Vietnam War Protest Songs Spoke of WWI

As the Iraq War was going sour in 2007, I interviewed the acerbic and authoritative rock critic, Robert Christgau. I was seeking comment on what seemed like a dearth of present anti-war music compared with the past. Without exactly telling me I was an idiot kid gulled by Boomer propaganda, he corrected me. There was hardly any anti-war music in the 1960s, he said. Movies had projected the few major anti-war songs such as “Fortunate Son” backward by a few years in our collective memory. Just look at the charts; some of the California sound was coming in. But Frank Sinatra was still nabbing big hits by crooning Broadway show tunes. In 1966, the No. 1 hit on American radio was “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” Big acts such as the Dixie Chicks and Green Day had publicly turned against President George W. Bush in a much more explicit way than any similarly popular act in the 1960s went after Lyndon Johnson.

Christgau was right. Besides folkies like Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs, the culture industry mostly waited until it was Nixon’s war before turning on it. And even when it did, artists often didn’t attack the subject directly. In fact, they attacked a different war altogether.

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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As the Iraq War was going sour in 2007, I interviewed the acerbic and authoritative rock critic, Robert Christgau. I was seeking comment on what seemed like a dearth of present anti-war music compared with the past. Without exactly telling me I was an idiot kid gulled by Boomer propaganda, he corrected me. There was hardly any anti-war music in the 1960s, he said. Movies had projected the few major anti-war songs such as “Fortunate Son” backward by a few years in our collective memory. Just look at the charts; some of the California sound was coming in. But Frank Sinatra was still nabbing big hits by crooning Broadway show tunes. In 1966, the No. 1 hit on American radio was “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” Big acts such as the Dixie Chicks and Green Day had publicly turned against President George W. Bush in a much more explicit way than any similarly popular act in the 1960s went after Lyndon Johnson.

Christgau was right. Besides folkies like Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs, the culture industry mostly waited until it was Nixon’s war before turning on it. And even when it did, artists often didn’t attack the subject directly. In fact, they attacked a different war altogether.