"Religion and Radical Politics, " published by Temple Univ. Press, byRobert H. Craig. Examines A.J. Muste, Dorothy Day, who were exemplary, and other figures like CPUSA fellow traveller, Harry F. Ward, who was a naive fool.The final chapter, "The Great Evasion: Religion, Marxism, and the Politics of Non-Violence, " compares Niebuhr and Muste.(That chapter title, cf. an ignored work of Christian Socialist, William A. Williams, "The Great Evasion: An Essay on the Contemporary Relevance of Karl Marx & on the Wisdom of Admitting the Heretic into the Dialogue about America's Future, " (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1964), was savaged by Genovese at the time in Studies on the Left.
William K. Tabb, ed. Churches in the Struggle: Liberation Theologies and Social Change in North America, Monthly Review Press, 1986.
Michael Ferber, draft resister in the 60's (see, "The Resistance, Ferber and Staughton Lynd, Beacon Press, '67 or so.) , The Nation, "The Religious Left is the only Left we've got, " 1987.
Counterpoint, Richard John Neuhaus, former leftist, former
Catholic, observes on Clergy and Laity Concerned about Vietnam,
http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9603/public.html
on Adam Garfinkle's neo-con book on the anti-Vietnam War movement
(good read, I read it several yrs. ago. Extensively documented.)
>...But he seems not to know quite what to do with that other antiwar
movement of the liberals and right liberals. At this point I must
declare interest, for I was intensely engaged in some of the
organizations discussed by Garfinkle. I was for years on the national
board of SANE, the organization most publicly associated with Norman
Cousins, Norman Thomas, and Dr. Benjamin Spock. (To my later regret, I
sided with Spock against Cousins in opening SANE to the left, which
led to its eventual assimilation into the anti-Amerika posture of the
radicals.) And, in the fall of 1964, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, the late
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and I started Clergy Concerned About
Vietnam (later called Clergy and Laity Concerned [CALC], which also
veered sharply to the left by 1971, after I had withdrawn from a
leadership role).
Garfinkle seems ambivalent about the more liberal and "establishment" antiwar movement represented by SANE and CALC. In his account, such organizations segue into the discussion of "Congressional antiwar influence" as exercised by, for instance, Senators William Fulbright and Mark Hatfield. It is true that "our" part of the antiwar movement, although it had its moments of high drama, was not nearly so colorful as the countercultural antics of the Yippies, Maoists, Motherf______, and assorted anarchists. But it takes a contorted redefinition of influence to deny that the liberal pressure against the war had a significant bearing, for better or for worse, on decision-making.
Prior to the abandonment of fixed war aims in his March 1968 speech, Johnson was consulting regularly with the "Wise Men"-including Dean Acheson, George Ball, McGeorge Bundy, General Omar Bradley, John J. McCloy, and Arthur Goldberg. Garfinkle attributes to the Wise Men great influence in turning Johnson against the war, and rightly so. But he suggests that the antiwar movement had little or no impact on their thinking. "If anything, the movement served as a once- or twice-removed psychological factor in the irresoluteness of a small group of important people already tormented by their own doubts."
Well, yes, but psychological factors are what inner torment is about. We know from their public and private statements that some of these men were deeply anxious about what was happening in the streets, and especially on the campuses. Moreover, most of them were very much part of the world of liberal discourse (as "liberal" was then understood) and were in regular conversation with people in what Garfinkle calls the "liberal right" antiwar movement. Then too, the slogan of the radicals, "We Are Your Children," had a good measure of truth. They were disproportionately the children of the affluent and powerful; and their elders in the elite were not only eager to appease them but also to "identify" with their protest as an expression of moral idealism.
Overlappings I confess I found myself cheering Garfinkle on in his attack against the radical anti-Amerikanists. They were an awful pain in the neck-self- important, self-righteous, self-indulgent, dime-store nihilists. Yet the overlap between liberals, "radicalized" liberals, and all-out leftists and revolutionaries (both political and cultural revolutionaries) was greater than Garfinkle usually allows, as was the overlap between that confused combination of antiwar pressure and decisions about war policy. Moreover, in that confused combination Garfinkle generally neglects the role of religious organizations. Not simply groups such as CALC, but the powerful organizational and cultural force of almost all the oldline churches of the time. At points Garfinkle acknowledges this neglect of religion, explaining that his chief interest is in the radicals, and for them the movement was their religion.
About that he is entirely right. I recall a bizarre meeting of CALC, when it was fast turning to the left, in which the proposal was seriously debated whether CALC should declare itself to be a church, since that is where thousands of people found their real "spiritual meaning." Garfinkle is especially good in detailing the ways in which the radical antiwar movement peaked at the Chicago convention of 1968 and then fell into faction-ridden disarray. More attention might have been paid, however, to the fact that the largest, best-financed, and most stable organizational base for radical politics continued to be the liberal churches and ancillary institutions. He quotes Michael Ferber, a radical activist who wrote in the Nation in 1987, "The religious left is the only left we've got." Not all the countercultural enthusiasms but certainly the politics of 1968 had a long afterlife in the churches. In some ghettoized religious circles, it is still 1968, although what goes on in such circles has in recent years been overshadowed by political activism on the conservative end of the religious spectrum.
Why It Happened So who lost Vietnam? Or does that question make any sense? Here is Garfinkel's answer: "The antiwar movement neither lost the war nor caused the subsequent bloodbath in Southeast Asia. In the broadest sense, the war was lost because the American ship of state itself had lost its bearings. The expansion of containment to Asia and its post- Korean War militarization merged with a rapidly expanding economic base to produce a level of American hubris that was bound to send its ship of state onto the rocks sooner or later. However morally motivated, the U.S. commitment to Vietnam was strategically unsound; thus, even had the war been won the costs might well have exceeded any strategic benefits. But the war was not won because U.S. administrative, diplomatic, and especially military strategies failed. In other words, even beyond a flawed decision to commit itself, which flowed from the lack of a realistic strategy for containing polycentric communism in the geostrategic peripheries of the Cold War, the Vietnam War was lost by some combination of the U.S. military's inability to adapt to politico- military counterinsurgency warfare, ill-advised micromanagement of the war by Pentagon civilians, and maladroit meddling in South Vietnam's stygian political system. None of these sources of American defeat was set in motion or significantly worsened either by antiwar activism or by fear of it in Washington."
The book makes a good case for that conclusion, except, as I said, that in Garfinkle's determination to discredit the antiwar crazies he underestimates the impact of the "liberal right" opposition to the war. I am sometimes asked whether, thirty years later, I regret having opposed U.S. policy in Southeast Asia. Of course there are some things I said and did that I regret, but no, I do not regret opposing the war. Successive Administration statements about the aims of the war-a factor critical to judging the justice of any conflict-were obscure and frequently contradictory; the human cost of the war was indeterminable; the prosecution of the war was mired in military incompetence and political mendacity. Blame for the disaster that was Vietnam is broadly shared, but the person chiefly responsible, I thought then and think now, was Lyndon Johnson.
But I also thought then and think now that I could have been wrong to oppose U.S. policy. During those years, I had two brothers fighting in Vietnam, I had parishioners killed in Vietnam, and I had my dear friend, the late Paul Ramsey, a moral theologian of great distinction, hammering away relentlessly at my every argument. Opposing the war seemed to me a morally solemn and risky thing to do, which is no doubt why I share Adam Garfinkle's revulsion from radicalisms that exploited the war to indulge revolutionary fantasies or to excuse the trashing of civilizational constraints.