Quick questions on Anti-war movement and media: HSC Modern History Indochina

The anti-war movement in the United States emerged from the student left, civil rights activism, and pacifist traditions. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Vietnam Day Committee organised teach-ins from March 1965; the University of Michigan teach-in (24 to 25 March 1965) drew 3,000.

On 30 April 1970 President Nixon announced the Cambodian incursion on television. The next week saw protests on 450 university campuses. At Kent State University in Ohio on 4 May 1970, Ohio National Guard troops, called by Governor James Rhodes, fired 67 rounds in 13 seconds at students protesting on the Commons. Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder were killed; nine were wounded.

Vietnam was the first "television war". By 1968 over 90 per cent of US homes had a television; the evening news broadcast 15- to 20-minute war segments most nights. Combat footage was filmed on 16mm film, flown back, and aired with two- to three-day delay.

Daniel Ellsberg, an analyst at the RAND Corporation, copied and leaked a classified 7,000-page Department of Defense history (United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945 to 1967) to The New York Times. The first instalment ran on 13 June 1971. The Nixon administration sought a prior restraint injunction.

Australia's commitment in April 1965 was paralleled by domestic resistance. Conscription under the National Service Act of 24 November 1964 selected 20-year-olds by ballot. The Save Our Sons movement (1965, led by Joyce Golgerth, Joan Coxsedge and others) opposed conscription. Don Maclean and Bill White's draft refusal cases drew attention.

The movement did not in itself end the war. The DRV's strategy and the South Vietnamese collapse in 1975 ended it. The movement did: - foreclose Johnson's choices after Tet (the rejection of Westmoreland's 206,000-troop request); - force Nixon to publicise Vietnamisation and a phased withdrawal from June 1969; - constrain the Cambodian incursion of 1970 (Cooper-Church); - end the draft (1 July 1973); - discredit the imperial presidency (War Powers Resolution, 7 November 1973); - shape the Paris Peace Accords as a face-saving exit rather than a victorious settlement.

Tom Wells (The War Within, 1994) is the standard study of the US movement.

The movement constrained; it did not decide. Tet's effect on opinion was the trigger.

The Melbourne Moratorium of 8 May 1970 is the canonical Australian example.

4 May 1970, four days after the Cambodian incursion announcement.