The Sixties in America Primary Sources | The Antiwar Movement

Like the American involvement in the Vietnam War (1954–75), the movement to protest that war started slowly. Before President Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973; served 1963–69) asked Congress for authorization to broaden American involvement in Vietnam in August of 1964, most Americans did not even realize that the United States had a stake in the small country in Southeast Asia. But those few political activists who knew Vietnam and its history as a French colony perceived it to be a small, impoverished country that wished to shake off the yoke of French domination and practice self-government—much...