part of the embassy grounds for over six hours before being killed. For a short while the Vietcong managed to close all roads into Saigon, as well as forcing the shutdown of the city's airport. Soon, parts of the city were evacuated so that U.S. combat jets could bomb Vietcong-held neighborhoods.
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Though the North Vietnamese were driven back, unable to hold any of their gains and losing somewhere between 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers, the offensive succeeded in planting in the United States widespread doubt of the country's ability to win the war as well as of the legitimacy of the South Vietnam government. In driving the North Vietnamese out of Saigon, Americans were witness to a public execution. The executioner, a South Vietnamese general, claimed that because the captured man had a handgun he was a Vietcong terrorist. With news cameras rolling, the general pulled out his pistol, put it to the prisoner's head, and shot him.
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Within weeks politicians from both parties, including Eugene McCarthy, Edward Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Jacob Javits, were calling for an end to American involvement in Vietnam. 12 At the same time the two leading Republican candidates for President, Richard Nixon and George Romney, renewed their attacks on Johnson's policies. 13
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By April 1968, when Mark Rudd stepped up to the podium to condemn the Columbia University administration, U.S. casualties in Vietnam had risen to almost 22,000 deaths and only eight days earlier had cost Lyndon Johnson the presidency. 14 Johnson, having never clearly defined the goals of that war and faced with a rising storm of protest within his own party, had bowed out of the race for reelection.
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At Columbia University, the fury over this unwanted, badly-fought war barely simmered below the surface. At the center of that anger was Mark Rudd and his followers.
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Rudd was the head of the Columbia University chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (S.D.S.). With about 30,000 members nationwide, the S.D.S. had for several years helped organize many of the earliest, most visible antiwar protests, such as the November 1968 rally in Washington.*
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| | * See page 125
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