trangbang68:
“Ayers was a self serving phony little rich boy elitist … there was no huge support for Kerry’s stand. If there was why did Nixon win in a landslide in 1972? …. the antiwar protests ended when the draft lottery began.”
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In 1971 when John Kerry led the 800 veterans who threw away their ribbons and medals, I was a 19-year-old university student, so I have personal knowledge of the opinions and attitudes that were common on campuses at that time. I was also acquainted with some veterans who were classmates.
By the way, I remember that a lot of the members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War could not travel to Washington DC, so there were similar demonstrations at state capitals across the country. So the total number of veterans who threw away their ribbons and medals on that day was significantly higher than the 800 in Washington DC.
People who opposed the war felt passionately about their opinions. Many became quite radical.
A few, like Ayers, became extreme and destructive. Every large campus had a group of such extremists. At my campus, there were a couple of bombings and the ROTC building was frequently attacked. I remember attending a meeting where people proposed to destroy the campus’s computer center. The campus newspaper published discussions about whether and when violence was justified in opposing the war.
Throughout the entire USA, there probably were a few thousand people who basically became as extreme as Ayers. He was just much more effective than most of them in organizing a secret group that actually managed to explode a lot of bombs.
A much larger number, perhaps in the tens of thousands, returned or burned their draft cards or actively evaded military conscription or decided that they would evade if conscripted. Females were not conscripted, but similar numbers agreed and encouraged males to resist or evade conscription.
Morale in the US military was relatively low, especially in Vietnam. Most of the soldiers there had been conscripted or had volunteered only because they expected to be conscripted. US soldiers did commit a lot of atrocities. There was a lot of talk that there were incidents when US soldiers fragged their own officers. There was quite a lot of drug abuse, including heroin. There were free-fire zones. There was napalm. There was Agent Orange. We shouldn’t exaggerate the problems in our military at that time, but we shouldn’t whitewash them either.
Racial conflicts were a crucial part of this entire situation. The Jim Crow laws were overturned only in 1965, just six years before that day when hundreds of veterans threw away their medals. There were race riots, which included major arson, during the entire 1960s. Blacks were not as able to evade military conscription by attending college. There were radical Black groups like The Black Panthers.
This was the environment where John Kerry and Bill Ayers did what they did. They were in their mid-twenties. In 1971 both of them were about 28 years old. They were old enough to become the leaders of radical organizations in which most of the members were in their early or mid 20s. They got carried away and made a lot of mistakes.
After the Vietnam War ended, most of this radicalism dissipated. Practically all the radicals drifted away from their radical activities and organizations and joined more conventional activities and organizations.
This is true even in the case of an extreme case like Ayers. He quit the Weather Underground in 1980 and has led a law-abiding life for the following 28 years until now and probably will continue to do so for the rest of his life.
