<P> In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson began his re-election campaign . Eugene McCarthy ran against him for the nomination on an anti-war platform . McCarthy did not win the first primary election in New Hampshire, but he did surprisingly well against an incumbent . The resulting blow to the Johnson campaign, taken together with other factors, led the President to make a surprise announcement in a March 31 televised speech that he was pulling out of the race . He also announced the initiation of the Paris Peace Negotiations with Vietnam in that speech . Then, on August 4, 1969, U.S. representative Henry Kissinger and North Vietnamese representative Xuan Thuy began secret peace negotiations at the apartment of French intermediary Jean Sainteny in Paris . </P> <P> After breaking with Johnson's pro-war stance, Robert F. Kennedy entered the race on March 16 and ran for the nomination on an anti-war platform . Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, also ran for the nomination, promising to continue to support the South Vietnamese government . </P> <P> Protests bringing attention to "the draft" began on May 5, 1965 . Student activists at the University of California, Berkeley marched on the Berkeley Draft board and forty students staged the first public burning of a draft card in the United States . Another nineteen cards were burnt May 22 at a demonstration following the Berkeley teach - in . Draft card protests were not aimed so much at the draft as at the immoral conduct of the war . </P> <P> At that time, only a fraction of all men of draft age were actually conscripted, but the Selective Service System office ("Draft Board") in each locality had broad discretion on whom to draft and whom to exempt where there was no clear guideline for exemption . In late July 1965, Johnson doubled the number of young men to be drafted per month from 17,000 to 35,000, and on August 31, signed a law making it a crime to burn a draft card . </P>

What methods did student activists use during the 1960s to oppose the war in vietnam