The Complete Idiot's Guide to American History

by Idiot's Guide to American History(Lit)

  Bombs for Christmas

  The fact that Nixon's negotiator, Kissinger, had been able to announce that "peace is at hand" assured the president reelection in 1972. Once in office, however, Nixon supported Thieu, repudiating the peace terms Kissinger had negotiated. Nixon then ordered massive B-52 bombing raids north of the 20th parallel, which forced the North Vietnamese back to the negotiating table.

  The agreement reached after the bombing was not materially different from what Kissinger had originally concluded. This time, President Thieu was ignored.

  Paris Accords and the Fall of Saigon

  On January 31, 1973, the United States and North Vietnam signed the Paris Accords, which brought U.S. withdrawal and the return of the POWs, some of whom had been languishing in North Vietnamese prisons for nearly a decade. A four-party Joint Military Commission and an International Commission of Control and Supervision supervised the cease-fire. However, the Nixon administration continued to send massive amounts of aid to the Thieu government, and both the North and South freely violated the accords. To pressure the North into abiding by them, the United States resumed bombing Cambodia and menaced North Vietnam with reconnaissance overflights.

  But a war-weary Congress had turned against the president, whose administration (as you shall see in the next chapter) was now wallowing and disintegrating in the Watergate Scandal. In November 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act, which required the president to inform Congress within 48 hours of deployment of U.S. military forces abroad; the act also mandated the forces' withdrawal within 60 days if Congress did not approve. In 1.974, U.S. aid to South Vietnam was reduced from $2.56 billion to $907 million, and to $700 million in 1975.

  What hopes Thieu held out for support from the Nixon administration were dashed when the U.S. president, facing impeachment, resigned in August 1974. Beginning in early 1975, the dispirited South suffered one military defeat after another. After Congress rejected President Gerald Ford's request for $300 million in supplemental aid to South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu hurriedly resigned his office. He left the leadership of his nation to Duong Van Minh, whose single official act was unconditional surrender to the North on April 30, 1975. A dramatic, frenzied evacuation of Americans remaining in Vietnam followed. The spectacle of U.S. personnel being airlifted by helicopter from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon was humiliating and heartbreaking. At the cost of over $150 billion and 58,000 Americans killed, the Vietnam War had ended in defeat for South Vietnam and (as many saw it) for the United States as well.

  The Least You Need to Know

  U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was an extreme result of the Cold War policy of the "containment" of communism.

  The Vietnam War was the most unpopular and divisive war in American history, wrecking the grand social programs of Lyndon Johnson and badly undermining popular faith in the federal government and the nation's leaders.

  Stats

  In 1965, 75,000 Americans were fighting in Vietnam. In 1966, the number jumped to 375,000, and to half a million by 1968.

  Main Event

  The most visible and violent "confrontation" of the 1960s took place August 26-29, 1968, in Chicago, during the Democratic National Convention. Earlier, on March 31, 1968, President Johnson had announced to a stunned nation that he would not run for reelection. However, probably the most electable antiwar candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, was assassinated on June 6, following his victory in the California primary. Hubert H. Humphrey then became the most likely candidate, and he did not oppose the war. Some 10,000 individuals massed in Grant and Lincoln parks along Chicago's lakefront to protest the war, to protest the nomination of Humphrey (Dump the Hump!" they chanted), and to vent rage against Chicago mayor and Democratic 'boss" Richard J. Daley, whom they as a racist and even a fascist.

  Word for the day

  The object of the Nixon--Kissin diplomacy was to achieve detente with the Soviet Union and China, a condition of increased diplomatic, commercial, and cultural contact designed to reduce tensions.

  Main Event

  On March 16, 1968, a U.S. infantry company commanded by Lieutenant William L. Calley marched into the South Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai, supposedly a Viet Cong sanctuary/stronghold. The company massacred 347 unarmed civilians, including women, old men, and children, some of whom were herded into ditches and shot. The grisly scenes were recorded by army photographers.

  The "My Lai Incident" was not made public until 1969, and then only through the efforts of Vietnam veteran Ronald Ridenhour, who threatened to go to the media with what he had heard about the massacre if the U.S. Army failed to initiate an inquiry. That proceeding resulted in the court martial of several soldiers, of whom only Calley was convicted on March 29, 1971.

  For many Americans, My Lai symbolized the essential brutality of the Vietnam War, a conflict in which the defenders of democracy were seen as slaughterers of innocent women and children. As to Calley, some people saw him as likewise a victim, thrust into a war in which everyone was a potential enemy. Sentenced to life imprisonment, Calley was released in September 1974 when a federal court overturned the conviction.

  Word for the Day

  Officers who ordered their men into dangerous situations risked fragging--that is, assassination by their own troops--typically by fragmentation grenade.

  OF LOVE, THE MOON, AND DIRTY TRICKS

  (1968-1974)

  In This Chapter

  The counterculture movement

  Landing of Apollo 11 on the moon

  Nixon's foreign-policy breakthroughs

  Crisis of national trust: Pentagon Papers and Watergate

  Who were the victims of the Vietnam War? Two, perhaps three million Indochinese died, and 58,000 American lives were lost. Many thousands more were wounded, some disabled for life. U.S. Vietnam veterans were not welcomed home with parades but were looked on with guilt and suspicion. By some Americans, veterans were seen as "baby killers"; by others, they were regarded as damaged goods--young men who may have escaped physical wounds but who bore psychological scars that made adjustment to civilian life difficult if not impossible.

  The fact is that all America was a victim of the war, which had created a rift--to use a term from the era, a credibility gap--between citizens and government. Vietnam killed human beings, and it also killed trust.

  Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out

  Since the early 20th century, illegal drug abuse had been associated with the fringes of society, with desperate and disturbed individuals, and to some extent, with urban African-Americans. By the 1950s, addiction to such narcotics as heroin was becoming a major and highly visible problem in many American cities and was linked to the increasing incidence of violent street crime, Yet drug use was still far from a mainstream affliction.

  This all changed by the mid 1960s. A new generation of middle-class youth, characterized by relative affluence and the advantages of education, became passionately dedicated to forms of music and other types of popular art that expressed a turning away from much that had been accepted as the American dream: material prosperity, a successful career, a happy marriage, a house set amid a green lawn and surrounded by a white picket fence. Youngsters craved the experience of new music (a development of the rock 'n' roll that had started in the 1950s) and new clothing--colorful, wild, casual, sometimes evoking the bygone world of British Edwardian extravagance and sometimes suggesting the realm of that ultimate thorn in the side of the American dream, the hobo. As they looked with distrust on their elders ("anyone over thirty"), 1960s youth indulged in so-called recreational drugs. True, previous generations had had their overindulgences, especially alcohol, but for many of those coming of age in the 1960s, drugs became an integral part of everyday life.

  With thermonuclear war an ever-present danger, with an ongoing war escalating in Vietnam--a meatgrinder into which American youth were regularly tossed--and with social justice still an elusive goal in America, there was much to protest and reject in mainstream so
ciety. Marijuana was one form of protest, alternative, and escape (all rolled up into a cigarette called a roach or joint). Sex (which many youth in the 1960s saw as a synonym for love) was another. Yet another alternative was religion--not the "outworn" faiths of the Judeo-Christian West, but the apparently less materialistic beliefs of the East. The decade spawned a series of spiritual leaders, or gurus, including the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (b. 1911?), who introduced a generation to Transcendental Meditation. Mahesh gained renown as spiritual counselor to a bevy of celebrities, including the Beatles.

  A guru of a different kind exhorted his followers to "expand" their minds with a hallucinogenic drug called LSD, which (it was claimed) offered users a universe of "psychedelic" experience. "My advice to people today is as follows," proclaimed Harvard psychologist and LSD advocate Timothy Leary (1920-96) in 1966: "If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out."

  By taking drugs--"turning on"--one would "tune in" to what was really worthwhile in life and, as a consequence, be prompted to "drop out" of life in the hollow mainstream. The phrase became the banner slogan of a generation: Turn on, tune in, drop out.

  Summer of Love

  Americans who had, to one degree or another, turned on, tuned in, and dropped out characteristically called themselves hippies (derived from hip, slang for being attuned to the latest social trends). The hippie movement, despite its association with drug-induced escapism, was certainly not all negative. The movement placed emphasis on kindness, on affection, on looking out for one's fellow being, on caring for the natural environment, on social justice, on freedom of expression, on tolerance, on fostering creativity, on general peaceful coexistence, and on other life-affirming values. Naive from today's perspective, perhaps, hippies seemed to be engaged in a mass attempt to will the world to return to innocence. And if love was often confused with sex, the word love took on a more general meaning as well, as in the biblical injunction to love thy neighbor.

  For many who remember the 1960s fondly, the era was summed up in the summer of 1969, called the summer of love and capped by an open-air rock-music festival held on a farm near Woodstock, New York, August 15-17, 1969. The most popular rock music performers of the time drew perhaps 500,000 fans, who indulged in three days of song, drugs, sex, and (there is no other word for it) love. Woodstock immediately became a cultural icon, symbol of a generation's solidarity in rebellion against the Establishment (a collective label given to those who controlled the status quo) and its war in Vietnam. Woodstock was a symbol, too, of a generation's hope for a better world.

  The Eagle Has Landed

  As much as the counterculture wanted to believe it, the Establishment did not fail in all it put its hand to. Beginning with the launch of Sputnik I in 1957, the United States had consistently come in second to the Soviet Union in the space race. In 1961, President Kennedy made a speech in which he set a national goal of putting a man on the moon before the end of the decade. At the time, few Americans thought this goal was realistic, but on July 20, 1969, at 4:17 p.m. (Eastern Daylight Time), the people of a world shaken by a multitude of fears, gnawed by myriad acts of injustice, and racked by a terrible war in Southeast Asia, watched live television pictures of two American astronauts setting foot on the lunar surface, a quarter million miles from earth.

  "That's, one small step for man," Neil Armstrong declared as he hopped down off the ladder of the lunar excursion module (LEM) Eagle, "and one giant leap for mankind." The successful mission of Apollo I I was a national--and human--triumph in a time of bitterness, pain, doubt, and rejection of long-cherished values.

  Pentagon Papers

  Unfortunately, the government that put men on the moon was capable of moral lapses as deep as its lunar aspirations were lofty. During June 19 7 1, the New York Times published a series of articles on a secret government study popularly called The Pentagon Papers. The 47-volume document, compiled between 1967-1969 by Defense Department analysts, meticulously revealed how the federal government had systematically deceived the American people with regard to its policies and practices in Southeast Asia. Among many other things, the study showed how the CIA had conspired to overthrow and assassinate South Vietnam president Diem, and it revealed that the Tonkin Gulf Resolution was actually drafted months in advance of the attack on the destroyer Maddox and the apparent attack on the C. Turner Joy, the events that supposedly prompted the resolution.

  In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, an MIT professor and government consultant who had access to the study and who had become disgusted and disillusioned with the Vietnam War, leaked The Pentagon Papers to the Times. The Department of Justice attempted to block publication of the document, but the Supreme Court upheld freedom of the press and ruled in favor of the newspaper. Although Ellsberg (whom some deemed a hero, others a traitor) was indicted for theft, espionage, and conspiracy, the charges were dismissed in 1973 because the government had acted illegally in obtaining evidence. Part of the govern-ment's illegal action included, at the behest of the Nixon administration, burglarizing the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to find material to embarrass the whistle blower.

  The revelations of The Pentagon Papers marked a low point of popular faith in the American government and the continued prosecution of the Vietnam War. The effect of these documents was profoundly depressing precisely because Americans had long taken for granted that theirs was a free, open, honest, and noble government--as Abraham Lincoln had put it, "the last best hope of the world,"

  SALT, China, and the Middle East

  Last best hope. President Nixon, who had risen to power in Congress through his uncompromising, at times virulent stance against communism, now worked with his advisor Henry Kissinger to engineer detente with the Soviets and with the communist Chinese. His most immediate motivation was to cut them loose from North Vietnam, but the ramifications of the Nixon-Kissinger diplomacy extended far beyond the Vietnam War. The consummate "cold warrior," Richard M. Nixon initiated the long thaw that ultimately ended the Cold War.

  In 1968, the United Nations sponsored the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which sought to limit the spread of nuclear weapons by persuading nations without nuclear arsenals to renounce acquiring them in return for a pledge from the nuclear powers that they would reduce the size of their arsenals. The following year, the United States began negotiations with the Soviet Union to limit strategic (that is, nuclear-armed) forces. These 'Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) produced a pair of important arms-control agreements in 1972. Then, from 1972 to 1979, the talks of SALT II were conducted, extending provisions formulated in 1972. Although the U.S. Senate failed to ratify SALT II, the two nations generally abided by its arms-limitation and arms-reduction provisions.

  Perhaps even more remarkable was President Nixon's February 1972 journey to China, where he was received in Beijing by Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the very incarnation of the communism Nixon had spent his life opposing. In a single stroke of diplomacy, Nixon reversed the long-standing U.S. policy of refusing to recognize China's communist government, and by January 1979 (under President Jimmy Carter), full diplomatic relations were established between the nations.

  The third of Nixon's major triumphs in diplomacy came in the war-torn Middle East. Following the Arab-Israel War in 1973, Nixon's emissary Henry Kissinger presided over negotiations that led to a cease-fire, troop disengagement, and ultimately, the foundations of a more lasting peace in the region.

  CREEP

  Brilliant, even noble on the international front, Richard Nixon never won total trust and confidence at home. A vigorous, typically merciless political campaigner, Nixon had a reputation for stopping at nothing to crush his opponent. "Tricky Dick," he was called, and never affectionately.

  As the 1972 elections approached, there was little doubt that Nixon would be reelected. Henry Kissinger had announced that peace in Vietna
m was "at hand," international relations were dramatically improving, and Americans were generally loath to (in Lincoln's homely phrase) change horses in midstream. Yet, oddly, none of this optimism was enough for the president. He directed his reelection organization, the Committee to Reelect the President--known (incredibly enough) by the acronym CREEP--to stack the deck even more thoroughly in his favor. The committee engaged in a campaign of espionage against the Democratic party and a program of dirty tricks aimed at smearing Democratic challengers.

  Plumbers

  On June 17, 1972, during the presidential campaign, five burglars were arrested in the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C. This was hardly front-page news--except that these burglars were really "Plumbers." That's what the White House secretly called the men, because their mission was to plug any leaks (security breaches) that developed or might develop in the aftermath of the publication of The Pentagon Papers. The Plumbers served the Nixon administration as a kind of palace guard, assigned to do jobs that lay beyond the chief executive's constitutional mandate. One such job involved planting electronic bugs (listening devices) at the headquarters of the political opposition.

  The five Plumbers included three anti-Castro Cuban refugees, all veterans of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion, and James McCord, Jr., former CIA agent and now "security" officer for CREEP. McCord reported directly to CREEP's head, Nixon's campaign manager, U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell. In a slapstick security faux pas, one of the burglars carried in his pocket an address book with the name of E. Howard Hunt. A former CIA agent (he'd been in charge of the Bay of Pigs operation) and writer of spy novels, Hunt was assistant to Charles Colson, special counsel to President Nixon. Hunt's address? "The White House."