SYNOPSIS

“The War at Home” tells the story of the impact of the war in Vietnam on one American town – and scrutinizes how the Midwestern city of Madison, Wisconsin was transformed into a battleground where American foreign policy in Vietnam and American values at home were challenged and changed.

Over twenty interviews with antiwar activists, university and police officials, Vietnam veterans and others illuminate rare archival film footage of ‘60s political activism to weave an eyewitness portrait of the antiwar movement in Madison. The state capitol and home of the University of Wisconsin, Madison was the scene of some of the most violent antiwar demonstrations of the Vietnam Era.

Madison’s TV news crews tracked the protestors as a local news story, from the earliest antiwar demonstration at the U.W. in 1963 (with male protestors in suits and ties), through the violent confrontations of the late ‘60s, to the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement in 1973. Army footage of troops, helicopters, napalm strikes, burning villages and B-52 bombings expose the stark realities of the U.S. war in Vietnam.

The film opens in Madison, 1963. Former WKOW-TV anchor, Blake Kellogg, narrates the “1963 Year-End News in Review” local newsreel, summing up some of the year’s highlights. Kellogg’s voice over notes “It was an unprecedented boom year for Madison: more than 50 new retail stores opened, the university’s enrollment jumped 8%, the suburbs grew, and commuter bus ridership swelled.” Kellogg proudly notes that Madison is “the city voted the best place to live in America” (Life Magazine cover, 1948) and concludes that, “Madison is the American prescription. It’s the all-American town.”

In contrast to this idyllic lifestyle of middle class prosperity and U.W. football victories, the U.S. military involvement in Vietnam is growing. A year before, President Kennedy acknowledged, “We are putting in a major effort in Vietnam. We have 10 or 11 times as many men there as we had a year ago. There is great difficulty fighting a guerrilla war …We don’t see the end of the tunnel, but I must say, I don’t think it’s darker than it was a year ago, in some ways lighter.”

The August,1964 “Gulf of Tonkin Incident” which claimed U.S. two ships had been attacked by North Vietnamese PT boats in an unprovoked attack, spurred controversy in Washington and around the country on college campuses. President Johnson used the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution to gain authorization and funding for the undeclared war in Vietnam. The vote in the U.S. Senate was 98-2 in favor. One of the two Senators who voted against the Resolution was Ernest Gruening (D-Alaska) who is interviewed in The War at Home and says, “The story was false to begin with…We were engaged in an act of aggression at the very time Johnson was preparing to claim we were fighting aggression.”

In February,1965, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announces the “Operation Rolling Thunder” bombing campaign against North Vietnam which sparks the first significant antiwar demonstrations in Madison and at other universities around the country. Reacting to the protests, the U.S. government sent out State Dept. “truth teams” to the quell the concern. One such team came to the University of Wisconsin to “explain” U.S. policy in Vietnam to the skeptical students. But their explanation backfires when antiwar students confront the State Dept. representatives over the widespread use of napalm in Vietnam, until they finally get them to admit the truth about napalm.

As the war escalates, so do the protests against it. In 1965, antiwar leaders organize demonstrations in Madison designed to attract news coverage. In one protest, 30 or 40 protestors march to Truax Air Force Base to “arrest the base commander for war crimes”. Following the tactics of the Civil Rights Movement, they are non-violently arrested – all of it filmed by local TV news. When Madison’s Congressman, Robert Kastenmaier is unable to get Congress to hold public hearings on the war in Vietnam he holds the first two-day public hearing on the war in Madison.

The antiwar movement makes a leap forward in May,1966 when more than 1000 students stage a multi-day sit-in at the UW Administration Building to protest the university’s “complicity” with the U.S. Selective Service system, i.e. the Draft. Antiwar activists are also seen disrupting and heckling Senator Ted Kennedy about his position on the war in Vietnam during his speech to support the Democratic candidate for governor. A few months later, the first protests against the Dow Chemical Company (napalm producer) on-campus recruitment begins in February, 1967.

In the Fall of ’67, Dow Chemical Company recruiters returned to the University of Wisconsin. This time the students are more organized with a two-day protest planned against the napalm producer’s recruitment of chemical engineers. The large peaceful protest and sit-in at the UW Commerce Building metamorphizes into the first violent confrontation between students and police, politicizing thousands. “Dow” as the ensuing police riot would forever be known, ends the pacifist period of the early antiwar years in Madison and marks the evolution of the antiwar movement’s politics “from protest to resistance” with larger, more militant demonstrations in the years to come.

In the presidential election year of 1968, many antiwar activists sought an electoral end to the war by campaigning for Sen. Gene McCarthy’s antiwar platform. A local Madison referendum calling for “an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Vietnam” is also on the ballot in the Spring of ’68. The election rocks the nation when McCarthy wins the Wisconsin primary; the antiwar referendum garners 44% of the vote in Madison – and soon after, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announces he will not seek reelection.

But by the time of the August,1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an electoral solution to pull the troops out of Vietnam seems hopeless. Karl Armstrong, a McCarthy supporter goes to the Chicago Convention to bear witness and protest “pro-war candidate” Hubert Humphrey winning the Democratic Nomination for President. Armstrong describes how the Chicago Police charged into the seated, non-violent protestors outside the Convention, slamming him face first into the pavement, radicalizing him. Armstrong says, “In that split second, I said to myself, ‘If they were going to make war on us. We were going to make war on them.’”

Gerald Ford, campaigning for fellow Republicans in Madison, comments on the “Battle of Chicago” and predicts victory for Nixon and the GOP in 1968.

By 1969, Madison’s antiwar movement matures. In February, thousands of U.W. students demonstrate to support black students’ demands to create a Black Studies program, shutting down the university. When the students’ tactics switch to disruption and street maneuvers Gov. Warren Knowles calls in the National Guard to occupy the campus.

The “counter-culture” and local authorities butt heads. Undercover agents try to subvert the movement. A block party in a student neighborhood on Mifflin St erupts into a riot between Madison police, antiwar students and community residents. The lines are drawn in Madison: UW students and antiwar activists on one side, the police and government officials on the other. Madison Police Dept. Former Chief Inspector Herman Thomas notes in the film: “The Sheriff’s Dept. had people working undercover, the University Protection & Security had people working undercover, so did the Dept. of Justice, the FBI had someone, and even military intelligence was in the streets.

And we jelled all of it together.

In the fall of 1969, hundreds of thousands of Americans observe the local and national moratoria called to “stop business as usual” and “reflect on the meaning of the war” and to protest U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. Local events are held in dozens of cities across the U.S., including Madison, in October — with the National Moratorium the following month, draws more than 500,000 protestors to Washington DC, signaling the apex of the national antiwar movement. President Nixon fuels the opposition when he declares that “no amount of protest” will shift his position on the war.

Nixon’s escalation of the bombing and the war in Vietnam in 1970, plus the invasion of Cambodia, provokes antiwar activists into radical action. Window trashing and fire bombings replace picket signs and banners as some activists turned to violence to protest the war. (e.g. The Dept. of Justice reports that from Jan. 1, 1969 – April 15, 1970 8,200 bombings, attempted bombings and bomb threats attributed to student unrest.)

Widespread reaction to Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia and the shocking killing of four students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University throws Madison and the entire nation into a spasm of violence during the largest protests and most strident conflict of the period. Tear gas, repression, and more violence follow. In the aftermath of the Cambodian protest, the August 24, 1970 bombing of the U.S. Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin brings the war home.

Vietnam veterans and antiwar activists alike spurn President Richard Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy – the withdrawal of American troops on the ground, while ordering up the most intensive bombing of the war. Vietnam Veterans Against the War demonstrate on the steps of the U.S. Capitol Building, angrily throwing their medals away in protest. The War at Home concludes with the dramatic protests in Madison and nationwide against Nixon’s mining of North Vietnamese ports in May, 1972 — that helped propel the signing of the Paris Peace Agreements in January, 1973, formally bringing the United States war in Vietnam to a close.