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| Martin Luther King spoke at Cal's Sproul Plaza in 1967, outlining how civil rights included being against the war. |
IN 1968, the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese staged the Tet Offensive demonstrating how vulnerable American and South Vietnamese forces were and how fragile the Saigon government was.
In America the anti-war movement was gaining steam with each casualty report coming out of the Vietnam war. Nowhere was the anti-war movement stronger that at our country's college campuses. UC Berkeley, where I was starting my second year, was in the center of the storm.
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| Richard Nixon |
Even though I was in ROTC, I wasn't immune to the sentiment of my peers in regards to the war. In some ways, those of us in ROTC had more at stake than most. It was a difficult time for everyone and I was no exception. I was torn. I struggled. On one hand, I wholeheartedly agreed with my friends about the war. On the other hand, I attended pro-war seminars and lectures trying to find justification for being part of the military conducting what I felt was an unjust war where the U.S. shouldn't have been involved. These efforts failed.
To people outside of the campus -- people in the Midwest and those political leaders in Washington, D.C. -- it might have appeared that the country was on the border of a real revolution. The Beatles came out with a song titled "Revolution," and people who didn't listen to the lyrics thought it advocated revolution. (Video below)
Other social forces were converging - the civil rights movement, the country was still shaken by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy, the Black Panthers were carrying their guns in the streets, the Brown Berets looked threatening, Asian students and professors were grumbling at S.F. State planning the Third World Strike with their allies in the Chicano and black studies departments -- stirring the pot and added to this bubbling cauldron of social unrest was the anti-war movement.
To lovers of the status quo, it indeed might have looked like the country and the old social order were on the verge of collapse.
That sentiment forced President Johnson to decide not to run for reelection and the war was THE central issue of the Presidential campaign which pitted former Vice President Richard Nixon and Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
All of those memories and feelings came rushing back to me last month with the revelation of Nixon's role in sabotaging the peace talks between North and South Vietnam.
As if Watergate wasn’t
enough to forever taint President Nixon’s record of public service, if he were alive today, he would be
in jail for being a traitor to our country.
I didn’t think that this type of political
commentary would fit in this blog’s format but I’m so angry, I had to write
about it. Why mainstream media isn’t all over this story with 10 different
angles; talking heads would be analyzing this on all our networks; editorials
would be lamenting Nixon’s true legacy and Fox News would have figured out a
way to twist the facts around and blame Obama – is beyond me.
The state of mainstream media these days is
so sad I shouldn’t be surprised at their timidity. I guess the latest suntanning efforts of the Kardasians is more important.
For years, it was rumored that Nixon was
behind the failure of President Johnson to negotiate a peace treaty with North
Vietnam in 1968. The audiotapes of President Lyndon Johnson White House
conversations revealed that the president accused Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign of
treason for undermining the peace negotiations to end the war in Vietnam.
It wasn’t until this summer that
those rumors were confirmed.
