Fracture: Vietnam, Watergate, and After, 1968–1980

This is Unit Fifteen, part two, on nineteen sixty-eight, Nixon's first term, the environment, and the long exit from Vietnam. Part one closed with La Raza Unida in South Texas, and pointed to the year nineteen sixty-eight. Carry two things through this part. First, a realignment: the course has marked two already, in eighteen ninety-six and nineteen thirty-two, and here is the third. Second, a habit: set what officials claimed beside what happened, from a massacre first reported as a firefight to a movement whose founding the anchor leaves out. By the end you will be able to describe the events of nineteen sixty-eight that broke the Democratic coalition. To explain the southern strategy as the third realignment. To describe Nixon's opening to China and détente. To explain how the environmental movement won its major laws. And to describe My Lai, the army's first claim, and what was exposed.

Six entries on nineteen sixty-eight: a withdrawal, an assassination, a riot, a trial, an election, and the realignment beneath it.

Johnson steps aside.

USH2 2120 Johnson Steps Aside

In March nineteen sixty-eight, beleaguered by an unpopular war, inflation and unrest, Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection, a move the Yawp calls unprecedented in modern American politics, after Eugene McCarthy, running against the war, came within two hundred thirty votes of him in the New Hampshire primary, as Digital History counts.

Robert Kennedy.

USH2 2121 Robert Kennedy

Encouraged by McCarthy's showing, Robert Kennedy entered the race and won the California primary, forty-six percent to McCarthy's forty-two, and was shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as he left after claiming victory; he died twenty-six hours later. His killer, Sirhan B. Sirhan, had allegedly targeted him for supporting military aid to Israel, the anchor records.

Chicago.

USH2 2122 Chicago, 1968

At the Democratic convention in Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley deployed twelve thousand police, six thousand National Guard and six thousand Army soldiers against protesters, and television cameras caught what became known as a police riot, officers clubbing people and firing tear gas. Hubert Humphrey won the nomination without winning a primary and spoke for law and order, the anchor notes.

The Chicago Seven.

USH2 2123 The Chicago Seven

After the convention Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and five other protesters, the Chicago Seven, were tried for inciting a riot. The Yawp says the violence convinced many Americans that civil society was unraveling, and Nixon played on those fears.

The election.

USH2 2124 The Election of 1968

Nixon won three hundred one electoral votes to Hubert Humphrey's one hundred ninety-one, though Humphrey won nearly the same share of the popular vote, and George Wallace, a segregationist third-party candidate, won thirteen and a half percent and five southern states. Afterward, the anchor records, a commission led by George McGovern tied Democratic delegates to primary results.

The southern strategy.

USH2 2125 The Southern Strategy

Nixon won in nineteen sixty-eight with a southern strategy learned from Goldwater's campaign and an appeal to northern blue-collar workers he later called the silent majority, while his running mate, Spiro Agnew, called the Democrats fiscally irresponsible and soft on communism. The appeal reached northern middle-class and blue-collar White voters and southern White voters who had moved to the suburbs after the Court's integration rulings, the anchor says. Unit five's realignment of eighteen ninety-six and unit eleven's of nineteen thirty-two each rebuilt the parties; this is the third. Once elected, the anchor adds, Nixon deliberately neglected the civil rights movement and minorities' needs. The Democratic coalition of unit eleven was breaking apart.

Four entries: the moon, Nixon in China, détente, and the vote at eighteen.

The moon landing.

USH2 2126 The Moon

On July twentieth, nineteen sixty-nine, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon while hundreds of millions watched, and planted the American flag on the lunar surface. Unit thirteen's Sputnik had set off the space race, and federal money for science followed; twelve years later Americans reached the moon.

Nixon in China.

USH2 2127 Nixon in China

In nineteen seventy-two Nixon became the first American president to visit Communist China, meeting Mao Zedong in Beijing, and the first since Franklin Roosevelt to visit the Soviet Union, the Yawp records. It says Nixon exploited tensions between China and the Soviet Union to strengthen the American position with both.

Détente.

USH2 2128 Détente

Under Henry Kissinger's guidance, the Yawp says, Nixon turned from active anti-Communist containment toward détente, a relaxation of tensions with Cold War rivals, and the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, the anchor says, limited each side to two antiballistic missile systems. The Yawp pairs SALT with the antiballistic missile treaty; both froze arms levels.

The voting age.

USH2 2129 The Twenty-sixth Amendment

The Twenty-sixth Amendment, passed by Congress on March twenty-third and ratified on July first, nineteen seventy-one, lowered the voting age to eighteen, the National Archives records: the right of citizens eighteen or older to vote shall not be denied or abridged on account of age. The anchor does not carry the amendment; the ratification took barely three months.

Four entries on the environmental movement, which the anchor does not tell and the witnesses do.

Silent Spring.

USH2 2130 Silent Spring

In nineteen sixty-two the biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which Digital History says did more to awaken environmental consciousness than any other single work, and which the Yawp calls an unparalleled argument for the interconnectedness of ecological and human health. The anchor's chapters do not carry the environmental movement; these entries come from the witnesses.

Two disasters of nineteen sixty-nine.

USH2 2131 Santa Barbara and the Cuyahoga

In nineteen sixty-nine an oil spill devastated the coast near Santa Barbara, California, and that summer the Cuyahoga River, choked with industrial pollutants, caught fire, the Yawp records. Americans had had enough, it says, and the protest came the next spring.

Earth Day.

USH2 2132 Earth Day

On April twenty-second, nineteen seventy, over twenty million Americans rallied for the first Earth Day, the Yawp records. Afterward Nixon consolidated several environmental programmes under the new Environmental Protection Agency, the first agency charged with studying, regulating and spreading knowledge about the environment, and more laws followed: the Clean Water Act and the Ocean Dumping Act of nineteen seventy-two, the Safe Drinking Water Act of nineteen seventy-four and the Toxic Substances Control Act of nineteen seventy-six. Two facts sit uneasily together, and both are true. The movement drew millions and passed its major laws under a Republican president, and the anchor does not tell the agency's founding; the course takes it from the Yawp.

The Population Bomb.

USH2 2133 The Population Bomb

Digital History records the nineteen sixty-eight bestseller The Population Bomb, by a Stanford ecologist, warning that world population growth was outstripping the earth's supply of food, fresh water and minerals, and says it was in the nineteen sixties that environmentalism became a mass movement. The Yawp notes that intellectual and social changes had begun to reshape public debates about the environment.

Three entries on an economy that stalled: recession and deficits, the oil embargo, and stagnation with inflation.

Recession and deficits.

USH2 2134 Recession and Deficits

By mid-nineteen seventy a recession had begun and unemployment reached six point two percent, twice the level under Johnson, the anchor records, with deficit budgets of eleven billion dollars in nineteen seventy-one and twenty-five billion the next year, and a ninety-day wage and price freeze. Digital History blames war spending, social spending and foreign competition.

The oil embargo.

USH2 2135 The Oil Embargo

From October nineteen seventy-three to March nineteen seventy-four Arab oil producers embargoed shipments to the United States, retaliating, the Yawp says, for American intervention in the Middle East, and gasoline rose from thirty-eight cents a gallon to fifty-five cents by June nineteen seventy-four, the anchor records. Inflation reached twelve point two percent by nineteen seventy-four, it adds.

Stagflation.

USH2 2136 Stagflation

By the early nineteen seventies the economy suffered what Digital History calls stagnation, high unemployment and inflation together, as Arab nations, holding sixty percent of the non-Communist world's reserves, cut oil production by twenty-five percent. Digital History calls economic policy in the decade a nightmare of confusion and contradiction.

Four entries on leaving Vietnam: Vietnamization, the lottery, My Lai, and the only soldier convicted.

Vietnamization.

USH2 2137 Vietnamization

Nixon's Vietnamization turned more of the war over to South Vietnamese forces, trained and armed by the United States, while American troops withdrew, aiming, in the Yawp's phrase, at peace with honour, an appeal to the silent majority who still supported the war. Disengagement took five years, Digital History says; a third of American combat deaths came under Nixon.

Withdrawal and the lottery.

USH2 2138 Withdrawal and the Lottery

In June nineteen sixty-nine Nixon began withdrawing American troops, and in December he replaced the military draft with a lottery, Digital History records. It notes that sixty percent of draft-age men did not serve between nineteen sixty-three and nineteen seventy-four, and ninety-eight percent saw no combat.

My Lai.

USH2 2139 My Lai

In nineteen sixty-eight Captain Ernest Medina led about one hundred soldiers of Charlie Company into My Lai, a village suspected of hiding Viet Cong fighters, with orders to destroy it. Members of the First Platoon under Lieutenant William Calley forced seventy to eighty unarmed people, children and infants among them, into an irrigation ditch and shot them. The anchor says the dead numbered between three hundred forty-seven and five hundred four; none was armed, and the Americans were never fired upon. The army first claimed one hundred fifty dead, most of them Viet Cong, in a firefight. The reporter Seymour Hersh exposed the massacre in nineteen sixty-nine, the Yawp records, and nearly half of those asked in a Minnesota poll refused to believe it had happened.

The only soldier convicted.

USH2 2140 The Only Soldier Convicted

Calley was convicted in March nineteen seventy-one and sentenced to life, as hundreds of thousands joined a Free Calley campaign, and two days later Nixon moved him to house arrest at Fort Benning, Georgia. The sentence was cut to twenty years, and he was paroled in September nineteen seventy-four after three and a half years under house arrest.

Look at what you can now do. You can describe nineteen sixty-eight: Johnson stepping aside, Robert Kennedy killed, a police riot in Chicago, and Wallace carrying five southern states. You can explain the southern strategy as the course's third realignment, as White voters in the South and the suburbs moved to Nixon and the Democratic coalition of unit eleven broke apart. You can describe Nixon in China and détente: tensions relaxed, and arms frozen by treaty. You can explain how the environmental movement won its laws, from Silent Spring and a burning river to Earth Day and a new agency under a Republican president. And you can describe My Lai: hundreds of unarmed villagers killed, a firefight claimed, a massacre exposed, and one soldier convicted.