Michael Ansara spent much of the 1960s and 1970s protesting the Vietnam War as an activist with Students for a Democratic Society.
Mr Ansara, now 77, said politics is not less “radical” than it was half a century ago, but it is less “stupid”.
Like many, Ansara sees striking parallels between 1968 and 2024: a burgeoning anti-war movement, a contentious presidential election and Democrats heading to Chicago in August to formally select their candidate for the White House.
This year, college student voters have expressed deep disappointment in President Joe Biden and his handling of America’s role in the Israel-Hamas war, with many in the Democratic Party’s core voting base threatening to drop out of the presidential election.
Mr. Ansara understands this thinking well. In 1968, he and other activists rejected the election of then-Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, because of his support for the Vietnam War. “Vote with your feet, vote in the streets,” they chanted during protests, and refused to campaign because they believed there was only a slight difference between Humphrey and Republican candidate Richard Nixon.
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It was a mistake, Ansara says now.
“We weren’t protesting. We weren’t wrong in our assessment of Humphrey,” he argued. “We were lacking in political imagination.”
Nixon went on to win the popular vote by less than half a percentage point, and US involvement in Vietnam continued for another five years — a grave error that Mr Ansara says he only realised decades later.
If activists had worked to get Humphrey elected and lobbied South Dakota politicians to end the war, millions of American and Vietnamese lives could have been saved, Ansara said.
This year, as Biden and former President Donald Trump prepare for a similarly tough showdown in November, Biden and other anti-war activists USA Today spoke to said they won’t make the same mistake.
And they hope that a younger generation of pro-Palestinian protesters will listen to their regrets.
Déjà vu
Mark Nason, now a professor of history at Fordham University, was a doctoral student at Columbia University in 1968. That year, Nason said, he participated in campus protests calling for the university to cut ties with military research that supported the Vietnam War and to halt construction of a gym that was thought to promote racial segregation.
He recently felt a sense of deja vu as students from his alma mater organized an encampment and took over Hamilton Hall, the same administration building that Nason and his colleagues used more than 50 years ago.
The 77-year-old predicts that many of the people he protested with will vote for Biden this fall, despite some reservations about the president’s treatment of Israel.
Nason said the same can’t be said about younger protesters.
A Harvard Kennedy School poll released in April found that 41% of voters ages 18 to 29 said they disliked both Trump and Biden. A staggering 76% disliked Biden’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war.
Nason said he fears the current climate could push the country’s politics to the right, recalling a trend that occurred decades ago during Nixon’s 1968 presidential election.
“Even people who were beginning to question the war were reluctant to see young people from highly privileged, elite universities occupying buildings, disrupting classes and getting into somewhat violent clashes with police,” Nason said.
A new perspective
Many former anti-war activists from the 1960s and ’70s who USA Today spoke to said their political leanings haven’t changed much in the past half century.
If anything, people who are now in their 70s and 80s say they’ve just become more realistic.
Miles Rapoport, a former member of Students for a Democratic Society, said he supported protesters’ calls for a ceasefire in Gaza.
But he said he sees more differences than similarities between the administration’s actions during the Vietnam War and Biden’s response to the Israel-Hamas war.
Rapoport, a former Connecticut secretary of state, argued that while the responsibility for the Vietnam War rests entirely on the shoulders of U.S. leaders, the Gaza war began “because of Israeli policies and Hamas’ brutal aggression.”
Rapoport said Vietnam War leaders “failed to listen” to opposition, but Biden argued he was working to end the war.
“The big lesson we’ve learned is not to let short-term or even sharp disagreements with the president blind us to the big differences between the two presidential candidates,” Rapoport, 74, said.
Some, like Jean Barry, a former leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War movement, see themselves in the protesters: “If I didn’t have a disability, I’d be there with them,” said Barry, 81.
Barry maintained that this year’s protests were no different from past ones, recalling the 1971 encampment by Vietnam War veterans on the National Mall in Washington, DC, to protest an end to the war. He said that movement was based on a 1932 campaign by World War I veterans who sought an advance on their bonuses during the Great Depression.
Like today’s student protesters, Barry, who is the same age as Biden, described the president’s response to the Israel-Hamas conflict as “terrible.”
Barry also plans to vote as an “independent” in New Jersey’s June 4 Democratic presidential primary to protest Biden’s policies toward Israel, and said he expects both Biden and Trump to back down before the general election, just as then-President Lyndon B. Johnson abruptly did in March 1968 when he outlined his plans to wind down U.S. involvement in Vietnam in a nationally televised address.
But if that’s unlikely, Barry said he “has no choice” and will vote for Biden.
“He ended the war in Afghanistan,” Barry said, “and I have some hope that he’ll continue to push to do the right thing with regards to Gaza.”
An experience worth learning from
Even with election uncertainty looming, many veteran antiwar activists are now hesitant to offer advice to younger generations.
Ansara, who is writing a memoir about his years as an activist, said even if protesters from the 1960s and 1970s offered advice, he doubted young people would take it.
“I was 21 in 1968,” Ansara said, “and I would never have listened to older people telling me what to do or not do.”
Michael James, 82, told USA Today that he felt admonishing young people, including his own adult children, for “being too visible” was distancing himself from the cause and felt like “revisionist.”
Amid the chaos of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, James, then a 26-year-old shaggy-haired activist, is immortalized in a black-and-white photograph of him rocking a police van, staring into the camera.
“Looking back, we were to blame, not at the beginning but at that moment, for putting Nixon in power,” James said of his generation’s apathy toward the ballot box.
Today, the Bernie Sanders-loving “progressive left” believes Trump poses a fascist threat too big to ignore.
“Nixon was, in my opinion, much less dangerous than Trump, no, not at all,” James told USA Today. “I’m rooting for Biden and the Democrats. A few years ago I wouldn’t have thought that.”
