Source: TomDispatch
by Rebecca Gordon
“I spent the summer of 1965 arguing about the Vietnam War. I was 13, and my interlocutor was my 18-year-old camp counselor in Vermont. She was headed for U.C. Berkeley in the fall, where she would, as she later described it, ‘major in history and minor in rioting.’ Meanwhile, I was headed back to junior high school. I was already convinced that our government was lying about why we were fighting in Vietnam (supposedly to protect our sworn ally, the South Vietnamese government, in response to a trumped-up ‘incident’ in the Gulf of Tonkin). I was also convinced that the war was unjustified and wrong. She seemed less certain about the war but was similarly convinced that expending energy opposing it would distract activists from supporting the Civil Rights movement. As it turned out, we were both right.” (08/19/25)