Hell No: The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Peace Movement

by Tom Hayden

Why those who protested the Vietnam War must be honored, remembered, and appreciated.

"Hell no" was the battle cry of the largest peace movement in American history—the effort to end the Vietnam War, which included thousands of veterans. The movement was divided among radicals, revolutionaries, sectarians, moderates, and militants, which legions of paid FBI informants and government provocateurs tried to destroy. Despite these obstacles millions marched, resisted the draft on campuses, and forced two sitting presidents from office. This movement was a watershed in our history, yet today it is in danger of being forgotten, condemned by its critics for everything from cowardice to stab-in-the-back betrayal.

In this indispensable essay, Tom Hayden, a principal anti-Vietnam War organizer, calls to account elites who want to forget the Vietnam peace movement and excoriates those who trivialize its impact, engage in caricature of protesters and question their patriotism. In so doing, he seeks both a reckoning and a healing of national memory.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

169 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 31, 2017

About the author

Thomas Emmet Hayden was an American social and political activist, author, and politician.

Reviews

[Eve · Rating 4 out of 5]

IDK if this has spoilers or not, but since I talk about politics & how this book fits into those conversations, consider that to be a disclaimer.

I mainly focus on chapter 4 & the conclusion, partly since I just read that, but also because it seemed to be where he was finally starting to make his points that he says he wants to make at the preface, (which is. a valid storytelling style: present time, tell past story as exposition, return to present time with your opinion. (That being said I usually use parenthesis at long distances for that sort of setup, but whatever that's not accepted by most style guides apparently, lol.))

Also I just want to say that I think there's a theme of closetedness in this book. While I might be misusing a Muslim term here I think it'd be "taqiya" in the same way "jihad" merely means "The Struggle". Based on this "The" construction, I guess the Buddhist 1st of 4 precepts is All Life is The Suffering since that also includes a lot sizes.

By the way, I rant interdisciplinaryish like this throughout this whole review, so if you don't like that writting style, then Skip mine over.

The personal impact this book had feels important like maybe a 4 or 5, but because I think it missed its own aims, I'm giving it a 4.

This took about a year to read since I kept forgetting that I was out of chapter 3 or where I was in it & since I had to get it from my library (via reserving a hold & having it transferred) because of personal budget concerns.

Okay, I honestly forgot the first 2 chapters. I should skim & edit this later, but in case you're wondering. However, a misreading of the timeline of activism somewhere between chapters 1-3 accidentally led me to The Laurel Canyon Conspiracy Theory.

Chapter 3 is like a lot of ruminations & kind of an awe of not knowing how everything came together, though to be fair, history is made by groups not single designer great men like the big tech culture that grew out of hippee countercultural communes would like us to believe. He summarizes it though as having teach-ins on college campuses to research what the hell they were being drafted into, especially since there was a lot of Cold War Mentality muddying the information. After that they did an in-and-out strategy & people power campaigns.

Chapter 4 takes place around 2007, and it's a trip he has meeting up with the Old Revolutionaries. However most of Vietnam's population by that point had been born after the war by that point too. It reads very much like Chicago's ABC 7's newsanchor Linda Yu's visit to her family in China around 2007 & how she said at the end of her visit that they finally put the math together & realized this was likely the last time they'd see each other alive since it was hard to arrange seeing each other & they were already in their 80s. I should probably put a list of all the names lg people he meets up with in this chapter, but I want to get this published first.

It felt like he forgot why he was condemning the sanitation of the memorials of the soldiers who chanted hell no we won't go etc & fragged officers (which i learned about via this book), but he finally got back to that point saying that the some 300k dead who fought for USA but were Vietnamese weren't being recognized by the USAmerican memorial because the USA Govt didn't want to pay out damages etc. Point being, he called that a "double betrayal". While I do think it's offensive to praise USAmerican imperialist forces, I do understand why we should hating deadbeats skedaling when they say they're solid with us.

So he supported Hillary Clinton, which is very weird. He mentions her a lot. He endorsed her on his website on December 5, 2012. He said for her to avoid her war-hawk side that we'd need to lay groundwork for peace. He very much saw Obama as being able to lay the groundwork for this when he visited Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in 2016. Also this book seemed very much as something to go along with a Hillary Clinton victory. Hayden also mentions that he saw Obama as becoming a peacebroker like J. Carter or B. Clinton and that there was a lot to do out in Vietnam & Cambodia & Laos. However, Obama never did that, he's focused more on building his libraries & stuff. In this context Obama's visit seems to have been apologia for Hayden's concerns that USA Govt was too warhawkish for Hillary The Dove to come out to play.


He tragically died in October 2016, and based on his acknowledgements he was going to be doing a college tour with his then 16 year old son Liam the following year, aka 2017. So he was expecting to see the outcome of the election even though he was having cardiovascular problems. Point being, (besides the fact that that broke my emotional-heart & am kind of grieving over it while simultaneously wondering how is this my grief to grieve over or if I could at least try to have like sympathy/empathy/remorse over a kid's position about 3 years ago), I suspect he would've been horrified to see the DNC resort to McCarthyism & Sovietphobia/Russophobia in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton's loss. He did say he was anti-communist though so that doesn't bode well that he himself wouldn't have had a side that would've gone along with it.

The reason why I'm offended by russiagate is that it conflates Russia & the USSR, it conflates Hitler with that conflated union, it's ridiculously historically ignorant. And thankfully Tom Hayden knew that all these things were different, and in fact he was able to talk about The Second World & the various different forms, nuances, rivalries that took place within their sphere that helped further condemn Cold War Domino Theorists focused on "who lost China?". In my generation it was "who lost the world trade center?" & "Who lost queen Hillary's throne?" as opposed to say: who lost our social services, who lost our economy, who lost our civil liberties, who sacked us with The Patriot Act?

That being said he seems to think USSR was probably better in the soviet-sino split, that China has pissed off a lot of its neighbors with its Han chauvinism/imperialism. He also goes at length to criticize how Maoism & The Cultural Revolution
& The Red Book quote "Revolution is not a dinner party" led to senseless violence. That maoists educated at French schools became the Khmer Rouge. He called them & Pol Pot right-wing stereotypes of "Communism".

He basically says that the reason why Vietnam has been so open to joining neoliberal stuff has to do with having USA protection against China to secure their national autonomy (which is ironic since during the TPP deal which USA left but China stayed in, they were agreeing to have Harley-Davidson motorcycles which would be so big their roads would be wrecked & road deaths would go up tremendously. One of their negotiatiors left that one Sobbing!) While IDK if this amounts to us betraying the Vietnamese like we betrayed the Kurds in 2019. However since the USAmerican people tend to not like our imperialism, we've been able to have healing to a degree. Also Ho Chi Minh did take inspiration from USA revolutionaries & got into Marxist-Leninism for the anti-colonialism. I guess combined with China's imperialism of Africa & the botching/recuperation of Mao, I guess that's why I've heard that in The Global South Marxist-Leninism is more popular than Marxist-Leninism-Maoism.

However, Hayden also talks to some capitalist about his family etc. The dude is named Bao Ninh, and under doi moi his novel "The Sorrow Of War" caught on & was translated into several languages. He also mentions
However, since Ho Chi Minh/Nguyen Ai Quoc studied USA like on the ground etc, there is a lot of like Revolutionary Americana incorporated with Vietnam's revolutionary identity.

I guess if we look at the politics we see reviewed in Chapter 4 & the Conclusion we can see how the left had a lot of sectarianism with CIA/FBI infiltration. (He correctly pointed out that Gloria Steinheim was working with the CIA.) Also considering how after activism some of those activists wanted to get into politics, that the democrat party in 1968 basically ousted the labor unions for not being woke enough like the hipees that compounded with the McCarthyism & voila we end up with the counterculture getting recuperated by Capitalist Imperialists.

This connection got especially shown with the focus on anti-imperialism/anti-colonialism, while also being anti-communist. I think that's kind of a fatal flaw, but again when you only got a handful of role models, there is a desire to not be a photocopy/stereotype, and so I guess I understand that cumbersomeness as a trans woman growing up as a little trans girl in a cisheterosexist USA circa late 1990s early two-thousand-and-x's.

However, he did mention Tito as a second world country looking for a different style of communism, so again I don't know whether he was embracing cold war rhetoric sincerely or working with what was legible in USA in the cold wars aftermath like he said Obama was. Of course, Obama was clearly a scammer, a Moderate Republican DINO, (which this book correctly points out), but still.

Also I tried finding Robert Scheer's 1965 pamphlet "How The United States Got Involved In Vietnam" and that I couldn't find it suggests very much to me that this unavailability because whether it's paywalls or lack of archiving is partly why the memory of the anti-war movement seems to be fading away. That sucks because when you're the first to do something you're likely going to botch it, but when you get to look at past experiments, data, experiences, we can actually take our rightful place as one of many people who've tried it & actually try a different method. This erasure of records we can also see with colonizers' of the Americas which actually listening to indigenous people is important in other not only secure human rights & overthrow our Imperialist habits, but we need it to avoid going extinct from a hostile climate. But that's getting too interdisciplinary & conversations you can find elsewhere.

Also honestly I've had this conversation about how citations are really just antedotal when their sources are unavailable/off-limits.

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Point being, I read this book wanting to learn about the anti-war movement. There is a list in Further Reading which I haven't checked out yet. While I did learn about fragging, this book goes over the movement like a nostalgic rumination. (Regarding giving an inventory on what procedural hurdles activists face when campaigning to congresspeople I think AOC reporting on why she's struggling or how she's succeeding in getting left or new deal shit passed is helping since she does show the procedural mechanisms that lobbyists use to hijack the Congress to support rich people instead of their constitutants.) I need to get access to those other sources in order to know more about it.

However, I did end up learning about the geopolitics of The Second World, how USA fits into that, and I've come away with a better opinion of USSR over PRC. Like Mao is like good but plays too much into the neoconservative fake news which gives them too much emphasis I think. However, I really want to read Ho Chi Minh since I heard that he didn't like the Soviet-Sino Split, invoked Revolutionary Americana.

Also since I learned from AlJazeera America that since post-modernist art & jazz was set up by the CIA as a propaganda display of capitalist spontanetity opposed to socialist planning (also to detach the masses from art), my conspiracy theory brain region is hypothesizing that shit like this made that 2nd world split & means there are maoists who are merely recuperating it on behalf of the CIA. So whether that means Mao was actually a socialist or not is another story but yay suspicious minds & CIA witchhunts. This shit is why the left are our own damn bastard cops. lol, I needed this humourous tangent break here.

I think we need to liberate the availability of information to be freely available. Basically copyright now functions as a private-dector de/classification & it's getting ridiculous to keep it. If it took leaking COINTELPRO documents in order to deal with that then we need to expect the same with preventing misuse of the likeness of soldiers who were against the war etc. If Hayden's goal was to get the govt's vietnam memorial to recognize the anti-war movement, this reminds me of the end of that Pink song with Indigo Girls "Dear Mr. President" where she sings "Dear Mr. President, you'd never take a walk with me" when she's giving an open letter about questions she would ask him if she was close to him. I mean calling out the govt as giving a double betrayal to the vietnamese that fought for the usamerican side is blunt as hell. Point being, that irony makes me think Hayden hid the point of the book, but probably had it kind of spelled out.

I also think Hayden got fooled enough, but since he can't react to the current leftist discourse I don't know for sure if I'm right.

But yeah, "Hell No" would've acted as "Hillary was a dove" propaganda had she won & it seemed to base its publicity plan on that. It could've also acted as a force to get people further to the left than our discourse very well could've very well been stuck at if Hillary wasn't largely now considered unelectable & the youth largely able to see thru this shit. (Like Gloria Steinheim is still considered a feminist authority, which this book states how that's disputable) Again, you do still wonder whether he might've been a fool?

[Steve Mayer · Rating 3 out of 5]

A series of somewhat disjoined and repetitious essays, published posthumously. I'd like to think it would have been better had he lived longer; there are quite a few little errors, esp. from someone who claimed to have "a no-mistakes approach to research and editing." More importantly, there are lots of places where mistakes in chronology lead to mistakes in analysis. For example, one howler toward the end claims that Obama's politics "took form under the influence of Cold War anti-communism" and that Obama "had an absolute belief that he could never be seen as soft on communism." This seems wildly wrong, as Obama's overture to Cuba demonstrates. Hayden also has the habit of mushing events together (e.g., Watergate and the peace movement) and treating one as a cause of the other. Still and all, the penultimate chapter, about Hayden's trip to Vietnam in 2007, is worth the price of admission, as he reflects on the disconnect between the Vietnam he knew in the 1960's and 1970's and the "consumer communist" society it is today. And Hayden is likewise right to give himself and the movement credit for helping to stop a cruel, unnecessary and misguided war.

[Michael Messner · Rating 4 out of 5]

His final book before his death, Hell No is Tom Hayden's intervention into the ongoing 50th anniversary remembrances of the American War in Vietnam, his goal, to “…put a stop to false and sanitized history” of the war (5). “We need to resist the military occupation of our minds…The war makers seek to win on the battlefield of memory what they lost in the battlefields of war. Usually the victors write history; this time it is the losers who are deployed to do so.” He discusses the three prongs of the anti-war movement: anti-colonial nationalist resistance in Vietnam, growing resistance from U.S. communities of color, and widespread dissent among the troops themselves. But the power of this book is not simply Hayden's attempt to provide a clear backward look to the peace movement; he continually re-connects to the present, showing the continuing relevance of the peace movement's accomplishments, shortcomings, and lessons learned, thus cementing the book's main point: that battles over memory are central to understanding and resisting current and future wars.

[Jenny · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a very interesting and timely book that covers a lot of ground in less than 150 pages. I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 because text is repeated in different chapters, which I found annoying.

Tom Hayden's main goal in writing this book is to make a case for including the Vietnam Peace Movement in the history of the Vietnam War. To do this he provides a history of the peace movement, in the United States and around the world. He includes information about support for the peace movement in the US military and the peace movement in Vietnam. Much of his message will be useful for activists today, particularly advice on turning an activist movement into a political force and warnings to avoid infighting and bitterness within the movement and its allies.

I wonder what he would think of the outcome of the election and the varied voices who have come together in protest. Turnout for the Women's March was far greater than turnout for any of the peace protests in the 1960s, we will have to see if it becomes a stained force for political change.

[Richard Crowder · Rating 5 out of 5]

I used to think that being a “child of the 60s” made it unnecessary to read much about the period. I was seriously mistaken. The old will learn a lot about what was going on behind the headlines, and the young will learn that the 2010s were not the first time the U.S. government displayed a disturbing blend of arrogance and folly.

[Daniela Kraml · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Hell no” was the battle cry of the largest peace movement in American history – the effort to end the Vietnam War, and Tom Hayden was an elemental part of it. Here he tells the story of this movement in the attempt to save it from getting lost in the remembrance of a nation.
But Hayden not only tells us of the peace movement and to what length the government went to destroy it, he also tells us a lot about Vietnam itself and how this tiny nation not only defeated the world's most powerful nation, but how it also made it's peace with the former enemy. In this times, with IS terror already at our door (I'm living in Austria), it is lifting to read about people overcoming such enmity and embracing a positive future.
Reading it I just wished it had been read by all those Americans who voted for Donald Trump and maybe, just maybe, some of them wouldn't have given him their vote.
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[Ender Campoverde · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The Vietnam War threw the American economy off the gold standard as a pillar of the Western world. The war spending enriched a growing industry of military contractors while starving budgets for education, health care, environmental protection, and the War on Poverty.”

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hell No The Forgotten Power of the Vietnam Peace Movement provides this heroic insider’s concise, definitive account of those who fought the domestic battles during the anti-Vietnam War era. And he underlines the reasons and tactics for the long yet ultimately successful movement. Led by people of integrity, many of whom had worked on behalf of domestic civil rights, they defied their government’s injustice, discriminatory laws and refused to accept the genocide of Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian citizens.
They identified the truth to the media by giving a platform to the damaged veterans and by not accepting the government and military spin of events. Their dedication can be a beacon of direction for those who need to stand up today for global human rights and to find peaceful resolutions.

I was a witness to the Vietnam era and when I began my professional life in 1967 everyone was impacted by the war. Many important decisions were taken away and people fought the military draft. I had many women friends whose fiancés and boyfriends were being called up to fight in S. E. Asia. Those who found temporary safety on college campuses were led by their consciences to speak out against the escalating war. By 1973 I had become completely dissatisfied with Nixon and his collaborating cabinet and moved out of the country for three years.

But the lesson of this book is to not simply understand history. Instead of abandoning ones country, it is more important to participate, demonstrate and work to uphold its democratic ideals. Tom Hayden’s historical eyewitness account explains why the campaign to end that war mattered then and why it’s imperative to prevent new wars and provide examples of contemporary relevance. His ideals and legacy are still here to inspire and lead us. Read the book at once!