1. The Humbling Decade

2. Late January 1968 – Tet Offensive

3. Intensity of the fighting shattered public confidence in the Johnson administration
March 1968 – Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection

4. Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated in Memphis, April 4, 1968
Urban violence erupts in over 100 cities
April 1968 – students occupied Columbia University buildings to protest the university’s involvement in military research
June 5, 1968 – Robert F. Kennedy assassinated by Palestinian nationalist in Los Angeles after winning the California primary

5. 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago

7. The Vietnam War now became Richard Nixon’s War
Henry Kissinger
Intensified bombing, which included targets in Cambodia, failed to end the war
Vietnamization
On June 8, 1969, Nixon announced that 25,000 U. S. troops would be withdrawn by August and replaced by South Vietnamese troops

8. April 30, 1970 – bombing of Cambodia is made public
May 4 – Kent State

9. Jackson State College
Soldiers in Vietnam were showing mounting opposition to their mission
“Search and avoid” missions
“fragging”
After a final outbreak of protest and violence following the murders at Kent State, antiwar activism began to ebb
Internal divisions in the New Left
Government harassment

10. Vietnam Veterans Against the War return their medals on the Capitol steps in 1971.

11. Cost of the war: 58,000 U. S. troops died
300,000 injured
3-4 Million Vietnamese were killed
The war produced 10 million refugees
The defeat in Vietnam prompted Americans to think differently about foreign affairs and to acknowledge the limits of U. S. power abroad
“Vietnam Syndrome”
War Powers Act

12. The National Despondency of the 1970s

13. George McGovern
AFL-CIO refused to endorse the Democratic candidate
The “plumbers”
Watergate
Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein
Watergate Tapes
Faced with certain congressional impeachment for “high crimes and misdemeanors” Nixon resigned on August 7, 1974

15. Spiro Agnew
Gerald Ford
Nixon’s fall and the revelations of years of governmental misconduct helped convince many Americans that the conservatives were correct when they argued that to protect liberty it was necessary to limit Washington’s power over Americans’ lives
End of capitalism’s “golden age”

16. In 1971 the United States experienced a merchandise trade deficit
1971 – Nixon takes the US off of the gold standard
The end of fixed currency rates injected a new element of instability into the world economy
1973 oil crisis
Stagflation

18. The Misery Index,

19. A lack of participation indicated an alienation from the political system
In 1960, 63 percent of those eligible to vote cast ballots in the presidential election
By 1976, this figure had dropped to 53 percent
Jimmy Carter
Patricia Harris – Secretary of Housing and Urban Development

20. Andrew Young – Ambassador to the United Nations
Augusto Pinochet
Carter’s limited human rights initiatives were undermined by a changed international arena influenced by the rise of corporate power
By the early 1970s, about three hundred U. S. corporations, including the seven largest banks, earned 40 percent of their net profits outside the U. S.

21. As a group, the multinationals constituted the third-largest economy in the world, next to the U. S. and the Soviet Union
Despite election promises, Carter’s first budget proposed not a decrease, but an increase of $10 billion for the military

22. If Carter’s job was to restore faith in the system, his greatest failure was in not imbuing people with confidence in the economy
His efforts to hold onto social programs were undermined by very large military budgets