Vietnam and the Watergate scandal affected popular trust in the government. During his 1968 campaign, Nixon promised that he had a “secret plan” to put an end the Vietnam War. Once he was in office, he created a new policy called Vietnamization. With this, U.S. troops would slowly be withdrawn while South Vietnamese troops, backed by U.S. bombing, would take up fighting. However, Vietnamization did not end the war or end the antiwar movement like Nixon had planned. In early 1970, Nixon ordered U.S. troops into neutral Cambodia, in order to disrupt supply lines to the South. But the invasion did not achieve its military goals, and it destabilized the Cambodian government, starting a chain of events that brought the Khmer Rouge to power and
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Although all young men were subject to the draft, most college students received deferments. The army was mostly composed of working-class whites and poor racial minorities. Blacks complained of having disproportionately higher casualty rates than white soldiers. And the military was not immune from domestic social and cultural changes. More and more soldiers wore peace and Black Power symbols, used drugs, refused orders, deserted, and assaulted and killed unpopular officers. The erosion in discipline convinced many high-ranking officers that the United States had to pull out from Vietnam. At the same time, public support for the war declined. Revelations in 1969 that U.S. forces had committed a massacre of some 350 civilians at My Lai the year before shocked the nation. In 1971, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, a classified government report that traced U.S. involvement in Vietnam back to World War II and showed how multiple presidents had misled the American public about it. In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act, which limited presidential authority by requiring congressional approval for troop commitments …show more content…
But triumph was succeeded by disaster. Nixon was obsessed with secrecy and did not tolerate differences of opinion. He viewed critics as national security threats and created an “enemies list” of unfriendly reporters, politicians, and celebrities. When the Pentagon Papers were published, Nixon established a special investigative unit in the White House known as the “plumbers” to get information about Daniel Ellsberg, the former government official who had leaked the papers to the press. The plumbers raided Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to discredit him. In June 1972, five former employees of Nixon’s reelection committee were caught breaking into the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C., and were
Although all young men were subject to the draft, most college students received deferments. The army was mostly composed of working-class whites and poor racial minorities. Blacks complained of having disproportionately higher casualty rates than white soldiers. And the military was not immune from domestic social and cultural changes. More and more soldiers wore peace and Black Power symbols, used drugs, refused orders, deserted, and assaulted and killed unpopular officers. The erosion in discipline convinced many high-ranking officers that the United States had to pull out from Vietnam. At the same time, public support for the war declined. Revelations in 1969 that U.S. forces had committed a massacre of some 350 civilians at My Lai the year before shocked the nation. In 1971, the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, a classified government report that traced U.S. involvement in Vietnam back to World War II and showed how multiple presidents had misled the American public about it. In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act, which limited presidential authority by requiring congressional approval for troop commitments …show more content…
But triumph was succeeded by disaster. Nixon was obsessed with secrecy and did not tolerate differences of opinion. He viewed critics as national security threats and created an “enemies list” of unfriendly reporters, politicians, and celebrities. When the Pentagon Papers were published, Nixon established a special investigative unit in the White House known as the “plumbers” to get information about Daniel Ellsberg, the former government official who had leaked the papers to the press. The plumbers raided Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to discredit him. In June 1972, five former employees of Nixon’s reelection committee were caught breaking into the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C., and were