Vietnam Era Antiwar Movement: Successes, Failures, and Legacies

W. D. Ehrhart is a former Marine Corps sergeant, veteran of the Vietnam War, and author of multiple books of nonfiction and poetry, including a memoir trilogy and most recently Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems. He holds a PhD from the University of Wales at Swansea, and is a retired master teacher of English and History. His first published work appeared in Winning Hearts and Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans published by 1^st Casualty Press in 1972.

Carolyn Rusti Eisenberg is a professor of U.S. history and American foreign policy at Hofstra University. Her new book, Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger and the Wars in Southeast Asia is being published December 2022 by Oxford University Press. Her previous book Drawing the Line: the American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-49 (Cambridge University Press) won the Stuart Bernath Book Prize, and the Herbert Hoover Library Prize and was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber Prize. Carolyn was on the Strike Steering Committee at Columbia University in 1968 and decades later was a co-founder of Brooklyn for Peace. She is presently Legislative Coordinator for Historians for Peace and Democracy.

Daniel Ellsberg is a lecturer, writer, activist, and whistleblower. A former analyst at the RAND corporation, he was also an official in the Defense and State Departments under President Lyndon Johnson. From 1965-1967 he served in Vietnam studying pacification programs. By 1969, believing the Vietnam War unjust, Ellsberg photocopied a top-secret 7,000-page study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam (the Pentagon Papers). In 1971, he leaked them to the New York Times and eighteen other newspapers. The government charged Ellsberg with twelve felony counts with a possible sentence of 115 years. The case was dismissed in 1973 when Watergate inquiries exposed criminal misconduct against Ellsberg by the Nixon White House. In the decades since, he has been arrested scores of times for acts of civil disobedience in opposition to U.S. nuclear and foreign policy. His books include The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner (2017) and Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002).

Nguyet Nguyen was born and raised in Vietnam. She completed her MA at the University of Oregon on a Fulbright scholarship, obtained her Ph.D. at American University in 2019, and is currently writing a book on the transnational antiwar movement by the Vietnamese during the war with the U.S. She has been active in shedding light on the GI antiwar movement and in projects to help clear unexploded ordnance in Vietnam. She is now teaching at the University of Alaska – Southeast as assistant professor of history. 

Judith Ehrlich (moderator) is the co-director and producer of The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers, winner of the Peabody Award. Ehrlich’s most recent documentary, The Boys Who Said NO!, tells the story of a mass movement of draft resisters who chose conscience over killing in the Vietnam War. Ehrlich is currently producing an animated podcast featuring Ellsberg’s anti-nuclear analysis and activism for Defuse Nuclear War.