When William F. the Marxists

Scan page 7

would lead to his transformation into a right-wing Cold Warrior and supporter of McCarthyism. Explaining unfamiliar ideas in a clear way bole. In “Kill Anything That Moves: The Real Ameri­ can War In Vietnam,” (Macmillan Publishers, 2013), investigative journalist Nick Turse documents from records held in the National Archives how intentional killing of civilians was de facto policy of many U.S. mil­ itary units in Vietnam.

The results of the American war were a stark and bloody legacy. By the time the war ended in 1975, ap­ proximately 58,000 U.S. military personnel had died in the war. For the Vietnamese, the death toll was much higher: 2 million Vietnamese civilians killed and another 5.3 million wounded. Some 11 million Viet­ namese were made refugees. Another 4 million may have been exposed to toxic defoliants such as Agent Orange. I mention these facts in case anyone wants to maintain, as Buckley did, that it was the socialists who were “extremists.”

This might surprise today’s young activists, who, if they’ve even heard of the SWP, are likely to equate it with the sterile political grouping they occasionally see selling The Militant newspaper at public events. Led by Jack Barnes, the self-styled (Dear) leader of “proletarian communism” in the United States, the SWP has devolved into a dreary little cult of workersycophants, one whose long, steady decline in mem­ bership is matched only by its political irrelevance and authoritarian internal life.

In 1968, however, the SWP was a small, well-orga­ nized left-wing group that played a pivotal role in the era’s Vietnam War protests. Indeed, the group pro­ moted united-front coalitions that helped transform the peace movement from a politically unpopular force in its early days into by decade’s end one of the largest grassroots political movements in U.S. history. It’s a story aptly told in Halstead’s nearly 900-page “Out Now! A Participant’s Account of the Movement in the United States Against the Vietnma War,” and more recently in the highly informative two-volume political memoir, “The Party,” by former SWP leader Barry Sheppard.

Of course, these days popular media, when it even bothers to reflect on the peace movement of the 1960s, tends to highlight a few dramatic moments to tell the story. The focus is on the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, the theatrical personalities of the Yippies, or that temper tantrum of infantile poli­ tics known as the Weather Underground. In fact, it was the steady, day-to-day efforts by many thousands of peace activists to turn broad public opinion against