be done; much more, in fact, than we have been doing up to now. Military alliances in Southeast Asia are necessary but not enough. Atomic superiority and the development of new ultimate weapons are not enough. Informational and propaganda activities, warning of the evils of Communism and the blessings of the American way of life, are not enough in a country where concepts of free enterprise and capitalism are meaningless, where poverty and hunger are not enemies across the 17th parallel but enemies within their midst. As Ambassador Chuong has recently said: "People cannot be expected to fight for the Free World unless they have their own freedom to defend, their freedom from foreign domination as well as freedom from misery, oppression, corruption."

I shall not attempt to set forth the details of the type of aid program this nation should offer the Vietnamese -- for it is not the details of that program that are as important as the spirit with which it is offered and the objectives it seeks to accomplish. We should not attempt to buy the friendship of the Vietnamese. Nor can we win their hearts by making them dependent upon our handouts. What we must offer them is a revolution -- a political, economic, and social revolution far superior to anything the Communists can offer -- far more peaceful, far more democratic, and far more locally controlled. Such a Revolution will require much from the United States and much from Vietnam. We must supply capital to replace that drained by the centuries of colonial exploitation; technicians to train those handicapped by deliberate policies of illiteracy; guidance to assist a nation taking those first feeble steps toward the complexities of a republican form of government. We must assist the inspiring growth of Vietnamese democracy and economy, including the complete integration of those refugees who gave up their homes and their belongings to seek freedom. We must provide military assistance to rebuild the new Vietnamese Army, which every day faces the growing peril of Vietminh Armies across the border.

And finally, in the councils of the world, we must never permit any diplomatic action adverse to this, one of the youngest members of the family of nations -- and I include in that injunction a plea that the United States never give its approval to the early nationwide elections called for by the Geneva Agreement of 1954. Neither the United States nor Free Vietnam was a party to that agreement -- and neither the United States nor Free Vietnam is ever going to be a party to an election obviously stacked and subverted in advance, urged upon us by those who have already broken their own pledges under the Agreement they now seek to enforce.

All this and more we can offer Free Vietnam, as it passes through the present period of transition on its way to a new era -- an era of pride and independence, and era of democratic and economic growth -- an era which, when contrasted with the long years of colonial oppression, will truly represent a political, social and economic revolution.

This is the revolution we can, we should, we must offer to the people of Vietnam -- not as charity, not as a business proposition, not as a political maneuver, nor simply to enlist them as soldiers against Communism or as chattels of American foreign policy -- but a revolution of their own making, for their own welfare, and for the security of freedom everywhere. The Communists offer them another kind of revolution, glittering and seductive in its superficial appeal. The choice between the two can be made only by the Vietnamese people themselves. But in these times of trial and burden, true friendships stand out. As Premier Diem recently wrote a great friend of Vietnam, Senator Mansfield, "It is only in winter that you can tell which trees are evergreen." And I am confident that if this nation demonstrates that it has not forgotten the people of Vietnam, the people of Vietnam will demonstrate that they have not forgotten us.

https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/Vietnam-Conference-Washington-DC_19560601.aspx

Press Conference Transcript, President Lyndon B. Johnson, July 28, 1965 (excerpt) (Primary Source)

My fellow Americans:

Not long ago I received a letter from a woman in the Midwest. She wrote:

"Dear Mr. President:

"In my humble way I am writing to you about the crisis in Viet-Nam. I have a son who is now in Viet-Nam. My husband served in World War II. Our country was at war, but now, this time, it is just something that I don't understand. Why?"

Well, I have tried to answer that question dozens of times and more in practically every State in this Union. I have discussed it fully in Baltimore in April, in Washington in May, in San Francisco in June. Let me again, now, discuss it here in the East Room of the White House.

Why must young Americans, born into a land exultant with hope and with golden promise, toil and suffer and sometimes die in such a remote and distant place?

The answer, like the war itself, is not an easy one, but it echoes clearly from the painful lessons of half a century. Three times in my lifetime, in two World Wars and in Korea, Americans have gone to far lands to fight for freedom. We have learned at a terrible and a brutal cost that retreat does not bring safety and weakness does not bring peace.

It is this lesson that has brought us to Viet-Nam. This is a different kind of war. There are no marching armies or solemn declarations. Some citizens of South Viet-Nam at times, with understandable grievances, have joined in the attack on their own government.

But we must not let this mask the central fact that this is really war. It is guided by North Viet-Nam and it is spurred by Communist China. Its goal is to conquer the South, to defeat American power, and to extend the Asiatic dominion of communism. There are great stakes in the balance. Most of the non-Communist nations of Asia cannot, by themselves and alone, resist the growing might and the grasping ambition of Asian communism.

Our power, therefore, is a very vital shield. If we are driven from the field in Viet-Nam, then no nation can ever again have the same confidence in American promise, or in American protection.

In each land the forces of independence would be considerably weakened, and an Asia so threatened by Communist domination would certainly imperil the security of the United States itself.

We did not choose to be the guardians at the gate, but there is no one else.

Nor would surrender in Viet-Nam bring peace, because we learned from Hitler at Munich that success only feeds the appetite of aggression. The battle would be renewed in one country and then another country, bringing with it perhaps even larger and crueler conflict, as we have learned from the lessons of history.

Moreover, we are in Viet-Nam to fulfill one of the most solemn pledges of the American Nation. Three Presidents--President Eisenhower, President Kennedy, and your present President--over 11 years have committed themselves and have promised to help defend this small and valiant nation.

Strengthened by that promise, the people of South Viet-Nam have fought for many long years. Thousands of them have died. Thousands more have been crippled and scarred by war. We just cannot now dishonor our word, or abandon our commitment, or leave those who believed us and who trusted us to the terror and repression and murder that would follow.

This, then, my fellow Americans, is why we are in Viet-Nam.

Once again in man's age-old struggle for a better life and a world of peace, the wisdom, courage, and compassion of the American people are being put to the test. This is the meaning of the tragic conflict in Vietnam.

In meeting the present challenge, it is essential that our people seek understanding, and that our leaders speak with candor.

I have therefore directed that this report to the American people be compiled and widely distributed. In its pages you will find statements on Vietnam by three leaders of your Government--by your President, your Secretary of State, and your Secretary of Defense.

These statements were prepared for different audiences, and they reflect the differing responsibilities of each speaker. The congressional testimony has been edited to avoid undue repetition and to incorporate the sense of the discussions that ensued.

Together, they construct a clear definition of America's role in the Vietnam conflict:

• the dangers and hopes that Vietnam holds for all free men
• the fullness and limits of our national objectives in a war we did not seek
• the constant effort on our part to bring this war we do not desire to a quick and honorable end.

What are our goals in that war-strained land?

First, we intend to convince the Communists that we cannot be defeated by force of arms or by superior power. They are not easily convinced. In recent months they have greatly increased their fighting forces and their attacks and the number of incidents.

I have asked the Commanding General, General Westmoreland, what more he needs to meet this mounting aggression. He has told me. We will meet his needs.

I have today ordered to Viet-Nam the Air Mobile Division and certain other forces which will raise our fighting strength from 75,000 to 125,000 men almost immediately. Additional forces will be needed later, and they will be sent as requested.

This will make it necessary to increase our active fighting forces by raising the monthly draft call from 17,000 over a period of time to 35,000 per month, and for us to step up our campaign for voluntary enlistments.

After this past week of deliberations, I have concluded that it is not essential to order Reserve units into service now. If that necessity should later be indicated, I will give the matter most careful consideration and I will give the country--you--an adequate notice before taking such action, but only after full preparations.

We have also discussed with the Government of South Viet-Nam lately, the steps that we will take to substantially increase their own effort, both on the battlefield and toward reform and progress in the villages. Ambassador Lodge is now formulating a new program to be tested upon his return to that area.

These steps, like our actions in the past, are carefully measured to do what must be done to bring an end to aggression and a peaceful settlement.

We do not want an expanding struggle with consequences that no one can perceive, nor will we bluster or bully or flaunt our power, but we will not surrender and we will not retreat.

For behind our American pledge lies the determination and resources, I believe, of all of the American Nation.

Second, once the Communists know, as we know, that a violent solution is impossible, then a peaceful solution is inevitable.

We are ready now, as we have always been, to move from the battlefield to the conference table. I have stated publicly and many times, again and again, America's willingness to begin unconditional discussions with any government, at any place, at any time. Fifteen efforts have been made to start these discussions with the help of 40 nations throughout the world, but there has been no answer.

But we are going to continue to persist, if persist we must, until death and desolation have led to the same conference table where others could now join us at a much smaller cost.

Let me also add now a personal note. I do not find it easy to send the flower of our youth, our finest young men, into battle. I have spoken to you today of the divisions and the forces and the battalions and the units, but I know them all, every one. I have seen them in a thousand streets, of a hundred towns, in every State in this Union--working and laughing and building, and filled with hope and life. I think I know, too, how their mothers weep and how their families sorrow.

This is the most agonizing and the most painful duty of your President.

There is something else, too. When I was young, poverty was so common that we didn't know it had a name. An education was something that you had to fight for, and water was really life itself. I have now been in public life 35 years, more than three decades, and in each of those 35 years I have seen good men, and wise leaders, struggle to bring the blessings of this land to all of our people.

And now I am the President. It is now my opportunity to help every child get an education, to help every Negro and every American citizen have an equal opportunity, to have every family get a decent home, and to help bring healing to the sick and dignity to the old.

As I have said before, that is what I have lived for, that is what I have wanted all my life since I was a little boy, and I do not want to see all those hopes and all those dreams of so many people for so many years now drowned in the wasteful ravages of cruel wars. I am going to do all I can do to see that that never happens.

But I also know, as a realistic public servant, that as long as there are men who hate and destroy, we must have the courage to resist, or we will see it all, all that we have built, all that we hope to build, all of our dreams for freedom--all, all will be swept away on the flood of conquest.

So, too, this shall not happen. We will stand in Viet-Nam.

http://millercenter.org/president/lbjohnson/speeches/speech-5910

Address to the Nation Announcing Conclusion of an Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam, President Richard Nixon, January 23, 1973 (Primary Source)

Good evening:

I have asked for this radio and television time tonight for the purpose of announcing that we today have concluded an agreement to end the war and bring peace with honor in Vietnam and in Southeast Asia.

The following statement is being issued at this moment in Washington and Hanoi:

At 12:30 Paris time today, January 23, 1973, the Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring Peace in Vietnam was initialed by Dr. Henry Kissinger on behalf of the United States, and Special Adviser Le Duc Tho on behalf of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

The agreement will be formally signed by the parties participating in the Paris Conference on Vietnam on January 27, 1973, at the International Conference Center in Paris.

The cease-fire will take effect at 2400 Greenwich Mean Time, January 27, 1973. The United States and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam express the hope that this agreement will insure stable peace in Vietnam and contribute to the preservation of lasting peace in Indochina and Southeast Asia.

That concludes the formal statement. Throughout the years of negotiations, we have insisted on peace with honor. In my addresses to the Nation from this room of January 25 and May 8 [1972], I set forth the goals that we considered essential for peace with honor.

In the settlement that has now been agreed to, all the conditions that I laid down then have been met:

A ceasefire, internationally supervised, will begin at 7 p.m., this Saturday, January 27, Washington time.

Within 60 days from this Saturday, all Americans held prisoners of war throughout Indochina will be released. There will be the fullest possible accounting for all of those who are missing in action.

During the same 60-day period, all American forces will be withdrawn from South Vietnam.

The people of South Vietnam have been guaranteed the right to determine their own future, without outside interference.

By joint agreement, the full text of the agreement and the protocol to carry it out will be issued tomorrow.

Throughout these negotiations we have been in the closest consultation with President Thieu and other representatives of the Republic of Vietnam. This settlement meets the goals and has the full support of President Thieu and the Government of the Republic of Vietnam, as well as that of our other allies who are affected.

The United States will continue to recognize the Government of the Republic of Vietnam as the sole legitimate government of South Vietnam.

We shall continue to aid South Vietnam within the terms of the agreement, and we shall support efforts by the people of South Vietnam to settle their problems peacefully among themselves.

We must recognize that ending the war is only the first step toward building the peace. All parties must now see to it that this is a peace that lasts, and also a peace that heals--and a peace that not only ends the war in Southeast Asia but contributes to the prospects of peace in the whole world.

This will mean that the terms of the agreement must be scrupulously adhered to. We shall do everything the agreement requires of us, and we shall expect the other parties to do everything it requires of them. We shall also expect other interested nations to help insure that the agreement is carried out and peace is maintained.

As this long and very difficult war ends, I would like to address a few special words to each of those who have been parties in the conflict.

First, to the people and Government of South Vietnam: By your courage, by your sacrifice, you have won the precious right to determine your own future, and you have developed the strength to defend that right. We look forward to working with you in the future--friends in peace as we have been allies in war.

To the leaders of North Vietnam: As we have ended the war through negotiations, let us now build a peace of reconciliation. For our part, we are prepared to make a major effort to help achieve that goal. But just as reciprocity was needed to end the war, so too will it be needed to build and strengthen the peace.

To the other major powers that have been involved even indirectly: Now is the time for mutual restraint so that the peace we have achieved can last.

And finally, to all of you who are listening, the American people: Your steadfastness in supporting our insistence on peace with honor has made peace with honor possible. I know that you would not have wanted that peace jeopardized. With our secret negotiations at the sensitive stage they were in during this recent period, for me to have discussed publicly our efforts to secure peace would not only have violated our understanding with North Vietnam, it would have seriously harmed and possibly destroyed the chances for peace. Therefore, I know that you now can understand why, during these past several weeks, I have not made any public statements about those efforts.

The important thing was not to talk about peace, but to get peace--and to get the right kind of peace. This we have done.

Now that we have achieved an honorable agreement, let us be proud that America did not settle for a peace that would have betrayed our allies, that would have abandoned our prisoners of war, or that would have ended the war for us but would have continued the war for the 50 million people of Indochina. Let us be proud of the 2 1/2 million young Americans who served in Vietnam, who served with honor and distinction in one of the most selfless enterprises in the history of nations. And let us be proud of those who sacrificed, who gave their lives so that the people of South Vietnam might live in freedom and so that the world might live in peace.

In particular, I would like to say a word to some of the bravest people I have ever met--the wives, the children, the families of our prisoners of war and the missing in action. When others called on us to settle on any terms, you had the courage to stand for the right kind of peace so that those who died and those who suffered would not have died and suffered in vain, and so that where this generation knew war, the next generation would know peace. Nothing means more to me at this moment than the fact that your long vigil is coming to an end.

Just yesterday, a great American, who once occupied this office, died. In his life, President Johnson endured the vilification of those who sought to portray him as a man of war. But there was nothing he cared about more deeply than achieving a lasting peace in the world.

I remember the last time I talked with him. It was just the day after New Year's. He spoke then of his concern with bringing peace, with making it the right kind of peace, and I was grateful that he once again expressed his support for my efforts to gain such a peace. No one would have welcomed this peace more than he.

And I know he would join me in asking--for those who died and for those who live--let us consecrate this moment by resolving together to make the peace we have achieved a peace that will last. Thank you and good evening.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=3808

Need to contact a human?

• Release Notes
• Known Issues
• Privacy and Security
• System Status

Mobile Menu Overlay

The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington, DC 20500

Remarks by President   Biden and President Võ Văn Thưởng of Vietnam at a State   Luncheon

Presidential Palace, Yellow Room Hanoi, Vietnam

1:26 P.M. ICT

MODERATOR: (As interpreted.) Today, on the occasion of the state visit to Vietnam by President Joe Biden, President of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, His Excellency Võ Văn Thưởng, solemnly hosts the banquet (inaudible) President Joe Biden and the high-level delegation of the United States of America.

We are very honored to invite your Excellency, President Võ Văn Thưởng, to deliver his welcome remarks.

PRESIDENT THƯỞNG: (As interpreted.) Honorable President Joseph Biden, distinguished American and Vietnamese guests, on behalf of the state and people of Vietnam, once again, I would like to warmly welcome you, President Joseph Biden of the United States of America, to Vietnam on your first state visit.

Your visit is truly significant. It builds on the very special character of Vietnam-U.S. relations. You are the first U.S. president to visit Vietnam at the invitation of the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, Nguyễn Phú Trọng.

During this visit, you have also joined General Secretary Nguyễn Phú Trọng to announce the upgrade of relations to a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership for peace, cooperation, and sustainable development. This is truly a new page in the relationship between our two countries — an enduring, stable long-term framework that opens up a vast space for further development of the bond between us for decades to follow.

Mr. President, distinguished guests, a mere five months after national independence, President Hồ Chí Minh penned a letter addressing President Truman, expressing the desire to establish a bond of full cooperation with the United States. As history would have it, this desire had to confront countless turmoil and challenges — all of such we have overcome. And today, we can speak with joy that never before has the relationship between our two countries reached such flourishing height as today.

From former enemies to Comprehensive Strategic Partners, this is truly a model in the history of international relations as to how reconciliation and relationship-building should proceed after a war. This is a result of the efforts to walk past such challenges and vicissitudes of history by so many generations of our country’s leaders and people.

Over the past 50 years, we have witnessed events of such significance in the relationship and the unprecedented quantum leaps in our relationship. There have been momentous achievements in various areas of cooperation between Vietnam and the U.S. — from economic, trade, investment ties and in education and training cooperation, to various mechanisms for dialogue and joint efforts across different domains and sectors.

Across the comprehensive areas of cooperation between us, I would like to specifically call to attention the truly pride-worthy and striking achievements in our cooperation in addressing war legacy issues.

Allow me to cite the dioxin remediation projects in Da Nang and Bien Hoa airports; support given by the U.S. in various ways to Vietnamese persons with disabilities, including Agent Orange victims of the second and third generation; and the re- — and the removal of UXOs left behind after the war.

And most recently, for the first time, our two countries have started working together to conduct forensic identification of yet unidentified remains of Vietnamese war martyrs. I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to generations of U.S. administrations and people — and to you, Mr. President, and the First Lady, Dr. Jill Biden — for your active support for Vietnam in the humanitarian field.

On our part, since 1973, Vietnam has actively conducted unilateral searches for American MIAs. In 1988, both sides commenced the first joint mission. After half a century, the co- — the full cooperation between Vietnam and U.S. in this area is still growing stronger and stronger. Many American MIAs lost in high mountains or deep oceans, even the — on grounds hardly ever tread, have since been found — their remains returned to their home.

Mr. President, distinguished guests, to quote Secretary General Nguyễn Phú Trọng, “Set aside the past, overcome differences, build on similarities, look to the future.”

You have also pledged your support for a strong, independent, resilient, and prosperous Vietnam. I have a strong belief that building on the length of Vietnam-U.S. relations with mutual trust and respect, and given the new driver we have established during your visit, the Strategic — Comprehensive Strategic Partnership for peace, cooperation, and sustainable development between Vietnam and the U.S. will continue to grow in strength and substance and bring concrete benefits to our two peoples, make positive contributions to peace, friendship, cooperation and sustainable development in the region and the world.

Let me take this opportunity to express my respectful gratitude to the different agencies, organizations, and individuals from both countries who, from one generation to the next, have tirelessly cultivated and nurtured the relationship between Vietnam and the U.S.

Of these very exemplary persons, I would like to especially honor the late Senator John McCain, former Senator Patrick Leahy, and Special Presidential Envoy John Kerry — truly close friends of Vietnam through the years.

Let us, in the generations to come, work together to build on these efforts to preserve, reinforce, and grow this special relationship, take it higher and further in the warm atmosphere of friendship and cooperation between Vietnam and the United States of America.

Let us raise our glasses to the happiness of the American people and the prosperity of the United States of America, to the flourishing Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between Vietnam and the United States of America, to the good health of President Joe Biden, and to the good health of all present here today. (Applause.)

(President Thưởng offers a toast.)

MODERATOR: Now we have the great honor to invite Your Excellency, Mr. Joe Biden, President of the United States of America, to respond.

PRESIDENT BIDEN: Mr. President, the — the great Vietnamese poet Nguyễn Du once wrote, “In glory they made up for their past hardships, and their love got fresher and warmer each day.”

Mr. President, friends, it’s an honor to be here today on this historic occasion, a day when we feel all the glory and warmth of the boundless possibilities that lie ahead — a day that may have seemed impossible not that long ago.

As a matter of fact, I was just in the other room with my very close and old friend, Tom Vallely, who is the guy who put together the Fulbright University. And he was helping me when I was a much younger man trying to get the nomination for president.

And we were sitting in a small twin-engine plane. And I looked at him, and I said, “Tom, why are you doing this for me?” He said, “Because I want to fundamentally change the relationship with Vietnam.” And he had been here as a soldier. “I want to fundamentally change that relationship.” And he’s worked his whole career to do that.

And, you know, for — we — as we sit side by side, Mr. President, we’re reminded of the hard work we all did to get here to overcome the hardships of the past and seize the promises of the future — one of greater opportunity, dignity, security, and prosperity for all our people.

And as we trace this 50-year arc of progress between our nations, there’s one common denominator: you, our people, our activities, our activists, our entrepreneurs, our scholars, our veterans, our innovators, and our leaders who never forget — like Senator, later Secretary Kerry, who was a brave soldier who fought here but wanted, every day since then, to make it better. Everyone in both our countries who’s working to make sure that people, no matter who they are, can seize potential of this moment.

I want to thank three close friends again in normalizing these relations: John Kerry, Tommy Vallely, and a close friend of the three of us — a guy who is not here today; a guy who, when he returned from Vietnam, came to work for me as a military aide in the United States Senate and then I convinced him he should run for United States Senate. He ran in the other party. We argued like hell from that point on, but we still loved one another. And John McCain, who I miss — we all three of us miss dearly today.

We know where there was darkness, you all found light. Where there was hardship, you found healing to bring us forward, to bring us together, to bring us to this day. It’s testament to how far our countries have come but, most importantly, how far we will go in the years ahead.

And that’s what Comprehensive Strategic Partners is about — and thank you for inviting us to have that status — going forward together, tackling challenges together, facing the future together.

So please join me, if you will, in — I’d like to make a toast. I quoted a Vietnamese poet to begin with, and I’m going to quote — my colleagues in the Senate always kidded me. I was always quoting Irish poets. I quote them not because I’m Irish — because they’re the best poets in the world. That’s why I quote them.

But all kidding aside. There is a great quote from a man whose wife I got to know after he passed away, Seamus Heaney. And he wrote a poem called “The Cure at Troy.” And this is my toast to all of you.

He said, “History teaches us, don’t hope on this side of the grave. But then, once in a lifetime, that longed-for tidal wave of justice rises up, and hope and history rhyme.”

Here’s to us making hope and history rhyme for all our people. God bless you all. (Applause.)

(President Biden offers a toast.)

1:40 P.M. ICT

Stay Connected

We'll be in touch with the latest information on how President Biden and his administration are working for the American people, as well as ways you can get involved and help our country build back better.

Opt in to send and receive text messages from President Biden.

Columbia in crisis, again

On April 30, 1968, New York City police officers, acting at the behest of officials at Columbia University, cleared five campus buildings that had been occupied by students protesting various issues linked to the war in Vietnam and the fight for racial justice. Police arrested around seven hundred people, and more than a hundred injuries were reported. The Spectator , the campus newspaper, quickly got an edition out, the front page of which contained photos of police surrounding an academic and a student with a bloodied head, as well as clipped, yet highly vivid, eyewitness dispatches compiled by twenty student journalists. (“The police moved in, some swinging radio aerials from walkie-talkies, whip-sawing faces. Several heads were pushed against the stone steps.”) The dispatches continued inside, interspersed with ads for aftershave and cologne, an Israel Independence Day celebration, and an issue of The Atlantic referring to the Vietnam War as “the wrong Rubicon.” The edition also reproduced a statement by Grayson Kirk, the president of Columbia, who said he had concluded, with the “utmost regret,” that he had taken “the steps necessary to permit the University to resume its operations.” 

The events took a toll on the Spectator ’s journalists, one of whom, the paper reported, was “hit in the face twice by a plain-clothes policeman” and “sent by a doctor to St. Luke’s Hospital, suffering from dizziness and double vision.” (The paper relayed this shocking fact deep down page three, in parentheses.) Even before the arrests, “most of the press was denied access to the occupied buildings, and the administration, paralyzed, wasn’t talking. So it fell to a group of not-quite and barely twenty-somethings—the reporters, editors, and photographers who made up the Spectator staff—to explain what was going on,” Robert Friedman, then the editor in chief, recalled fifty years later, in an essay for the paper . “With little or no sleep, we worked around the clock, climbing in and out of buildings, interviewing participants on all sides, describing what was being said behind closed doors; then writing, editing, and proofreading until dawn to keep the campus and the outside world informed, and then doing it all over again the next day.”

On Thursday, New York City police officers, acting at the behest of officials at Columbia University, cleared an encampment on a lawn outside the library that had been occupied by students protesting various issues linked to the war in Gaza. Police arrested over a hundred people. The Spectator (which, these days, only prints once a week ) quickly got a story up online, which contained photos of officers leading away protesters with zip-tied wrists, as well as a video clipping together scenes of noisy chaos and eyewitness accounts compiled by twenty-one student journalists. The story quoted from an email to the university community written by Minouche Shafik, the president, who said that, “out of an abundance of concern for the safety of Columbia’s campus,” she had authorized police to begin clearing the encampment.

Since then, the Spectator has published at least seventeen more stories tracking the escalating fallout. Undeterred, protesters continued camping out into a third day , then a fourth , then a fifth . University administrators began notifying participants that they had been suspended and banned from entering “common areas” on campus, and that they could even lose access to Columbia housing. Various faculty members and students expressed outrage at the arrests . Over the weekend, pro-Israel counterprotesters reported receiving threats and anti-Semitic abuse both on and just outside campus, including shouts of “Go back to Poland, go back to Belarus” and “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground.” In a WhatsApp chat, a campus rabbi urged Jewish students to stay at home , adding, “it is not our job as Jews to ensure our own safety on campus.” 

To quickly note: CJR is based within Columbia’s Journalism School, but it is not a student publication; we cover the media industry and related debates, not campus life. Speaking personally, I have not observed any of the events on campus in recent days since I don’t live in New York. For a detailed blow-by-blow accounting of what’s happening on the ground, I’d suggest that you read the Spectator or other reporting from journalists on campus .

This being said—and as in 1968—the arrests and their aftermath have become a media story in various respects, including on campus. While some journalists from outside news organizations have reported from campus, various others say they have had difficulty getting in. (On Friday, the Columbia Journalism School invited credentialed members of the media who had been denied access to get in touch over social media so that they might facilitate it .) Over the weekend, WKCR, a radio station at Columbia, said that a university public safety officer had asked its personnel to leave the building from which they were broadcasting, as part of a general evacuation. After explaining that WKCR is a “press organization with a duty to the people of NYC to operate a 24/7 FM signal,” and following a number of phone calls, the station’s staff was allowed to stay put. WKCR said that it was told there had been a “misunderstanding.”

And if, as Friedman would later put it , the 1968 protests became a national front-page news story and made Columbia “the center of the universe,” something similar has happened this time—albeit in a very different media ecosystem, one by turns fractured and amplified by the noise of social media. In a statement marking Passover , the White House condemned “reprehensible and dangerous” anti-Semitism on college campuses, without naming Columbia directly; the official X account of the state of Israel retweeted a video of protesters outside the campus gates , referring to them as “terrorists.” Speaking for myself, trying to follow what was actually happening online over the weekend was a disorienting, maddening experience; as Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at Princeton (and formerly at Columbia Journalism School), put it yesterday , “a student protest is going national on the basis of very distorted impressions.” (For one, it’s far from clear which protesters are affiliated with the university and which aren’t. Yesterday, protest organizers at Columbia put out a statement saying that they “reject any form of hate or bigotry” and are “frustrated by media distractions focusing on inflammatory individuals who do not represent us.”)

The crisis at Columbia has entered into a broader national media climate that has treated campus culture as a huge story in recent years, and particularly since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7 and Israel responded by bombarding Gaza. As I see it, such coverage has sometimes been over-generalized and has often been disproportionate—even distracting, at times, from the much weightier events in the region, where tens of thousands of Palestinians and over a thousand Israelis have been killed ( including at least a hundred or so journalists, most of them in Gaza ). The story’s arriving in the media capital of the nation, if not the world, was always likely to supercharge it. And yet this type of story does raise important questions—about the repression of speech, the abuse of it, and the advance of a culture war that, it increasingly seems, has left no American institution untouched.

That, of course, includes the media itself—an institution whose lifeblood is speech, and one that has been rocked by sharp differences over the war ever since it began; as my colleague Ayodeji Rotinwa reported in December , “nothing in recent memory has riven newsrooms the way this war has.” To that point, journalists in several newsrooms worldwide had been punished, even fired, for public expressions of solidarity with Gaza. Arab journalists working for US publications suggested that they had “borne the brunt of this moment,” Rotinwa reported, with both Western and Arab observers questioning their credibility and objectivity, for different reasons.

Such convulsions have continued since. Just last week, the New York Times concluded an internal probe that it launched after details of editorial disagreements over a story about Hamas deploying sexual violence as a weapon of war appeared in The Intercept ; the probe did not reach a “definitive conclusion” as to what had happened but did identify “gaps in the way proprietary journalistic material is handled.” Inside and outside observers criticized the paper for siccing a leak investigation on its own staff, while the union representing Times journalists filed a grievance alleging that the probe targeted journalists of Arab and Middle Eastern descent. (The Times denies this.) Meanwhile, Uri Berliner, a senior editor at NPR, resigned after he was suspended for publishing an unauthorized essay in The Free Press accusing the broadcaster of drifting into uncritical left-wing orthodoxy. Among other complaints, Berliner criticized his colleagues for downplaying the events of October 7 and the global rise in anti-Semitic hate—and for covering “the Israel-Hamas war and its spillover onto streets and campuses through the ‘intersectional’ lens that has jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms.”

The controversy kicked off by Berliner’s essay was much wider than this one complaint, and in many ways different from the recent episode at the Times ; both episodes raise questions about power dynamics and principles of collegiality and objectivity that are peculiar to newsrooms, or at least hard to directly compare to the recent events at Columbia. Still, there are some clear parallels. And some entanglements. For example, Christopher Rufo—a right-wing activist (and self-described journalist) who helped bring down the president of Harvard earlier this year in the aftermath of a prior, similar row about campus protesters, and who was quite explicit about his reasons for doing so — is now pushing to have Katherine Maher, the new CEO of NPR , fired after he unearthed some old tweets in which she expressed liberal views. (Maher posted the tweets prior to working in the media business, and does not set NPR’s editorial policy. The president of Harvard, it should be noted, ultimately fell over plagiarism allegations, but had recently appeared—disastrously—before a congressional committee hearing on campus anti-Semitism. Last week, the day before the Columbia arrests, Shafik appeared before the same committee.)

If the speech questions facing colleges and media organizations, in the context of the war and more broadly, are similar but not identical, much the same could be said of the comparison between this moment and 1968. This comparison has itself worked its way into the national-level coverage of the current crisis at Columbia—sometimes because of the self-evident parallels between the two sets of arrests (see above); sometimes because political reporters seem thirsty for an election-year comparison. ( See also: the persistent 1968 narrative around the 2020 election .) Such comparisons can be instructive. But they can never be exact.

This extends, of course, to the Spectator ’s coverage. Last week, following the arrests, the paper’s editorial board weighed in with a sharp rebuke of Shafik and nodded back to 1968 . “History has made clear who stood on the wrong side then, and it’s clear that this is the side you are aligning yourself with now,” the editorial read, adding “this will be your legacy.” In the immediate aftermath of those violent 1968 arrests, however, the paper left a blank space where its editorial should have been. “All week, we had debated and disagreed about the events unfolding around us,” Friedman later wrote. “But that night there was no disagreement: Exhausted and horrified, we decided to run two columns of white space, surrounded by a thick black border, just below the masthead where the editorial was supposed to appear.” Those running the paper had concluded that sometimes, “silence is more effective than words.”

Other notable stories:

• Vanity Fair ’s Charlotte Klein reports that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign has denied press credentials to several journalists whose work has displeased it. These reporters can still attend Trump rallies, but must do so on the same terms as the general public, which entails inconveniences. In 2016, Trump’s campaign denied credentials to entire news outlets; this time, one reporter told Klein, it’s being “more picky-choosy.” 
• Lawmakers in New York State approved a budget that includes ninety million dollars in payroll tax credits to incentivize the hiring of local journalists—the first such provision to pass nationwide. “The aid will be split between companies with 100 or fewer employees and larger ones,” Politico reports , with eligible outlets receiving “a 50 percent refundable credit for the first $50,000 of a journalist’s salary, up to a total of $300,000 per outlet.”
• Washingtonian ’s Andrew Beaujon dug into the recent decision by bosses at WAMU , an NPR member station in Washington, DC, to shutter DCist , the news site under its aegis. Bosses say that the site caused WAMU to deviate from its core mission of audio broadcasting, but the decision also “tanked employee morale and baffled some faculty members and alumni of American University, which operates WAMU,” per Beaujon.
• Press Gazette ’s Bron Maher dug into the sharp recent layoffs at openDemocracy , a newsroom that has done impressive work in the UK . The extent of a “funding crisis” at the nonprofit “only became apparent to the board in February,” Maher writes, but “questions remain among staff as to how these issues emerged so suddenly.” Now “the bad blood within the organisation has escalated to legal letters,” Maher reports.
• And Terry Anderson, a reporter with the AP who was abducted by Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1985 and held hostage for nearly seven years, has died . He was seventy-six. “He never liked to be called a hero, but that’s what everyone persisted in calling him,” Sulome Anderson, his daughter, said. When asked recently if he had anything left on his bucket list, he replied, “I’ve lived so much and I’ve done so much. I’m content.” 

ICYMI: A camera-free courtroom gives Trump the upper hand

The voice of journalism, since 1961

• Privacy Policy

Support CJR

• Become a Member

Biden’s Gaza Quagmire: Worse Than Vietnam

Today on TAP: There’s still time for the U.S. to reverse course on Israel policy—but barely. Will Biden do it?

by Robert Kuttner

April 19, 2024

Mary Altaffer/AP Photo

Police in riot gear stand guard as demonstrators chant slogans outside the Columbia University campus, April 18, 2024, in New York.

For my generation, the Vietnam War was the catastrophe that destroyed our hopes for a decent America. Vietnam wrecked the most expansive domestic program since the New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society. Vietnam splintered the New Deal coalition, divided the kids from the hard hats, and ushered in a Republican era that undermined civil rights and began the “Southern strategy” of using racism to convert the Dixiecrat Solid South into a Republican Solid South. The defection of the white working class from the Democrats began a long and winding road that led to Donald Trump.

If anything, Biden’s quagmire is worse. And so are the consequences.

Like Lyndon Johnson, Joe Biden was a pleasant surprise for progressives. His speech to the Steelworkers Wednesday was the most pro-union speech by a U.S. president I’ve ever heard, outdoing even FDR. Like Johnson, Biden has pursued a stunningly progressive series of economic policies. Unlike Johnson, who had a working majority in Congress that rivaled Roosevelt’s, Biden has done it with fumes.

Like Johnson’s Vietnam blunder, Biden’s Gaza war could well cost him re-election. In 1968, the consequences were “only” the election of Richard Nixon. In 2024, the election of Donald Trump would cost America our democracy, quite possibly forever.

More from Robert Kuttner

And if you unpack the details, it gets worse. Israel’s annihilation of civilian Gaza is unmistakably Biden’s war, every bit as much as Vietnam was LBJ’s war. As Nick Kristof wrote in The New York Times , “when an American-made aircraft drops an American-made bomb on an American aid group in an American-supported war, how can that not come back to Biden?”

But at least the Vietnam War was entirely LBJ’s, with the South Vietnamese regime in the role of American puppets. Johnson and his generals called the shots, with their own illusions and their own strategic mistakes, and finally, when it was too late, decided to de-escalate.

By contrast, Bibi Netanyahu is no puppet. Bibi, like Pinocchio, is determined to be a Real Boy, and Bibi is Pinocchio in more ways than one (this is a reference to lying, not to Jewish noses). If anything, Biden has willingly become Bibi’s puppet.

So Biden has the worst of both worlds. His fingerprints are all over a war that has killed upward of 30,000 civilians, but he has no control over how the war is conducted.

This is Biden’s fault, not Bibi’s. He could be conditioning aid far more explicitly. He keeps tiptoeing up to the edge of that posture and then backing off.

And it gets still worse. Like Vietnam, Israel’s behavior is dividing Democrats and playing havoc with civil liberties. Among the knock-on effects with echoes of Vietnam are protests that include civil disobedience, with police invading campuses. Unlike Vietnam, we have an increase in antisemitism, with far-right Republicans in the bizarre and purely opportunistic role of Defenders of the Jews (who, the Republicans’ evangelical base believes, are worth defending only pending their descent to eternal Hell with the coming of the Rapture).

Like my generation recoiling from Vietnam, large numbers of American young people see the Gaza disgrace as a colonialist war, with crimes against humanity. Notwithstanding the greater threat of Trump, many have vowed never to vote for Biden, as we once foolishly vowed never to vote for LBJ or even for Hubert Humphrey. In one more awful echo, as in 1968 there will be protests and civil disobedience at the unfortunately located Chicago Democratic National Convention, upstaging and wrecking what should be a Biden unity event.

Meanwhile, back in the Middle East, there is a very narrow window for some kind of provisional settlement. Israel’s provocation of Iran, bombing its embassy complex in Damascus, in turn led to Iran’s missile and drone attack on Israel, which did no damage. Israel’s retaliatory raid today on a military target in Iran was surprisingly restrained.

For the moment, both sides can claim vindication, with no immediate need for further escalation. American diplomats are now pushing a regional deal that includes much closer three-way ties between Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S.

But this proposed deal is pure carrot. To get Netanyahu to take him seriously, Biden needs to wield a much bigger stick. Time is running out, both in terms of the risk of a wider war and in terms of whether Biden can ever regain the trust of America’s young to win re-election.

You can count on the Prospect , can we count on you?

There's no paywall here. Your donations power our newsroom as we report on ideas, politics and power — and what’s really at stake as we navigate another presidential election year. Please, become a member , or make a one-time donation , today. Thank you!

About the Prospect / Contact Info

Browse Archive / Back Issues

Subscription Services

Privacy Policy

DONATE TO THE PROSPECT

Copyright 2023 | The American Prospect, Inc. | All Rights Reserved

Help inform the discussion

Presidential Speeches

November 3, 1969: address to the nation on the war in vietnam, about this speech.

Richard M. Nixon

November 03, 1969

President Nixon assures the American people that he is taking all necessary measures to push towards peace and end the Vietnam War.   He does not advocate withdrawing troops, but instead negotiating peace. The President remains sympathetic to the American call for peace but pushes forward with steadfast intention to end the war and ensure stability in South Vietnam.

• Download Full Video
• Download Audio

Good evening, my fellow Americans: Tonight I want to talk to you on a subject of deep concern to all Americans and to many people in all parts of the world—the war in Vietnam. I believe that one of the reasons for the deep division about Vietnam is that many Americans have lost confidence in what their Government has told them about our policy. The American people cannot and should not be asked to support a policy which involves the overriding issues of war and peace unless they know the truth about that policy. Tonight, therefore, I would like to answer some of the questions that I know are on the minds of many of you listening to me. How and why did America get involved in Vietnam in the first place? How has this administration changed the policy of the previous administration? What has really happened in the negotiations in Paris and on the battlefront in Vietnam? What choices do we have if we are to end the war? What are the prospects for peace? Now, let me begin by describing the situation I found when I was inaugurated on January 20. —The war had been going on for 4 years. —31,000 Americans had been killed in action. —The training program for the South Vietnamese was behind schedule. —540,000 Americans were in Vietnam with no plans to reduce the number. —No progress had been made at the negotiations in Paris and the United States had not put forth a comprehensive peace proposal. —The war was causing deep division at home and criticism from many of our friends as well as our enemies abroad. In view of these circumstances there were some who urged that I end the war at once by ordering the immediate withdrawal of all American forces. From a political standpoint this would have been a popular and easy course to follow. After all, we became involved in the war while my predecessor was in office. I could blame the defeat which would be the result of my action on him and come out as the peacemaker. Some put it to me quite bluntly: This was the only way to avoid allowing Johnson's war to become Nixon's war. But I had a greater obligation than to think only of the years of my administration and of the next election. I had to think of the effect of my decision on the next generation and on the future of peace and freedom in America and in the world. Let us all understand that the question before us is not whether some Americans are for peace and some Americans are against peace. The question at issue is not whether Johnson's war becomes Nixon's war. The great question is: How can we win America's peace? Well, let us turn now to the fundamental issue. Why and how did the United States become involved in Vietnam in the first place? Fifteen years ago North Vietnam, with the logistical support of Communist China and the Soviet Union, launched a campaign to impose a Communist government on South Vietnam by instigating and supporting a revolution. In response to the request of the Government of South Vietnam, President Eisenhower sent economic aid and military equipment to assist the people of South Vietnam in their efforts to prevent a Communist takeover. Seven years ago, President Kennedy sent 16,000 military personnel to Vietnam as combat advisers. Four years ago, President Johnson sent American combat forces to South Vietnam. Now, many believe that President Johnson's decision to send American combat forces to South Vietnam was wrong. And many others—I among them—have been strongly critical of the way the war has been conducted. But the question facing us today is: Now that we are in the war, what is the best way to end it? In January I could only conclude that the precipitate withdrawal of American forces from Vietnam would be a disaster not only for South Vietnam but for the United States and for the cause of peace. For the South Vietnamese, our precipitate withdrawal would inevitably allow the Communists to repeat the massacres which followed their takeover in the North 15 years before. —They then murdered more than 50,000 people and hundreds of thousands more died in slave labor camps. —We saw a prelude of what would happen in South Vietnam when the Communists entered the city of Hue last year. During their brief rule there, there was a bloody reign of terror in which 3,000 civilians were clubbed, shot to death, and buried in mass graves. —With the sudden collapse of our support, these atrocities of Hue would become the nightmare of the entire nation—and particularly for the million and a half Catholic refugees who fled to South Vietnam when the Communists took over in the North. For the United States, this first defeat in our Nation's history would result in a collapse of confidence in American leadership, not only in Asia but throughout the world. Three American Presidents have recognized the great stakes involved in Vietnam and understood what had to be done. In 1963, President Kennedy, with his characteristic eloquence and clarity, said: "we want to see a stable government there, carrying on a struggle to maintain its national independence." "We believe strongly in that. We are not going to withdraw from that effort. In my opinion, for us to withdraw from that effort would mean a collapse not only of South Viet-Nam, but Southeast Asia. So we are going to stay there." President Eisenhower and President Johnson expressed the same conclusion during their terms of office. For the future of peace, precipitate withdrawal would thus be a disaster of immense magnitude. —A nation cannot remain great if it betrays its allies and lets down its friends. —Our defeat and humiliation in South Vietnam without question would promote recklessness in the councils of those great powers who have not yet abandoned their goals of world conquest. —This would spark violence wherever our commitments help maintain the peace—in the Middle East, in Berlin, eventually even in the Western Hemisphere. Ultimately, this would cost more lives. It would not bring peace; it would bring more war. For these reasons, I rejected the recommendation that I should end the war by immediately withdrawing all of our forces. I chose instead to change American policy on both the negotiating front and battlefront. In order to end a war fought on many fronts, I initiated a pursuit for peace on many fronts. In a television speech on May 14, in a speech before the United Nations, and on a number of other occasions I set forth our peace proposals in great detail. —We have offered the complete withdrawal of all outside forces within one year. —We have proposed a cease-fire under international supervision. —We have offered free elections under international supervision with the Communists participating in the organization and conduct of the elections as an organized political force. And the Saigon Government has pledged to accept the result of the elections. We have not put forth our proposals on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. We have indicated that we are willing to discuss the proposals that have been put forth by the other side. We have declared that anything is negotiable except the fight of the people of South Vietnam to determine their own future. At the Paris peace conference, Ambassador Lodge has demonstrated our flexibility and good faith in 40 public meetings. Hanoi has refused even to discuss our proposals. They demand our unconditional acceptance of their terms, which are that we withdraw all American forces immediately and unconditionally and that we overthrow the Government of South Vietnam as we leave. We have not limited our peace initiatives to public forums and public statements. I recognized, in January, that a long and bitter war like this usually cannot be settled in a public forum. That is why in addition to the public statements and negotiations I have explored every possible private avenue that might lead to a settlement. Tonight I am taking the unprecedented step of disclosing to you some of our other initiatives for peace—initiatives we undertook privately and secretly because we thought we thereby might open a door which publicly would be closed. I did not wait for my inauguration to begin my quest for peace. —Soon after my election, through an individual who is directly in contact on a personal basis with the leaders of North Vietnam, I made two private offers for a rapid, comprehensive settlement. Hanoi's replies called in effect for our surrender before negotiations. —Since the Soviet Union furnishes most of the military equipment for North Vietnam, Secretary of State Rogers, my Assistant for National Security Affairs, Dr. Kissinger, Ambassador Lodge, and I, personally, have met on a number of occasions with representatives of the Soviet Government to enlist their assistance in getting meaningful negotiations started. In addition, we have had extended discussions directed toward that same end with representatives of other governments which have diplomatic relations with North Vietnam. None of these initiatives have to date produced results. —In mid-July, I became convinced that it was necessary to make a major move to break the deadlock in the Paris talks. I spoke directly in this office, where I am now sitting, with an individual who had known Ho Chi Minh [President, Democratic Republic of Vietnam] on a personal basis for 25 years. Through him I sent a letter to Ho Chi Minh. I did this outside of the usual diplomatic channels with the hope that with the necessity of making statements for propaganda removed, there might be constructive progress toward bringing the war to an end. Let me read from that letter to you now. "Dear Mr. President: "I realize that it is difficult to communicate meaningfully across the gulf of four years of war. But precisely because of this gulf, I wanted to take this opportunity to reaffirm in all solemnity my desire to work for a just peace. I deeply believe that the war in Vietnam has gone on too long and delay in bringing it to an end can benefit no one--least of all the people of Vietnam .... "The time has come to move forward at the conference table toward an early resolution of this tragic war. You will find us forthcoming and open-minded in a common effort to bring the blessings of peace to the brave people of Vietnam. Let history record that at this critical juncture, both sides turned their face toward peace rather than toward conflict and war." I received Ho Chi Minh's reply on August 30, 3 days before his death. It simply reiterated the public position North Vietnam had taken at Paris and flatly rejected my initiative. The full text of both letters is being released to the press. —In addition to the public meetings that I have referred to, Ambassador Lodge has met with Vietnam's chief negotiator in Paris in 11 private sessions. —We have taken other significant initiatives which must remain secret to keep open some channels of communication which may still prove to be productive. But the effect of all the public, private, and secret negotiations which have been undertaken since the bombing halt a year ago and since this administration came into office on January 20, can be summed up in one sentence: No progress whatever has been made except agreement on the shape of the bargaining table. Well now, who is at fault? It has become clear that the obstacle in negotiating an end to the war is not the President of the United States. It is not the South Vietnamese Government. The obstacle is the other side's absolute refusal to show the least willingness to join us in seeking a just peace. And it will not do so while it is convinced that all it has to do is to wait for our next concession, and our next concession after that one, until it gets everything it wants. There can now be no longer any question that progress in negotiation depends only on Hanoi's deciding to negotiate, to negotiate seriously. I realize that this report on our efforts on the diplomatic front is discouraging to the American people, but the American people are entitled to know the truth-the bad news as well as the good news-where the lives of our young men are involved. Now let me turn, however, to a more encouraging report on another front. At the time we launched our search for peace I recognized we might not succeed in bringing an end to the war through negotiation. I, therefore, put into effect another plan to bring peace—a plan which will bring the war to an end regardless of what happens on the negotiating front. It is in line with a major shift in U.S. foreign policy which I described in my press conference at Guam on July 25. Let me briefly explain what has been described as the Nixon Doctrine—a policy which not only will help end the war in Vietnam, but which is an essential element of our program to prevent future Vietnams. We Americans are a do-it-yourself people. We are an impatient people. Instead of teaching someone else to do a job, we like to do it ourselves. And this trait has been carried over into our foreign policy. In Korea and again in Vietnam, the United States furnished most of the money, most of the arms, and most of the men to help the people of those countries defend their freedom against Communist aggression. Before any American troops were committed to Vietnam, a leader of another Asian country expressed this opinion to me when I was traveling in Asia as a private citizen. He said: "When you are trying to assist another nation defend its freedom, U.S. policy should be to help them fight the war but not to fight the war for them." Well, in accordance with this wise counsel, I laid down in Guam three principles as guidelines for future American policy toward Asia: —First, the United States will keep all of its treaty commitments. —Second, we shall provide a shield if a nuclear power threatens the freedom of a nation allied with us or of a nation whose survival we consider vital to our security. —Third, in cases involving other types of aggression, we shall furnish military and economic assistance when requested in accordance with our treaty commitments. But we shall look to the nation directly threatened to assume the primary responsibility of providing the manpower for its defense. After I announced this policy, I found that the leaders of the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, South Korea, and other nations which might be threatened by Communist aggression, welcomed this new direction in American foreign policy. The defense of freedom is everybody's business—not just America's business. And it is particularly the responsibility of the people whose freedom is threatened. In the previous administration, we Americanized the war in Vietnam. In this administration, we are Vietnamizing the search for peace. The policy of the previous administration not only resulted in our assuming the primary responsibility for fighting the war, but even more significantly did not adequately stress the goal of strengthening the South Vietnamese so that they could defend themselves when we left. The Vietnamization plan was launched following Secretary Laird's visit to Vietnam in March. Under the plan, I ordered first a substantial increase in the training and equipment of South Vietnamese forces. In July, on my visit to Vietnam, I changed General Abrams' orders so that they were consistent with the objectives of our new policies. Under the new orders, the primary mission of our troops is to enable the South Vietnamese forces to assume the full responsibility for the security of South Vietnam. Our air operations have been reduced by over 20 percent. And now we have begun to see the results of this long overdue change in American policy in Vietnam. —After 5 years of Americans going into Vietnam, we are finally bringing American men home. By December 15, over 60,000 men will have been withdrawn from South Vietnam including 20 percent of all of our combat forces. —The South Vietnamese have continued to gain in strength. As a result they have been able to take over combat responsibilities from our American troops. Two other significant developments have occurred since this administration took office. —Enemy infiltration, infiltration which is essential if they are to launch a major attack, over the last 3 months is less than 20 percent of what it was over the same period last year. —Most important—United States casualties have declined during the last 2 months to the lowest point in 3 years. Let me now turn to our program for the future. We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable. This withdrawal will be made from strength and not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater. I have not and do not intend to announce the timetable for our program. And there are obvious reasons for this decision which I am sure you will understand. As I have indicated on several occasions, the rate of withdrawal will depend on developments on three fronts. One of these is the progress which can be or might be made in the Paris talks. An announcement of a fixed timetable for our withdrawal would completely remove any incentive for the enemy to negotiate an agreement. They would simply wait until our forces had withdrawn and then move in. The other two factors on which we will base our withdrawal decisions are the level of enemy activity and the progress of the training programs of the South Vietnamese forces. And I am glad to be able to report tonight progress on both of these fronts has been greater than we anticipated when we started the program in June for withdrawal. As a result, our timetable for withdrawal is more optimistic now than when we made our first estimates in June. Now, this clearly demonstrates why it is not wise to be frozen in on a fixed timetable. We must retain the flexibility to base each withdrawal decision on the situation as it is at that time rather than on estimates that are no longer valid. Along with this optimistic estimate, I must—in all candor—leave one note of caution. If the level of enemy activity significantly increases we might have to adjust our timetable accordingly. However, I want the record to be completely clear on one point. At the time of the bombing halt just a year ago, there was some confusion as to whether there was an understanding on the part of the enemy that if we stopped the bombing of North Vietnam they would stop the shelling of cities in South Vietnam. I want to be sure that there is no misunderstanding on the part of the enemy with regard to our withdrawal program. We have noted the reduced level of infiltration, the reduction of our casualties, and are basing our withdrawal decisions partially on those factors. If the level of infiltration or our casualties increase while we are trying to scale down the fighting, it will be the result of a conscious decision by the enemy. Hanoi could make no greater mistake than to assume that an increase in violence will be to its advantage. If I conclude that increased enemy action jeopardizes our remaining forces in Vietnam, I shall not hesitate to take strong and effective measures to deal with that situation. This is not a threat. This is a statement of policy, which as Commander in Chief of our Armed Forces, I am making in meeting my responsibility for the protection of American fighting men wherever they may be. My fellow Americans, I am sure you can recognize from what I have said that we really only have two choices open to us if we want to end this war. —I can order an immediate, precipitate withdrawal of all Americans from Vietnam without regard to the effects of that action. —Or we can persist in our search for a just peace through a negotiated settlement if possible, or through continued implementation of our plan for Vietnamization if necessary—a plan in which we will withdraw all of our forces from Vietnam on a schedule in accordance with our program, as the South Vietnamese become strong enough to defend their own freedom. I have chosen this second course. It is not the easy way. It is the right way. It is a plan which will end the war and serve the cause of peace—not just in Vietnam but in the Pacific and in the world. In speaking of the consequences of a precipitate withdrawal, I mentioned that our allies would lose confidence in America. Far more dangerous, we would lose confidence in ourselves. Oh, the immediate reaction would be a sense of relief that our men were coming home. But as we saw the consequences of what we had done, inevitable remorse and divisive recrimination would scar our spirit as a people. We have faced other crises in our history and have become stronger by rejecting the easy way out and taking the right way in meeting our challenges. Our greatness as a nation has been our capacity to do what had to be done when we knew our course was right. I recognize that some of my fellow citizens disagree with the plan for peace I have chosen. Honest and patriotic Americans have reached different conclusions as to how peace should be achieved. In San Francisco a few weeks ago, I saw demonstrators. carrying signs reading: "Lose in Vietnam, bring the boys home." Well, one of the strengths of our free society is that any American has a right to reach that conclusion and to advocate that point of view. But as President of the United States, I would be untrue to my oath of office if I allowed the policy of this Nation to be dictated by the minority who hold that point of view and who try to impose it on the Nation by mounting demonstrations in the street. For almost 200 years, the policy of this Nation has been made under our Constitution by those leaders in the Congress and the White House elected by all of the people. If a vocal minority, however fervent its cause, prevails over reason and the will of the majority, this Nation has no future as a free society. And now I would like to address a word, if I may, to the young people of this Nation who are particularly concerned, and I understand why they are concerned, about this war. I respect your idealism. I share your concern for peace. I want peace as much as you do. There are powerful personal reasons I want to end this war. This week I will have to sign 83 letters to mothers, fathers, wives, and loved ones of men who have given their lives for America in Vietnam. It is very little satisfaction to me that this is only one-third as many letters as I signed the first week in office. There is nothing I want more than to see the day come when I do not have to write any of those letters. —I want to end the war to save the lives of those brave young men in Vietnam. —But I want to end it in a way which will increase the chance that their younger brothers and their sons will not have to fight in some future Vietnam someplace in the world. —And I want to end the war for another reason. I want to end it so that the energy and dedication of you, our young people, now too often directed into bitter hatred against those responsible for the war, can be turned to the great challenges of peace, a better life for all Americans, a better life for all people on this earth. I have chosen a plan for peace. I believe it will succeed. If it does succeed, what the critics say now won't matter. If it does not succeed, anything I say then won't matter. I know it may not be fashionable to speak of patriotism or national destiny these days. But I feel it is appropriate to do so on this occasion Two hundred years ago this Nation was weak and poor. But even then, America was the hope of millions in the world. Today we have become the strongest and richest nation in the world. And the Wheel of destiny has turned so that any hope the world has for the survival of peace and freedom will be determined by whether the American people have the moral stamina and the courage to meet the challenge of free world leadership. Let historians not record that when America was the most powerful nation in the world we passed on the other side of the road and allowed the last hopes for peace and freedom of millions of people to be suffocated by the forces of totalitarianism. And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support. I pledged in my campaign for the Presidency to end the war in a way that we could win the peace. I have initiated a plan of action which will enable me to keep that pledge. The more support I can have from the American people, the sooner that pledge can be redeemed; for the more divided we are at home, the less likely the enemy is to negotiate at Paris. Let us be united for peace. Let us also be united against defeat. Because let us understand: North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States. Only Americans can do that. Fifty years ago, in this room and at this very desk, President Woodrow Wilson spoke words which caught the imagination of a war-weary world. He said: "This is the war to end war." His dream for peace after World War I was shattered on the hard realities of great power politics and Woodrow Wilson died a broken man. Tonight I do not tell you that the war in Vietnam is the war to end wars. But I do say this: I have initiated a plan which will end this war in a way that will bring us closer to that great goal to which Woodrow Wilson and every American President in our history has been dedicated—the goal of a just and lasting peace. As President I hold the responsibility for choosing the best path to that goal and then leading the Nation along it. I pledge to you tonight that I shall meet this responsibility with all of the strength and wisdom I can command in accordance with your hopes, mindful of your concerns, sustained by your prayers. Thank you and goodnight.

More Richard M. Nixon speeches

US has long history of college protests: Here's what happened in the past

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have taken over parts of college campuses across the U.S., the latest in a decades-long string of protests ignited by political activism — some of which have spiraled into violence amid police crackdowns .

In the past, free speech sit-ins quickly escalated into massive rallies, Vietnam War college demonstrations turned deadly and U.S. civil rights protests ended in mass arrests.

The circumstances of each protest were different, but the story is familiar: Young people demanded changes on their campuses or in the world — and their impassioned demonstrations often escalated amid clashes with authorities.

Columbia , the university at the center of the current wave of protests, has even seen similar protests before, including during the Vietnam War in 1968. Demonstrations led the university to end classified war research and stop military recruitment, among other changes, wrote Rosalind Rosenberg, a professor of history at Barnard College, for Barnard Magazine .

Today's demonstrators also have specific changes in mind, often involving divestment from Israel , citing the deaths of more than 34,000 Palestinian people who died in Gaza amid Israel's bombardment and ground assault. That military campaign was triggered by Hamas' incursion into southern Israel on Oct. 7, when about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and more than 240 people were taken hostage.

But as campus authorities react swiftly, citing safety concerns and calling in police to break up encampents, it's unclear if or how the current protests will influence the Israel-Hamas war.

USA TODAY revisited four monumental campus protests to explain how college protests have become a staple of American life and often influence the outcomes of political strife. Here's a look at how previous campus protests unfolded — and whether they were successful in their causes.

University of California, Berkeley: Free Speech in 1960s

At the University of California Berkeley starting in 1964, students protested the university's limits on political activities and free speech during the civil rights movement and Vietnam-war era.

"In the wake of  McCarthyism’s  anti-Communist sentiments during the 1950s, public universities in California had enacted numerous regulations limiting  students’ political activities ," wrote Karen Aichinger for the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee University. "At the University of California, Berkeley, student groups taking part in any on- or off-campus political activities were banned from campus."

What transpired were "small sit-ins and demonstrations" that "escalated into a series of large-scale rallies and protests demanding full constitutional rights on campus," reads the UC Berkeley website.

Nearly 800 students were arrested by local police as a result.

The students' protest ultimately worked in their favor. The university eventually overturned policies that would restrict the content of speech or advocacy, according to the college.

"Today, the Movement stands as a symbol of the importance of protecting and preserving free speech and academic freedom," reads the UC Berkeley website.

Kent State University in Ohio: Vietnam War in 1970

The most prolific university protest of the Vietnam War happened at Kent State University in Ohio in May 1970. Students started protesting the Vietnam War and the U.S. invasion of Cambodia on their campus on May 2. Two days later, the National Guard opened fire into a sea of antiwar protesters and passerbys. The soldiers killed four young people – Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Knox Schroeder – and injured several others with their violence.

"The impact of the shootings was dramatic," wrote Jerry Lewis and Thomas Hensley in an article for Kent State University. "The event triggered a nationwide student strike that forced hundreds of colleges and universities to close."

The shootings also influenced national politics, Lewis and Hensley wrote.

"In The Ends of Power, (H.R.) Haldeman, (a top aide to President Richard Nixon), states that the shootings at Kent State began the slide into Watergate, eventually destroying the Nixon administration," the article reads.

Today, the protest and shootings "certainly come to symbolize the deep political and social divisions that so sharply divided the country during the Vietnam War era," Lewis and Hensley wrote.

Jackson State College in Mississippi: Racial Injustice in 1970

Days after the shootings at Kent State, police opened gunfire at a college dormitory Jackson State College in Mississippi, a school with a predominantly Black student population.

Black students there were protesting racial injustice, including how they were treated by white drivers speeding on campus, according to the university .

Police received a call that Black young people were throwing rocks at white drivers near the campus. Police arrived at the scene and shot hundreds of bullets into Alexander Hall, according to an FBI report, NPR reported . Police killed two students – Phillip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green – and injured 12 others. The college also canceled its graduation due to the killings and unrest.

At a 2021 commencement ceremony, the university honored 74 of the students who were unable to walk the stage in 1970, NBC reported . At the commencement ceremony, Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba said police “unjustly gunned down two innocent young Black men, terrorized and traumatized a community of Black students and committed one of the gravest sins in our city’s history," NBC reported .

The killings at Jackson State College and Kent State University national sparked outrage. College students across the nation protested on their campuses, according to the Zinn Education Project , a collaboration of historical content from the groups  Rethinking Schools  and  Teaching for Change .

"The spring of 1970 saw the first general student strike in the history of the United States, students from over four hundred colleges and universities calling off classes to protest the invasion of Cambodia, the Kent State affair, the killing of two black students at Jackson State College in Mississippi, and the continuation of the war," wrote Howard Zinn in the book "You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train ."

Angus Johnston, an adjunct assistant professor at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York and a historian of student activism, said after both events: "There was a period of about 30 years or so where it tended to be fairly unlikely that campuses would respond with mass arrests even in the case of admin building occupations."

Nationwide: South Africa anti-Apartheid protests in 1985

Another form of popular college campus protest occurred in the 1980's. Students across the country wanted their colleges to cut ties with groups that supported from the South African apartheid.

"Under apartheid, race restricted every aspect of life for South Africans who were Black, Indian and colored — a multiracial classification created by the government," The New York Times reported . "There were strict limits on where they could live, attend school, work and travel.

Columbia University was at the center of the movement. Students led by the Coalition for a Free South Africa at Columbia University "blockaded Hamilton Hall, the university’s administrative building, leading to the first successful divestiture campaign at the university," reads a summary of the events from the Zinc Education Project .

There was less pushback for protesters during this time, due to a “certain embarrassment among elites in the United States that there was complicity with South Africa’s white government,” said Daniel Farber, a history professor at the University of Kansas who has studied American activism, reports Vox Media .

Columbia University was one of the first colleges to divest from doing business with South Africa and 155 universities followed suit. U.S. Congress also passed the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act in 1986, which aimed to prevent new trade and investment between the nation and South Africa.

What is the future of college protests in America?

Free speech experts told USA TODAY that students should continue to peacefully protest in open campus spaces to avoid conflict.

Alex Morey, the director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, encourages universities to remain neutral in times of unrest and not to call in authorities unless a demonstration turns violent. The national nonprofit defends Americans rights to free speech and thought.

"Peaceful protest is a hallmark of a healthy speech climate on American college campuses and it has been for decades – whether it's the Berkeley free speech movement, or students protesting the Vietnam War era or civil rights," Morey said. "Generations of students have felt passionately about certain issues and the open air places on campuses are great places to support their views."

Contact Kayla Jimenez at [email protected] .  Follow her on X at @kaylajjimenez.

Watch CBS News

Columbia University has a long history of campus protests. Here's a look back at some of them.

By Mark Prussin

Updated on: April 22, 2024 / 3:49 PM EDT / CBS New York

NEW YORK -- Columbia University students have used the campus to stage demonstrations for decades - long before the latest pro-Palestinian protests . Columbia is currently holding classes remotely as hundreds of pro-Palestinian protesters occupy the campus South Lawn.   

The student body at Columbia has a long history of activism, making their voices heard in some of the country's most important cultural debates.

Vietnam War protests, 1968

In 1968, students opposing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War  occupied several buildings on campus .  That protest lasted a week before police were brought in. Some protesters suffered minor injuries, according to a New York Times report . 

Anti-apartheid protests, 1984

In 1984, students led anti-apartheid protests calling on Columbia to divest from South Africa. Demonstrators gathered at the entrance to Hamilton Hall, one of the same buildings occupied in the 1968 demonstrations. 

Sexual assault protests, 2014

Thirty years later, in the wake of the  Ray Rice scandal , some students  carried mattresses  around to draw attention to the issue of  on-campus sexual assaults and the university's handling of reported rapes . 

Climate Change, 2019

In March 2019, Columbia students held one of the largest rallies in New York City during  a national strike over climate change . Students in over 130 cities skipped classes in protest.

Israel-Hamas war, 2023

Weeks after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 , hundreds of students gathered at the center of campus  protesting Columbia's decision to suspend the "Students for Justice in Palestine" and "Jewish Voice for Peace" groups for the semester.

Columbia's Special Committee on Campus Safety said, "The two groups repeatedly violated university policies related to holding campus events, culminating in an unauthorized event ... that proceeded despite warnings and included threatening rhetoric and intimidation."

The pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia have now been ongoing for nearly a week . The NYPD previously removed protesters that had built a makeshift encampment on the South Lawn , but a few days later, the tents had returned. 

• Columbia University
• Palestinians
• New York City

Mark Prussin is a Digital Producer at CBS New York. He covers breaking news, sports, politics and trending stories in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut for CBSNewYork.com. Mark joined the CBS New York team in 2019.

Featured Local Savings

More from cbs news.

Columbia University officials deny claims of lockdown, evictions on campus

Columbia students worried May 15 graduation will be disrupted

Columbia protest met with pro-Israel rally. Where things stand.

Why are more officers being assaulted? NYPD commissioner weighs in.

Four Vietnamese people smugglers arrested after advertising on Facebook

A further 12 individuals suspected of being linked to the same group were also arrested in France

Four Vietnamese nationals have been arrested by the National Crime Agency (NCA) after investigating smugglers advertising small boat crossings on Facebook.

Investigators in a joint UK-French operation allege that the group shared posts aimed at the Vietnamese community, with migrants charged up to £15,500 each to make the illegal crossing to Britain.

The officers arrested a 23-year-old woman at an address in Heathfield Road in Croydon, south London, a 64-year-old man at an address in Abinger Grove, London and a man, 34, in Grasmere Street, Leicester on Monday, the NCA said.

They were held on suspicion of assisting unlawful immigration and were later questioned.

All three were charged and appeared at Croydon magistrates court on Tuesday.

The 64-year-old is accused of acting as a driver who collected migrants from the south coast and brought them to an address in London.

A fourth individual, a 25-year-old man, was also arrested at the same Heathfield Road address in Croydon on Monday on a warrant issued by French authorities.

He will now face extradition proceedings after he was allegedly involved in people smuggling and drug offences.

A further 12 individuals suspected of being linked to the same group were also arrested in France.

The network was involved in drug smuggling, money laundering and sexual and labour exploitation,   Europol said.

In a statement, Europol, which is the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation , said that the network typically brought migrants to the EU on fraudulent working visas. They would then be taken through Poland, Germany and France before being smuggled into the United Kingdom on small boats.

Some migrants reportedly smuggled methamphetamine into France in exchange for a reduced price for a crossing into the UK. Others were forced to work in the sex trade or suffered labour exploitation in nail salons or grocery shops, Europol said.

Law enforcement authorities raided 16 locations across Britain and France and seized £85,000 in cash in different currencies, £250,000 held in bank accounts as well as luxury goods and watches, synthetic drugs and electronic equipment.

James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, said: “We are using every possible lever at our disposal to crack down on people smugglers and break their supply chains.

“Just last week, we signed a new agreement with Vietnam, strengthening our cooperation on illegal migration.

“Together with law enforcement agencies such as the NCA, our French partners, and other countries like Vietnam, we are committed to dismantling the criminal gangs who are trying to turn a profit by abusing our borders.”

Chris Farrimond, NCA director of threat leadership, said: “Vietnamese nationals now make up a large number of those we see arriving on small boats.

“We allege this group were advertising their crossing services on social media to encourage others from their country to make the same treacherous journey.

“The NCA is continuing our work with partners and has had thousands of social media pages and posts advertising organised immigration crime services removed from platforms.”

• United Kingdom,
• City of London,
• James Cleverly,
• Facebook Icon
• WhatsApp Icon

What is behind US college protests over Israel-Gaza war?

• Medium Text

WHAT ARE THE PROTESTERS DEMANDING?

Who are the protesters, what has been the response from authorities.

WHAT HAS BEEN THE IMPACT ON REGULAR CAMPUS LIFE?

How are political leaders responding.

Sign up here.

Reporting by Julia Harte in New York, Kanishka Singh in Washington, Brendan O'Brien in Chicago, and Andrew Hay in Albuquerque, New Mexico, Editing by Rosalba O'Brien

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. New Tab , opens new tab

World Chevron

Philippine students suffer in wilting heat, thwarting education efforts

Sweltering heat in the Philippines can curb farm production, disrupt water and power and weigh on businesses, but it also takes a toll on students, hampering the Southeast Asian nation's efforts to catch up to its neighbours in education.