APUSH Chapter 37

Vietnam

Between the positions of the Republicans and the Democrats on Vietnam, there was little choice. Both candidates were committed to carrying on the war until the enemy settled for an "honorable peace," which seemed to mean an American victory. The millions of "doves" had no place to roost, and many refused to vote at all. Humphrey, scorched by the LBJ brand, went down to defeat as a loyal prisoner of his chief's policies.

The Big Four

Even more impressive were the Big Four legislative achievements that crowned LBJ's Great Society program: aid to education, medical care for the elderly and indigent, immigration reform, and a new voting rights bill.

Medicare

Medicare for the elderly, accompanied by Medicaid for the poor, became a reality in 1965. Like the New Deal's Social Security program, Medicare and Medicaid created "entitlements." That is, they conferred rights on certain categories of Americans in perpetuity, without the need for repeated congressional approval. These programs were part of a spreading "rights revolution" that materially improved the lives of millions of Americans—but also eventually helped to undermine the federal government's financial health.

Critics

Nixon sought to win the war by other means, without the further spilling of American blood. But even this much involvement was repugnant to the American "doves," many of whom demanded a withdrawal that was prompt, complete, unconditional, and irreversible. Antiwar protesters staged a massive national Vietnam moratorium in October 1969, as nearly 100,000 people jammed Boston Common and some 50,000 filed by the White House carrying lighted candles.

Credibility Gap

Opposition in Congress to the Vietnam involvement centered in the influential Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, headed by Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas. A constant thorn in the side of the president, he staged a series of widely viewed televised hearings in 1966 and 1967, during which prominent personages aired their views, largely antiwar. Gradually the public came to feel that it had been deceived about the causes and "winnability" of the war. A yawning "credibility gap" opened between the government and the people. New flocks of antiwar "doves" were hatching daily.

The Proliferation of Primaries

Partly thanks to that commission's work, the number of primary elections began a steady and irreversible rise, from 15 for both Democrats and Republicans in 1968 to 20 in 1972. (The numbers reached 40 for Democrats and 43 for Republicans by 2000.) The proliferation of primaries marked a historic shift away from an elite-dominated nominating system, with decisions made in the proverbial "smoked-filled room," to a costly and drawn-out popular campaign process, featuring media-focused politicking and appeals to the ideological activist base of each party.

McGovern

The continuing Vietnam conflict spurred the rise of South Dakota senator George McGovern in the 1972 race for the Democratic presidential nomination, while changes in the nominating system itself helped to ensure his victory at the party's convention. After the 1968 debacle in Chicago, McGovern had led a party commission tasked with reforming state delegate selection procedures to ensure popular participation in Democratic presidential nominations.

The Voting Rights Acts

The passage of the Voting Rights Act, exactly one hundred years after the conclusion of the Civil War, climaxed a century of awful abuse and robust resurgence for African Americans in the South. "Give us the ballot," said Martin Luther King, Jr., "and the South will never be the same again." He was right. The act did not end discrimination and oppression overnight, but it placed an awesome lever for change in blacks' hands.

The Cultural Upheaval of the 1960s- Negative Attitude Toward Authority

The struggles of the 1960s against racism, poverty, and the war in Vietnam had momentous cultural consequences. Everywhere in 1960s America, a newly negative attitude toward all kinds of authority took hold. Disillusioned by the discovery that American society was not free of racism, sexism, imperialism, and oppression, many young people lost their traditional moral rudders. Neither families nor churches nor schools seemed to be able to define values and shape behavior with the certainty of shared purpose that many people believed had once existed. No matter what the topic, conventional wisdom and inherited ideas came under fire. "Trust no one over thirty" was a popular sneer of rebellious youth.

Nixon "Vietnamizes" the War- Nixon

Inaugurated on January 20, 1069, Richard Nixon urged the American people, torn with dissension over Vietnam and race relations, to "stop shouting at one another." The new president seemed an unlikely conciliator of the clashing forces that appeared to be ripping apart American society. Solitary and suspicious by nature, Nixon could be brittle and testy in the face of opposition. He also harbored bitter resentments against the "liberal establishment" that had cast him into the political darkness for much of the preceding decade. But Nixon brought one hugely valuable asset with him to the White House—his broad knowledge and thoughtful expertise in foreign affairs. With calculating shrewdness he applied himself to putting America's foreign-policy house in order.

Results

Nixon withdrew the American troops from Cambodia on June 29, 1970, after only two months. But in America the Cambodian invasion amplified the bitterness between "hawks" and "doves." Disillusionment with "whitey's war" increased ominously among African Americans troops. The Senate (though not the House) overwhelmingly repealed the Gulf of Tonkin blank check that Congress had given Johnson in 1964. American youths were only slightly mollified when the government reduced draft calls and shortened the period of draftability, on a lottery basis, from eight years to one year. They were similarly pleased, though not pacified, when the Twenty-sixth Amendment in 1971 lowered the voting age to eighteen.

The Nixon Landslide of 1972- The Continuing Vietnam Conflict

Nearly four years had passed since Nixon had promised, as a presidential candidate, to end the war and "win" the peace. Yet in the spring of 1972, the fighting escalated anew to alarming levels when the North Vietnamese, heavily equipped with foreign tanks, burst through the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two Vietnams. Nixon reacted strategic centers in North Vietnam, including Hanoi, the capital. Either Moscow or Beijing, or both, could have responded explosively but neither did, thanks to Nixon's shrewd diplomacy.

The Pentagon Papers

New combustibles fueled the fires of antiwar discontent in June 1971, when a former Pentagon official leaked to the New York Times the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study that documented the blunders and deceptions of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, especially the provoking of the 1964 North Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin.

A New Team on the Supreme Bench- Warren

Nixon had lashed out during the campaign at the "permissiveness" and "judicial activism" of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren. Following his appointment in 1953, Warren had led the Court into a series of decisions that drastically affected sexual freedom, the rights of criminals, the practice of religion, civil rights, and the structure of political representation.

Moscow Visit

Nixon next traveled to Moscow in May 1972 to play his "China card" in a game of high-stakes diplomacy in the Kremlin. The Soviets, hungry for American foodstuffs and alarmed over the possibility of intensified rivalry with an American-backed China, were ready to deal. Nixon's visits ushered in an era of détente, or relaxed tension, with the two communist powers and led to several significant agreements including an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty and a series of arms-reduction negotiations known as SALT (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), aimed at freezing the numbers of long-range nuclear missiles for five years. The ABM and SALT accords constituted long-overdue first steps toward slowing the arms race, though both parties still forged ahead with the development of "MIRVs" (multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles) equipped with large numbers of warheads, several to a rocket.

Southern Strategy

Appointing conservative Supreme Court justices, soft-pedaling civil rights, and opposing school busing to achieve racial balance were all parts of a GOP electoral approach that Nixon advisers called the "southern strategy." By deliberately seeking to convert disillusioned white southern Democrats to the Republican cause, Nixon set in motion a sweeping political realignment that eventually transformed the American party system.

Murder

But events soon blighted bright hopes. In late June 1964, one black and two white civil rights workers disappeared in Mississippi. Their badly beaten bodies were later found buried beneath an earthen dam. FBI investigators eventually arrested twenty-one white Mississippians, including the local sheriff, in connection with the killings. When Mississippi officials refused to prosecute for murder under state law, the U.S. Justice Department won several convictions on the lesser charge of conspiracy to violate civil rights. Not until four decades later did a Mississippi court convict the mastermind of the murders on charges of manslaughter. There were other disappointments. In August 1964, the integrated Mississippi Freedom Democratic party delegates challenging their state's all-white "regulars" were denied seats at the Democratic National Convention. And only a handful of black Mississippians had succeeded in registering to vote.

Negative Consequences

But in only a few years, the clean-cut Berkeley activists and their sober-minded sit-ins would seem downright quaint. Fired by outrage against the war in Vietnam, some sons and daughters of the middle class became radical political rebels. Others turned to mind-bending drugs, tuned in to "acid rock," and dropped out of "straight" society. Still others "did their own thing" as commune-living "hippies." Beflowered women in trousers and long-haired men with earrings heralded the rise of a self-conscious "counterculture" stridently opposed to traditional American ways.

Cambodia's Problems

Defiance followed secretiveness. After the Vietnam cease-fire in January 1973, Nixon brazenly continued large-scale bombing of communist forces in order to help the rightist Cambodian government, and he repeatedly vetoed congressional efforts to stop him. The years of bombing inflicted grisly wounds on Cambodia, blasting its people, shredding its economy, and revolutionizing its politics. The long-suffering Cambodians soon groaned under the sadistic heel of Pol Pot, a murderous tyrant who dispatched as many as 2 million of his people to their graves. He was forced from power, ironically enough, only by a full-dress Vietnamese invasion in 1978.

Oil Addiction

The five months of the Arab "blackmail" embargo in 1974 clearly signaled the end of an era—the era of cheap and abundant energy. A twenty-year surplus of world oil supplies had masked the fact that since 1948 the United States had been a net importer of oil. American oil production peaked in 1970 and then began an irreversible decline. Blissfully unaware of their dependence on foreign suppliers, Americans, like revelers on a binge, had more than tripled their oil consumption since the end of World War II. The number of automobiles increased 250 percent between 1949 and 1972, and Detroit's engineers gave nary a thought to building more fuel-efficient engines.

The Silent Majority

Undaunted, Nixon launched a counteroffensive by appealing to what he called the "silent majority" who presumably supported the war and rejected the counterculture. Though ostensibly conciliatory, Nixon's appeal was in fact deeply divisive. His intentions soon became clear when he unleashed tough-talking Vice President Agnew to attack the "nattering nabobs of negativism" who demanded a quick withdrawal from Vietnam. Nixon himself in 1970 sneered at the student antiwar demonstrators as "bums."

Results

Nixon won the election in a landslide. His lop- sided victory encompassed every state except Massachusetts and the nonstate District of Columbia (which was granted electoral votes by the Twenty-third Amendment in 1961). He piled up 520 electoral votes to 17 for McGovern and a popular majority of 47,169,911 to 29,170,383 votes. McGovern had counted on a large number of young people's votes, but less than half the eighteen-to-twenty-one age group even bothered to register to vote. Dominated by conflict over both Vietnam and the counterculture, the 1972 presidential election proved in many ways to be the last election of the sixties era. The Secret Bombing of Cambodia and the War Powers Act

Silent Progress

Rioters noisily made news, but thousands of other blacks quietly made history. Their voter registration in the South shot upward, and by the late 1960s several hundred blacks held elected office in the Old South. By 1972 nearly half of southern black children sat in integrated classrooms. Actually, more schools in the South were integrated than in the North. About a third of black families had risen economically into the ranks of the middle class— though an equal proportion remained below the "poverty line." King left a shining legacy of racial progress, but he was cut down when the job was far from done.

Republicans

Scenting victory over the badly divided Democrats, the Republicans convened in plush Miami Beach, Florida, where former vice president Richard M. Nixon arose from his political grave to win the nomination. As a "hawk" on Vietnam and a right-leaning middle-of-the-roader on domestic policy, Nixon was acceptable to both the Goldwater conservatives and party moderates. He appealed to white southern voters and to the "law-and-order" element when he tapped as his vice-presidential running mate Maryland's Governor Spiro T. Agnew, noted for his tough stands against dissidents and black militants. The Republican platform called for victory in Vietnam and a strong anticrime policy.

Observers

Straight-laced guardians of respectability denounced the self-indulgent romanticism of the "flower children" as the beginning of the end of modern civilization. Sympathetic observers hailed the "greening" of America— the replacement of materialism and imperialism by a new consciousness of human values. The upheavals of the 1960s could be largely attributed to three P's: the population bulge of the baby boomers, protest against racism and the Vietnam War, and the prosperity that seemed a permanent fixture of postwar America. The "counterculture" may not have fully replaced older, traditional values by the end of the "sixties," but it surely weakened their grip, perhaps permanently.

Nixon on the Home Front- Welfare Programs

Surprisingly, Nixon presided over significant expansion of the welfare programs that conservative Republicans routinely denounced. In this sense his presidency was very much in keeping with the "sixties" era of government activism. He approved increased appropriations for entitlements like Food Stamps, Medicaid, and Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), while adding a generous new program, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), to assist the indigent aged, blind, and disabled. He signed legislation in 1972 guaranteeing automatic Social Security cost-of-living increases to protect the elderly against the ravages of inflation. Ironically, this "indexing" actually helped to fuel the inflationary fires that raged out of control later in the decade.

LBJ

Talented but tragedy-struck Lyndon Johnson returned to his Texas ranch in January 1969 and died there four years later. His party was defeated, yet Johnson's legislative leadership for a time had been remarkable. No president since Lincoln had worked harder or done more for civil rights. None had shown more compassion for the poor, blacks, and the ill-educated. But by 1966 Johnson was already sinking into the Vietnam quicksands. As soaring war costs sucked tax dollars into the military machine, his attempt to provide both guns and butter prevented him from deliv- ering either in sufficient quantity. The War on Poverty met resistance that was as stubborn as the Viet Cong and eventually went down to defeat. Johnson crucified himself on the cross of Vietnam. He chose to defend the American foothold and enlarge the conflict rather than be run out. That intransigence caused him intense personal anguish over the loss of young American lives and cost him his political future. His ultimate decision not to escalate the fighting further offended the "hawks." His refusal to back off alto- gether infuriated the "doves." Like the Calvinists of colonial days, luckless Lyndon Johnson was damned if he did and damned if he did not.

Vietnamization

The first burning need was to quiet the public uproar over Vietnam. President Nixon's announced policy, called Vietnamization, was to withdraw the 540,000 U.S. troops in South Vietnam over an extended period. The South Vietnamese—with American money, weapons, training, and advice—could then gradually take over the burden of fighting their own war. The so-called Nixon Doctrine thus evolved. It proclaimed that the United States would honor its existing defense commitments but that in the future, allies would have to fight their own wars without the support of large bodies of American ground troops.

The American Independent Party

Adding color and confusion to the campaign was a "spoiler" third-party ticket—the American Independent party—headed by a scrappy ex-pugilist, George C. Wallace, former governor of Alabama. In 1963 he had stood in the doorway to prevent two black students from entering the University of Alabama. Speaking behind a bulletproof screen, he called for prodding the blacks into their place, with bayonets if necessary. He and his running mate, former air force general Curtis LeMay, also proposed smashing the North Vietnamese to smithereens by "bombing them back to the Stone Age."

The Civil Rights Act

After a lengthy conservative filibuster, Congress at last passed the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. The act banned racial discrimination in most private facilities open to the public, including theaters, hospitals, and restaurants. It strengthened the federal government's power to end segregation in schools and other public places. Title VII of the act barred employers from discriminating based on race or national origin in hiring and empowered the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC, a body Kennedy had created in 1961) to enforce the law. When conservatives tried to derail the legislation by adding a prohibition on sexual, as well as racial, discrimination, the tactic backfired. The bill's opponents cynically calculated that liberals would not be able to support a bill that threatened to wipe out laws that singled out women for special protection because of their sex. But the act's Title VII passed with the sexual clause intact. It soon proved to be a powerful instrument of federally enforced gender equality, as well as racial equality. Johnson struck another blow for women and minorities alike in 1965 when he issued an executive order requiring all federal contractors to take affirmative action against discrimination.

OPEC's Response

America's policy of backing Israel against its oil-rich neighbors exacted a heavy penalty. Late in October 1973, the OPEC nations announced an embargo on oil shipments to the United States and several European allies supporting Israel. What was more, the oil-rich Arab states cut their oil production, further ratcheting up pressure on the entire West, whose citizens suffered a long winter of lowered thermostats and speedometers. Lines at gas stations grew longer as tempers grew shorter. The shortage triggered a major economic recession not just in America but also in France and Britain. Although the latter two countries had not supported Israel and had thus been exempted from the embargo, in an increasingly globalized, interconnected world, all nations soon felt the crunch of the "energy crisis."

World's View

America could not defeat the enemy in Vietnam, but it seemed to be bringing more and more defeat upon itself. World opinion grew increasingly hostile; the blasting of an underdeveloped country by a mighty superpower struck many critics as obscene. Several nations expelled American Peace Corps volunteers. The ever-censorious Charles de Gaulle withdrew France from NATO in 1966 and ordered all American troops out of the country, reportedly prompting Johnson to ask if that included the thousands buried in Normandy.

Philadelphia Plan

Amid much controversy, Nixon in 1969 implemented his so-called Philadelphia Plan, requiring construction-trade unions to establish "goals and time-tables" for the hiring of black apprentices. Nixon may have been motivated in part by a desire to weaken the forces of liberalism by driving a wedge between blacks and trade unions. But whatever his reasoning, the president's new policy had far-reaching implications. Soon extended to all federal contracts, the Philadelphia Plan in effect required thousands of employers to meet hiring quotas or to establish "set-asides" for minority subcontractors.

Environmental Protection Agency

Among Nixon's legacies was the creation in 1970 of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which climaxed two decades of mounting concern for the environment. Scientist and author Rachel Carson gave the environmental movement a huge boost in 1962 when she published Silent Spring, an enormously effective piece of latter-day muckraking that exposed the poisonous effects of pesticides. On April 22, 1970, millions of environmentalists around the world celebrated the first Earth Day to raise awareness and to encourage their leaders to act. In the wake of what became a yearly event, the U.S. Congress passed the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Endangered Species Act of 1973. The EPA now stood on the frontline of the battle for ecological sanity and made notable progress in reducing automobile emissions and cleaning up befouled waterways and toxic waste sites.

McGovern's Campaign

An ultraliberal dark-horse candidate at the beginning of 1972, McGovern proved to be the first politician to make effective use of the new, more populist system. His promise to pull the remaining American troops out of Vietnam in ninety days earned him the backing of the large antiwar element in the Democratic camp. But his appeal to racial minorities, feminists, leftists, and youth branded him as the countercultural candidate of "acid, amnesty, and abortion" and alienated the traditional working-class backbone of his party. Moreover, the discovery shortly after the convention that McGovern's running mate, Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton, had undergone psychiatric care—including electroshock therapy—forced Eagleton's ouster from the ticket and virtually doomed the Democrats' hopes of recapturing the White House.

Protests

Angry students nationwide responded to this newest escalation of the fighting with rock throwing, window smashing, and arson. At Kent State University in Ohio, jumpy members of the National Guard fired into a noisy student crowd, killing four and wounding many more; at historically black Jackson State College in Mississippi, the highway patrol discharged volleys at a student dormitory, killing two students.

What Wallace's Results Proved

As for Wallace, he won an impressive 9,906,473 popular votes and 46 electoral votes, all from five states of the Deep South, four of which the Republican Goldwater had carried in 1964. Wallace had amassed the largest third-party popular vote in American history to that point and was the last third-party candidate to win any electoral votes. (In 1992 Ross Perot enjoyed a greater popular-vote margin but won no states.) Wallace had also resoundingly demonstrated the continuing power of "populist" politics, which appealed to voters' fears and resentments rather than to the better angels of their nature. His candidacy foreshadowed a coarsening of American political life that would take deep root in the ensuing decades.

As President

As president, Johnson quickly shed the conservative coloration of his Senate years to reveal the latent liberal underneath. "No memorial oration or eulogy," Johnson declared to Congress, "could more eloquently honor President Kennedy's memory than the earliest possible passage of the Civil Rights Bill for which he fought so long."

Voting Rights

But the problem of voting rights remained. In Mississippi, which had the largest black minority of any state, only about 5 percent of eligible blacks were registered to vote. The lopsided pattern was similar throughout the South. Ballot-denying devices like the poll tax, literacy tests, and barefaced intimidation still barred black people from the political process. Beginning in 1964, opening up the polling booths became the chief goal of the black movement in the South. The Twenty-fourth Amendment, ratified in January 1964, abolished the poll tax in federal elections. Blacks joined hands with white civil rights workers—many of them student volunteers from the North—in a massive voter-registration drive in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964. Singing "We Shall Overcome," they idealistically set out to soothe generations of white anxieties and black fears.

Results

By 1974 America was oil-addicted and extremely vulnerable to any interruption in supplies. That stark fact deeply colored the diplomatic and economic history of the next three decades and beyond, as the Middle East loomed ever larger on the map of America's strategic interests. OPEC approximately quadrupled its price for crude oil after lifting the embargo in 1974. Huge new oil bills wildly disrupted the U.S. balance of international trade and added further fuel to the already raging fires of inflation. The United States took the lead in forming the International Energy Agency in 1974 as a counterweight to OPEC and instituted a national speed limit of fifty-five miles per hour to conserve fuel. Various sectors of the economy, including Detroit's carmakers, began their slow, grudging adjustment to the rudely dawning age of energy dependency. But full reconciliation to that uncomfortable reality was a long time coming.

Unfair and Unpopular

By January 1970 the Vietnam conflict had become grotesquely unpopular, even among troops in the field. Because draft policies largely exempted college students and men with critical civilian skills, the armed forces in Vietnam were largely composed of the least privileged young Americans. Especially in the war's early stages, African Americans were disproportionately represented in the army and accounted for a disproportionately high share of combat fatalities. Black and white soldiers alike fought not only against the Vietnamese enemy but also against the coiled fear of floundering through booby-trapped swamps and steaming jungles, often unable to distinguish friend from foe among the Vietnamese peasants. Drug abuse, mutiny, and sabotage dulled the army's fighting edge. Morale appeared to have plummeted to rock bottom when rumors filtered out of Vietnam that soldiers were "fragging" their own officers—murdering them with fragmentation grenades. Domestic disgust with the war further deepened amid revelations that American troops had slaughtered innocent women and children in the village of My Lai in 1968.

The War Powers Act

Congressional opposition to the expansion of presidential war-making powers by Johnson and Nixon led to the War Powers Act in November 1973. Passed over Nixon's veto, it required the president to report to Congress within forty-eight hours after committing troops to a foreign conflict or "substantially" enlarging American combat units in a foreign country. Such a limited authorization would have to end within sixty days unless Congress extended it for thirty more days. The War Powers Act was but one manifestation of what came to be called the "New Isolationism," a mood of caution and restraint in the conduct of the nation's foreign affairs after the bloody and futile mis- adventure in Vietnam. Meanwhile, the draft ended in January 1973, although it was retained on a standby basis. Future members of the armed forces were to be volunteers, greatly easing anxieties among draft-age youth.

Johnson's Campaign

Democrats gleefully exploited the image of Goldwater as a trigger-happy cowboy who would "Barry us" in the debris of World War III. Johnson cultivated the contrasting image of a resolute statesman by seizing upon the Tonkin Gulf episode early in August 1964. Unbeknownst to the public or Congress, U.S. Navy ships had been cooperating with South Vietnamese gunboats in provocative raids along the coast of North Vietnam. Two of these American destroyers were allegedly fired upon by the North Vietnamese on August 2 and 4, although exactly what happened still remains unclear. Johnson nevertheless promptly called the attack "unprovoked" and ordered a "limited" retaliatory air raid. He loudly proclaimed that he sought "no wider war," thus implying that the truculent Goldwater did. Johnson also used the incident to spur congressional passage of the all-purpose Tonkin Gulf Resolution. With only two dissenting votes in both chambers, lawmakers virtually abdicated their war-declaring powers and handed the president a blank check to use further force in Southeast Asia. The Tonkin Gulf Resolution, Johnson boasted, was "like grandma's nightshirt—it covered everything."

MLK's Murder

Despair deepened when the magnetic and moderate voice of Martin Luther King, Jr., was forever silenced by a sniper's bullet in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. A martyr for justice, he had bled and died on the peculiarly American thorn of race. The killing of King cruelly robbed the American people of one of the most inspirational leaders in their history—at a time when they could least afford to lose him. This outrage triggered a nationwide outburst of violent ghetto-gutting riots, costing over forty lives.

Antiwar Demonstrations

Domestic discontent festered as the Vietnamese entanglement dragged on. Antiwar demonstrations had begun on a small scale with campus "teach-ins" in 1965. Gradually these protests mounted to tidal-wave proportions. As the long arm of the military draft dragged more and more young men off to the Southeast Asian slaughter pen, resistance stiffened. Thousands of draft registrants fled to Canada; others publicly burned their draft cards. Many Americans felt pangs of conscience at the spectacle of their countrymen burning peasant huts and blistering civilians with ghastly napalm.

Crusade for the Ballot

Early in 1965 Martin Luther King, Jr., resumed the voter-registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, where blacks made up 50 percent of the population but only 1 percent of the voters. State troopers with tear gas and whips assaulted King's demonstrators as they marched peacefully to the state capital at Montgomery. A Boston Unitarian minister was killed, and a few days later a white Detroit woman was shotgunned to death by Klansmen on the highway near Selma. As the nation recoiled in horror before these violent scenes, President Johnson, speaking in soft southern accents, delivered a compelling address on television. Following words with deeds, Johnson speedily shepherded through Congress the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, signed into law on August 6. It outlawed literacy tests and sent federal voter registrars into several southern states.

Nixon's Détente with Beijing (Peking) and Moscow- Cold War

Even as the war in Vietnam ground on, Nixon pursued a dramatic Cold War diplomatic initiative in Beijing and Moscow. The two great communist powers, the Soviet Union and China, were clashing bitterly over their rival interpretations of Marxism. In 1969 they had even fought several bloody skirmishes along the "inner border" that separated them in Asia. Nixon astutely perceived that the Chinese-Soviet tension afforded the United States an opportunity to play off one antagonist against the other, in the process gaining new flexibility and leverage on the world stage and, potentially, even the aid of both powers in pres- suring North Vietnam into peace.

Critics

Even within the administration, doubts were deepening about the wisdom of the war in Vietnam. When Defense Secretary McNamara expressed increasing discomfiture at the course of events, he was quietly eased out of the cabinet. By early 1968 the brutal and futile struggle had become the longest and most unpopular foreign war in the nation's history to date. The government had failed utterly to explain to the people what was supposed to be at stake in Vietnam. Many critics wondered if any objective could be worth the vast price, in blood and treasure, that America was paying. American casualties, killed and wounded, already exceeded 100,000. More bombs had been dropped on Vietnam than on all enemy territory in World War II.

Cambodianizingn the Vietnam War- Cambodia

For several years the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had been using Cambodia, bordering South Vietnam on the west, as a springboard for troops, weapons, and supplies. Suddenly, on April 29, 1970, without consulting Congress, Nixon ordered American forces to join with the South Vietnamese in cleaning out the enemy sanctuaries in officially neutral Cambodia.

Nixon's Changes

Fulfilling campaign promises, President Nixon undertook to change the Court's philosophical complexion. Taking advantage of several vacancies, he sought appointees who would strictly interpret the Constitution, cease "meddling" in social and political questions, and not coddle radicals or criminals. The Senate in 1969 speedily confirmed his nomination of white-maned Warren E. Burger of Minnesota to succeed the retiring Earl Warren as chief justice. Before the end of 1971, the Court counted four conservative Nixon appointments out of nine members.

Goldwater's Campagin

Goldwater's forces had galloped out of the Southwest to ride roughshod over the moderate Republican "eastern establishment." Insisting that the GOP offer "a choice not an echo," Goldwater attacked the federal income tax, the Social Security system, the Tennessee Valley Authority, civil rights legislation, the nuclear test-ban treaty, and, most loudly, the Great Society. The senator owed his nomination to a burgeoning conservative movement that was gathering strength in the mushrooming middle-class suburbs of the Sunbelt. Led intellectually by vibrant writers like William F. Buckley and his staff at National Review magazine, conservative activists in the early 1960s formed groups like Young Americans for Freedom and volunteered enthusiastically for the Draft Goldwater movement. They were especially well received in the once-solidly Democratic South, where the civil rights movement was disrupting the ancient political loyalties of many white voters.

Results

Great Society programs came in for rancorous political attack in later years. Conservatives charged that the billions spent for "social engineering" had simply been flushed down the waste pipe. Yet the poverty rate declined measurably in the ensuing decade. Medicare made especially dramatic reductions in the incidence of poverty among America's elderly. Other antipoverty programs, among them Project Head Start, sharply improved the educational performance of underprivileged youth. Infant mortality rates also fell in minority communities as general health conditions improved.

Vietnam Topples Johnson- Losses

Hawkish illusions that the struggle was about to be won were shattered by a blistering communist offensive launched in late January 1968, during Tet, the Vietnamese New Year. At a time when the Viet Cong were supposedly licking their wounds, they suddenly and simultaneously mounted savage attacks on twentyseven key South Vietnamese cities, including the capital, Saigon. Although eventually beaten off with heavy losses, they demonstrated anew that victory could not be gained by Johnson's strategy of continual escalation. The Tet offensive ended in a military defeat but a political victory for the Viet Cong. With an increasingly insistent voice, American public opinion demanded a speedy end to the war. American military leaders responded to the Tet attacks with a request for 200,000 more troops. The size of the request staggered many policymakers.

What Nixon's Results Proved

He carried not a single major city, thus attesting to the continuing urban strength of the Democrats, who also won about 95 percent of the black vote. Nixon had received no clear mandate to do anything. He was a minority president who owed his election to divisions over the war and protest against the unfair draft, crime, and rioting.

Allende

He strongly opposed the election of the outspoken Marxist Salvador Allende to the presidency of Chile in 1970. His administration slapped an embargo on the Allende regime, and the Central Intelligence Agency worked covertly to undermine the legitimately elected leftist president. When Allende died during a Chilean army attack on his headquarters in 1973, many observers smelled a Yankee rat—an impression that deepened when Washington warmly embraced Allende's successor, military dictator General Augusto Pinochet.

Why did Humphrey win so easily?

Humphrey secured the nomination with such ease because the nominating procedures of the era left most of the power over delegate selection in the hands of state and local party officials, who were overwhelmingly aligned with the administration. Over six hundred of the convention delegates had actually been selected back in 1966, and Humphrey managed to become the nominee without having entered a single primary race in 1968. The Humphrey forces also blocked the McCarthyites' attempt to secure an antiwar platform plank and hammered into place their own declaration that armed force would be relentlessly applied until the enemy showed more willingness to negotiate.

Changes

Iconic historical decades rarely align perfectly with the actual calendar. What many Americans remember as the tumultuous "sixties" did not truly come to pass until after the shocking slaying of President John F. Kennedy, and its several upheavals in culture and politics extended well into the following decade. Between President Kennedy's assas- sination in 1963 and President Nixon's resignation in 1974, Americans experienced a sexual revolution, a civil rights revolt, the emergence of a "youth culture," a devastating war in Vietnam, a massive enlargement of the federal government, and the beginnings of a feminist uprising. The era's close left Americans exhausted, divided, and disillusioned—but also permanently transformed in myriad ways.

Immigration

Immigration reform was the third of Johnson's Big Four feats. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished at last the "national-origins" quota system that had been in place since 1921. The act also doubled (to 290,000) the number of immigrants allowed to enter annually, while for the first time setting limits on immigrants from the Western Hemisphere (120,000). The new law further provided for the admission of close relatives of U.S. citizens, outside those numerical limits. To the surprise of many of the act's architects, more than 100,000 persons per year took advantage of its "family unification" provisions in the decades after 1965, and the immigrant stream swelled beyond expectations. Even more surprising to the act's sponsors, the sources of immigr tion soon shifted heavily from Europe to Latin America and Asia, dramatically changing the racial and ethnic composition of the American population.

Cases

In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the Court struck down a state law that prohibited the use of contraceptives, even among married couples. The Court proclaimed (critics said "invented") a "right of privacy" that soon provided the basis for decisions protecting women's abortion rights. In 1963 the Court held (Gideon v. Wainwright) that all criminal defendants were entitled to legal counsel, even if they were too poor to afford it. More controversial still were decisions in two cases—Escobedo (1964) and Miranda (1966)—that ensured the right of the accused to remain silent and enjoy other protections. The latter case gave rise to the Miranda warning that arresting police officers must read to suspects. These several court rulings sought to prevent abusive police tactics, but they appeared to conservatives to coddle criminals and subvert law and order. Conservatives also objected to the Court's views on religion. In two stunning decisions, Engel v. Vitale (1962) and School District of Abington Township v. Schempp (1963), the justices argued that the First Amendment's separation of church and state meant that public schools could not require prayer or Bible reading.

Black Panther Party

In the streets of Oakland, California, meanwhile, the avowedly socialist Black Panther party brandished weapons in "citizens' patrols" intended to resist police brutality, even while it also established children's breakfast programs. That summer, Trinidad-born Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), began to preach the doctrine of Black Power, which, he said, "will smash everything Western civilization has created." Some advocates of Black Power insisted that they simply intended the slogan to describe a broad-front effort to exercise the political and economic rights gained by the civil rights movement and to speed the integration of American society. But other African Americans, recollecting previous black nationalist movements like that of Marcus Garvey earlier in the century, breathed a vibrant separatist meaning into the concept of Black Power. They emphasized African American distinctiveness, promoted "Afro" hairstyles and dress, shed their "white" names for new African identities, and demanded black studies programs in schools and universities.

Riots

Ironically, just as the civil rights movement had achieved its greatest legal and political triumphs, more city-shaking riots erupted in the black ghettos of several American cities. A bloody outburst in Newark, New Jersey, in the summer of 1967 took twenty-five lives. Federal troops restored order in Detroit, Michigan, after forty-three people died in the streets. As in Los Angeles, black rioters torched their own neighborhoods, attacking police officers and even firefighters, who had to battle both flames and mobs yelling "Burn, baby, burn." These riotous outbursts angered many white Americans, who threatened to retaliate with their own "backlash" against ghetto arsonists and killers. Inner-city anarchy baffled many northerners, who had considered racial problems a purely "southern" question. But black concerns had moved north—as had nearly half the nation's black people in the decades after World War II. Residential discrimination, white outmigration to suburbs, and deindustrialization all directly affected African Americans, who suffered unemployment at twice the rate of whites.

War on Poverty

Johnson also rammed Kennedy's stalled tax bill through Congress and added proposals of his own for a billion-dollar "War on Poverty." The initial political impetus for the antipoverty campaign had come from journalist Michael Harrington's surprise bestseller The Other America (1962), which revealed that even in affluent America 20 percent of the population—and over 40 percent of the black population—suffered in poverty. Prior to his death, Kennedy had contemplated developing an antipoverty initiative. Now his successor took up the cause with a vengeance. Johnson's War on Poverty composed one element of a far-reaching reform program that he dubbed the Great Society. Epitomizing the confidence of the era, the Great Society project entailed a sweeping array of measures encompassing New Deal-style universal social programs, targeted assaults on remaining pockets of poverty, and major new public investments in education and the arts.

Johnson's Plan

Johnson had now taken the first fateful steps down a slippery path. He and his advisers believed that a fine-tuned, step-by-step "escalation" of American force would drive the enemy to defeat with a minimum loss of life on both sides. But the enemy matched every increase in American firepower with more men and more wiliness in the art of guerrilla warfare. The South Vietnamese themselves were meanwhile becoming spectators in their own war, as the fighting became increasingly Americanized. Corrupt and collapsible governments succeeded each other in Saigon with bewildering rapidity. Yet American officials continued to talk of defending a faithful democratic ally. Washington "hawks" also defended America's action as a test of Uncle Sam's "commitment" and of the reliability of his numerous treaty pledges to resist communist encroachment. Persuaded by such panicky thinking, Johnson steadily raised the military stakes in Vietnam. By 1968 he had poured more than half a million troops into Southeast Asia, and the annual bill for the war was exceeding $30 billion. Still, the end was nowhere in sight.

Education

Johnson neatly avoided the thorny question of separation of church and state by channeling educational aid to students, not schools, thus allowing funds to flow to hard-pressed parochial institutions. Catholic John F. Kennedy had not dared to touch this prickly issue.

The Great Society Congress- Reforms

Johnson's huge victory temporarily smashed the conservative congressional coalition of southern Demo- crats and northern Republicans. A wide-open legislative road stretched before the Great Society programs, as the president skillfully ringmastered his two-to-one Democratic majorities. Congress poured out a flood of legislation, comparable only to the output of the New Dealers in the Depression decade. Confident that a growing economy gave him ample fiscal and political room for maneuver, Johnson delivered at last on long-deferred Democratic promises of social reform. Escalating the War on Poverty, Congress doubled the appropriation of the Office of Economic Opportunity to $2 billion and granted more than $1 billion to redevelop the gutted hills and hollows of Appalachia. Johnson also prodded Congress into creating two new cabinet offices: the Department of Transportation and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), to which he named the first black cabinet secretary in the nation's history, respected economist Robert C. Weaver. Other noteworthy laws established the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities, designed to lift the level of American cultural life.

Johnson Battles Goldwater in 1964- Democrats

Johnson's nomination by the Democrats in 1964 was a foregone conclusion; he was chosen by acclamation in Atlantic City as his birthday present. Thanks to the tall Texan, the Democrats stood foursquare on their most liberal platform since Truman's Fair Deal days.

Kennedy

Johnson's star fell further four days later when Senator Robert F. Kennedy, now a senator from New York and an outspoken dove on the war, threw his hat into the ring. The charismatic and handsome Kennedy, heir to his murdered brother's mantle of leadership, stirred a passionate response among workers, African Americans, Latinos, and young people.

Problems

Launched in youthful idealism, many of the cultural "revolutions" of the 1960s sputtered out in violence and cynicism. Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), once at the forefront of antipoverty and antiwar campaigns, had by decade's end spawned a clandestine terrorist group called the Weather Underground. (Commonly known as the Weathermen, they took their name from Bob Dylan's song lyric, "You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.") Peaceful civil rights demonstrations had given way to blockbusting urban riots. What started as apparently innocent experiments with drugs like marijuana and LSD had fried many youthful brains and spawned a loathsome underworld of drug lords and addicts.

Affirmative action

Nixon's Philadelphia Plan drastically altered the meaning of "affirmative action." Lyndon Johnson had intended affirmative action to protect individuals against discrimination. Nixon now transformed and escalated affirmative action into a program that conferred privileges on certain groups. The Supreme Court went along with Nixon's approach. In Griggs v. Duke Power Co. (1971), the justices prohibited intelligence tests or other devices that had the effect of excluding minorities or women from certain jobs. The Court's ruling strongly suggested to employers that the only sure protection against charges of discrimination was to hire minority workers—or admit minority students—in proportion to their presence in the population. Together the actions of Nixon and the Court opened broad employment and educational opportunities for minorities and women. They also opened a Pandora's box of protest from critics who assailed the new style of affirmative action as "reverse discrimination," imposed by executive order and judicial decision, not by democratically elected representatives. Yet what other remedy was there, defenders asked, to offset centuries of prejudice and opportunity denied?

Nixon's campaign

Nixon's campaign emphasized that he had wound down the "Democratic war" in Vietnam from some 540,000 troops to about 30,000. His candidacy received an added boost just twelve days before the election when the high-flying Dr. Kissinger announced that "peace is at hand" in Vietnam and that an agreement would be reached in a few days.

Success

Nixon's détente diplomacy did, to some extent, de-ice the Cold War. Yet Nixon remained staunchly anticommunist when the occasion seemed to demand it.

Kissinger

Nixon's thinking was reinforced by his national security adviser, Dr. Henry A. Kissinger. In 1969 the former Harvard professor had begun meeting secretly on Nixon's behalf with North Vietnamese officials in Paris to negotiate an end to the war in Vietnam. He was meanwhile preparing the president's path to Beijing and Moscow.

China Visit

Nixon, heretofore an uncompromising anticommunist, announced to a startled nation in July 1971 that he had accepted an invitation to visit Communist China the following year. He capped his visit with the Shanghai Communiqué, in which the two nations agreed to "normalize" their relationship. An important part of the accord was America's acceptance of a "one-China" policy, implying a lessened American commitment to the independence of Taiwan.

Results

Nixon, who had lost a cliffhanger to Kennedy in 1960, won handily in 1968. Unlike most new presidents, Nixon faced congressional majorities of the opposing party in both houses.

Six-Day War

Overcommitment in Southeast Asia also tied America's hands elsewhere. Attacked by Soviet-backed Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, a beleaguered Israel stunned the world with a military triumph in June 1967. When the smoke cleared after the Six-Day War, Israel expanded to control new territories in the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip, and the West Bank of the Jordan River, including Jerusalem. The Israeli victory brought some 1 million resentful Palestinian Arabs under direct Israeli control, while another 350,000 Palestinian refugees fled to neighboring Jordan. The Israelis eventually withdrew from the Sinai after signing a peace treaty with Egypt, but they refused to relinquish the other areas without a treaty and began moving Jewish settlers into the heavily Arab district of the West Bank. The Six-Day War markedly intensified the problems of the already volatile Middle East, leading to an intractable standoff between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Skepticism's Roots

Skepticism about authority had deep historical roots in American culture, and it had even bloomed in the supposedly complacent and conformist 1950s. "Beat" poets like Allen Ginsberg and iconoclastic novelists like Jack Kerouac had voiced dark disillusion with the materialistic pursuits and "establishment" arrogance of the Eisenhower era. In movies like Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the attractive young actor James Dean expressed the restless frustration of many young people.

Criticism

Social conservatives raised anew the battle cry "Impeach Earl Warren." From 1954 on, the Court came under relentless criticism, the bitterest since New Deal days. But for better or worse, the black-robed justices were grappling with stubborn social problems spawned by midcentury tensions, even—or especially—if duly elected legislatures failed to do so.

The World

Social upheaval in the 1960s was hardly confined to the United States as youth-driven political and social conflict roiled nations around the world. The newfound power of popular youth culture—especially the urgent rock 'n' roll of artists like the Beatles, Janis Joplin, and Jimi Hendrix—proved global in its reach, helping to stitch together generational styles, norms, and touchstones across borders.

Sexual Revolution

The 1960s also witnessed a "sexual revolution," though its novelty and scale are often exaggerated. Without doubt, the introduction of the birth-control pill in 1960 made unwanted pregnancies much easier to avoid and sexual appetites easier to satisfy. The Mattachine Society, founded in Los Angeles in 1951, was a pioneering advocate for gay rights, as gay men and lesbians increasingly demanded sexual tolerance. A brutal attack on gay men by off-duty police officers at New York's Stonewall Inn in 1969 proved a turning point, when the victims fought back in what became known as the Stonewall Rebellion. Widening worries in the 1980s about sexually transmitted diseases like genital herpes and AIDS (acquired immunodefi- ciency syndrome) slowed but did not reverse, the sexual revolution.

Republicans

The Republicans, convening in San Francisco's Cow Palace, nominated box-jawed Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, a bronzed and bespectacled champion of rock-ribbed conservatism. The American stage was thus set for a historic clash of political principles.

Workers and Consumers

The federal government also expanded its regulatory reach on behalf of workers and consumers. Late in 1970 Nixon signed the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) into law, creating an agency dedicated to improving working conditions, preventing work-related accidents and deaths, and issuing safety standards. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) followed two years later, holding companies to account for selling dangerous products. Together these three megagencies gave the federal government far more direct control over business operations, drawing the ire of many big companies, which chastised the overbearing "nanny state."

Black Power- Shift

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 marked the last major legislative victory of the southern-focused, integrationist, largely nonviolent mobilization within the long civil rights struggle—what one activist later called the "classical phase" of the movement. Though civil rights struggles against discrimination and police brutality in the urban North had been occurring for decades, those conflicts took on new potency, national prominence, and ideological coloring in the years after Jim Crow's formal demise in the South. As if to symbolize this shift, just five days after President Johnson signed the voting law, a bloody riot erupted in Watts, a black ghetto in Los Angeles. Blacks enraged by police brutality burned and looted their own neighborhoods for nearly a week. When the smoke finally cleared over the Los Angeles basin, thirty-one blacks and three whites lay dead, more than a thousand people had been injured, and hundreds of buildings stood charred and gutted. The Watts explosion heralded a new phase of the black struggle—increasingly marked by militant confrontation, led by radical and sometimes violent spokespersons, and aimed not at interracial cooperation but at black separatism.

Cambodia Constitutionality

The constitutionality of Nixon's continued aerial battering of Cambodia had meanwhile been coming under increasing fire. In July 1973 Americans were shocked to learn that the U.S. Air Force had secretly conducted some thirty-five hundred bombing raids against North Vietnamese positions in Cambodia, beginning in March 1969 and continuing for some fourteen months prior to the open American incursion in May 1970. The most disturbing feature of these sky forays was that while they were going on, American officials, including the president, had sworn that Cambodian neutrality was being respected. Countless Americans began to wonder what kind of representative government they had if the United States had been fighting a war they knew nothing about.

Free Speech Movement

The disaffection of the young crescendoed in the tumultuous 1960s as the baby boom generation reached college age. One of the first organized protests against established authority broke out at the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, in the aptly named Free Speech Movement. Students objected to an admin- istrative ban on the use of campus space for political debate. During months of protest, they accused the Cold War "megaversity" of promoting corporate interests rather than humane values.

"Peace"

The dove of peace, "at hand" in Vietnam just before the balloting, took flight after the election. Nixon launched a furious two-week bombing of North Vietnam in an iron-fisted effort to force the North Vietnamese back to the conference table. This merciless pounding drove the North Vietnamese negotiators to agree to a cease-fire in the Treaty of Paris on January 23, 1973, nearly three months after peace was prematurely proclaimed. Nixon hailed the face-saving cease-fire as "peace with honor," but the boast rang hollow. The United States was to withdraw its remaining 27,000 or so troops and could reclaim some 560 American prisoners of war. The North Vietnamese were allowed to keep some 145,000 troops in South Vietnam, where they still occupied about 30 percent of the country. The shaky "peace" was in reality little more than a thinly disguised American retreat.

The Arab Oil Embargo and the Energy Crisis- The Yom Kippur War

The long-rumbling Middle East erupted anew in October 1973, when the rearmed Syrians and Egyptians unleashed surprise attacks on Israel in an attempt to regain the territory they had lost in the Six-Day War of 1967. With the Israelis in desperate retreat, Kissinger, who had become secretary of state in September, hastily flew to Moscow to restrain the Soviets, who were arming the attackers. Believing that the Kremlin was poised to fly combat troops to the Suez area, Nixon placed America's nuclear forces on alert and ordered a gigantic airlift of nearly $2 billion in war materials to the Israelis. This assistance helped save the day, as the Israelis aggressively turned the tide and threatened Cairo itself before American diplomacy brought about an uneasy cease-fire to what became known as the Yom Kippur War.

Church

The nation's mainline Protestant denominations, which had dominated American religious life for centuries, lost their grip, as weekly churchgoing declined from 48 percent in the late 1950s to 41 percent in the early 1970s. The liberal Protestant churches suffered the most. They increasingly ceded religious authority to conservative evangelicals while surrendering cultural authority to secular professionals and academic social scientists. A new cultural divide began to take shape, as educated Americans became increasingly secular and the less educated became more religious. Religious upheaval even churned the tradition-bound Roman Catholic Church, among the world's oldest and most conservative institutions. The Second Vatican Council, meeting from 1962 to 1965, passed reforms aimed at modernizing church liturgy and practices and encouraging more ecumenical interactions with other faiths. Clerics abandoned their Roman collars and Latin lingo, folk songs replaced Gregorian chants, and meatless Fridays became ancient history.

Malcolm X

The pious Christian moderation of Martin Luther King, Jr., came under heavy fire from this second wave of younger black leaders, who privately mocked the dignified Dr. King as "de Lawd." Embodying this new militancy was Malcolm X. Born Malcolm Little, he was at first inspired by the militant black nationalists in the Nation of Islam. Like the Nation's founder, Elijah Muhammed (born Elijah Poole), Malcolm changed his surname to advertise his lost African identity in white America. A brilliant and charismatic preacher, Malcolm X trumpeted black separatism and inveighed against the "blue-eyed white devils." Eventually Malcolm distanced himself from Elijah Muhammed's separatist preachings and moved toward mainstream Islam. In early 1965 he was cut down by rival Nation of Islam gunmen while speaking to a large crowd in New York City.

McCarthy

The president meanwhile was being sharply challenged from within his own party. Eugene McCarthy, a little-known Democratic senator from Minnesota, had emerged as a contender for the 1968 Democratic presidential nomination. The soft-spoken McCarthy, a sometime poet and devout Catholic, gathered a small army of antiwar college students as campaign workers. Going "clean for Gene," with shaven faces and shortened locks, they helped him gain an impressive 41.4 percent of the Democratic vote in the New Hamp- shire primary on March 12, 1968. Although still second to Johnson's 49.6 percent, McCarthy's showing was devastating for the president.

The Presidential Sweepstakes of 1968- Democrats

The summer of 1968 was one of the hottest political seasons in the nation's history. Johnson's heir apparent for the Democratic nomination was his liberal vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, a former pharmacist, college professor, mayor, and U.S. senator from Minnesota. Senators McCarthy and Kennedy meanwhile dueled in several state primaries, with Kennedy's bandwagon gathering ever-increasing speed. But on June 5, 1968, the night of his exciting victory in the California primary, Kennedy was shot to death by a young Arab immigrant resentful of the candidate's pro-Israel views. Angry antiwar zealots, deprived by an assassin's bullet of one of their candidates, streamed menacingly into Chicago for the Democratic convention in August 1968. Mayor Richard Daley responded by arranging for barbed-wire barricades around the convention hall ("Fort Daley"), as well as thousands of police and National Guard reinforcements. Some militant demonstrators baited the officers in blue and as people the world over watched on television, the exasperated "peace officers" broke into a "police riot," clubbing and manhandling innocent and guilty alike. Acrid tear gas fumes hung heavily over the city even as Humphrey steamrollered to the nomination on the first ballot.

Results

The towering Texan rode to a spectacular victory in November 1964. The voters were herded into Johnson's column by fondness for the Kennedy legacy, faith in Great Society promises, and fear of Goldwater. A stampede of 43,129,566 Johnson votes trampled the Republican ticket with its 27,178,188 supporters. The tally in the Electoral College was 486 to 52. Goldwater carried only his native Arizona and five other states—all of them, tellingly, in the traditionally Democratic but now racially restless South. Johnson's record-breaking 61 percent of the popular vote swept lopsided Democratic majorities into both houses of Congress.

Illegal Acts

The war was also ripping apart the fabric of American society and even threatening to shred the Constitution. In 1967 President Johnson ordered the CIA, in clear violation of its charter as a foreign intelligence agency, to spy on domestic antiwar activists. He also encouraged the FBI to turn its counterintelligence program, code-named "Cointelpro," against the peace movement. "Cointelpro" subverted leading "doves" with false accusations that they were communist sympathizers. These clandestine tactics made the FBI look like a totalitarian state's secret police rather than a guardian of American democracy. As the war dragged on, evidence mounted that America had been entrapped in an Asian civil war, fighting against highly motivated rebels who were striving to overthrow an oppressive regime. Yet Johnson clung to his basic strategy of ratcheting up the pressure bit by bit. He stubbornly assured doubting Americans that he could see "the light at the end of the tunnel." But to growing numbers of Americans, it seemed that Johnson was bent on "saving" Vietnam by destroying it.

LBJ's Address

These startling events abroad and at home were not lost on LBJ. In a bombshell address on March 31, 1968, he announced on nationwide television that he would freeze American troop levels and scale back the bombing. Then, in a dramatic plea to unify a dangerously divided nation, Johnson startled his vast audience by firmly declaring that he would not be a candidate for the presidency in 1968. Johnson's "abdication" had the effect of preserving the military status quo. He had held the "hawks" in check, while offering himself as a sacrifice to the militant "doves." The United States could thus maintain the maximum acceptable level of military activity in Vietnam with one hand, while trying to negotiate a settlement with the other. North Vietnam shortly agreed to commence negotiations in Paris. But progress was glacially slow, as prolonged bickering developed over the very shape of the conference table.

Vietnam Vexations- Vietnam

While violence at home eclipsed Johnson's legislative triumphs, foreign flare-ups were threatening his political life. The United States was sinking deeper into the monsoon mud of Vietnam. Guerillas loyal to the North Vietnamese communists, called Viet Cong, attacked an American air base at Pleiku, South Vietnam, in February 1965. The president immediately ordered retaliatory bombing raids against military installations in North Vietnam and for the first time ordered attacking U.S. troops to land. By the middle of March 1965, the Americans had "Operation Rolling Thunder" in full swing—regular full-scale bombing attacks against North Vietnam. Before 1965 ended, some 184,000 American troops were involved, most of them slogging through the jungles and rice paddies of South Vietnam searching for guerrillas.

The LBJ Brand on the Presidency- LBJ's Background

With President Kennedy struck down, the torch passed to craggy-faced Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Texan who towered six feet three inches. Although he mistrusted "the Harvards," Johnson retained most of the bright Kennedy team. The new president managed a dignified and efficient transition in the winter of 1963, pledging continuity with his slain predecessor's policies. The new president hailed from the populist hill country west of Austin, Texas, whose people had first sent him to Washington as a twenty-nine-year-old congressman in 1937.

Battling for Black Rights- Civil Rights

With the last of his Big Four reforms, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Johnson made heartening headway against one of the most persistent American evils, racial discrimination. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gave the federal government more muscle to enforce school-desegregation orders and to prohibit racial discrimination in all kinds of public accommodations and employment.

Inflation

Worried about creeping inflation (then running at about 5 percent), Nixon overcame his distaste for economic controls and imposed a ninety-day wage and price freeze in 1971. To stimulate the nation's sagging exports, he next stunned the world by taking the United States off the gold standard and devaluing the dollar. These moves effectively ended the "Bretton Woods" system of international currency stabilization that had functioned for more than a quarter of a century after World War II.

Nixon's Lesson

Yet Nixon was to learn the ironic lesson that many presidents have learned about their Supreme Court appointees: once seated on the high bench, the justices are fully free to think and decide according to their own consciences, not according to the president's expectations. The Burger Court that Nixon shaped proved reluctant to dismantle the "liberal" rulings of the Warren Court; it even produced the most controversial judicial opinion of modern times, the momentous Roe v. Wade decision in 1973, which legalized abortion.