Marty Levine
February 17, 2025
It will be 60 years ago this coming Sunday when about 25,000 Americans took to the streets to add their voices and bodies to the call for this country to end its brutal war on the Vietnamese people. Looking back on that moment I was surprised at how “small” that number seemed but 60 years ago it represented the largest massing to oppose the war and began this modern era of peaceful protest.
As a young protesting student, I saw this action as an expression of how our democracy worked. We could speak what we believed, press our elected officials to do what we felt was right, and use our votes and legal system to ensure that the system worked as I thought it should.
Then President Lyndon Johnson, who had already announced that he would not run for reelection so he could devote himself to this war, was unmoved.
On the day after the March on Washington, President Johnson responded to the student antiwar demonstration, indirectly but unmistakably, with a pledge that “there is no human power capable of forcing us from Vietnam. We will remain as long as necessary, with the might that is required, whatever the risk and whatever the cost.” The president explained that he also sought peace and regretted that “the necessities of war have compelled us to bomb North Vietnam.” He even said that the events of the past week had brought a “strengthened unity of American purpose,” while rejecting the “slander and invective” of those who doubted the American mission to defend the people of South Vietnam.
The war continued and so did the effort to bring it to an end.
By the fall of 1969, Richard Nixon had replaced Lyndon Johnson in the White House, and the depth of involvement had grown to hundreds of thousands of troops and billions of dollars in cost. And the death count of Americans and Vietnamese had grown exponentially.
A second March on Washington drew an estimated 500,000 protestors massing in our capital to plead and demand an end to the carnage. I remember marching down Constitution Avenue after having driven overnight from Saint Louis to be present feeling this was how Democracy worked.
And I remember distinctly feeling so down because nothing seemed to change. Despite the mass protests, the number of deaths continued to rise and the war went on. President Nixon told us he heard our concern, understood our feelings but he wouldn’t change his policies. And the increased bombing he supported, he said, was his way of bringing us peace!
60 years have passed. Our country and our world are so very different. But much about this moment seems the same.
I find myself again looking in horror at a government that seems so out of sync with my beliefs and values. It is a government that seems to be rapidly turning back the clock to recreate the United States of long ago.
In just four weeks the new administration has aggressively tried to roll our nation back to the pre-Brown v. Board of Education USA, to a time when white privilege was not a concept to be discussed but a reality of life. And to a time when women’s role was to raise children and keep house. Here’s how NY Times columnist James Bouie sees the Trump Administration’s seeming quest to create a color-blind “meritocracy” and a nation that “protects” women.
His attack on D.E.I. isn’t about increasing merit or fighting wrongful discrimination; it is about reimposing hierarchies of race and gender (among other categories) onto American society. And following the goals of its intellectual architects — one of whom is infamous for his supremacist views — Trump’s war on D.E.I. is a war on the civil rights era itself, an attempt to turn back the clock on equal rights. Working under the guise of fairness and meritocracy, Trump and his allies want to restore a world where the first and most important qualification for any job of note was whether you were white and male, where merit is a product of your identity and not of your ability. As is true in so many other areas, the right’s accusation that diversity means unfair preferences masks a confession of its own intentions.
His war on migrants wants to return our nation to the last century. I had 60 years ago, when I fancied myself the next great American folk singer, discovered Woody Guthrie’s homage to the people who were needed to do farm work but were given not the dignity of having a name. In 1948 a plane load of farm workers crashed while it was returning these workers to their homeland in Mexico killing 48 people. Many of those died without even a name to mark their graves. Guthrie’s message in his song “Deportee” was clear: “You won’t have a name when you ride the big airplane. And all they will call you will be ‘Deportee’”
The song introduced me to another part of our nation’s underside and now, as the Trump Administration has turned its full force to deport millions, I am back again to facing a country that is willing to de-humanize millions of men, women, and children who have come here for a better life just as my parents did a century ago.
And, perhaps most disturbingly, we are at another moment when a President has declared himself above the law. In a 1977 interview years after he had become the first President to resign his office, Richard Nixon told interview David Frost that “”When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal.” This was his explanation for all of his actions while in office that had been challenged and caused him to resign before he was impeached. He was telling the world they were wrong and he was right and, perhaps, he made a mistake when he resigned because he had done nothing wrong.
But years earlier, in 1974 a Unanimous Supreme Court had ruled against President Nixon and, according to Rachel Reed writing for Harvard Law Today put it, that Nixon’s belief is not our nation’s:
“Neither the doctrine of separation of powers nor the generalized need for confidentiality of high-level communications, without more, can sustain an absolute, unqualified Presidential privilege of immunity from judicial process under all circumstances,” wrote Chief Justice Warren E. Burger. Quoting from a trial court decision by Chief Justice John Marshall in an 1807 treason case against Aaron Burr, Burger added that “Marshall cannot be read to mean in any sense that a President is above the law.”
President Trump now claims that this case was, as my lawyer friends would say, wrongly decided. He recently posted on X (formerly Twitter) “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”
So where does that leave us?
We have a President again who sees himself as all-powerful, who says he has a mandate despite getting less than 50% of the total vote and receiving 4 million fewer votes than President Biden received when he won in 2020. His actions are moving us in a direction that is abhorrent to me and places so many at risk.
He is a President who seems totally uncaring about the harm he causes, as presidents Johnson and Nixon seemed disconnected from the harm of their war. Day by day, it becomes clearer that he believes that he can do anything he wishes as he told us in an infamous 2016 campaign speech
“I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s, like, incredible.”
So, what do we do now? Is it now, as we did in the age of Vietnam, our mission to take the streets in bigger and bigger numbers, protesting until we are finally heard? That was John Oliver’s plea when he returned to the air on Sunday night.
Or do we wait for the slow process of our legal system to reach a conclusion? Do we trust and hope that it will reaffirm the decision of 50 years ago that there are limits on Presidential powers? Do we insist that Trump must follow the law even knowing that this process can grind exceedingly slowly and that the damage being done day by day is real and might not be repairable?
And if we wait for the courts, what are we prepared to do if the Trump administration refuses to abide by their decisions and orders?
Those are the difficult choices that I find myself stewing on these days.
So, I keep writing, keep lobbying, keep protesting but I keep wondering if it is enough.
I know this is a depressing way to end but that is where this moment has left me. I’m looking for a sign of hope like the bird with a green twig in its beak that told Noah the waters had begun to recede. Have you seen one that I have missed?
Are there any signs of hope on the horizon?
