What the polls asked
The antiwar movement of 1967 is easy to overrate if it is judged by the noise it made. Public opinion polls give a different and more sober picture. The best-known long-running question came from Gallup, which repeatedly asked Americans whether the United States had made a mistake in sending troops to fight in Vietnam. Tracking that one question across several years gives a rough measure of how opinion moved, though the exact wording and timing of surveys varied, and the results below should be read as approximate.
From 1965 to late 1967
In the summer of 1965, when the major US ground build-up began, only about a quarter of those asked said sending troops had been a mistake. Support for the president’s handling of the war was higher, and the sense that the nation should stand behind its soldiers was strong. Through 1966 the share who called the war a mistake rose into the thirties. By October 1967, Gallup found it had reached around 47 per cent, slightly more than the share who said it was not a mistake, the first time that the doubters outnumbered the others in that survey. Exact figures differ slightly in later summaries, but the direction is not in dispute.
President Johnson’s approval rating moved with it. By the autumn it had fallen to around the high thirties in Gallup’s measure, among his lowest readings to that point, and polls reflected a growing sense that the war was a stalemate. The Tet Offensive of January 1968 would deepen this mood, but the shift was already well advanced before it.
Doubt did not mean support for protest
What the polls also showed is that doubts about the war did not translate into sympathy for the demonstrators. In surveys of the period, large majorities said they disapproved of antiwar demonstrations, and many respondents associated them with disorder, draft-card burning and disrespect for soldiers. Some saw the protesters as helping the enemy. After the Pentagon march in October, commentators noted that public reaction to the more radical tactics was hostile.
There is a simple reason these two facts fit together. People who said the war was a mistake held very different views about what to do next. Some wanted to withdraw. Many wanted to win faster, with more bombing or more troops. Others wanted a negotiated end. Pollsters sometimes grouped the public into hawks and doves, and the “hawks” included many who were unhappy with the way the war was being fought. Polls in 1967 often found more people saying the United States should step up its effort than saying it should pull out. A person could therefore criticise the war in the same breath as criticising the protesters, and from the opposite direction.
Why opinion shifted
Historians generally attribute the movement of opinion to several causes, and the protests were only one of them.
- Rising casualties and the growing number of draftees, which made the war personal for more families.
- The appearance of a stalemate, especially when official statements of progress, including those by General Westmoreland, were set against reports from the field.
- Television and press coverage that brought the fighting into living rooms, although scholars caution against treating media as a simple cause.
- The cost of the war at home, including higher taxes and inflation.
- Criticism from respected figures such as senators, former officials and Martin Luther King, which made opposition seem less extreme.
It is difficult to say how much the movement itself moved opinion. Some researchers argue that the movement raised the profile of the issue and gave doubters a language. Others suggest the unpopular tactics may have slowed the process, giving the administration an easy target. The truth is probably a mixture, and it varied by time and place.
The politics of the numbers
The polls mattered to politicians. They helped explain why Democrats who disliked the war began to explore challenges to Johnson, a story told in the account of the Dump Johnson movement, and why Eugene McCarthy’s campaign would gain a hearing in the following year. They also helped Johnson’s critics on the right, who argued for a harder line.
The administration responded in the fall of 1967 with a public relations effort stressing progress, and in November Westmoreland returned to Washington to say that the end was beginning to come into view. Polls taken afterward showed only a short and small lift in confidence, followed by the shock of January.
So the antiwar movement was a growing force in a limited sense. It was growing in organisation, in visibility and in the number of Americans who shared its doubts. It was not growing in popularity. That gap, between a public increasingly uneasy about the war and a movement most people found uncomfortable, defined the politics of 1967.