Today’s antiwar activists can learn a lot from the tactics and strategies that put an end to the Vietnam War.

The decades-long resistance of the Vietnamese people, whose heroism is hard to overstate, was obviously a central factor in the US defeat. But Vietnamese revolutionaries were also the first to underscore that they could not win without a strong peace movement within the belly of the beast. To understand how that movement succeeded, there’s no better place to turn than Fred Halstead’s extraordinary 880-page history, Out Now: A Participant’s Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnam War.

Halstead served on the steering committees of virtually every national antiwar coalition from 1965 to 1975. He was a garment cutter, a World War II navy veteran, the presidential candidate for the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) in 1968, and at six feet six and 350 pounds, one of the most physically imposing chief marshals in the history of American protest. His book is a week-by-week, meeting-by-meeting account of how tenacious organizers built a movement that helped end a war and the strategic fights they had to win along the way to do it. As we’ll see, it was independent mass action — not liberalism nor ultraleftism — that proved most effective.

The Fight Over Demands

From its earliest days, the Vietnam antiwar movement was consumed by a three-way fight over what to demand. On the right stood organizations like SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, which wanted the movement to call for “negotiations.” Its logic was practical: all wars end with negotiations; the task was to strengthen the hand of congressional “doves” who were beginning to criticize escalation. SANE wanted to work closely with liberal Democratic politicians, to convince them that negotiations should begin. In that framework, “immediate withdrawal” slogans were a liability — they would shut off the friendly ears of establishment figures who accepted the basic premises of the Cold War.

The liberal wing of the movement thus hitched its fortunes to the Democratic Party, trusting that patient lobbying and respectable protest would eventually move the administration toward peace. But Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson had no intention of rolling back US imperial influence. Even as SANE and its allies cultivated relationships with sympathetic Democrats, LBJ was dramatically escalating — pouring hundreds of thousands of troops into Vietnam and intensifying the bombing of the North.

The strategy of working through friendly channels inside the party proved fruitless: the very politicians the liberals courted either fell in line behind the president or found themselves powerless to change his course.