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Richard Nixon
B-1913
Navy during WWII
Representative (HUAC Committee)
Senator
VP under Ike
Nixon’s Cabinet
• Weak people
• Kept the power with him
• HR 'Bob' Haldeman
• Nixon's chief of staff
• John Ehrlichman
• Nixon's assistant for domestic affairs
National Security Advisor
• Help with the “Grand Design”
• Started talking to North Vietnam before Nixon was inaugurated
“Vietnamization”
• Nixon Doctrine
• Guam Doctrine
• Training and equipping South Vietnamese to do their own
fighting
• American ground combat forces in Vietnam fell steadily
• But…we wanted out completely
• Apollo 11
We land on the moon
“Tranquility Base here.
The Eagle has landed."
--NASA Mission Control & Neil Armstrong,
July 20, 1969
• Neil Armstrong
steps on the moon
“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”
Moratorium
• October, 1969
• Marches all across the nation
• It was becoming Nixon’s war
Nixon speaks to the nation
• “And so tonight-to you, the great silent majority of my fellow
Americans-I ask
for your support.”
• He got it!
Cambodia?
• Announces the launching of military attacks on enemy sanctuaries in
Cambodia
• Cambodia viewed as a neutral nation
• End the constant supply line
• Saw as an extension of the war
Kent State
“My daughter was not a bum.”
• Kent State in Ohio
• National Guard was sent in
• Fired on Students
Colleges went wild
• After Kent State, many colleges lashed out with violence
• Some had to cancel summer school
Environmental Protection Agency
• Congress creates this agency to improve the environment
• Clean Air Act
• Fueled by:
• the literature of Rachel Cardon, Paul Ehrlich, and Barry Commoner
• protests of Greenpeace against nuclear testing
• 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, California
Problems with the war
• Mai Lai Incident (1968)
• Pentagon papers (1971)
My Lai Incident
• Charlie Company had lost many men
• Under the command of Lt William Calley
• On March 16, 1968 men of Charlie Company, 11th Brigade, American
Division entered the Vietnamese village of My Lai.
• Massacre of over 300 apparently unarmed civilians including women,
children, and the elderly.
• Calley ordered his men to enter the village firing, though there had been
no report of opposing fire.
Pinkville
• One of the men wrote his senator about Mai Lai using the code
name.
• Calley was charged with murder in September 1969
• He was sentenced to life in prison, but was released in 1974,
following many appeals. After being issued a dishonorable
discharge, Calley entered the insurance business.
Pentagon Papers
• The study was leaked to The New York Times, which prepared a series of
lengthy articles and began publication on June 13, 1971.
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Daniel Ellsberg,
Department of Defense
Made a study of the steps taken during Vietnam
had access to the study
Copied it and leaked most of it to Neil Sheehan, a New York Times reporter who had
been in Vietnam.
Let’s discredit Ellsberg
• President Nixon authorized White House aides to burglarize Ellsberg's
psychiatrist's office in an attempt to discredit him.
Some of the facts reported on
• U.S. had eventually supported about 80 percent of the cost of the failed French war
against Vietnam
• U.S. had engaged in covert action against North Vietnam as early as 1954
• U.S. had undermined the 1954 Geneva Accords by hand-picking and supporting an
unpopular South Vietnamese leader who ensured that no post-Geneva elections were
held to unify Vietnam
• U.S. significantly increased its covert actions against North Vietnam in 1964 before
overstating to Congress and the public what happened in the Gulf of Tonkin in August
1964.
Now what?
• Congress later bans US combat forces in Cambodia and Laos.
• 1971: South Vietnamese troops invade Laos.
• The resolution was terminated (December 31, 1970).
• But in fact, the war had been sustained by Congress's continued military
appropriations, not by the Tonkin Resolution..
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Grand Design
diplomacy based on the Nixon Doctrine
devaluation of the dollar and other foreign economic policies
ending (after widening) the war in Vietnam
establishing rapprochement with China and détente with the
USSR.
Rapprochement to China
• The week that changed the world," as President Nixon called his historic
1972 visit to Communist China
• Did not recognize China, but we will begin a cultural exchange
Detente
• Improved relations between the United States and the Soviet
Union that began tentatively in 1971
• Set summit for May of 1972
Easter offensive
• North Vietnam threw its entire military might behind an invasion
• Was turned back by the South Vietnamese
• Nixon
• Mining of Haiphong Harbor
• Bombing of Hanoi
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SALT I
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks
First American President to go to the Kremlin
Limited the number of anti ballistic missiles
Agreed to a five year freeze on the number of offensive missiles each side
could possess.
• Democrats
• Teddy Kennedy
• Edmund Muskie
Election of 1972
• George Wallace
• George McGovern
I love the Mutha!!
Teddy Kennedy
• Chappaquiddick mess
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Muskie was number 1
He was a strong candidate
So Nixon trashed Muskie
Muskie had had affairs with both men and women
He beat his wife
Muskies' wife was an alcoholic
• Shot in May
• Paralyzed
• Only candidate left
George Wallace
George McGovern
Nixon
• Concerned with his “enemies”
• Anyone who did not agree with his policies
• Needed to know about the Democratic party's business