Unit 8 Princetown Review Pt. 3 Flashcards
(21 cards)
US in Vietnam After American Troops
Soon, Johnson had flooded the region with American troops.
He also authorized massive Air Force bombing raids into North Vietnam.
Those strikes, called “Operation Rolling Thunder,” were supposed to last a few weeks, but continued for years.
Many of them dropped chemical agents like Agent Orange and Napalm, which destroyed the Vietnamese jungles and contaminated the land.
Throughout Johnson’s administration, the United States essentially took over the war effort from the South Vietnamese—hence, the Americanization of the Vietnam War.
As the war ground on and the draft claimed more young Americans, opposition to the war grew.
Protest rallies grew larger and more frequent, and more and more young men either ignored their draft notices or fled to a foreign country (more than 30,000 went to Canada) to avoid military service.
Tet Offensive
Johnson’s advisers continued to assure him that the war was “winnable” until January 1968, when the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive (named after the Vietnamese holiday celebrating the New Year).
In conjunction with the Vietcong, the North Vietnamese inflicted tremendous damage on American forces and nearly captured the American embassy in the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon.
Though the North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces were, in the end, decisively driven back, the severity of the strikes was an ugly shock for the American people, who had been assured by the Johnson administration that the United States was winning the war.his would be a major turning point in the war, as most Americans had been confident their superior technology could easily defeat the underdeveloped Third World nation.
The Tet Offensive was a highly calculated series of attacks carried out around the country, demonstrating that American military experts had vastly underestimated the sophistication of Vietnamese strategy.
That the North Vietnamese and Vietcong could launch such a large-scale offensive and nearly succeed in taking the American embassy made the American public come to believe it was being lied to and that perhaps this war was not winnable.
The My Lai Massacre
Occurred the same year as the Tet Offensive.
American soldiers were becoming more and more frustrated and began to act in unspeakable ways.
The most publicized of these horrific events, although not an isolated occurrence, took place in a small village in South Vietnam, where U.S. soldiers abused, tortured, and murdered an estimated 347 to 504 innocent civilians, including women, children, and elderly Vietnamese too infirm to fight.
When the story finally came to light in November 1969, the American public was outraged. Public opinion turned and protests against the war grew angrier and more frequent.
The Summer of 1968 and the 1968 Election
Johnson withdrew from the presidential race in large part because his association with the Vietnam War had turned many Americans against him, including many within his own party. Johnson’s renomination would not have been easy; both Eugene McCarthy (no relation to Joseph McCarthy!) and Robert Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s brother and former attorney general, were poised to challenge him.
Johnson’s withdrawal opened the field to a third candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
Assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
Early in April 1968, a white assassin killed Martin Luther King, Jr.
His murder ignited a massive wave of civil unrest, including arson and looting of largely white-owned businesses, in more than 150 towns and cities.
In Chicago, where the Democratic convention would later be held, the mayor ordered the police to shoot arsonists on sight.
To say that King’s assassination heightened the already considerable tension surrounding race relations would be a huge understatement.
During this time, the Kerner Commission report on race relations came out, stating that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one white and one Black—separate and unequal.”
Robert Kennedy Assassination
Then, in June, frontrunner for the Democratic nomination Robert Kennedy was assassinated.
Kennedy had come to represent the last bastion of hope for many Americans.
Young, handsome, and vital (like his adored older brother), Kennedy was also an aggressive advocate for the poor and a harsh critic of the war in Vietnam.
Together, the two assassinations convinced many that peaceful change from within the political system was impossible.
Candidates
Democratic Convention
Many disenchanted young Americans came to Chicago in August to demonstrate at the Democratic Convention against government policy.
The police were ordered to break up the crowds of protesters, which they did with tear gas, billy clubs, and rifles.
Images of American policemen in gas masks clubbing American citizens reached millions of living rooms across the country through television and the newspapers, presenting a picture eerily reminiscent of the police states against which America supposedly fought. When the convention chose pro-war Vice President Humphrey over the antiwar McCarthy and refused to condemn the war effort, the Democrats alienated many of their core constituency on the left.
Republican Candidate
Meanwhile, the Republicans handed their nomination to former vice president Richard Nixon at a rather peaceful convention.
Third candidate
Then, a third candidate entered the national election, Alabama governor George Wallace, who ran a segregationist third-party campaign, much like Strom Thurmond had done in 1948 against Harry Truman.
Wallace was popular in the South, which had traditionally voted Democratic.
Results of Election of 1968
Thus, Humphrey was twice cursed: he had alienated his progressive urban base in the North and Wallace was siphoning his potential support in the South.
Humphrey denounced the Vietnam War late in the campaign, but it was too little, too late.
In one of the closest elections in history, Richard Nixon was elected president.
Conservative resurgence
Not everyone in America embraced the changes of the 1960s, though.
Dismayed with what they perceived to be the excesses of the civil rights movement, the counterculture movement, and feminism, some Americans were eager to bring the country back to traditional values based on religious principles.
Other Americans were alarmed by the rising cost of social welfare programs created by the New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society.
The conservative resurgence began in the 1970s at the grassroots level with a variety of groups that focused on single issues such as ending abortion, criticizing affirmative action, or emphasizing traditional gender roles and the nuclear family.
Many older people were suspicious of the largely young contingent who had come to question the values of their parents and grandparents.
Religious people distrusted the rejection of traditional morals and spiritual beliefs.
Southern segregationists resisted the civil rights movement.
And some Americans who did not have strong political leanings simply tired of marches and protests and wanted to return to a more peaceful way of life.
Phyllis Schlafly and the ERA
One notable leader in the Conservative reaction to the changes of the 1960s was Phyllis Schlafly.
She is most well known for lobbying against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution.
The ERA passed Congress, but was never fully ratified by the states, in part due to efforts to quell it by Schlafly and her supporters.
Opponents to the ERA claimed that it could lead to the conscription of women into war (the Vietnam draft was already highly controversial), negatively affect women in divorce cases, and even allow men entry to women’s-only colleges and clubs.
Whatever the effects of the ERA would have been, these warnings influenced the opinions of many Americans and thus the ERA was never fully ratified.
When Richard Nixon ran for office, he sought to appeal to Americans who did not fully embrace the cultural and political changes of the 1960s and 1970.
Conservatives voted for Nixon in large numbers, hoping that he would reverse the trend of encroaching federal power, as did some Southern Democrats who distrusted the newer liberal social policies of their party.
“Vietnamization.
Nixon entered office promising to end American involvement in Vietnam by turning the war over to the South Vietnamese, a process he called “Vietnamization.”
He soon began withdrawing troops; however, he also increased the number and intensity of air strikes.
Like his predecessors, Nixon was a veteran cold warrior who believed that the United States could, and must, win in Vietnam.
He ordered bombing raids and ground troops into Cambodia, in hopes of rooting out Vietcong strongholds and weapons supplies.
American involvement in Vietnam dragged on until 1973, when Secretary of State Henry Kissinger completed negotiations for a peace treaty with the North Vietnamese.
Post Withdrawal Vietnam Info/Impacts
There are a couple of postscripts to the Vietnam story.
First, the negotiated peace crumbled almost as soon as American troops started to vacate the country.
In 1975, Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese Army, and Vietnam was united under communist rule.
Second, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973 in order to prevent any future president from involving the military in another undeclared war.
War Powers Resolution
The War Powers Resolution requires the president to obtain congressional approval for any troop commitment lasting longer than 60 days.
Foreign Policy Successes
Nixon did have success, however, in his other foreign policy initiatives, especially those concerning the world’s two other superpowers, the USSR and China.
During Nixon’s first term, the United States increased trade with the Soviets, and the administration negotiated the first of a number of arms treaties between the two countries.
Results were even more dramatic with China.
After a series of secret negotiations, Nixon traveled to communist China, whose government the United States had previously refused to acknowledge.
Nixon’s trip eased tensions, partly because at the time of the trip, Americans trusted the anti- communist Nixon to improve relations with China, and his trip opened trade relations between the two countries.
It also allowed Nixon to use his friendship with the Chinese as leverage against the USSR, and vice versa. (The Chinese and the Soviets, despite both being communist, hated each other.)
Detente
Nixon Doctrine
Detente
The Nixon years added two new terms to the vocabulary of foreign policy.
Together, Nixon and Kissinger formulated an approach called détente, a policy of “openness” that called for countries to respect each other’s differences and cooperate more closely.
Détente ushered in a brief period of relaxed tensions between the two superpowers but ended when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.
The Nixon Doctrine
announced that the United States would withdraw from many of its overseas troop commitments, relying instead on alliances with local governments to check the spread of communism.
Nixon failed in domestic policy
During Nixon’s presidency, the economy worsened, going through a period of combined recession-inflation that economists called stagflation.
Nixon attempted to combat the nation’s economic woes with a number of interventionist measures, including a price-and-wage freeze and increased federal spending.
None of his efforts produced their intended results.
Politically, American society remained divided among the haves and have-nots, the conservatives and the progressives.
Much of the political rhetoric on both sides painted the opposition as enemies of the “American way.”
Meanwhile, urban crime levels rose, causing many to flee to the relative tranquility of the suburbs.
Kent State University Protest
Several confrontations on college campuses heightened political tensions, most notably when national guardsmen shot and killed four protesters at Kent State University in Ohio who were protesting the United States’ decision to invade Vietcong camps in neutral Cambodia.
This incident became synonymous with the division between the youth and middle America.
A similar incident occurred at the historically Black Jackson State University in Mississippi, but the media failed to report the incident—further evidence of continued racial conflict in American society.
1972 Election
Still, in 1972, Nixon won re-election in one of the greatest landslide victories in American political history, defeating liberal Senator George McGovern.
Although Nixon won the election easily, both houses of Congress remained under Democratic control, an indication of the mixed feelings many Americans felt toward their political leaders.
Pentagon Papers
In the summer of 1971, two major newspapers published the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret government study of the history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
The study covered the period from World War II to 1968, and it was not complimentary.
It documented numerous military miscalculations and flat-out lies the government had told the public.
Even though the documents contained nothing about the Nixon administration, Nixon fought aggressively to prevent their publication.
The United States was involved in secret diplomatic negotiations with North Vietnam, the USSR, and China at the time, and both Nixon and Henry Kissinger (Nixon’s Secretary of State) believed that the revelation of secret government dealings in the past might destroy their credibility in the present.
Nixon lost his fight to suppress the Pentagon Papers, a loss that increased Nixon’s already considerable paranoia.
Nixon Response to Pentagon Papers
In an effort to prevent any further leaks of classified documents, Nixon put together a team of investigators called the plumbers.
The plumbers undertook such disgraceful projects as burglarizing a psychiatrist’s office in order to gather incriminating information on Daniel Ellsberg, the government official who had turned the Pentagon Papers over to the press.
During the 1972 elections, the plumbers sabotaged the campaigns of several Democratic hopefuls and then botched a burglary of Democratic headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.
When the plumbers were arrested at the Watergate Hotel, the White House began an all-out effort to cover up the scandal.
