WATCH: The Vietnam Peace Movement & Ukraine Today

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Historian Carolyn Woods Eisenberg speaks on “Ending the ‘American War’ in Vietnam: Impact of the U.S. Antiwar Movement and Lessons for the Present.”  

Historian Carolyn Woods Eisenberg addressed Massachusetts Peace Action on Monday.

On January 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Conference agreed to U.S. withdrawal of all troops and advisors from Vietnam, withdrawal of all foreign troops from Laos and Cambodia, and a ceasefire throughout Vietnam. It was the culmination of a failed US project that cost vast sums of money and millions of lives. For years a vibrant antiwar movement challenged the direction of U.S. policy.

Focusing on the Nixon years, Eisenberg has drawn upon thousands of declassified documents to illuminate the impact of the antiwar movement on the Nixon Administration. In looking back at the Vietnam experience, do those events have implications for the present? Eisenberg’s new book Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia is a compelling, meticulous narrative of the way national security decisions formed at the highest levels of government affect the lives of individuals at home and abroad.

Carolyn Woods Eisenberg is Professor of U.S. History and American Foreign Relations at Hofstra University. She is the author of the prize-winning book Drawing the Line: the American Decision to Divide Germany, 1944-49. She is the co-founder of Brooklyn for Peace and co-legislative coordinator for Historians for Peace and Democracy.

Student protesters marching down Langdon Street at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, January 1965. (UW Digital Collections/Wikimedia Commons)

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