A distorted misconception about communism, an obsession with stopping the spread of communism, and an inability to admit to wrong-doing and simply withdraw. Both Johnson and Nixon were egotistical and feared damaging American prestige. They kept getting deeper and deeper in the conflict, when they should have been pulling out.

-Did you think Communism was something to be feared by the United States?

Not at all. If democracy is so strong, it should be able to stand on its own merits without needing to go to war with other forms of government.

-Did you believe there was a racist aspect to the war?

There was a lot of racism involved in the war. The big, tough Americans were going to go kill the "gooks" in black pajamas. They didn't account for their strong-willed fight though, even in the face of incredible odds.

-In what ways was Vietnam different from wars of the past?

It was an unnecessary use of military might. In World War II, the public was very supportive of the war, because they recognized it as a necessity to our national security. In Vietnam, we were the aggressors, and the Vietnamese posed little threat to us.

-What were your personal beliefs that led you to oppose the war?

I felt that it was unjust for us to tell another country what kind of government they should have. I wasn't strongly anti-communist, and I didn't buy into the domino theory. My opposition was also partly selfish, because I didn't want to fight in a war that would put my life in danger.

-Many people, particularly politicians, changed their stance on Vietnam as the conflict progressed. Was this the case with you?

I didn't feel strongly one way or another until around 1967. Until then I wasn't terribly into the issue. I was more concerned with the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King's actions until then. The first time I started thinking about it was in my 10th grade history class, after my teacher started a class debate and brought the issue to our attention.

-Could you please describe some of the key points of the civil rights movement?

It centered around the Voting Rights Act. In most southern states, blacks were systematically excluded from voting by impossible literacy tests, constitutional tests, etc. that realistically kept them from voting. Racists kept getting elected and so it kept getting worse. Job discrimination, housing discrimination, and inferior education, were all major issues. It's funny… my mother, who was strongly opposed to the war, never particularly liked Martin Luther King. I never figured that one out.

-Your father was a World War II veteran. How did he feel about Vietnam?

He opposed it, but was relatively silent. He was a man of few words. He was a major during World War II, but never talked about his experiences. My mother was the most outspoken one in the family about the war. My entire family was against it.

-How did you feel about Ho Chi Minh as a national leader? What did you think about his attempts to contact United States authorities such as President Truman that were ignored?

I didn't know much about him, to be honest. I knew his form of government was a military dictatorship. I didn't admire the guy or anything, but it was a communist form of government and somehow the Vietnamese had to figure out how to deal with it within their own country. I didn't think that the U.S. should feel at liberty to install its military any time a communist government rose up. With regard to the second part of the question, I wasn't surprised by U.S. belligerence and knuckle-head diplomacy. Their egos wouldn't allow them to soften their stance. They wanted to settle it with guns. The single thing I remember most about Ho Chi Minh was one of our old protest chants: "Hey, hey, LBJ - how many kids did you kill today? Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh - Vietnam is going to win."

-Comparatively, how did you feel about Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam?

I thought he was nothing but a puppet of the U.S. government. He wasn't democratically elected either, and couldn't get the support of his own people. The U.S. always seems to be willing to deal with other dictators when it comes to fighting communism.

-Did you feel that U.S. efforts to block democratic elections sanctioned by the Geneva conference undermined its objectives in Vietnam?

Absolutely. We talked about being for democracy, yet we didn't foster democracy ourselves. In Vietnam we simply fostered military might, as well as dictatorships. We like dealing with any government that we can control.

-What was your reacstion after hearing about the assassination of John F. Kennedy?

I was in the 7th grade, in modern math class, around 3 in the afternoon. It was announced over the school's intercom. I was stunned, devastated. I remember going home in a state of shock. We all watched the news all night. My mom, in particular, was a huge JFK fan. He was nearly a saint in our household. She woke us up at 3 A.M. to let us all know he'd been elected. It wasn't until later that I realized he was largely responsible for our participation in Vietnam.

-… Martin Luther King, Jr.?

I feared for the future of the country. Cities were burning. When I heard the news I was at work. My boss, a pharmacist outside of Philadelphia said "Good, they finally got the nigger." I told him I had to go home. I couldn't believe in 1968 someone could still be that prejudiced. There was a real sense when I was in high school that the country was out of control. We all felt alienated from our government, that it was a bunch of old men who wanted to send young guys off to be killed. There was a sense in terms of race relations that it was never going to get any better.

-… Robert F. Kennedy?

He was the politician I liked the most when I was in high school. Bobby Kennedy was everything I thought a politician should be, but he wasn't bright as a politician. He just spoke his mind. He was a great friend of the poor and the oppressed. His assassination deepened the sense of the despair that myself and many other young people had. We thought any good leader who stepped forward was going to get killed.

-What was your opinion on the Gulf of Tonkin incident? Did you believe it was a justifiable cause for increased involvement?

No, I thought much of it was staged by President Johnson and the generals, just as the Spanish-American War had a staged naval incident leading to American involvement. Many of our wars we've been the aggressors, but we need to create an incident to "provoke" us. Johnson violated the War Powers Act by not getting a vote from Congress. Under the act, he needed Congress' support to go to war. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution gave him ultimate power to go to war without seeking congressional approval to go to war.

-In your opinion, what was the media's role during the Vietnam War?

Up until the Tet Offensive the media was definitely supportive of the government and its actions. In 1968, when the Tet Offensive started to break, Walter Cronkite, Huntley Brinkley, and others started questioning whether the media was getting the straight story. Robert McNamara and President Johnson were feeding them false information. The Tet Offensive opened the media's eyes to that.

-Did you see any of the live broadcasts of the Tet Offensive?

We watched the news every night. We realized there was no way, no how that the U.S. was going to win the war. Everyone who takes a history class knows that popular uprising and revolutions by indigenous people have overthrown unjust, repressive outside powers. It was beginning to look like the American Revolution. The Tet Offensive showed that old guys in black pajamas with rusty rifles could stifle America's military might, because they had the ambition to protect their homeland. President Johnson had been trying to convince Americans we were winning the war. The Tet Offensive disproved many of his claims.

-Describe some of the "counter culture" movements of the time. What aspects were central to the ideas of the Hippies, Yippies, Black Panthers, and Women's Liberation movements?

People were alienated from their cultures, so they set up subcultures. The women's movement was a natural outgrowth of the civil rights movement. Women wanted equal rights too. The Black Panthers were an outgrowth of the civil rights movement too, a militant wing of it. Eldredge Cleaver, Stokely Carmichael, and others said that civil rights was only going to come through the barrel of a gun. I heard some Black Panther rallies, but I never felt terribly sympathetic with their cause. The Hippie movement was really a self-indulgent drug culture of alienated people who just wanted to drop out of society and enjoy themselves. I was at some Yippie demonstrations. I tried to stay away from them for the most part - they were crazy. They'd carry around rocks and the like in their backpacks. I got tear gassed in Boston. Vice President Agnew came to town in 1970. Around 200,000 people came to "welcome" him. He had been quoted as saying students were "nabobs of negativism." The Yippies were throwing rocks. One of them threw a cherry bomb. I got out of there, but only after being tear gassed. They were much like Sam Adams during the American Revolution.

-Which of the counter culture movements did you sympathize most with, and why?

I was a member of Students for a Democratic Society. At Boston College it was called the Left Collective. Nationally, it was a movement of mostly students on campuses who organized to fight the war, for civil rights, etc. On our campus, we also fought an administration that we felt was ignoring the students. To this day, I don't know if the FBI has a file on me. They had them on most of the SDS members, I think. I've never found out for sure.

-Were there any religious groups that took an active political role in terms of the war?

The Society of Friends (Quakers) were at the forefront of the war protests. The Catholic Church and many other church groups went to the south to march in civil rights marches with Martin Luther King, and other prominent activists. All kinds of Protestant groups, Jewish groups, etc were supportive of the movement. Reverend William Sloane Coffin was the most vocal critic of the war that I heard speak.

-What role did music play in the anti-war movement?

When we marched, whether in Washington or in Boston, we would sing "Street Fighting Man" by the Rolling Stones. Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young were probably the most timely and appropriate band during Vietnam. I grew up playing the guitar, listening to Pete Sieger and Bob Dylan, whose songs were anti-war in general, if not entirely directed at Vietnam. It was both for entertainment value and political value.

-There were obviously quite a few sympathizers with the counter culture in the music business. Were their any prominent pro-war artists? If so, how were they received by the public?

There was one song that we all laughed about, "The Green Beret." John Wayne also had a movie about the green berets in the late ‘60s. We thought it was comical, really.

-What did you think about the events of the 1968 Democratic National Conference?

I was horrified watching it on TV. I was very pleased when Vice President Hubert Humphrey got to the microphone at the convention and tried to settle things down and warn Mayor Daly, who'd been very condescending about the whole situation. The police lost their cool and ran amok. The Yippies seized the opportunity, hoping to create a violent confrontation to negatively reflect on the police. There were other peaceful protesters, however, who were beaten and brutalized. During the protests I was in, I barely dodged a few police clubs, so I couldn't help but sympathize with them. During the Chicago 7 trial, Judge Julius Hoffman (an odd coincidence, considering Abbie Hoffman's name), took away the civil rights of many of the defendants. He wouldn't let some of them speak. Others were chained up. The afternoon that they were convicted, 100,000 people showed up on the Boston commons to protest the verdicts. The police lobbed tear gas at us, because "we didn't have a permit for a demonstration."

-Were you of the age that you were required to enter the draft during the Vietnam conflict?

I registered for the draft when I turned 18 in 1969. It was the first year of the lottery. Fortunately, I got a high lottery number, so I knew I wouldn't be drafted. They had dropped the college deferments that same year, so I was worried. My parents had given me permission to flee to Canada if necessary, but it didn't come to that.

-How did you feel about others who dodged the draft?

I didn't have a problem with most of the draft dodgers. I considered running to Canada myself, if circumstances required it. What I strongly objected to were those who dodged the draft while supporting the war, those who felt it was alright to send others off to their death but refused to go themselves.

-Did you know anyone closely who actually fought in Vietnam?

Loads of people. A lot of people I went to high school with. One came back a heroine addict. One didn't come back. Most of my college friends and I had agreed to take off to Canada if we were drafted. By the time I was a freshman in college the general population had largely turned against the war. We knew it would be over soon, one way or another.

-How did they feel about the war before entering it themselves? Afterward?

They were pro-war, mostly. By the time they came back, they were anti-war, and had suffered a great deal, both mentally and physically. Most of them, to this day, don't talk about it. I've only ever met one person, a pilot responsible for dropping napalm, who didn't later regret his service.

-Did you actively participate in any major protests?

Dow Chemical, the group responsible for most of the napalm production, came to Boston College to recruit new employees. We blocked their entrances. There were hundreds of us with protest signs. There was another one in April of '70, in Washington. My mother called to ask if I was going. I told her I had school papers to do, and I was broke. She told me there were more important things than school, and even offered to send me the bus fare. There were close to 10 busses from my campus that went during the night. I was near the White House. They had the building surrounded by busses, parked end to end, so you couldn't see or get through. On the other side of the busses, there were army jeeps with machine guns mounted on them. Before we got there, I heard Howard Zinn, Pete Sieger, and other speakers at a mall nearby. Then we marched to the White House. This was about a month before Kent State. If I was there after Kent State, I wouldn't have gotten near the White House. I saw a group of Yippies start rocking one of the busses. They flipped it. As they tried to climb over it to get in toward the white house, the machine guns jeeps turned toward them and they stopped. Instead, they started throwing rocks, and got themselves tear gassed. Largely, it was a good experience. The sight of the White House was scary though, that the country had gotten to that point. My sister went to another rally shortly after. Thousands, including my sister, were arrested and thrown into the Washington Red Skins stadium over night. Even common citizens, lawyers, etc, had accidently been arrested.

-What was your response when you heard about what happened at Kent State?

I was a college student, at the time. We were aghast. We were afraid that the national guard and the army were just going to start killing college kids. That the government was sick of protests and was going to start responding with guns. I went to the college chaplain and requested a public mass for the students at Kent State the morning after. He said "Why are you so insistent about this?" I told him that some Yippies were planning to try to torch a building on campus the next day where the ROTC was located, and I hoped that a public ceremony would curtail their aggressiveness. While I supported war protests, I didn't want to allow that to happen. I was afraid people would get hurt at the building. They didn't torch it, but it was vandalized while the mass was going on.

-What was your reaction to Nixon's bombing of Cambodia?

Nixon decided the North Vietnamese army was hiding in Cambodia in the spring of 1970, so he bombed it. That was when we loaded up buses for the march on Washington. We felt that the government was operating behind our backs.

-How did you feel about the Watergate scandal?

"Thank God for Watergate," was all we could say. We carried signs that said "Dick Nixon, before he dicks you." We really disliked the guy. Had it not been for Watergate, the war probably would have gone on considerably longer. We were all very pleased that he resigned from the presidency in disgrace.

-Is there any one thing that you did, or didn't, do during that time period that you most regret?

I regret missing Woodstock, but I'm not sure I'd put that first. We felt sort of powerless with our protests, even with how large they were. That feeling of powerlessness still makes me feel negatively about things today. I'm pleased that I went to the protests, certainly. I just regret that it took so long to end a war that 50,000 Americans and probably millions of Vietnamese died in, unjustly.

-In your opinion, what will the legacy of the Vietnam War be? What do you think America learned from its experiences there?

Most of the people in my generation learned that they couldn't trust the government, because old guys will happily send young guys off to get killed for causes not worth dying for. We, unfortunately, did not learn the lesson of not invading other countries. We still have a colonial interventionist attitude when it comes to protecting American businesses.

-How do you think Vietnam can be related to the present conflict in Iraq? Are the two similar?

George W. Bush didn't learn the lessons of the war. It appears that he is protecting American business and oil interests by use of military might rather than diplomacy, or some other form of getting rid of a dictator without exacting hardship on an entire population. Bush on weapons of mass destruction sounded just like Johnson with the domino theory to me… that if we didn't stop it here, it would expand to other countries. He's been using fear and lies to get the American public behind him. Right now, Michael Moore is probably the best critic of Bush's tactics.