The Smart Aleck's Guide to American History

by Adam Selzer

  While he did a lot of good work as president, such as his War on Poverty, much of it is overshadowed nowadays by his connection to the Vietnam War. This made him so unpopular that even though he could have run for a second full term in 1968, he didn’t bother, fearing that he would lose the primaries to Eugene McCarthy, an antiwar senator who had decided to challenge him for the nomination. Johnson had initially planned to run, but McCarthy enlisted thousands of young volunteers who shaved, cut their long hair, and even put on clean pants to be “Clean for Gene” as they went door to door to promote his candidacy. Johnson won the first primary against McCarthy 49 percent to 42 percent, a margin much smaller than anyone had predicted. This made Johnson look vulnerable, and when several other candidates, including Senator Robert F. Kennedy, brother of JFK, jumped into the race as well, Johnson decided to give up. The nomination would eventually go to his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, but only after a bitter, chaotic primary season and convention.

  LBJ showing how nice he is.

  The other public domain picture of Elvis, taken during his meeting with Richard Nixon. For the meeting, in which Elvis offered to be a special agent in charge of sniffing out drug use, Nixon wore a suit, and Elvis wore what appears to be a professional wrestling championship belt.

  RICHARD NIXON:

  BACK AGAIN

  Despite telling reporters that they wouldn’t have him to kick around anymore a few years earlier, Nixon ended up running for president again in 1968. At the start of the campaign, he was terribly unpopular, and few felt that he really had a chance of winning.

  However, 1968 was a pretty bad year all around. In April, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. In June, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in the middle of his attempt to win the Democratic nomination for president. After a season of bitter primaries, the Democratic Convention in Chicago to nominate someone was a disaster, with protestors engaging in riots and fights with the police all over the city.

  Nixon’s most famous pose.

  People in America were in such a bad mood that they actually elected Richard Nixon, who managed to squeak into office despite having won only 43.4 percent of the popular vote. His main competitor, Hubert Humphrey, received 42.7 percent. Thirteen percent went to George Wallace, the guy who’d stood in the doorway to keep black students out of the University of Alabama a few years earlier. Wallace ran for president in 1968 as an independent candidate and won most of the Southern states.

  AS MENTIONED IN BILLY JOEL’S “GOODNIGHT SAIGON”: THE VIETNAM WAR

  Right around this point in “We Didn’t Start the Fire” comes a mention of Ho Chi Minh, which is the closest Billy really gets to mentioning the Vietnam War. Ho was president of North Vietnam from 1954 to 1969.

  The conflict between the United States and the North Vietnamese Communist forces was already getting under way when Kennedy was president, but it was Johnson who started drafting more and more people who didn’t want to fight in the war into the army. The peacetime draft had been going on for more than a decade, but not too many people were being drafted, and anyway, there wasn’t a war on, so not too many people complained.

  But once the fighting started, things changed. The draft to build the army for Vietnam wasn’t much more popular than most other wartime drafts, and thousands of young people either fled to Canada or enrolled in college, as college students could usually get around being drafted. The draft became especially unpopular because of this—people who could afford to go to college or to hire a draft lawyer could usually get out of having to go to war, but poor people couldn’t, leading many to state (all together now), “This is a rich man’s war, and a poor man’s fight.”

  Though there was never a formal declaration of war, U.S. efforts to stop the Communist North Vietnamese (the Viet Cong) from taking over South Vietnam dragged on for ten years, leaving more than fifty thousand American soldiers dead. The Viet Cong suffered even greater losses—more than a million deaths were reported—but the United States never won. This wasn’t an old-fashioned “beat the other army and it’s all over” sort of war. The Viet Cong knew that they could actually lose just about every battle, and, as long as more people kept fighting (or being forced to fight) them, they could drag the conflict on and on until the Americans gave up. If this sounds familiar, go back to Chapter 2 and see how the colonists won the Revolutionary War. One North Vietnamese leader said that if the Americans wanted war for twenty years, they would have war for twenty years.

  It’s worth noting that this was the first war that was really televised. People at home were able to see firsthand just what a messy business war really was, and every time dead bodies were shown on television, support for the war dropped.

  Violence in Vietnam continued to escalate for years, even after Johnson left office and was replaced by Richard Nixon. Nixon promised “peace with honor,” but Henry Kissinger, one of his top advisors, told him (at least at first) that victory was the only way to exit with honor. Nixon was prepared to do whatever it took to win the war, even if it meant escalation of violence.

  Meanwhile, the antiwar movement was gaining strength in America. As actually “winning” the war seemed more and more like a remote possibility, there began to be more and more pressure on Nixon to pull everyone out. But an equally loud voice, which included the voices of the military-industrial complex Eisenhower had warned about, pushed for U.S. troops to stay in Vietnam for as long as humanly possible and stated that people who opposed the war were traitors.

  It wasn’t until early in 1973, shortly after winning his second term, that Nixon declared a halt to American offensive operations, but the war wasn’t officially over until President Gerald Ford announced the end in 1975. The North Vietnamese took over Saigon days later.

  Protestors put flowers into guns. Note: This does not stop guns from working. It only works symbolically.

  In theory, going to the moon sounds awesome. In practice, there’s so little to do there that you might as well go to Omaha, which at least had a really wicked arcade last time the Smart Aleck staff was there.

  Nixon is generally thought of as an ultraconservative president, though his policies were actually fairly well to the left. He supported civil rights and opened relations with China, which had been cut off ever since they’d become a Communist country in 1949. It was his tough talking that made him seem conservative—well, that and his private comments about Jews, blacks, Italians, Mexicans, homosexuals, and any other group he felt like taking a shot at, many of which were captured on tape recorders that he left running in the White House at all times.

  Yes, there was always something about Nixon that made people want to throw things at him. In fact, when he was vice president and visiting South America, people threw vegetables at his car. In a rare moment of humor, he noted that people weren’t throwing things at him, they were throwing things at the car. He was riding in an Edsel.

  But say what you will about the guy (and we here at the Smart Aleck’s Guide say a lot about him), at least he never expected his cabinet to watch him take a dump.

  THE MOON SHOT

  It was President Kennedy who suggested in 1961 that America could put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. When he said it, wheels were put in motion to develop the technology that would actually put a living person, not just a monkey, on the moon and bring him back safely.

  By this time, the United States was finally pulling ahead of Russia in the space race, though by 1969, it was fairly obvious that there wasn’t much of a military advantage to going to the moon. The space race was really just about bragging rights.

  Still, having developed the technology, NASA launched the Apollo 11 spacecraft in July of 1969, and a few days later, Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on the moon. He was followed shortly therafter by his shipmate Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, Jr. Armstrong promptly said, “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” He meant to say “for a man,” which would have made mor
e sense, but people knew what he meant.

  WOODSTOCK

  Just when you thought we were done talking about people who smelled bad …

  Hippies were sort of the 1960s equivalent of beatniks, only they wore much brighter clothes and usually favored rock and folk music over jazz. Many beatniks, such as Allen Ginsberg, actually ended up becoming hippies themselves.

  In many ways, hippies are the cowboys of the twentieth century, in that they’ve become incredibly romanticized over the years. We generally think of them as gentle, happy people who stood up for peace, for social and political change, and for individuality and idealism, while making some pretty awesome music along the way. Some of them really were like this. However, there were also a lot of them who were just, to quote Beatle George Harrison, “horrible, spotty69 drop-out kids on drugs.”

  YES, THE MOON LANDING HAPPENED.

  Nowadays, more and more people seem to believe that the whole moon landing thing was a hoax. You’ll probably meet a few of them over the course of your life. All we really have to say to them is that faking the moon landing and getting that past the Russians would have been twice as hard as getting to the moon in the first place, but arguing with conspiracy theorists is usually a fool’s errand. No amount of proof will persuade some of them to change their minds.

  The Russians never doubted that Americans had been on the moon. They just pointed out that we could have sent robots to the moon instead and gotten the same scientific results for a whole lot less money, without risking any lives.

  But the race to the moon was never about scientific results. It was about getting there before the Soviets.

  Mission accomplished.

  Conspiracy theorists say that the flag shouldn’t be blowing in the wind, since there’s no wind on the moon. And it’s not. It’s held up by a horizontal bar, as you can see just by looking at the picture.

  Woodstock, a three-day concert in upstate New York, was one of the biggest hippie gatherings, and certainly the most publicized. It’s also one of the reasons the romanticized image of hippies has endured. The festival shows that there was at least a kernel of truth behind the image. Featuring such acts as Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, and Janis Joplin, the concert was a veritable Who’s Who of rock music in the sixties (except for the Beatles, who weren’t touring at the time; Bob Dylan, who lived right nearby but didn’t perform; and the Rolling Stones, who tried to stage their own festival a few months later in California, which ended badly). Though about 150,000 concertgoers were expected, almost half a million showed up.

  Nixon leaves the White House for the last time after resigning—and pauses to strike his trademark pose again. Gotta give him credit for going out with style. Ford issued a full pardon to Nixon, figuring that he’d suffered enough.

  As cool as this was, there wasn’t enough food for half a million people—which was a relief, in a way, because there also weren’t enough toilets. The rain made the whole place a mud pit, the conditions were awful, but the music was great, and the fact that it didn’t become a huge riot scene made it one of the most famous events of the day.

  Rose Mary Woods does her freestyle floor routine and shows off her taste in bland office art.

  WATERGATE

  When Nixon took office, his approval ratings really had nowhere to go but up. He easily won a second term in 1972. But for Nixon, things sort of went downhill from there.

  In the middle of the campaign, Nixon operatives, led by future radio talk-show host G. Gordon Liddy, broke into a Democratic Party office in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C., to snoop around. After they were caught, no one really believed that Nixon had been involved in the crime or the subsequent cover-up. After all, he’d been way ahead in the polls—why would he have risked getting involved in a stupid break-in? But as time went on, some people began to suspect that Nixon had been involved, including Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, a couple of Washington Post reporters who were getting information from a secret source who called himself Deep Throat.

  For years, trying to figure out who Deep Throat really was was a popular game among political buffs and historians. In 2005, it was revealed that it was an FBI guy named W. Mark Felt.

  What got Nixon in real trouble was that it turned out that he was also (get this) snooping on himself. He had been taping everything that went on in the White House. When one tape revealed Nixon telling people to cover up the break-in, Congress ordered him to turn over all the other tapes so they could see what else he was up to. He turned most of them in, but he’d erased eighteen and a half minutes from one of them. To this day, no one knows what was erased.70 His secretary, Rose Mary Woods, claimed that she’d accidentally hit the foot pedal that erased the tapes while talking on the phone, but the kind of stretch she would have had to do in order to pull this off would have been a remarkable feat of acrobatics. Rose Mary was no slob, but she was in her mid-fifties, far past her prime years for gymnastics.

  THE WATERGATE TAPES

  In addition to connecting Nixon to the break-in, the Watergate tapes, as all tapes turned over during the investigation are known, revealed a side of Nixon that he probably never wanted people to see. Among the questionable things he said on the tapes:

  “I have the greatest affection for them [blacks] but I know they’re not going to make it for five hundred years. They aren’t. You know it, too… . The Mexicans are a different cup of tea. They have a heritage. At the present time they steal, they’re dishonest. They do have some concept of family life, they don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like.”

  This is a good example of the kind of quote (like that one about Grant resigning his commission) you shouldn’t believe until you see the source. For the record, it was transcribed straight from White House tapes from 1971 that were released to the public in 1999.

  Nixon went on TV and said, “I am not a crook,” but by that time, most people had already decided that he was, in fact, a crook, and his approval ratings plummeted. Congress began drawing up the paperwork to impeach him. Before they could finish the paperwork, Nixon resigned, leaving Gerald Ford, a guy Billy Joel didn’t see fit to mention in any of his songs, in charge of the country.

  PUNK ROCK (OR, HOW THE NATION DEALT WITH DISCO)

  In the mid-1970s, as the nation finally saw the end of Richard Nixon’s political career, the country settled into a generally happy mood—at least, the people who ignored the fact that the economy was in the tank did.

  Television got better. More and more people had color TV sets, and the general quality of the shows was improving. Shows like All in the Family dealt with tough issues like racism, sexuality, religion, and politics but managed to be seriously funny at the same time. The age of Leave It to Beaver was over. Of course, there was also plenty of crap on the air—especially in the form of corny comedy variety shows—but those could be ignored.

  As television started to get better, music took a turn for the worse. Most of the best groups of the 1960s were broken up or, in some cases, dead. Only a few of the biggest bands of 1967 were still doing anything notable by the mid-1970s: the beginning of the disco era.

  The real problem was that rock music was over, for all practical purposes. There was still good—even great—rock coming out; it just wasn’t viewed as quite so rebellious anymore. Men with long hair had gone mainstream. Presidential candidates were quoting Bob Dylan in campaign speeches. Elvis was still alive but was buried under a whole lot of rhinestones as Vegas-y glitz. Few people were trying to ban rock or saying that it would be the end of society anymore, which probably took some of the fun out of it.

  Punk Rockers plotting to destroy everything. Scared? You should be!

  And so along came punk rock, a hard, fast-paced music that people associated with nihilism and apathy. Punk fans spiked their hair, put safety pins through their face, and generally scared the crap out of most older people.

  The blueprint for punk was more or less set by the
Ramones, an American act, but most of the horrified public were introduced to the punk scene through media coverage of the Sex Pistols, an English band whose message was “no future for me” and who sang songs containing lines like “God save the Queen / she ain’t no human being,” which, apparently, was about the worst thing a British person could possibly say in public. If that’s true, then the British were in desperate need of punk rock.

  As a band, the Sex Pistols had several disadvantages: for one thing, they didn’t have a whole lot of raw musical talent (they made up for it with attitude). For another, they had to perform under fake names, such as S.P.O.T.S (Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly), Acne Ramble, and the Hamsters, because the “Sex Pistols” were banned from pretty much every town in England. When they appeared on television and swore like sailors, they spent the next several days on the cover of every tabloid. Rumors went around that they spent their afternoons roaming the streets puking on old ladies. Members of the government spoke out, saying that the band would be the end of society.71 Lead singer Johnny Rotten said, “I don’t understand it. All we’re trying to do is destroy everything.”

  There was only one real problem with it: the whole thing was basically an act. A couple of members of the band were, in fact, completely out of their minds, but the group’s manager, Malcolm McLaren, went out of his way to get the band into fights and get them in the news in any way possible. He even hired film critic Roger Ebert to write a movie about them. At their final concert (until the 1990s), in San Francisco, Johnny Rotten finished the set by saying, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” and walking off the stage.