How does the US antiwar movement today differ from that of 1967-1968

Schools are out, summer vacations fixed. But if the past is any guide to the future, United States university campuses come autumn will again erupt in demonstrations with inevitable violence and arrests if Israel continues its war on Gaza.

I covered my first antiwar demonstration on October 21, 1967. Then a 19-year-old cub reporter for a local Washington, DC, radio station, I marched with nearly 100,000 people across the Arlington Memorial Bridge into Virginia and on to the Pentagon. They were a mixed lot. Most just wanted to end the Vietnam War and bring home the more than 380,000 soldiers fighting there. But some seemed to be rooting for the Vietnamese communists to win. A 29-year-old protest leader named Walter Teague, who I came to know, carried a Viet Cong flag. Famed novelist Norman Mailer later profiled Teague in his book Armies of the Night, calling him a longtime “revolutionary” who believed in the communist “liberation” of Vietnam.

I watched US marshals manhandle 700 young people and take them into custody outside the doors of the Pentagon that night. Two years later, I left the US to report the war from Vietnam.