Vietnam: a Matter of Perspective by Howard Zinn

Those of us who had been involved in the Southern movement were not likely to accept, without deep suspicion, that the United States government-so loath to protect equal rights in its own country-was dropping bombs in Vietnam on behalf of democracy or liberty or self-determination or any other noble principle. In August 1964, the bodies of civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner were discovered in Neshoba County, Mississippi, shot to death. Earlier in the summer, a delegation of black Mississippians had traveled to Washington to plead with the national government for federal protection, and was received with silence. At a memorial service for the three young men, Bob Moses, SNCC organizer in Mississippi, held up a copy of that morning's newspaper which headlined LBJ SAYS SHOOT TO KILL IN THE GULF OF TONKIN. The United States had been conducting secret naval operations off the coast of North Vietnam and now claimed U. S. destroyers, on "routine patrol," had been fired on-a claim full of deceptions and outright lies, it turned out. Moses commented bitterly on the fact that the federal government refused protection for civil rights workers but was ready to send its armed forces halfway around the world for a cause no one could reasonably explain. I became involved in the antiwar movement very soon after that summer, spoke at the first antiwar rally on the Boston Common in the spring of 1965, and began writing about the war. In 1967 Beacon Press published my book Vietnam: The Logic of Withdrawal, which immediately went through eight printings. Reprinted here is the introductory chapter to that book.

Vietnam, it seems to me, has become a theater of the absurd. 1. By late 1966, the United States was spending for the Vietnam war at an annual rate of twenty billion dollars, enough to give every family in South Vietnam (whose normal annual income is not more than several hundred dollars) about $5,000 for the year. Our monthly expentiture for the war exceeds our annual expenditure for the Great Society's poverty program.