While millions of Americans struggled to fulfill their obligations to the American military, the war in Vietnam was opposed by hundreds of thousands of people both young and old. The first national protest against the war in Washington, D.C., in 1965 attracted about twenty thousand people. By the late sixties, similar demonstrations would attract more than a quarter million people. When the protests began in the mid-sixties, they were largely peaceful, but by the end of the decade many had turned into violent confrontations. Between the riots in the ghettos, the acid tests in Haight-Ashbury, and rowdy antiwar protests, some people felt that American society was collapsing into anarchy.

The Free Speech Movement

Even before Johnson began to escalate the war in Vietnam in late 1964, students at the University of California at Berkeley were organizing mass protests. Students had been using campus facilities to organize rallies...