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American History Lecture Twelve (view source)

Revision as of 19:31, November 30, 2008

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→‎Election of 1968: moving

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In 1971, in ''New York Times v. U.S.'', the Supreme Court denied President Nixon the power to stop publication of the Pentagon Papers, which was a secret document prepared by the government that had been leaked to the press. It contained an embarrassing study of American involvement in Vietnam.

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~~==Election of 1968==~~

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The hippies protested the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The tough Democratic mayor of Chicago, Richard Daley, used police to arrest and beat up the protesters. The media turned this into a major embarrassment for the Democratic Party. By then Lydon B. Johnson had failed so badly with the war that he had to withdraw from the presidential race, and the the leading Democratic candidate (Robert F. Kennedy) had been assassinated by someone disgruntled over the Middle East. Ultimately Richard Nixon won the presidential race when a third party candidate (George Wallace) siphoned votes away from the Democratic nominee (Hubert Humphrey).

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The Reverend Martin Luther King, who was a minister advocating greater rights for African Americans, was assassinated in 1968. Our society seemed to be falling apart. In 1969, news reports from Vietnam shocked the nation with a story about how American soldiers had murdered villagers in the “My Lai Massacre.” The story was that our soldiers would unsuccessfully look for North Vietnamese, known as “Viet Cong,” but in their frustration in finding the real enemy would allegedly kill innocent people instead.

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At Kent State University in 1970, peaceful protesters were shot at by National Guardsmen and several were killed. The United States began looking for ways to get out of the war. When we finally pulled out completely in 1973, South Vietnamese clung to the wheels of the last airplanes, begging to leave with us. North Vietnam eventually conquered South Vietnam after we left (Saigon fell to the communists in 1975), and created the new communist country of Vietnam that exists to this day.

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