January 7, 2017 at 6:35 a.m.
Year was worse than we realized
Editorial
The year 1968 seems a long time ago.
A good chunk of the American public was born long after that date.
But it may go down as the worst year in American history.
And its secrets are still seeping out, like blood from a wound that refuses to heal.
It was April of 1968 that saw the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
And it was in the weeks that followed that dreadful riots rocked American cities.
It was in June of 1968 that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in California just as his presidential campaign was beginning to take shape.
And throughout the year, American and South Vietnamese casualties continued to mount in a war most folks could no longer understand, if they had understood it in the first place
Summer brought more riots, and the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago was something between a travesty and a fiasco. No one came out of it looking good.
But beyond all that nastiness, something even worse was happening.
In the spring of 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson had announced that he would not seek re-election and would instead devote himself to efforts to bring about a negotiated end to the Vietnam War.
Peace talks were scheduled in Paris. There were crazy debates about the size and the shape of the table.
But something else was going on.
Historians have now concluded with certainty that one of the candidates for president in 1968 — Richard M. Nixon — had his minions working to scuttle those very peace talks.
Nixon’s operatives, it is now clear, did their best to convince the South Vietnamese leadership not to come to the table. Their argument was that South Vietnam would get a better deal if Nixon won the election.
In other words, presidential politics took precedence over national policy.
There were several outcomes: Nixon won the election thanks to a “secret plan” to end the war, the South Vietnamese were later frozen out of the peace talks despite Nixon’s promises, and something like 22,000 American troops needlessly lost their lives between that fall and the final collapse of South Vietnam.
And a bad year turns out to have been even worse than imagined. — J.R.
A good chunk of the American public was born long after that date.
But it may go down as the worst year in American history.
And its secrets are still seeping out, like blood from a wound that refuses to heal.
It was April of 1968 that saw the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
And it was in the weeks that followed that dreadful riots rocked American cities.
It was in June of 1968 that Robert Kennedy was assassinated in California just as his presidential campaign was beginning to take shape.
And throughout the year, American and South Vietnamese casualties continued to mount in a war most folks could no longer understand, if they had understood it in the first place
Summer brought more riots, and the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago was something between a travesty and a fiasco. No one came out of it looking good.
But beyond all that nastiness, something even worse was happening.
In the spring of 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson had announced that he would not seek re-election and would instead devote himself to efforts to bring about a negotiated end to the Vietnam War.
Peace talks were scheduled in Paris. There were crazy debates about the size and the shape of the table.
But something else was going on.
Historians have now concluded with certainty that one of the candidates for president in 1968 — Richard M. Nixon — had his minions working to scuttle those very peace talks.
Nixon’s operatives, it is now clear, did their best to convince the South Vietnamese leadership not to come to the table. Their argument was that South Vietnam would get a better deal if Nixon won the election.
In other words, presidential politics took precedence over national policy.
There were several outcomes: Nixon won the election thanks to a “secret plan” to end the war, the South Vietnamese were later frozen out of the peace talks despite Nixon’s promises, and something like 22,000 American troops needlessly lost their lives between that fall and the final collapse of South Vietnam.
And a bad year turns out to have been even worse than imagined. — J.R.
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