"The Good Guy Dupes and the Hard-Core Organizers": The Liberal-Left Coalition That Sparked the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam

After more than four years of protests that sought to end the Vietnam War, the antiwar movement experienced a broadening of its ranks during the summer of 1969. With an increasingly war-weary American public, more Democrats began to embrace variations of antiwar politics. The Moratorium to the End the War in Vietnam was born out of that moment, as antiwar liberals began to interact with left wing activists in significant ways that challenged traditional Cold War ideological boundaries. Sam Brown and David Hawk, young veterans of Eugene McCarthy’s 1968 presidential campaign created the Vietnam Moratorium Committee in order to organize an event that would appeal to less radical citizens who were opposed to the war. Through their efforts to expand the umbrella of the antiwar movement, they intersected with the New Mobilization Committee, a loose coalition of various left-wing organizations.

The results were the historic Moratorium demonstrations which mobilized millions of Americans to publicly oppose President Nixon’s policies in Vietnam. Nixon’s Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman wrote to the President that October, that the “problem is still to separate the good guy dupes from the hard-core organizers.” This paper will offer up a detailed history of Moratorium demonstrations, and present them as a crucial flash point for liberal-left politics during the Vietnam-era. Through studying the rise and fall of the moratorium movement, historians can better understand the successes and limitations that antiwar activists faced in their efforts to link liberals with the left.