How Vietnam Inflamed the Civil Rights Movement [View all]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/09/books/review/the-war-within-a-war-wil-haygood.html

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https://archive.li/b8PJW

The New York Times war correspondent David Halberstam caught the pulse of his era when he observed, in 1964, that there were parallels between America’s misbegotten adventure in Vietnam and the struggle for civil rights in the murderous, Klan-infested state of Mississippi. The similarities were obvious to Black people who were battling Jim Crow as their sons were shipped off to war by all-white draft boards, placed under the command of a heavily Southern, lily-white officer corps and often assigned to missions that would send them home in flag-draped coffins.

In the first years of the war, it was more than coincidental that the frontline fighters were disproportionately Black. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara — and the other federal officials whom Halberstam derisively called “the best and the brightest” — had contrived to capture thousands of souls for the ill-fated war on Communism by lowering testing standards and allowing the courts to drop criminal charges against young men who agreed to enlist.

The scheme, known as Project 100,000, protected the white middle class by preserving college deferments. Nearly half of those brought in by the project were Black, though African Americans made up little more than 10 percent of the population, and nearly all were poor.

The journalist Wil Haygood leverages this scenario to excellent effect in his clarifying and richly insightful Vietnam-era history, “The War Within a War.” As Haygood notes, Project 100,000 was cynically billed as part of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. But behind closed doors, the famously salty president slipped into his neo-Confederate drawl, praising the project as a means of cleaning up “all these Nigra boys that are now rejects.”

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