President Nixon and the Vietnam War Essay -- Vietnam War Essays

The politics of the ultratight resonated deeply with Richard Nixon. Nixon had cut his political teeth as a young Red-hunting member of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. His home district in Orange Country, California, was widely known as a Birch Society stronghold. The Los Angeles-area Birch Society claimed the membership of some(prenominal) political and economic elites, including members of the Chandler family, which owned and published the Los Angeles Times. According to the writer David Halberstam (1979, 118) the Times, which was one time described as the most rabid Labor-bating, Red-hating paper in the unify States, virtually created Richard Nixon. Nixons approach to the fight was Birchesque. He campaigned for president in 1968 as a peace candidate by pointing out that he had been raised as a Quaker and promising to bring the military home. His path to peace, however, entailed an escalated war. After his election as president, he unleashed a violent air assault on the Vietnamese and extended the ground war into Laos and Cambodia. When the anti-war strawman criticized these measures, Nixon did what any Bircher would do he decried the anti-war movement as a communist conspiracy that was prolonging the war and that deserved to be treated as an internal security threat.The Nixon-Agnew Strategy Smash the Left, Capture the Center The profligate of the myth of spat-upon Vietnam veterans lies in the propaganda campaign of the Nixon-Agnew administration to counter the credibility of the anti-war movement and prolong the war in Southeast Asia. Nixon had won election as peace candidate, but he was also committed to not organism the first American president to lose a war. It was a at odds(p) agenda. When the Vietnaame... ...of the attempt over how the war would be remembered. Blanketed by the discourse of disability, the struggle over the memory of veterans and the country alike would be waged with such asynclitism as to surpass even the most veiled operations of Nixons minions. While Nixons plumbers were wrenching together the Gainesville case against VVAW in the arising of 1972, mental health and news-media professionals were cobbling together the figure of the mentally incapacitated Vietnam veteran. More than any other, this image is the one that would stick in the minds of the American people. The psychologically damaged veteran raised a question that demanded an final result what happened to our boys that was so traumatic that they were never the same again? As it came to be told, the story of what happened to them had less to do with the war itself than with the war against the war.