Nation of Nations Concise 2/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff
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The war abroad provoked a virtual war at home; Americans found themselves fighting not only in Vietnamese jungles but also on American college campuses. In a guerrilla war without battle lines and against an often unseen foe, it was easy to wonder who was the friend and who the enemy. Americans could ask the same question about themselves.

The Road to Vietnam

The struggle that wracked Vietnam for some thirty years was deeply rooted in history. Ho Chi Minh drew on the ancient traditions of his people as well as Marxist-Leninist ideology. Before Lyndon Johnson committed U.S. combat troops to the war, his predecessors had made decisions interlocking the respective crusades of America's containment strategy and Ho's revolution.

With the U.S. already determined to preserve a pro-Western government in South Vietnam, President Johnson in 1964 began retaliatory air strikes on the North. Congress endorsed the President's action, giving Johnson in effect a blank check. The idea was to "escalate" the bombing until Ho Chi Minh would stop fighting, but the strategy didn't work. Instead, with air bases to defend, the United States had to send troops, and when the troops became involved in combat, reinforcements were brought in, until American forces assumed the major fighting role in the South.

Social Consequences of the War

Due to a draft system that made it easier for students and the more affluent to receive exemptions, the soldiers who served in Vietnam tended to be younger, poorer, and less well educated. Morale was high at first despite the rigors of jungle combat. Yet as the United States poured in soldiers and modern equipment, the Vietcong maintained control of much of the countryside. Even the advanced technologies of war, like napalm, bombs and defoliants, rather than defeating the enemy too often destroyed the land, villages and people that American policy makers were intending to help.

Opponents of the war (called "doves") mobilized both arguments and mass demonstrations against Johnson's policies. By 1967 protests had spread outward from college campuses. Thousands rallied to halt the bombing and end the war. The grim lack of progress led to defections even within Johnson's cabinet, most notably Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. And as the cost of the war rose, so did inflation.

The Unraveling

The debate over the war climaxed in 1968, after the shock of the Vietcong's Tet offensive. Americans won a costly military victory, but the Vietcong came away with a political triumph. Within Johnson's Cabinet, Defense Secretary Clark Clifford led a movement to de-escalate. When antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy almost beat Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, the president proposed a peace initiative. At the same time he announced he would not run for reelection, Lyndon Johnson had become another victim of America's longest war.

Four days later an assassin gunned down Martin Luther King, sparking riots in the nation's major cities. Another bullet felled Robert Kennedy while he campaigned for the presidency. Frustrated protesters confronted hostile police at the Democrats' Chicago convention, as Johnson's vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, came away with the Democratic presidential nomination. Former segregationist governor George Wallace of Alabama mounted a powerful independent campaign on behalf of the white working classes. But it was Republican Richard Nixon, appealing to what he called the "silent majority", who narrowly won in November.

The Nixon Era

The new President recognized that the Vietnam War must end, though to do so he escalated the bombing to force North Vietnamese concessions. As a result, domestic protest mounted. Hoping to return the fighting to the South Vietnamese, Nixon began withdrawing American troops-"Vietnamizing" the war. That reduced both American casualties and the morale of American troops.

Nixon saw Vietnam as part of a larger pattern of a decline in America's world power. In the Nixon Doctrine, he announced a shift of increased responsibility to allies like the South Vietnamese and the Shah of Iran. He also made a dramatic trip to China and initiated a policy of "détente" with the Soviet Union that included a Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) agreement limiting some nuclear weapons.

At home, the economy was in trouble too. Johnson's insistence on pursuing both the war and his domestic welfare programs (both "guns and butter") without paying for them through tax increases had led to "stagflation" (low growth combined with inflation). Nixon wanted to shift power from Washington to state and local government through a "New Federalism." But he also had to stem the economic slide. Despite his decentralizing philosophy and reputation as a conservative, the president accepted a number of national reforms, including the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. He even resorted to Keynesian deficit spending and wage and price freezes to stem inflation. Nixon aimed to bring together a middle class coalition of voters he called "the silent majority" to win reelection in 1972.

"Silent" Majorities and Vocal Minorities

Meanwhile, other significant minorities were becoming active. Hispanics had grown increasingly vocal in insisting that they, like African Americans, had been held back by discrimination and poverty. Various Hispanic groups campaigned for a greater political voice and for economic power. Cesar Chavez, for example, organized Mexican-American migrant farm workers. Indians, too, through protests and legal challenges frequently voiced by the American Indian Movement sought to reclaim dignity and old tribal rights. And certain militant homosexual groups joined the chorus of demands for respect and equal rights.

Social activists still looked to the Supreme Court to redress their grievances. Even with Nixon appointee Warren Burger replacing the liberal Earl Warren as chief justice, the Court upheld school busing as one way to redress segregation. Unable to shift the Court's balance far enough to the right, Nixon increasingly resorted to legal harassment by federal agencies to crush groups he saw as enemies. When the Democrats in 1972 nominated George McGovern, an antiwar liberal, to run for president, Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, won a smashing victory.

The End of an Era

In 1973, after untold material and personal loss, the United States signed a treaty with North Vietnam that ended an almost thirty-year involvement in Vietnam. An intense bombing campaign in 1972 allowed negotiator Henry Kissinger to claim "peace with honor". In fact, however, the North Vietnamese would overrun the South within two years. Even Richard Nixon, whose career had begun as an arch-cold warrior, came to recognize there were limits to what the United States could do to contain Communism.

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