The year 1968 was a global phenomenon – an exceptional year in which people around the world mobilized to protest capitalism, imperialism, authoritarianism, and war. Feeling that they were part of a global revolution, galvanized by popular media and international networks, students and dissidents demanded their governments uphold their promises of freedom and democracy.Footnote ¹ Nineteen sixty-eight has come to represent not just a year, but an era of social and political transformation. It marked the peak of popular resistance against the Cold War world order, and its meaning has been debated by scholars into the twenty-first century.

This chapter provides a brief look at two major events that challenged the Cold War status quo in 1968 – the Tet Offensive and the Prague Spring – and explores how Vietnam was both a rallying point for, and an active participant in, the global upheaval of 1968. While the North Vietnamese Communist Party and National Liberation Front (NLF) captured the imagination of the international militant left, South Vietnamese dissidents carried out massive protests that mirrored uprisings in other parts of the world. Vietnam was at the forefront of global consciousness in this special year, influencing people-powered movements all over the world as it was shaken by its own domestic turmoil.

At the close of World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as competing hegemons, each pushing their own vision of modernization across the world. The race between American capitalism and Soviet communism went on for more than two decades, coinciding with the age of decolonization as people across Asia and Africa fought for independence from European powers. Seeking to bring newly independent nations into their spheres of influence, the Cold War superpowers intervened in wars across the Third World – escalating already violent conflicts with infusions of money, tanks, bombs, and soldiers. Fourteen million people died in these conflicts between 1945 and 1990, the majority of whom were civilians.Footnote ²

As violent conflicts erupted across the decolonizing world, the post–World War II population boom and concurrent expansion of universities gave rise to a new, educated generation. Student enrollments more than doubled in the United States, West Germany, France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and China between 1955 and 1965.Footnote ³ This generation grew disillusioned with what they perceived as broken promises of democracy and freedom. Technological advances in television and radio and international exchanges in music, film, and material goods facilitated a global awareness of alternative ways of life as well as civil and personal rights.Footnote ⁴ Millions of young people took to the streets as dramatic events unfolded in the world around them: the terror of the Cultural Revolution took over China, the Tet Offensive cast doubts on the legitimacy of the war in Vietnam, and the Prague Spring blossomed and met its demise in Czechoslovakia.

The struggle of the Third World was a topic of global concern in 1968, and the Vietnam War stood as its prime example. There, the richest and most powerful country in the world intervened in a civil war over the future of the Vietnamese nation. Across the United States, Latin America, Europe, and Asia, radical student movements opposed US involvement in Vietnam, seeing it as the embodiment of American imperialism. But Vietnam was much more than just a symbolic cause or rallying cry for the world’s activists. Vietnamese people themselves also took part in the global upheaval of 1968. While Vietnamese communist guerrillas became an international symbol of anti-imperial struggle, noncommunist citizens of South Vietnam took to the streets to protest authoritarianism and war.Footnote ⁵ Vietnam provided both inspiration and ammunition for the student protests of 1968, and the movement against the Vietnam War created new infrastructures and methods for political protest in every region of the world.

Since the late 1990s, historians have sought to make sense of how the protests of 1968 changed societal norms and global politics. Earlier studies tended to focus on student protests in the United States and Europe, including their criticisms of consumer culture, demands for social and political freedoms, and solidarity with Third World liberation struggles.Footnote ⁶ More recent works have focused on decolonizing nations and marginalized actors, tying local and regional events to global trends.Footnote ⁷ While 1968 has been studied as a global phenomenon, scholars have noted important differences between Western movements and those in the Third World. The risks of popular dissent were much higher in the decolonizing world, where authorities – including Western powers in command in these places – more readily responded with violence, imprisonment, and execution. International media was also less influential in the Global South, where people were preoccupied with how neocolonialism, modernization, and nation-building played out in their immediate surroundings. Finally, the category of “youth” was more important in defining protests in the United States and Europe. In the Third World, other social factors such as political ideology, religion, and socioeconomic class played a bigger role in determining who participated in popular dissent.Footnote ⁸

The long-term political consequences of 1968 are still debated. In most places, mass protests did not lead to systemic change or upend the status quo. Still, the events of that year changed the nature of political participation and social movement organizing for decades to come. Nineteen sixty-eight continues to be invoked in today’s struggles against the injustices of capitalism and imperialism. Vietnam and its people were central to the spirit of international solidarity and collective consciousness that defined this historic year.

Double Crisis of Hegemony: The Tet Offensive and the Prague Spring

Nineteen sixty-eight struck a significant blow to the reputation of the two major Cold War powers. The legitimacy of both the United States and Soviet Union were brought into question as crises erupted in their spheres of influence. The Tet Offensive broke the US government’s facade of impending victory in Vietnam while mass unrest continued over civil rights violations at home. The violent crackdown on Czechoslovakia’s peaceful “Prague Spring” revealed that the Soviet bloc had a tenuous hold on Eastern Europe, preserved solely by the threat of military force. These events marked the beginning of a fundamental shift in Cold War relations. The limits of both American and Soviet power were put to the test, and the seeds of détente were sown.

The Tet Offensive was the first phase of a major Vietnamese communist operation meant to break the stalemate of the war in South Vietnam. Devised by Lê Duẩn, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam, it was launched during the 1968 Lunar New Year (Tết) holiday when it was suspected most of the South Vietnamese army would be on leave and unprepared. Starting on January 31 and going through September 23, People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) troops and National Liberation Front guerrillas targeted military bases and urban centers including Saigon, Nha Trang, Quảng Ngại, and Huế. The expectation was that these attacks would spark a general uprising among the southern people and turn the tide of war in favor of North Vietnam. However, the initial offensive resulted in nearly ten times as many casualties for the communist side compared to their enemies, and the anticipated massive general uprising never happened.Footnote ⁹ It took three years for the North Vietnamese war effort to recover from Lê Duẩn’s failed strategy.Footnote ¹⁰ At the same time, the Tet Offensive also dealt a heavy psychological blow to the other side as it brought unprecedented violence to South Vietnamese cities. American public support for the war fell dramatically, triggering a major change in US strategy in Vietnam and in the Cold War at large.

Images and media coverage of the Tet Offensive circulated around the world in 1968, igniting and feeding doubts about the US mission in Vietnam. One of the most infamous photos – by Associated Press photographer Eddie Adams – captured up close the moment South Vietnamese general Nguyễn Ngọc Loan executed a suspected communist officer at point-blank range on a Saigon street. It became one of the most reproduced images in history.Footnote ¹¹ Photographs such as this highlighted the brutality of war and the fact that the United States was enabling and participating in human rights violations in Vietnam. For critics of American imperialism, the Tet Offensive was further proof of the disaster that followed Western attempts to develop the decolonizing world.Footnote ¹²

Television news greatly influenced public opinion of the war. Walter Cronkite’s special report from Vietnam marked a significant turning point in perceptions of the war and of President Lyndon B. Johnson. The “Report from Vietnam,” which aired on CBS Evening News on February 27, 1968, showed Cronkite becoming increasingly skeptical of official accounts that claimed the war was nearly won. During his two-week trip, Cronkite lost faith in the US mission and concluded that the only path forward was to try to find an “honorable” way to withdraw. After watching the report himself, Johnson lamented, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”Footnote ¹³ By March 1968, the president’s closest advisors also changed their tune and began pressing him to withdraw troops from Vietnam. Former secretary of state Dean Acheson counseled Johnson to negotiate for peace, holding that the United States could “no longer do the job we set out to do in the time we have left, and we must begin to … disengage.”Footnote ¹⁴

On March 31, President Johnson shocked the nation when he announced in a forty-minute televised speech that he would not be running for reelection and would instead dedicate his remaining time in office to forging a diplomatic solution to the war in Vietnam.Footnote ¹⁵ He ordered an immediate end to US bombing of North Vietnam above the 20th parallel and declared his willingness to open serious peace negotiations with Hanoi. Reeling from the aftermath of the disastrous Tet Offensive and from the effects of American bombing, North Vietnamese leaders were ready to accept Johnson’s invitation to come to the table.Footnote ¹⁶

Four days after Johnson’s announcement, Americans were stunned yet again by the assassination of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., on April 4, 1968. Exactly one year before his death, the civil rights icon had delivered a highly controversial sermon titled “Beyond Vietnam,” in which he sharply condemned the war and tied the Vietnamese struggle for peace and self-determination to the struggle for racial and economic equality in the United States. The US government, King said, was “taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.” By spending more money on the war than on domestic social programs, the United States was “approaching spiritual death.”Footnote ¹⁷ In the weeks following the assassination of King, protests and riots exploded across the country, including in the nation’s capital. Eleven thousand troops were dispatched to Washington, DC, putting the city under military occupation and virtual martial law. Over the span of four chaotic days starting on April 6, police fired more than 8,000 canisters of tear gas; 1,190 people were injured; and 7,600 were arrested in clashes between citizens and law enforcement. The assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. – the foremost advocate of nonviolent resistance – followed by the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy only two months later served as proof to many activists that real social change required violent, armed struggle. As Jeremi Suri puts it, “A growing cohort of young Americans – black and white – believed that they could redress inequalities and end the war in Vietnam only through increased violence. Members of the Black Power movement and student radicals forged loose alliances during the tumultuous months of 1968.”Footnote ¹⁸

As the United States struggled with domestic turmoil and began to change course in Vietnam, the Soviet Union faced its own crisis in Eastern Europe, starting with the liberalization of Czechoslovak politics in early 1968. The social and political reforms that came to be known as the Prague Spring were ushered in by Alexander Dubček after he unseated the unpopular head of the Czechoslovak Communist Party (KSČ), Antonín Novotný, in January 1968. Novotný had held the position of First Secretary for nearly fifteen years. Within weeks of taking power, Dubček enacted sweeping reforms, including effectively ending press censorship and accelerating the rehabilitation of victims of the political show trials of the 1950s. He also instigated a wave of personnel changes, triggering anxiety in Moscow as Leonid Brezhnev observed that many “good and sincere friends of the Soviet Union had been forced to step down.” New KSČ leaders believed that the liberalization and democratization of the social, political, and economic systems were needed to ensure the continued domination of the party in their country. They initiated these reforms while reaffirming their commitment to uphold all Warsaw Pact obligations to East European allies and the Soviet Union, including being the leading military supplier for the North Vietnamese communist struggle. But while KSČ leaders verbally affirmed their loyalty to the Soviet bloc, their reforms enabled dissident political activities that moved beyond their control and challenged Soviet hegemony by prioritizing Czechoslovak sovereignty over all else. The KSČ also adopted an antinuclear stance, overturning their previous agreement to store Soviet nuclear warheads on Czech soil.Footnote ¹⁹

Moscow reacted to the Prague Spring with alarm. Brezhnev assessed that Czechoslovakia was “moving in an anti-communist direction,” and from March 1968 the “Czechoslovak question” was at the top of the Politburo’s agenda. The stability of the East European bloc would be at risk if these liberal reforms were to spill over to Poland, East Germany, and Ukraine. Dissidents within the Soviet Union itself were already taking note of Dubček’s reforms. Even after repeated warnings, the KSČ showed no sign of reversing or slowing down the liberalization program. By the middle of the year, there was no doubt among Soviet leadership that military intervention would be needed in Czechoslovakia. They prepared and launched their invasion at midnight on August 21, with Soviet forces supported by 80,000 soldiers from Poland, Bulgaria, Hungary, and East Germany. Within hours, the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovak transportation and communications lines was complete and the KSČ leadership arrested. Soviet leaders had made a political miscalculation, however, as Politburo analysis after the invasion showed that “75 to 90 percent of the [Czechoslovak] population … regard the entry of Soviet troops as an act of occupation.” Not wanting to be seen as a blatant occupier, they reinstalled Dubček and other Prague Spring leaders while keeping a Soviet military presence in the country.Footnote ²⁰

The long-term impacts of the invasion of Czechoslovakia were significant. Shortly after the beginning of the occupation, Brezhnev announced that the Soviet Union was prepared to intervene militarily anywhere in Eastern Europe to ensure that members of the Warsaw Pact adhered to Soviet-style communism – a policy that came to be known as the Brezhnev Doctrine. Albania protested by leaving the Warsaw Pact and aligning with China. West European communist parties, which had been inspired by the Prague Spring, also turned away from the Soviet Union after seeing its violent response to the peaceful, democratic reforms. With the Brezhnev Doctrine, ideological conformity became a requirement of the Warsaw Pact – a requirement that would be upheld by the threat of military invasion. The doctrine showed that the Soviet Union lacked a strong political coalition in Europe and that its allies were not capable of staying in power without Soviet military backing. In the words of Mark Kramer, “If Soviet leaders had once hoped that ‘stability’ in the Eastern bloc could be maintained by something other than coercion, the 1968 invasion put an end to those hopes.” The Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia also had an impact on relations between the major Cold War powers. China denounced the action and sent more troops to reinforce the Sino-Soviet border, setting the stage for Zhou Enlai’s announcement in March 1969 that the Soviet Union was China’s “main enemy.”Footnote ²¹ An easing of relations between the United States and China soon followed.

Nineteen sixty-eight triggered a crisis of hegemony for both the United States and Soviet Union. After more than five years of stalemate war in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive and escalating turmoil at home forced American leaders to rethink their priorities and their approach to the Cold War. By late March, President Johnson had become obsessed with ending the war in Vietnam. By the end of October, he brought a full stop to the bombing of North Vietnam, initiated peace negotiations with Hanoi, and opened a pathway toward improved relations with China and the Soviet Union.Footnote ²² The events of 1968 prompted the United States to begin making its way out of Vietnam and to ease tensions with its Cold War rivals. For the Soviet Union, the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the resulting fallout revealed the instability of the communist bloc in Eastern Europe. The reputation of the Soviet Union suffered, and China continued to rise as the new communist model for the Third World.Footnote ²³

The Vietnamese Communist Struggle and the Third World

International support was essential to the survival of the Vietnamese communist revolution. North Vietnamese leadership performed a delicate balancing act to maintain support from both China and the Soviet Union throughout the Vietnam War.Footnote ²⁴ Beyond relations with these communist giants, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRVN) also looked to position itself as a leader of the Third World. Especially after the Tet Offensive in 1968, Vietnamese communists saw their struggle as the main driving force of anti-imperial struggle and world revolution.Footnote ²⁵

While North Vietnam’s communist credentials were an asset in the socialist world, they were a liability when it came to the West and the Third World.Footnote ²⁶ To understand the success of North Vietnamese diplomacy in the noncommunist world, we have to look at the revolution’s southern front: the nominally independent National Liberation Front. Founded by Northern communist leadership in 1960, the NLF was a self-proclaimed nonaligned group representing southern Vietnamese people and their desire for peace and national independence. The degree to which the NLF was controlled by Hanoi throughout the war is still debated, but there is no doubt that communist leaders orchestrated NLF diplomacy to serve their own ends, particularly as the United States escalated its military involvement in the 1960s.Footnote ²⁷

In its recruitment and propaganda efforts, the National Liberation Front emphasized that it was fighting for freedom from American imperialism, not for communist revolution. This anti-imperial rhetoric helped to win over Western antiwar activists and the Third World, and Hanoi’s leadership used it to their advantage.Footnote ²⁸ They sent NLF delegations to Western university campuses and conferences with nonaligned states and intergovernmental organizations. NLF representatives were present at 125 conventions in 1966 alone. By 1967 they had more than twenty representative offices abroad and sent seventy-nine delegations to twenty-nine countries that year.Footnote ²⁹ NLF diplomacy served the North Vietnamese war effort by convincing foreign observers that the South Vietnamese government and its US ally were illegitimate and did not serve the interests of the Southern Vietnamese people.

Illustrative of the appeal of the NLF in the Third World is Madame Nguyễn Thị Bình, a woman whose reputation was established during the French Indochina War. Using the name Yên Sa, she organized Southern women in the revolution and eventually went north to train at the Nguyễn Ái Quốc party school in Hanoi. She was sent abroad as a delegate and proved to be an effective speaker. After the death of Hồ Chí Minh in September 1968, Bình took the helm of international diplomacy for the revolution. She traveled alongside North Vietnamese representatives, headed the NLF delegation at the 1968 Paris Peace Talks, and toured the world with other Southern Vietnamese women, including to the third Non-Alignment Movement conference in Lusaka, Zambia, in 1970.Footnote ³⁰ Bình was an ideal representative in a time when women’s activism and internationalism were at a high point.Footnote ³¹ While the North Vietnamese campaign focused on securing financial and material support from communist allies, NLF representatives like Nguyễn Thị Bình and her fellow “soldiers with long hair” won over Western antiwar activists and the Third World.Footnote ³²

Protestors across the globe stood in solidarity with Vietnamese guerrilla fighters in large part because of diplomatic efforts by the National Liberation Front. On every continent, people took over campuses and city streets decrying the war in Vietnam as the foremost example of Western imperialism. Images and slogans of the radical left proliferated as students celebrated figures such as Mao Zedong, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and Fidel Castro, who seemingly offered a third way out of both US capitalist and Soviet communist domination.Footnote ³³ Guevara’s call to “create two, three, many Vietnams” echoed across the Americas and the Third World.Footnote ³⁴ In Mexico City, students saw themselves and Vietnamese people as fellow victims of the United States; they marched with banners and slogans supporting Hồ Chí Minh against American imperialism.Footnote ³⁵

In Europe, students spoke out against Western hegemony and their governments’ complicity in the Vietnam War. Protestors in West Berlin found parallels between the suppression of democracy in Germany and US support for the authoritarian regime of South Vietnam. They predicted that Western military forces would soon be turned against them: “Today Vietnam, Tomorrow Us” read one protest pamphlet. Leading student organizer Rudolf Dutschke proclaimed that “Real solidarity with the Vietnamese revolution comes from the actual weakening and upheaval in the centers of imperialism.” When Vice President Hubert Humphrey visited West Berlin on April 6, 1967, more than 2,000 students took to the streets to protest US policies. In February 1968, 10,000 protestors from across Western Europe gathered at the Free University in West Berlin for a Vietnam Congress that called for revolutionary struggle against hegemony in the decolonizing world. Similar to their counterparts in Germany and following the style of protest that began at the University of California, Berkeley, students in Paris staged the first-ever sit-in protest in French history at Nanterre University on March 22, 1968. They demanded an end to militant state power and called for broader societal debate on capitalism, imperialism, and the struggle of students and workers worldwide. Other universities in and around Paris soon joined in, resulting in large protests that called for the “defeat of American imperialism in Vietnam” among other things.Footnote ³⁶ In Eastern Europe – particularly in Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia – solidarity with Vietnam against fascistic capitalism was expressed by state governments and grassroots organizations alike.Footnote ³⁷

In addition to the aforementioned cases, historians have identified radical student movements in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, the Philippines, and Thailand that opposed US involvement in Vietnam.Footnote ³⁸ There was a feeling of global connectedness across these movements, and international solidarity with the revolutionary Third World became a new measure of political radicalism in the late 1960s.

North Vietnamese leaders invested heavily in the National Liberation Front and its diplomatic campaign, knowing that winning the world’s sympathies was essential to winning the war against South Vietnam and its US ally. Vietnamese communist diplomacy largely succeeded because of the state’s strict control over speech and the press. Party leadership silenced dissent and carefully curated what foreigners were allowed to see, enabling them to maintain a consistent narrative.Footnote ³⁹ Several purges – including the infamous “revisionist purge” in the leadup to the Tet Offensive in 1968 – took out party members believed to be pro-Soviet or in favor of peaceful coexistence between communists and noncommunists. The lack of political freedom in North Vietnam and its strong propaganda machine ensured that the revolution could portray a unified message about its identity and goals throughout the war.Footnote ⁴⁰ The Vietnamese Communist Party created and fed the mythologized image of their guerrilla movement as the sole legitimate representative of the Vietnamese people, fighting a righteous war for peace and national independence.

Figure 30.1 The National Liberation Front flag hangs during a student demonstration at the Sorbonne in Paris, alongside a poster for the French Revolutionary Communist Youth Party (May 14, 1968).

Source: – / Stringer / AFP / Getty Images.

South Vietnam and the Global Upheaval of 1968

In contrast to the DRVN, South Vietnam had a diverse political scene and was plagued by civil unrest throughout the 1960s. As Heather Marie Stur argues, the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) was a fledgling democracy that was never able to take flight. An “ensemble cast” of activists from across the political spectrum animated Southern Vietnamese society, including Buddhists, Catholics, and – like the rest of the world – high school and university students.Footnote ⁴¹ Popular movements did force some change in South Vietnam, the most prominent example being the Buddhist protests of 1963, which led to the ousting of President Ngô Đình Diệm.Footnote ⁴² South Vietnamese citizens took to the streets as participants in the global upheaval of the 1960s. They put themselves at risk of imprisonment, torture, and death to challenge authoritarianism and demand civil freedoms and representative government.

The year 1968 specifically marked a shift in South Vietnamese popular protest for two reasons. First, a growing number of Catholics adopted an antiwar stance and began speaking out against the authoritarian practices of the government.Footnote ⁴³ It is generally believed that Vietnamese Catholics were staunchly anticommunist and supportive of the Saigon regimes and US intervention in Vietnam. Studies on Ngô Đình Diệm and his administration have emphasized Catholicism as part of the glue that held the United States–RVN alliance together. This may have held true in the 1950s and early 1960s, but a combination of war-weariness and the growing influence of liberation theology led to a significant shift in the late 1960s. Following the global trend of the Catholic New Left, many Vietnamese Catholics – particularly those of the younger generation – joined the antiwar movement and started advocating social and economic justice.Footnote ⁴⁴ They adopted radical ideas about the “spiritual obligation of religious leaders … to the struggles of the downtrodden.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Additionally, under Pope Paul VI, the Vatican had begun encouraging Catholics to open dialogue with Marxist governments and parties in Europe, and in 1968 some South Vietnamese began to follow suit by abandoning strict anticommunism and opening up to socialist ideas.Footnote ⁴⁶

The second big shift in South Vietnamese politics in 1968 was an escalation of antiwar dissent, which triggered a violent state response. The Tet Offensive brought the war to Vietnam’s Southern cities in a new way; before 1968, the cities suffered only from scattered terrorist attacks, while larger battles took place in the countryside. Five months into the offensive, by July 1968, more than 5,000 people had been killed in Saigon, 20,000 homes were destroyed, and the city’s already large refugee population had grown by 180,000. Thousands of civilians were massacred by the NLF in Huế, giving rise to fears of the potential bloodbath that would follow if the communists were to win the war. In the weeks following the offensive, young athletes and religious volunteers were recruited to distribute emergency aid and clean up debris around cities. Some stepped up to do the grisly work of collecting and burying bodies that had been left decaying in the streets.Footnote ⁴⁷ It was a rude awakening for city dwellers who had, until then, been spared the greater part of the war.

Figure 30.2 Buddhist monks and nuns demonstrating for peace and independence in front of the government palace in Saigon (August 1968).

Source: FRANCOIS MAZURE / Contributor / AFP / Getty Images.

As violence and destruction came to their doorstep, antiwar sentiment grew among the urban population, and clashes between student protestors and police became more frequent. The government cracked down on free speech, seeing any opposition or public discussion about the war as a threat to be silenced. Some politicians began openly calling for negotiations with the NLF and the formation of a coalition government to bring the war to a diplomatic end. One such politician, Trương Đình Dzu, was subsequently sentenced to five years of hard prison labor on Côn Sơn island and was not released until the end of the war.Footnote ⁴⁸

The paranoid crackdown of the Saigon government was not completely unfounded. They were, after all, fighting a war in which the enemy was making concerted efforts to destabilize them from within. The NLF actively recruited high school students and created several front organizations which blended in with genuinely independent, noncommunist groups active in the South.Footnote ⁴⁹ The dilemma of Saigon’s leadership was balancing democracy and self-preservation, and they prioritized the latter. According to an official report for the South Vietnamese National Assembly, 16,000 political prisoners were detained in 1968 alone.Footnote ⁵⁰ By 1972 the number had risen to an estimated 200,000.Footnote ⁵¹ In choosing to crush dissenting voices through censorship, imprisonment, torture, and death, the RVN fueled further resentment among its citizens and reinforced its global image as an illegitimate, authoritarian government.

Despite repressive government measures, mass organizing continued in South Vietnam through the end of the war. Its people not only took to the streets, but also reached out to the rest of the world. Buddhist and Catholic groups brought international attention to abuses by the South Vietnamese government, countering the US–RVN narrative of a heroic war to save democracy. The most outspoken Buddhist leader on the international stage was Thích Nhất Hạnh, who toured nineteen countries in 1966–7 and met with prominent religious and government leaders including Robert McNamara, Pope Paul VI, and Martin Luther King, Jr.Footnote ⁵² His meeting with the pope resulted in the sending of a papal delegation to South Vietnam, and King was so influenced by the Vietnamese monk that he later nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize.Footnote ⁵³ Exiled from South Vietnam for his antiwar activities, Thích Nhất Hạnh settled in France and established the Vietnamese Buddhist Peace Delegation, continuing his work of broadcasting the message of Vietnamese Buddhists to the rest of the world.Footnote ⁵⁴ Catholic leaders, including Father Nguyễn Quang Lâm and Father Chân Tín, took on the work of documenting the imprisonment and torture of political dissidents by the South Vietnamese government. Father Chân Tín recorded testimonies of torture that occurred in Thủ Đức, Côn Đảo, and other prisons and published these accounts in a monthly magazine called Đối Diện (Face to Face). By the 1970s, political repression was so severe that even the more conservative Catholic newspapers were publishing students’ testimonies of torture.Footnote ⁵⁵

The diversity of voices in the Republic of Vietnam, and constant turnover of leadership after the coup against Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963, meant that there was never one unified entity to speak for the young nation. Compared to their counterparts in North Vietnam and the National Liberation Front, the RVN’s public relations campaign was scattered and weak. Foreign press coverage of protests, as well as citizen diplomacy that alerted the world to government abuses, served as evidence that the RVN did not enjoy the support of many of its own citizens. It was apparent that South Vietnam had an authoritarian government that relied on force to maintain control. Against the backdrop of decolonization and the global movement against imperialism, the South Vietnamese government and its US ally seemed to play the role of the villain. The lively, chaotic, and at times violent political scene in South Vietnam stands as an example of what happens when citizens try to build a democracy amid war and under the influence of a hegemonic ally.

Conclusion

The idea of a “Global 1968” implies the presence of worldwide political, cultural, and social forces that shaped the events of that year. Vietnam held a unique position in this historical moment. Standing at the frontlines of the Global Cold War, Vietnamese dissidents and revolutionaries inspired people around the world to demand an end to US and Soviet domination. The National Liberation Front became an international symbol of anti-imperialism and Third World self-determination. But Vietnam’s relationship to the world in the 1960s was more complex than the communist propaganda that became so well known. Nonaligned dissidents in South Vietnam took to the streets and reached out to foreign allies, risking their lives to demand pluralism and democracy amidst war. Media coverage of Southern Vietnamese protests fueled antiwar sentiment and cast doubts on the legitimacy of the US mission there. The events of 1968 transformed how people on every continent understood their relationship to their fellow citizens, their nations, and the world. Vietnam and its people were at the forefront of global consciousness in this pivotal year, which set a new standard for mass political participation and international solidarity.