After America’s full involvement in what was formerly Vietnam’s civil war,
American society showed early signs of a division along generational lines. The
dissent with Johnson’s policies first manifested in the younger generation, which
slowly turned political as the war started to affect them personally, while,
according to Lytle, the greater number of people in America in the 1960s
retained an unquestioning patriotism (Lytle, 2006, p. 174). For example, college
students that had before been exempt from the draft for the time of their studies
could be drafted if their test results and grades were below a certain threshold,
leading to insecurities among the student population (Grace, 2016, p. 77). The
dividing line was therefore more between generations than between political
parties – the main opposition came from younger people.
It is always difficult to determine a general attitude in hindsight, which is
why many scholars express different opinions on whether the majority of
Americans supported the war in the beginning. Frederik Logevall, for example,
sees the majority more in the group of people calling for negotiations and who
did not want to escalate the conflict in early 1965 (Logevall, 2004, p. 102).
Randall Woods, conversely, takes the stance that most American people “saw no
moral alternative” to a war “to preserve a non-Communist entity in South
Vietnam” and only objected to “how that war was being conducted” (Woods,
2007, p. 8). The blurred lines between support and criticism of the war and these
different perceptions of where the majority of people stood on this issue makes
it clear how there was no obvious majority on either side – and how divided the
people really were concerning the war. Lytle comments that the inability to come
to a satisfying conclusion for both sides did “much damage to the cold war
consensus” in the long term (Lytle, 2006, p. 178).
This divide would only fully show after 1968 since politicians still perceived
the public support for the war to be rather high. In fact, all presidential
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