1968: The Year America Came of Age

Though Nixon also ran on a campaign to pull out of Vietnam, through what he termed the “Nixon Doctrine,” or the “Vietnamization” of the conflict by pulling U.S. troops out of the war-torn region and replacing them with Vietnamese troops. Yet Nixon would also launch secret bombing campaigns in Cambodia which led to the rise of murderous Cambodian dictator Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, both of which were responsible for the genocide of a third of that nation’s population during the 1970s. Nixon also launched what would become the modern-day drug war and created Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), both lobbied for by consumer activist and future presidential candidate Ralph Nader. But Nixon’s real legacy, which continues to affect us today, is his involvement in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in and burglary of the National Democratic offices and his administration staff, who included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, among others. The stealthiness of the Nixon administration, its willingness to break rules of law and disregard Congress can be found in the way the Bush administration has been governed since George W. Bush won the White House in the 2000 election. In fact, Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld learned well at the feet of the Nixon administration. According to Joe Conason in his latest book It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, both Cheney and Rumsfeld were instrumental in turning then President Gerald Ford against signing the Freedom of Information Act. Though Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Antonin Scalia, who was then an attorney who directed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, made arguments against the bill based on politically and legislatively weak merits, “Ford heeded their warnings about the supposed danger posed by the real freedom of information act. Foreshadowing the conflicts to come, the unelected president denounced the FOIA bill as an unconstitutional incursion on the privileges of the executive branch” (102). Though Congress overrode Ford’s veto, Cheney and Rumsfeld’s preoccupation with strengthening the executive branch to the exclusion of the legislative branch is a clear and direct legacy of Nixon’s administration.

It is impossible to view 1968 in a vacuum of political and cultural change without noticing the long shadow that year casts on the decades that followed. While in many ways America of 2007 is vastly different from the 1960s, who we are as a nation today is directly influenced by the events and political changes of 1968. But the real question emerges about what the United States will become forty years from now. How will the changes that are occurring today electorally, legislatively, politically and culturally effect the future?

Sources:

Conason, Joe. It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush. Thomas Dunne Books: New York. 2007.

Wikipedia

Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site Interpretive Staff:http://www.nps.gov/archive/malu/documents/kennedyr_king_assassination.htm

American Masters. PBS. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/brown_j.html