Professor Alex Bloom discusses war protest on 'The NewsHour'

Saying that Americans have been three times as quick to protest the war in Iraq as they were to criticize the Vietnam War, Wheaton College History Professor Alexander Bloom provided the historical and cultural context for a discussion of protest on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" on Sept. 26.

Bloom appeared on a panel to discuss last weekend's protests for and against the Iraq war. Guest host Gwen Ifill asked Bloom to clarify how significant these protest are today and have been in the past.

"One of the things I think that's striking is the degree to which Americans are increasingly thinking of the Iraq War as a mistake, that it's been much sooner in this process than it was in the Vietnam War time when it took actually many more years, almost three times as long, to get to the same point where the significant number of, almost 60 percent, of the American people are now saying the war is a mistake," Bloom explained.

"It is not so clear that the Bush administration is concerned [about the protest] on a day-to-day basis, but they can't be pleased by the poll numbers."

A scholar of 20th-century American intellectual and cultural life and a well known expert on the topic of political protest, Bloom is the author of Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World, a Pulitzer Prize finalist. His forthcoming work is The End of the Tunnel: The Vietnam Experience and the Shape of American Life, a study of the way in which the Vietnam War has shaped American life since 1975.

A transcript of the broadcast and an MP3 download are available on the PBS Web site.