When House Speaker Mike Johnson, in late April, rushed to Columbia University to condemn anti-war student protesters, suggesting it might be time to call in the National Guard, it was impossible not to think of the Kent State massacre. On May 4, 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard killed four unarmed college students during a Vietnam War protest.
We are not at that point yet. But crackdowns on protests at college campuses across the country have been reaching Vietnam-era intensity. It is appalling to watch scenes like an economics professor being thrown to the ground by police at Emory University in Georgia, and Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott crowing about sending in state troopers to arrest undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin because “these protesters belong in jail” and “antisemitism will not be tolerated in Texas.”
Rightwingers are eager to redirect public outrage from the horrific civilian death toll in Gaza to protests on U.S. campuses. In a video statement in April, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu outrageously compared anti-war demonstrations at college campuses to Nazi rallies in Germany in the 1930s.
We’ve seen this type of distraction before. When the murder of George Floyd by police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, shocked the nation in 2020, Fox News and Republican politicians quickly changed the channel by pumping up exaggerated stories about rioters wreaking havoc, even though the vast majority of Black Lives Matter protests were peaceful. They managed to shift the conversation from police violence and systemic racism back to “law and order” so they could continue the repression.
Now we have an authoritarian Republican presidential candidate arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court that he should be allowed to murder his political rivals with impunity. Stirring up a panicked cry for public safety helps set the stage for Donald Trump’s dream of martial law.
Antisemitism—the allegation used to justify the campus crackdowns—is a real phenomenon. But it is certainly not the prominent feature of the anti-war movement. Beneath Abbott’s post on X about rounding up University of Texas students and expelling “antisemites” is a barrage of vitriol about Jews and a meme of a man various commenters insist is Abbott’s “master”—a guy in a wheelchair wearing a kippa and kissing the Western Wall. These commenters, many of whom want Abbott to stop taking directions from “the Jews” and instead send law enforcement officers to round up “illegals” at the southern border, seem to be the same neo-Nazi types Trump has described as “very fine people.”
It’s also true that there are antisemitic elements in the protest movement. Khymani James, the protest leader at Columbia who ranted in a video earlier this year about killing Zionists, has become Exhibit A, the subject of massive media coverage. He later repudiated his own remarks, and he and other student protest leaders have said the comments don’t represent the entire movement. But this and many other incidents in which Jewish students have been singled out in classes, pushed to defend Israel and the war, or heckled on campus understandably make Jewish students feel that they are navigating a hostile environment.
But it’s a grotesque exaggeration to say that peace activists on campus are, in general, a threat to the safety of Jewish students and must be quelled with violence. Stoking fear of anti-war protesters is akin to the popular rightwing claim that the immigrants who pick crops, milk cows, and clean hotel rooms across the country are dangerous “military-aged men” who are “invading” the United States.
How are we supposed to keep our heads in this dangerous, overwrought time? It helps to have some historical perspective.
I recently finished reading historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s fascinating memoir, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s. In it, Kearns Goodwin describes her journey through the same types of political and cultural conflicts we are experiencing today.
Weaving together personal and political history, she traces our country’s journey from the bright optimism of the civil rights movement and the war on poverty through the dark days of the assassinations of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the horror of the Vietnam War, and the brutal backlash against youth counterculture that led to Richard Nixon’s presidency.
It’s touching to read about the idealism of the early 1960s, and crushing to feel the weight of the subsequent descent into disillusionment and violence during that decade.
Kearns Goodwin describes her process of researching the book with her late husband, Richard Goodwin, using his massive collection of papers. He was the chief speechwriter and confidant of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, as well as candidates Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy during their anti-war presidential campaigns.
It was Goodwin who wrote the moving speech Johnson delivered when he called on Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act in 1965, which ended with a line from the civil rights anthem, “We Shall Overcome.” Later, he broke with Johnson over Vietnam.
At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Goodwin, then working for McCarthy, an anti-war candidate, witnessed the violent attacks by Chicago police on protesters, bystanders, and journalists.
In her book, Kearns Goodwin quotes reporter Jack Newfield, who encountered Richard Goodwin in the hotel lobby at the convention with “the ashen nub of a cigar sticking out of his fatigued face, mumbl[ing], ‘This is just the beginning. There’ll be four more years of this.’ ”
Later that night, Hubert Humphrey beat McCarthy and won the Democratic nomination for President. Television coverage showed a split screen, Kearns Goodwin writes: “On one side, the uproar at the convention, with cheers and jeers in equal order; on the other, edited footage from the bloodbath earlier that night, the sight of bodies cowering under police clubs, the sounds of shrieks and sobbing. Humphrey captured the nomination on the first ballot, but on this night, Theodore White’s notes read: “ ‘The Democrats are finished.’ ”
That turned out to be true. The Vietnam War, which the Johnson Administration and the Pentagon had already begun to recognize as the colossally wasteful loss it would become, continued for seven more years.
This year, Republicans would be delighted to see the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago engulfed in clashes between police and protesters in a repeat of 1968. Chaos, violence, and division are the perfect medium for Trump. And it’s a rightwing fantasy that the “culture war” politics Republicans have been stoking would lead to actual bloody conflict. It’s important to resist such insanity.
It’s almost impossible today to connect with the ambitious optimism about American democracy of the 1960s. Even then it was tinged with willful ignorance—what author James Baldwin described in The Fire Next Time as “the collection of myths to which white Americans cling: that their ancestors were all freedom-loving heroes, that they were born in the greatest country the world has ever seen, or that Americans are invincible in battle and wise in peace.”
From the beginning there has been a lot of cognitive dissonance among the citizens of a nation founded on the principle of equality and an economy of slavery. Even when an idealistic young Goodwin was working for Kennedy’s Peace Corps and the Alliance for Progress in Latin America, U.S. foreign policy was propping up the interests of big corporations, including by violently repressing popular movements in other countries, all while claiming to defend democracy around the globe. But the Goodwins were not alone in their belief that young, idealistic Americans could change the world for the better. In some significant ways—including civil rights and anti-poverty programs and, finally, stopping the war in Vietnam—they did.
Today, after Vietnam and Watergate and Iraq and Afghanistan and George Floyd and Gaza, it has become impossible to recover that deluded American innocence of the early 1960s. That sunny, can-do optimism has curdled into cynicism for many on the left and, on the right, Trump’s brand of angry, defensive white nationalism, which constantly harps on the idea of making America great again. American greatness can no longer be taken for granted, no matter how many protest camps are cleared away.
Kearns Goodwin worked for Johnson and came away with a deeply nuanced sense of his immense talents and flaws; she wrote his biography, along with biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt. She takes a long view of history. So did her husband, whom she movingly describes at the end of his life as overcoming his own sense of discouragement when he realized how short a time the United States has existed and how much change had occurred in his lifetime.
“Too often memories of assassination, violence, and social turmoil have obscured the greatest illumination of the sixties: the spark of communal idealism and belief that kindled social justice and love for a more inclusive vision of America,” Kearns Goodwin writes.
It’s a helpful reminder that even in the darkest of times that hopeful vision lives on.