American History Discussion #12

 Evaluate Richard Nixon’s presidency.  Aside from Watergate, should he be considered a good president?  

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U.S. A NARRATIVE HISTORY, SEVENTH EDITION
DAVIDSON • DELAY • HEYRMAN • LYTLE • STOFF

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“Defeat in Vietnam marked the end of
liberalism triumphant and offered a stark
reminder of the limits of American power. No
longer did most Americans believe that the
world could be remade in their image.”

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 The Road to Vietnam
 Social Consequences of the War
 The Unraveling
 The Nixon Era
 The New Identity Politics
 Value Politics: The Consumer and Environmental

Movements
 Pragmatic Conservatism

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• Ho Chi Minh

 Lyndon Johnson’s War
• The domino theory
• Tonkin Gulf incident

 Publicized as “open aggression on the high sea”

 Rolling Thunder
• Escalation
• Air strikes

 By 1

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6 almost 1

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5,000 American troops had landed;
in

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68, 536,000 American troops were on the ground

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 The Soldiers’ War
• Effects of the draft

 Sons of blue-collar Americans most likely to accept draft
• Body counts

 Number of Vietcong killed might include innocent civilians
• The air war and Agent Orange

 The War at Home
• Hawks and doves

 Muhammad Ali
• McNamara loses faith
• Inflation

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• Tet Offensive
• One of the great American intelligence failures
• Military success and the “credibility gap”

• Between administration’s optimistic reports and reality
• Stalemate
• “Clean for Gene”

• Senator Eugene McCarthy intended to challenge Johnson
• LBJ withdraws

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 The Shocks of 1968
• King and Kennedy assassinated

 Both men exemplified the liberal tradition
 Johnson chose Hubert Humphrey as his successor;

Republicans chose Richard Nixon
• Convention mayhem

 Chicago demonstrations turn into a police riot

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 Revolutionary Clashes Worldwide
• Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution
• Student revolutionaries in Europe

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“The clashes in Chicago seemed homegrown, but

they took place against the backdrop of a global

surge in radical, often violent, student upheavals.”

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 Whose Silent Majority?
• George Wallace
• Nixon’s “silent majority”

 Outcome of the election of 1968

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 Vietnamization—and Cambodia
• Henry Kissinger

 “Peace with honor” and “Vietnamization”
• Invading Cambodia

 Wave of protests

 Fighting a No-Win War
• Low morale

 Became a serious problem for American soldiers
 Drugs among soldiers in Vietnam

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• The Move toward Détente
• Nixon Doctrine

• U.S. would remain engaged in Asia but shift some of the
military burden to other allies

• Détente
• SALT I

• Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, 1972: U.S. and Soviet
Union pledged to limit ICBMs deployed

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“Despite Nixon’s insistence…Vietnam was not a war

he had chosen to fight…. By 1968 the United States

no longer had the resources to dominate international

relations around the globe.”

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• Pluralism versus assimilation
• Affirmative action

 Latino Activism
• Puerto Ricans and Cubans
• César Chávez and the UFW
• Chicano activists
• La Raza Unida

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 The Choices of American Indians
• Termination

 Reduction of federal services, selling off tribal lands, push
the people into “mainstream”

• American Indian Movement (AIM)
 Indians of All Tribes
 Seizure of Alcatraz and calls for a national Pan-Indian rights

movement
 Militant takeover of Wounded Knee

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 Asian Americans
• New wave of Asian immigration

 Many middle-class professionals; more from Southeast and
South Asia

 Seen as “model minorities”
 Asian students joined with African Americans, Chicanos,

and Native Americans for a “third world revolution”

 Gay Rights
• Growing political activism
• Stonewall incident

 1969: New York police raided the Stonewall Inn; patrons
fought back

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 Feminism
• The Feminine Mystique

 Betty Friedan, 1963
 Women accounted for half the “Freedom Summers”

students
• National Organization for Women (NOW)

 Equal Rights and Abortion
• Roe v. Wade

 1973; struck down state laws restricting access to abortion
 Sharp backlash

• Failure of the Equal Rights Amendment

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• Technology and Unbridled Growth
• Sources of pollution

• Smog, radioactive fallout, lethal pesticides, polluted rivers
• Rising fatality rates on American highways

• Consumer advocates and corporate failures:
Ralph Nader, Unsafe at Any Speed (1965)

• Nader’s Raiders
• 1969: Center for the Study of Responsive Law

• Focus on Ecology
• Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (1971)

• Modern society courted disaster by trying to “improve on
nature”

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 Political Action
• Environmental Protection Agency
• Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA)
• Clean Water and Clean Air Acts
• Earth Day

 The Legacy of Identity and Value Politics
• No consensus on environmental ethic
• Nixon’s “southern strategy”

 Replace New Deal coalition with new Republican majority

 The End of the War

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• Philadelphia Plan

 Nixon’s New Federalism
• Revenue sharing
• Nixon favored an “income strategy”

 Stagflation
• Nixon’s wage and price controls

 Social Policies and the Court
• School busing
• The Nixon Court

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 Triumph and Revenge
• George McGovern and liberal Democrats

 Split between “us” and “them” Nixon wanted
 Nixon received almost 61 percent of the popular vote

• “The plumbers” and the Pentagon Papers
 Abuse of presidential powers

 Break-In
• June 1972: Democratic National Committee headquarters in

Watergate apartment complex burglarized

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• To the Oval Office
• White House tapes

• Discovery of taped conversations in the Oval Office
• Vice President Agnew found to be soliciting bribes;

Gerald R. Ford appointed to replace him
• The “Saturday Night Massacre”

• Nixon fired special prosecutor Archibald Cox

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• Resignation
• Articles of impeachment

• Three articles of impeachment drafted by House committee
• Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974, to avoid impeachment

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