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The general disillusionment with government during the Vietnam years and the Watergate scandals, the exposure of anti-democratic actions by the FBI and the CIA, led to resignations from government and open criticism by former employees.

A number of former CIA officials left the agency, and wrote books critical of its activities. John Stockwell, who had headed the CIA operation in Angola, resigned, wrote a book exposing the CIA’s activities, and lectured all over the country about his experiences. David MacMichael, a historian and former CIA specialist, testified at trials on behalf of people who had protested government policy in Central America.

FBI Agent Jack Ryan, a twenty-one-year veteran of the bureau, was fired when he refused to investigate peace groups. He was deprived of his pension and for some time had to live in a shelter for homeless people.

Sometimes the war in Vietnam, which had ended in 1975, came back to public attention in the eighties and nineties through people who had been involved in the conflicts of that day. Some of them had since made dramatic turnabouts in their thinking. John Wall, who prosecuted Dr. Benjamin Spock and four others in Boston for “conspiring” to obstruct the draft, showed up at a dinner honoring the defendants in 1994, saying the trial had changed his ideas.

Even more striking was the statement by Charles Hutto, a U.S. soldier who had participated in the atrocity known as the My Lai massacre, in which a company of American soldiers shot to death women and children by the hundreds in a tiny Vietnamese village. Interviewed in the eighties, Hutto told a reporter:

I was nineteen years old, and I’d always been told to do what the grown-ups told me to do. . . . But now I’ll tell my sons, if the government calls, to go, to serve their country, but to use their own judgment at times . . . to forget about authority . . . to use their own conscience. I wish somebody had told me that before I went to Vietnam. I didn’t know. Now I don’t think there should be even a thing called war . . . cause it messes up a person’s mind.

It was this legacy of the Vietnam war—the feeling among a great majority of Americans that it was a terrible tragedy, a war that should not have been fought—that plagued the Reagan and Bush administrations, which still hoped to extend American power around the world.

In 1985, when George Bush was Vice-President, former Defense Secretary James Schlesinger had warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: “Vietnam brought a sea change in domestic attitudes . . . a breakdown in the political consensus behind foreign policy. . . .”

When Bush became President, he was determined to overcome what came to be called the Vietnam syndrome—the resistance of the American people to a war desired by the Establishment. And so, he launched the air war against Iraq in mid-January 1991 with overwhelming force, so the war could be over quickly, before there was time for a national antiwar movement to develop.

The signs of a possible movement were there in the months of the prewar buildup. On Halloween, 600 students marched through downtown Missoula, Montana, shouting “Hell no, we won’t go!” In Shreveport, Louisiana, despite the Shreveport Journal’s front-page headline: “Poll Favors Military Action,” the story was that 42 percent of the respondents thought the U.S. should “initiate force” and 41 percent said “wait and see.”

The November 11, 1990, Veterans Parade in Boston was joined by a group called Veterans for Peace, carrying signs: “No More Vietnams. Bring ’Em Home Now” and “Oil and Blood Do Not Mix, Wage Peace.” The Boston Globe reported that “the protesters were greeted with respectful applause and, at some places, strong demonstrations of support by onlookers.” One of those onlookers, a woman named Mary Belle Dressler, said: “Personally, parades that honor the military are somewhat troublesome to me because the military is about war, and war is troublesome to me.”

Most Vietnam veterans were supporting military action, but