Beyond Left & Right – How the Vietnam War Turned the Antiwar Left Into Imperialist Democrats
by Dr. Lenora Fulani
Address to the Second Annual Antiwar.com Conference
3/25/00

Two Sundays ago, Pat Buchanan was interviewed by Tim Russert on Meet The Press. This was Pat’s "re-emergence" interview. The two major parties had just selected their respective – if indistinguishable – nominees. And so Pat and the Reform Party were back in the news.

At one point during the interview there was a discussion of Pat’s initiatives to reach out to movements and individuals who differ from him in dramatic ways. When Pat referenced that he reached out to me – an example of his right/left coalition building – Russert went ballistic.

"Lenora Fulani, who stood with Muammar Khaddafy in Libya!" he exclaimed, with that special kind of enunciation that liberals use when they are trying to skewer a leftist.

Pat was quick to remind viewers that it was he and Lt. Colonel Oliver North who had written Ronald Reagan’s speech announcing the bombing of Tripoli and Benghazi, to differentiate himself from me. But what was particularly interesting was that Russert also questioned Buchanan on his call to remove U.S. sanctions on Iraq. Russert pressed Buchanan on how he could support the lifting of sanctions on Saddam Hussein in light of the increase in oil prices and in light of Saddam’s obstruction of U.N. inspection teams searching for chemical weapons.

Pat replied that he understood full well who Saddam was, but that his concern was the 500,000 Iraqi children who have died prematurely of hunger or lack of medical treatment because of the embargo. In other words, Pat made a clear distinction between a government and its people and underscored the need for a foreign policy that takes that distinction into account. Of course, it was exactly that distinction that was operative when I traveled to Libya in 1987. But when Pat Buchanan makes that distinction, he is treated as someone who is "moderating his views" or becoming more of a statesman. No one assumes that he has taken a liking to Saddam. I, on the other hand, am regarded as a "friend of Khaddafy," meaning a friend of terrorism.

First, let me set the record straight. I’ve never met Col. Khaddafy. I’ve never spoken with him. I oppose all forms of terrorism. I traveled to Libya in April of 1987, on the one-year anniversary of the bombing, as part of a delegation of several hundred American progressives and Muslims who participated in a peace gathering. Specifically, my visit was designed to make a statement of friendship to the Libyan people and to extend to them a signal that many, many Americans – if not the American government – believed the bombing to have been a deplorable act of violence and terrorism. My statement, in going to Libya, had virtually nothing to do with Mr. Khaddafy. If it had to do with a head of state at all, it was a statement about President Reagan and the Pentagon’s decision to kill innocent civilians.

Mr. Russert, as one would expect, neither knows this history nor cares to know it. It is standard journalistic fare in these times to spew buzzwords of one kind or another and then link your target to them, most especially when your target is a leftist.

Due to the technological wonders of the Internet and Lexis/Nexis, combined with the mindlessness and partisanship of most journalists, I am now and probably forever "Lenora Fulani who supported Muammar Khaddafy" or "Lenora Fulani who went to Libya," or "Lenora Fulani an ally of Louis Farrakhan," or more recently, "Lenora Fulani the Black Marxist who endorsed Pat Buchanan the anti-Semite for President."

But all this trashing goes on in the media, as Justin Raimondo and others have pointed out, to try to pry any semblance of a left/right coalition apart and to discourage or frighten people of diverse ideologies from coming together. The left and the right are simply going to have to find ways to come together in spite of this.

Coming together will be no easy task. Even Pat believes I was "wrong on Libya." But my point about Libya is now his point about Iraq, not to mention that it is also now his point about Libya, too, as he includes Libya on the list of nations for whom sanctions should be lifted. Presumably, it’s not because he likes Khaddafy now any more than he did in 1986. But rather, because he – along with many other Americans – have a greater feel for the negative impact of US foreign policy on ordinary people around the world. The US government, run as it is by the two major parties and the special interests which control them, are immune to any such bottom-up concerns. But we are not. And this sentiment is part of the basis for uniting the left and the right to go beyond left and right to a new populist antiwar movement, one that defies traditional partisan and ideological categories.

As a progressive who comes out of and remains a part of the left – including the anti-imperialist left – I’d like to think that making this distinction between states and people is a core and consistent principle of the left. The principles of non-interventionism, anti-imperialism – not to mention the democratic right to self-determination – were very much alive and a driving force of the American New Left in the 1960’s. But these principles were severely corroded as the left implanted itself inside the Democratic Party in the midst of and following the antiwar movement of the 1960’s. Since I come before you as a leftist and a progressive, it is that corruption that I want to talk to you about today. For, in my opinion, when the anti-Vietnam War New left gave up its political independence, was seduced into a bid for control of the Democratic Party and then lost that fight to the same liberals who had prosecuted the war in Southeast Asia, America list its antiwar left. That history must be honestly deconstructed if we are to create a viable left/right coalition against war and the imperialist tendencies of the US government.

What is that history? How exactly did the left give up its voice for peace and non-interventionism in American politics? Put another way, how did America end up with a President who protested the war in Vietnam in the 1960’s and 30 years later bombed portions of Eastern Europe to Kingdom Come? To answer that question, we have to go back to the turbulence of the antiwar movement and a time when millions and millions of Americans directly challenged the bipartisan policy of imperialist war.

Five months before Lyndon Johnson’s landslide 1964 victory, congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which gave the President unlimited power to conduct a war in Southeast Asia. There were just under 25,000 US military personnel in Vietnam. Johnson pledged to the voters that he would never send American boys to fight there.

But less than two months after Johnson was sworn in, Operation Rolling Thunder, the ongoing bombing of North Vietnam, began – a campaign which continued relentlessly for four years. A month after the bombing began in 1965, 25,000 people marched on the capitol to protest the war. Few believed the numbers would grow significantly higher. By December of 1965, American military personnel in southeast Asia numbered more than 184,000. A year later, General William Westmoreland commanded over a million troops including 362,000 Americans. As the war escalated, so too did the size and militancy of antiwar demonstrations. By 1967 millions were marching on the capitol, on campuses and at the sites of defense and military intelligence contractors.

Johnson, meanwhile, surrounded by advisors and Cabinet members whom journalist David Halberstam dubbed "The Best and the Brightest," continued to prosecute the war. The Best and the Brightest, still smarting from the "loss" of China, and the Democratic Party, purged of its left by allowing – indeed, encouraging – Joseph McCarthy to witch hunt his way to national prominence, were not about to "go soft on communism."

Never mind that Vietnam had been struggling for its independence from the French and the Japanese since well before the turn of the century. Never mind that Vietnam’s pleas to be accorded the right to self-determination after the First World War had fallen on deaf ears. Never mind that the Vietnam Declaration of Independence, issued in 1945, following the Japanese surrender in World War II and written by Ho Chi Minh, began by paying homage to the American Revolution with the words, "All men are created equal. They are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Never mind that there was no actual geo-political, economic or moral reason to pursue the war, other than appeals to domino theories about the spread of communism.

The Democratic Party liberal establishment had spent more than 15 years cutting its ties to the left. They weren’t about to let a communist-let national liberation movement in Vietnam be used by Cold Warriors on the right to red bait them out of the White House.

The movement against the war would have to come from outside the establishment, in particular, from outside the liberal establishment. And it did. The millions of protesters who had taken to the streets by 1966 and 1967 calling for a halt to the bombing were largely students and young adults. Many had never voted at all. In effect, they were the independents of the 1960’s, citizens without a home in the two party system. They were in no way natural allies of the Republican Party to the GOP’s advantage. And while the Democratic Party had maneuvered to be the electoral beneficiary of the liberal and left domestic causes, like the civil rights movement, when it came to foreign policy, the Democrats were as or more pro-war than their counterpart. As the ranks of the antiwar movement swelled, and as popular opinion began to turn against the war, an independent new left took root. This new left was critical of the authoritarian failures of the old left and of the hypocrisy of the liberals. As it grew, the pressure on Congress and the President to reconsider our Vietnam policy mounted.

In April of 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. came out against the war, linking the struggle against racial injustice in America to the struggle for independence and democracy in Vietnam, tearing down the wall between the antiwar and civil rights movements, which outraged Johnson and the establishment liberals in both. The Democratic Party, which in the 1964 presidential election had mustered the highest margin of victory – over 61% – in American history, was now vulnerable. From within its ranks, the most independent and principled voices began to speak out against the war. And it was then that the Democratic Party’s resolve began to crumble, an alluring but ultimately deadly opportunity for the New Left. It was then that the New Left (as had the old left in the 1930’s) began its long and irreversible march into the Democratic fold, a march that would ultimately cost it its antiwar and anti-imperialist principles.

On March 12, 1968, antiwar Senator Eugene McCarthy almost toppled President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Four days later Robert Kennedy – notorious as a fence sitter on the war – entered the race and came out against US involvement. On March 22, Johnson relieved General Westmoreland of his command. On March 31, Johnson withdrew from the presidential race. Four days later, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis.

In late April, a vocal advocate for Johnson’s Vietnam policy, Vice President Hubert Humphrey entered the race. Though he missed a number of primaries, he did compete against McCarthy and Kennedy in a few states. The two antiwar candidates polled 69% of the total popular vote, while Humphrey polled 2/2%. Then on June 4^th, the night he won the all-important California primary, Kennedy was assassinated. The country was exploding in confusion and rage. And Vice President Humphrey, the pro-war Democrat – who had been wiped out in the popular vote – arrived at the infamous 1968 Chicago convention with a majority of the delegates and won the nomination on the first ballot. Party rules tilted the playing field heavily in favor of the pro-war incumbent machine. The left was out in the streets in force. And the whole world watched as protesters were beaten bloody by Chicago police. It was unimaginable that the left, so violently excoriated by the party hierarchs, would ever make peace with the Democrats. But it was only a matter of a handful of years before they did.

After receiving the nomination and after the debacle of the Chicago convention, Humphrey was sagging dangerously in the polls. At the Republican National convention, Richard Nixon called for "an honorable end to the war in Vietnam," adding, "We shall not stop there. We need a policy to prevent more Vietnams."

Now Humphrey was the pro-war candidate of a party whose base was against the war, while the Republican nominee was giving signals that he intended to extricate the United States from its Southeast Asian entanglements. The third party candidate, Right-winger George Wallace, was siphoning support from both parties, but particularly from Dixiecrats who thought the Democratic Party had moved too far to the left. Meanwhile, Humphrey was being pounded by the antiwar movement for his loyalty to Johnson’s policies. Very late in the process, he separated himself from Johnson on the war, whereupon McCarthy endorsed him and then, in what many viewed as a last ditch effort to salvage a Democratic victory, Johnson called a halt to the bombing on Oct. 31, six days before the election.

Richard Nixon won the White House. But the left was undaunted, believing its moment had come. For the antiwar left, Nixon’s victory was simply a signal that the moment was ripe to take over the Democratic Party and strip it of its imperialist, interventionist ties to the military/industrial complex. There was some dispute on this issue, because a segment of the left wanted a break to an independent antiwar, pro-civil rights party. The Peace and Freedom Party here in California, which just lost its ballot status after 30 years as a state-based independent party, was one such effort. Several leading critics of the war attempted to persuade McCarthy to run as an independent after Humphrey got the nomination, to no avail. Dr. King had been approached to run as an antiwar, pro-racial justice independent the year before he was assassinated but had declined as well.

As these left independent efforts were being marginalized, the mainstream of the left and the antiwar movement was being heavily wooed by antiwar liberals inside the Democratic Party. They seized on the disjuncture between the popular vote in the Democratic primaries and the convention’s nomination of Humphrey, and appealed to the left to join their campaign for radical rules changes in the party that would shift power to the rank and file. The left believed that these rule changes would pave the way for an antiwar takeover. And so, slowly, almost imperceptibly, the antiwar movement began to funnel itself into the Democratic Party. And an obscure liberal antiwar Senator from South Dakota, George McGovern, was selected to head a commission to rewrite party rules.

But meanwhile, the war raged on. And so did the protests. In 1970, the US invaded Cambodia and campus protests erupted in which demonstrators were shot to death at Kent State and Jackson State. Millions marched on the Capitol. George McGovern became the beneficiary of the protests and the rules changes when he won the Democratic nomination in 1972.

But the party machine was not about to give up the party without a fight. While having lost control of the nomination process, it maintained substantial control of the party’s "on the ground" electoral apparatus. The regulars "dumped" McGovern – as the unions and local elected officials purposefully twiddled their thumbs, leaving the left’s candidate to go down to one of the most ignominious defeats in US electoral history. McGovern carried only his own home state.

Before the election, Nixon – who had been busy invading Laos and mining Haiphong Harbor – had also sent Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to begin secret peace talks with the North Vietnamese. Just before Election Day 1972, Nixon announced that a treaty had been concluded by Kissinger and the North Vietnamese and that "peace was at hand." He won in a landslide. The peace agreement broke down a month after the election and Nixon took the occasion to order the massive Christmas bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. But a month later, the treaty was resurrected and signed by all parties. It basically contained the ten points first presented by the National Liberation Front three years earlier. In March of 1973 the remaining US combat troops were withdrawn from Vietnam and the draft was ended.

The political machinations surrounding the war and its demobilization have continued to this day. And what of the left? It never recovered from the McGovern debacle, though this was not readily apparent until the mid-1980’s. Throughout the 1970’s , and into the 1980’s the left continued to try to assert control over the Democratic Party and through it, over US foreign policy, an ironic mistake given that the New Left began as a critique of old left popular frontism with the Democratic Party. Nonetheless, it fell victim to the same political seduction.

As early as 1976, the prospects for a left take over of the Democratic Party were looking very grim, even though Nixon had been forced to resign and the post-Watergate reforms were in full swing. Gene McCarthy ran as an independent for President in 1976 and polled ¾ of a million votes, not enough to establish an independent antiwar party nor enough to rattle the Democratic Party, which nominated a Southern pseudo populist, Jimmy Carter. Carter popularized the notion of linking human rights to foreign policy, providing a new liberal justification for US interventionism abroad. Far from it being the case that the left’s anti-interventionist influence in the Democratic Party was growing, the Democrats were making their inexorable turn to the right, along with the rest of the country, which elected Ronald Reagan in 1980.

The election of Reagan was the cue for the Democratic Party old-line machine to retake control of the party’s nominating process back from the vestiges of the McGovern movement. A new rules commission, this time headed by Carter’s Vice President Walter Mondale, rewrote the rules to disempower the rank and file and created the modern day "super delegate" – delegates selected by state party organizations and party elected officials over the heads of voters. Naturally, Mondale was the beneficiary of these rules, becoming the party’s nominee in 1984 and ran on a Democratic platform that Congressional Quarterly called the "most conservative in the last 50 years."

And what of the antiwar left? Where had it gone by then?

In 1983, Ronald Reagan had invaded the tiny socialist nation of Grenada, intercepting and precipitating a series of coups and countercoups that overthrew the revolutionary New Jewel Movement and restored a pro-Washington government. Mondale announced that if he were Commander-In-Chief at the time, he would have done the same thing.

Meanwhile, the US was escalating its secret wars in Latin America, on the heels of the Nicaraguan revolution in 1979. The left anti-imperialist movement turned its sites on the Reagan administration and whipped itself into an antiwar frenzy calling for a "front" against "Reaganism." These movements – literally now handfuls of people, protested US interventionism, linked it to Reaganism and the Republican Party and ended up supporting Mondale – the lesser of two evils – for President. The Nation magazine endorsed him. Leslie Gelb of the New York Times wrote at the time, "Mondale has the peace movement. He needs the Reagan Democrats back."

The left antiwar movement was for all intents and purposes dead. It had become apologists for a rightward moving Democratic Party, which would ultimately take the White House again in 1992, by attacking the left that so intently supported it.

I announced my first run for the presidency as an independent in the summer of 1987, just three months after I returned from my trip to Libya. I made my announcement outside the United Nations headquarters in New York and I kicked off that campaign with a statement that the American people were opposed to war, opposed to US imperialism and interventionism, but that neither party endorsed their views.

I went on to get on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia and qualify for a million dollars in federal primary matching funds. On Election Day, I polled almost a quarter of a million votes. The left, by then thoroughly ensconced in the Democratic Party, spent the entire campaign season attacking me.

Republican George Bush was elected and midway through his term he took us into the Gulf War. I led a demonstration of 5,000, mainly African Americans, in protest, one of the largest antiwar mobilizations in New York in years. In 1992, Bill Clinton was elected President – with the full-scale support of the left. And later, the left stood by Clinton’s military adventures in the Balkans, on the grounds that our intervention was for humanitarian purposes.

Today analysts of the Republican Right call for a foreign policy based on "benevolent global hegemony" while their so-called opposites call for a new "liberal imperialism."

This much is clear. The left failed to install an antiwar, anti-imperialist harness in the Democratic Party. Indeed, the left abandoned its own principles in this regard to become incorporated into the Democrats postmodern, post-Vietnam, pro-war culture where globalist interests rule the day. Humanitarian concerns are used to justify military adventures and genocidal economic sanctions are justified as a progressive alternative to war.

As many of you are aware, my endorsement of Pat Buchanan and my efforts to move beyond left and right and create a new independent pro-reform antiwar alliance in American politics has been violently attacked by the left. I have been accused of making a deal with the devil. But my partnership with Buchanan, while perhaps surprising, is a principled move designed to forge a new kind of coalition in American politics. The deal with the devil – if there was one – is the one the antiwar left made with the Democratic party, when they traded in their anti-imperialism for liberal legitimacy and minor influence in the Clinton/Gore administration.

The US left was right about the war in Vietnam. But they were wrong about how to turn US policy away from interventionism and imperialism. They relied ultimately on a political arrangement and a political party dedicated to US global hegemony and tied to a military/industrial complex which profits politically and materially from war. They were insensitive to the extent to which Americans are proud of our country and fiercely patriotic – even when our country is doing wrong – and they allowed anti-imperialism to be cast as un-American. It is not.

The American left never came to terms with the fact that war and imperialism are the logical extensions of the policy of political parties, which cater to and are strategically controlled by globalist financial interests and multinational corporations. Capital must expand to survive and when expansion requires military intervention – either to protect its investment or to stabilize an environment for future economic intervention – the two parties oblige. The left – either naively or stupidly – believed it could check the drive for US globalist hegemony through a party which thrives off of it. Ultimately, the left decided that supporting military interventionism was the price it would pay for sufficient political entrée to be able to influence domestic policy in progressive ways, a choice that forfeits any claim to morality or progressivism.

The new left/right antiwar movement – its leaders seated in this room and the thousands across the country linked to us – will have to learn from those tragic mistakes and compromises. We will be called many bad things for doing so, including the "I" word – isolationist. But while we are not "Isolationists," there is an "I" word that does apply. Independent. To that charge, I plead guilty. We must appreciate the connection between political independence and peace if we are to move beyond left and right to an end to imperialism and war.

Lenora B. Fulani twice ran for President of the US as an independent, making history in 1988 when she became the first woman and African American to get on the ballot in all fifty states. Dr. Fulani is currently a leading activist in the Reform Party and chairs the Committee for a Unified Independent Party. She is also the head of the Campaign to Change the Question, which is pushing for greater third-party presence in the presidential debate process.