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aDrawing on comprehensive interviews and archival research, Andrew E. Hunt has written a highly informative account of one of the twentieth centuryas leading figures of American radicalism.a
&$151;"The Journal of American History"

"The story of David Dellinger's half century of leadership in the struggle for peace and social justice in the United States challenges the conventional narrative of recent American political history. Instead of the familiar history-by-decade, in which the radical thirties are followed by the conservative forties and fifties, to be succeeded again by the radical sixties, and so on, Hunt's biography of Dellinger provides readers with a sense of important and underlying continuities in the history of American radicalism."
--Maurice Isserman, author of "If I Had a Hammer: The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left"

"Meticulously researched and gracefully written, Andrew Hunt's splendid biography of David Dellinger follows the courageous revolutionary through six decades of activism while contributing new insights into the colorful history and interactions of pacifist, antiwar, and progressive organizations that shook the American establishment."
--Melvin Small, Wayne State University

"In this valuable biography, Hunt offers an outstanding description of Dellinger's political thought and activities over a sixty year period. Particularly interesting, because so little has been written about the subject, is the detailed discussion of Dellinger's antiwar activities during WWII. At the same time, Hunt is careful to portray a comprehensive view of Dellinger's career and placeshim in relation to the work of others in the American left."
--David J. Langum, author of "William M. Kunstler: The Most Hated Lawyer in America"

The year was 1969. In a Chicago courthouse, David Dellinger, one of the Chicago Eight, stood trial for conspiring to disrupt the National Democratic Convention. Dellinger, a long-time but relatively unknown activist, was suddenly, at fifty-three, catapulted into the limelight for his part in this intense courtroom drama.

From obscurity to leader of the antiwar movement, David Dellinger is the first full biography of a man who bridged the gap between the Old Left and the New Left. Born in 1915 in the upscale Boston suburb of Wakefield to privilege, Dellinger attended Yale during the Depression, where he became an ardent pacifist and antiwar activist. Rejecting his parentsa affluent lifestyle, he endured lengthy prison sentences as a conscientious objector to World War II and created a commune in northern New Jersey in the 1940s, a prototype for those to follow twenty years later.

His instrumental role in the creation of "Liberation" magazine in 1956 launched him onto the national stage. Writing regular essays for the influential radical monthly on the arms race and the Civil Rights movement, he earned an audience among the New Left radicals. As anti-Vietnam sentiment grew, he became, in Abbie Hoffmanas words, the father of the antiwar movement and the architect of the 1968 demonstrations in Chicago. He remained active in anti-war causes until his death on May 25, 2004 at age 88.

Vilified by critics and glorified by supporters, Dellinger was a man of contradictions: a rigid Ghandian who nonetheless supported violent revolutionarymovements; a radical thinker and gifted writer forced to work as a baker to feed his large family; and a charismatic leader who taught his followers to distrust all leaders. Along the way, he encountered Eleanor Roosevelt, Ho Chi Minh, Martin Luther King, Jr., the Black Panthers and all the other major figures of the American Left.

The remarkable story of a stubborn visionary torn between revolution and compromise, David Dellinger reveals the perils of dissent in America through the struggles of one of our most important dissenters.

"Hunt deliciously complicates the history of the 1960s by introducing a protest element not bound to college campuses or the counterculture. . . . It is a disturbing story, one that Hunt tells well."
--"Choice"

"All students of the concluding years of America's longest war should be grateful to Andrew Hunt for the clarity and grace with which he has told V.V.A.W.'s story."
--"Canadian Journal of History"

"This extraordinary and deeply moving history explodes all the encrusted stereotypes of GIs on one side of the barricades and anti-war protestors on the other. At along last we can again hear the voices of the thousands of courageous veterans who refused to be silent about the immoral war in Indochina."
"--Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz"

"A splendid addition to the growing literature on Vietnam veterans and their experiences during and after the war. Hunt's complex and moving history is a vital corrective to accounts which equate the anti-war movement with student activists as well as to those who persist in seeing veterans as passive victims."
"--Marilyn B. Young, author of The Vietnam Wars"

"Explodes one of the most persistent and pernicious myths attached to the 1960s: that the anti-war movement was anti-GI and anti-veteran. How could that be, when, as Hunt shows, many of the most committed and eloquent opponents of the Vietnam war were themselves veterans of the conflict in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam Veterans Against the War were heroes then, and they deserve to be remembered as heroes today."
"--Maurice Isserman, Hamilton College"

"For all kinds of veterans of the Sixties era, this book offers powerful testimony on the meaning of patriotismand moral courage. For younger people, whose images of the Sixties are often caught in the caricatures of the mass media, Hunt's sophisticated account of veterans' anti-war protest evokes new understanding, and I think, hard questions about a difficult time."
"--David Farber, author of The Age of Great Dreams"

The anti-Vietnam War movement in the United States is perhaps best remembered for its young, counterculture student protesters. However, the Vietnam War was the first conflict in American history in which a substantial number of military personnel actively protested the war while it was in progress.

In The Turning, Andrew Hunt reclaims the history of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), an organization that transformed the antiwar movement by placing Vietnam veterans in the forefront of the nationwide struggle to end the war. Misunderstood by both authorities and radicals alike, VVAW members were mostly young men who had served in Vietnam and returned profoundly disillusioned with the rationale for the war and with American conduct in Southeast Asia. Angry, impassioned, and uncompromisingly militant, the VVAW that Hunt chronicles in this first history of the organization posed a formidable threat to America's Vietnam policy and further contributed to the sense that the nation was under siege from within.

Based on extensive interviews and in-depth primary research, including recently declassified government files, The Turning is a vivid history of the men who risked censures, stigma, even imprisonment for a cause they believed to be "an extended tour of duty."