ABSTRACT
In early 1965 President Lyndon Johnson ordered US military forces to begin combat operations in South Vietnam, and by April of that year about 25,000 US troops were stationed in that country. During 1966 the base of the antiwar movement was broadened, and organizational structures were developed at local and regional levels. In November a conference in Cleveland created a national structure intended to organize a much more massive national demonstration scheduled for 15 April 1967. The movement began to emphasize resistance to continued conduct of the war in the form of draft resistance, organization of active-duty GI's, obstruction of induction centers, troop trains, and other war-related efforts, and by increasingly engaging in both substantive and symbolic civil disobedience. The rightist governmental, commercial, and military elite of Laos began to flee soon after the victories of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and of the North Vietnamese Army and the National Liberation Front in Vietnam.
