That many millions of students, academics, political activists and other people protested American involvement in Vietnam is one of the most widely known and proverbial features of that war -- but what impact did it actually have? I have read breathless accounts of various protests, marches, sit-ins, teach-ins, civilian congresses, conferences, and goodness knows how many other things... but missing from many of these narratives is any reliable sense of just how effective any of it all was.
I'm as interested in broad strokes as I am in individuals, here. I know that U.S. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, for one, did sometimes participate in debates and discussion with protesting groups and individuals. Do we have any record on whether or not it helped shape his thought on American involvement in the war? What about Robert McNamara, who seems to have remained comparatively more disengaged from such protests?
This is probably a hopelessly broad question, but I'm intrigued nonetheless. The protest movements of the 60s and 70s are frequently recollected as being heroic and important -- but does this stand up under scrutiny?
Have you read Todd Gitlin's The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making & Unmaking of the New Left (1980)? Gitlin is now an academic, but during 1963-4, he used to be the head of the SDS, the main student activist organization in the US, and was involved heavily with the anti-war movement. He wrote in detail about how the media skewed the protest movement in order to contain and control its impact. Rather than the protest movement itself, Gitlin actually credits the mass media and its distortion of the Tet Offensive with turning the national tide against the war, with implications for policy makers in Washington. He argues that the anti-war movement was heavily instrumentalized by the media in order to justify their headlines. In any case, it's worth a read, and it also points to a number of follow-up sources on the political impact of Tet, although they're a bit dated by now.