Letters to the Wall 2019

June – Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG)—see June 8, 1969 chronology entry-Foreign Minister, Nguyễn Thị Bình, travels to Algeria to garner international support for her revolutionary government and meets with President Boumediene and Foreign Minister Bouteflika. She then travels to China and meets with Zhou En-Lai in Beijing who prophesies a revolutionary victory for the Vietnamese revolutionaries.

John Kerry joins Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).

The Selective Service System (SSS) reports 271 instances of destructive attacks (bombing, arson, destruction of files) against draft boards in the previous 2 years.

June 3 – The NVA (PAVN or VPA) begin a new offensive toward Phnom Penh in Cambodia. The U.S. provides air strikes to prevent the defeat of Lon Nol’s inexperienced troops.

June 5 – President Nixon meets with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, CIA Director Richard Helms, and the heads of the NSA and DIA to discuss a proposed new domestic intelligence system. White House aide Tom Charles Huston has prepared his presentation. The plan is based on the assumption that “hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans—mostly under 30—are determined to destroy our society.” Nixon calls on the agencies to prove the assumed connections between the antiwar demonstrators and Communists. Nixon is convinced that both the FBI and the CIA have failed to find the links he is sure bind domestic troubles and foreign Communism.

June 12-16 – Battle of Kompong Speu: the combined forces of the South Vietnamese and Cambodian Armies fought to recapture the provincial capital of Kompong Speu. The town was captured by revolutionary forces on June 13 but was retaken by allied forces on June 16.

June 13 – President Nixon establishes the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest. The commission is directed to study the dissent, disorder, and violence breaking out on college and university campuses.

June 19-21 – The National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) is set up by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) with the support of the Student Mobilization Committee with a single-issue focus embodied in the antiwar slogan “Out Now!” This is an alternative to the New Mobilization Against the War in Vietnam (new Mobe). See chronology entry for July 1969.

June 24 – The U.S. Senate repeals the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. See chronology entries for August 2, 4, 5, 6 and 7, 1964.

June 26-27 – On June 26 The New York Times finally published the list of POWs that the DRV had provided for the Committee of Liaison on April 6. The next day the Pentagon describes the list as unofficial and “inaccurate and incomplete.”

Six antiwar GIs at Fort Lewis, Washington publicly refuse to be sent to Vietnam, possibly the largest action to date at any Army Shipment Center on grounds of conscientious objection, and become known as the “Fort Lewis Six.”

June 27-28 – The New Mobe Strategy Action Conference, held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, aims at building a multi-issue organization in contrast to the single-issue focus of NPAC. A follow-up conference is to be held from September.

June 29 – Private Willie Williams at Fort Lewis, Washington court-martialed for presenting an antiwar statement and poster to his commanding officer.

June 30 – U.S. troops withdraw from Cambodia. Over 350 Americans died during the invasion. General Abrams claimed 11,000 enemy soldiers killed and 2,500 captured, but his figures were disputed, as including civilian deaths. The ARVN troops remain, occupying heavily populated areas and supported by continued heavy U.S. air bombings. During this time, popular support for the Khmer Rouge broadens, its ranks swelling from 3,000 in March 1970 to a peak of about 30,000.