The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam

The Vietnam war left a gash in the heart of America that can still be felt today. The War Within is the definitive history of America's internal battle over that war, and it chronicles, as no other book has done, the full story of how a powerful grassroots force—the antiwar movement—changed the course of American history.

Tom Wells spent over ten years painstakingly researching government and antiwar-movement documents and interviewing virtually every key player from the Vietnam era—from Dean Rusk, William Westmoreland, and John Ehrlichman to Dave Dellinger, Philip Berrigan, and Daniel Ellsberg. Wells moves from protests at the White House gates to antiwar meeting halls, recreating the activities of the student factions, religious organizations, political splinter groups, and other organizations that waged campaigns of mass protest, draft resistance, civil disobedience, and sometimes political violence. Here, too, are the behind-the-scenes planning sessions of Democratic and Republican administrations as they sought to discredit and subvert the antiwar movement's efforts.

Wells demonstrates that Washington took the antiwar movement seriously at every stage of the war and that the movement was instrumental in the eventual withdrawal of U.S. forces from Southeast Asia. He also reveals how the movement's growing influence prompted the Watergate fiasco. And he graphically conveys the internecine conflicts that plagued the antiwar movement and its leaders.

In these pages the human drama of the antiwar era unfolds through the words of its participants, both the famous and the forgotten. Wells not only captures the spirit of these tumultuous times but also shows how the events of twenty-five years ago shaped the America of today.