Rolling Thunder - This story by James Tobin is reprinted courtesy of the Heritage Project at the University of Michigan

 Operation Rolling Thunder began on March 2, 1965. That night, one hundred U.S. and South Vietnamese heavy bombers crossed into North Vietnamese air space to pound supply routes between Hanoi and the south. It was the first time U.S. forces had taken the offensive in the war between South and North Vietnam.

On March 8, at the orders of President Lyndon Johnson, 3,500 U.S. Marines waded ashore at Da Nang. They were the first U.S. combat troops to enter the conflict.

Johnson had promised to draw down the American commitment. That had been a centerpiece of his campaign the previous fall against the hawkish Barry Goldwater. Voters chose Johnson in a landslide. Now he was escalating the war.

On March 9, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., marching at the head of hundreds demanding civil rights, set out from Selma, Alabama, toward the statehouse in Montgomery. State troopers and vigilantes turned them back.

At the University of California at Berkeley, students and faculty were barely recovering from days of disorder and mass arrests set off by the student-led Free Speech Movement, which had rebelled against the administration’s crackdown on political protests.

In Ann Arbor, all this news broke in thunderous waves. In 1965, only a handful of students were radical in their politics. But the faculty included a scattering of progressives involved in the early stirrings of dissent against the war. The attack on North Vietnam rang in their ears like a shrieking alarm.