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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
most useful history of anti-war movement available, May 24, 2001
This book by Fred Halstead is the most detailed and accurate account of the movement against the war in Viet Nam in the U.S. which has been written. A particular strength of the book is that it places the war and the movement against it within an international context. The author's attention to fact and detail (the book is well footnoted) recreate the mood and the political battles of the movement's conferences and debates. This book is a good starting place for a person who knew nothing about the anti-war movement or the 60's and early 70's. It is essential for anyone studying the war in Viet Nam. It is a particularly useful book for those looking to learn how a powerful political movement can be built.Halstead's discussion of the debates within the civil rights organizations and unions is an important contribution. This book though stands above all others in it's treatment of the anti-war organizing of active duty G.I.s and Viet Nam veterens. G.I.s were an essential componant of the movement. These sections of the book are among it's strongest and are an antidote to both liberal and conservative views of the war. Finally, Halstead states that he has an opinion. A member of the Socialist Workers Party he was a key player in the events he recounts. Because of his honesty and fairness this is a strength of the book, rather than a weakness.
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Good History, August 29, 1999
By A Customer
Halstead's book is a good history of the anti-war movement, much of which has been forgotten. The book's weakness, however, is the trotskyite sectarianism of the author which causes him to disparage the contributions of others like Dave Dellinger, Tom Hayden (who in a book once referred to the "hardworking Trotskyist foot soldiers" of the movement), the Chicago 8 and SDS. In the process Halstead unwittingly recycles right-wing stereotypes about hippies and student protestors. In particular, his rendition of the events of the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, which Halstead and his followers walked away from, is closer to the version of events promulgated by Mayor Daley than it is to what actually happened which as a presidential commission correctly determined was a "police riot." Halstead tries to justify this by making a false dichotomy between "ultraleft" extremism and "mass action." In actuality the protest in Chicago, like the civil rights march in Selma in 1965, was a peaceful mass protest which was attacked by the authorities who refused to allow the demonstrators to exercise their constitutional rights. In spite of certain contradictions among the various progressive forces in the radical movement (contradictions which the US government sought to exacerbate through programs like COINTELPRO), the historical fact is that the great mass protests of the anti-war movement were the product of a broad based united-front among all on the left. The most notable examples were the Oct/Nov 1969 protests organized by New Mobe and the Vietnam Moratorium and the April 1971 protests organized by NPAC, PCPJ and Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Notes of a participant, January 17, 2003
Like almost all of the real leaders of the antiwar movement, Fred Halstead, is an unknown name when the antiwar movement is discussed in the press and media. He was a respected figure across the movement by people who agreed and disagreed with him, an an important leader who helped chart a central political course for the movement, often selected to negotiate with the government and police in the biggest demonstrations of the 1960s and 1970s. He also was an experience revolutionary working class militant with experiences going back to the antiwar struggles of GIs and sailors at the end
of WWII. His history is the only decent political history of the struggle against the Vietnam war, and the only political analysis that is useful. It is written not as nostalgia, not as memoir, not as history for academics, but written so future generations of fighters against war, for workers, for women, for Blacks, Chicanos, and other oppressed people can use it to deepen their fights and win the way the antiwar movement did. The pictures in the newest editions of this book are so good that I bought it even though I had the book since it came out.
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