Transcripts For CSPAN3 1968 Presidential Election 20170514 :

CSPAN3 1968 Presidential Election May 14, 2017

Of Martin Luther king jr. And robert kennedy. Her class is about an hour and 10 minutes. Margaret lets get started. Welcome. Today we are talking about 1968, a year when a heck of a lot happened, including a president ial election. A year where there were a lot of social, economic, political parallels that are in some ways familiar to us now because, in part, some of the changes the early 21st Century America has experience particularly in politics were set in motion in this late period. 1960slets get started. Start with an unlikely as official News Conference or address to the american people. March 31, 1968. President Lyndon Johnson gave a televised address to the nation. His subject but was the vietnam war. By this point the vietnam had escalated into a bloody conflict involving over half a million american soldiers. A war that had gradually started as a small engagement against communist, put potential Prime Minister aggression in Southeast Asia in the 1950s had escalated into a major conflict that was tearing america apart. Johnson gives a speech about the war. He looks tired. He looks old. The glare of the television lights did not help matters. At the very end he lands this bombshell. Because of the importance of resolving the war in vietnam and peace talks were already ongoing with the north vietnamese, he says i do not believe i should devote an hour a day of my time to any personal partisan causes. Accordingly, i shall not seek and i will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president. So how did we get here . How did Lyndon Johnson, who had been elected in a landslide victory, less than four years earlier get to the point where he is decided not to run again for reelection because he does not think not only does he not think he will win, he does not think you look at the party nomination. How does this happen . This is a very hard scenario to imagine when johnson was first running for president in 1964. It was also a hard scenario to imagine given his administrations role in a broader, mainstream liberalism in 20thCentury America. Liberalism that has it is tied in with progressive ideas about progress and technology. Ideas that animated things like the 1939 worlds fair, the futurama exhibit and some of the other things we talked about in this class. This idea that big organizations and new technology. Big corporations and Big Government can bring good things about. America is Getting Better and better and that experts are the ones who can give the answers provide the answers for where america goes next. But having expertise, whether it be the expert engineers at General Motors envisioning the city of the future in the futurama exhibit in 1939, or be it the architects of things like the marshall plan, rebuilding europe and japan after world war ii, or the engineers of nasa who are building the rockets to send and to the men by the end of the 1960s. This optimism and faith in big organizations and Big Technologies is starting to break down. The thing that breaks down that faith more than anything else is the war in vietnam. This again was hard to imagine four years earlier. Opponent wasons barry goldwater, republican senator of arizona and someone from the far right of the Republican Party. The mainstream of the Republican Party in the early 1960s and before was not that far removed from the democrats, certainly there were lots of issues on which they differed. This general understanding that progress was possible, expertise you neededle, that big organizations to get things done even though dwight americanr warned the people in his farewell address about the growing militaryindustrial complex and the scientists who no longer knew how to innovate because they were on a government paycheck. He surrounded himself with scientists and understood the importance of these lark organizations Large Organizations to conduct business of the unites states. Both democrats and republicans are part of this broader postwar consensus about what the role of the government does, the importance of people with expertise in charge, and goldwater is someone who comes out of right field. Not left field. Although he was a sitting senator, he was a politician, a very seasoned politician and someone with a very firm and clear ideology conservative to libertarian. Today we would call him more of a libertarian. He was a great believer in freedom of every kind. Individual freedom and freedom from communism. He was the ultimate anticommunist crusader, following in the footsteps of people like Richard Nixon. Someone who comes and seizes the nomination for the Republican Party from more moderate abilities. Possibilities. He is quite a hardliner. Johnson very successfully runs against him as someone who was out of touch with the mainstream of politics, someone who was way too conservative for america. Someone who does not have americas interest at heart. Someone who should not be trusted to have his finger on the nuclear button. Nonetheless goldwater, despite the fact that a lot of the experts and establishment were very worried about goldwater, he had a lot of grassroots support, particularly among young people. Maybe not this young, although i had to throw this picture because i love it. He galvanized an incredible support from teenagers, housewives, people who are not part of the political establishment. A lot of people in the sun belt sun beltes, suburban communities of southern california, arizona, and the southwest who believe that america was on the wrong path. They were worried about communist influence in Public Schools and local governments, and were still the age of mccarthy was over, but they were still there was still a lot of people worried about the same things that joe mccarthy had Good Morning America about a decade before. But the democrats rule the day. The democrats have johnson in the democrats run a campaign that is successful not just in bringing building enthusiasm among the liberal coalition that had started in the age of Franklin Roosevelt with White Working Class voters from the north and west and africanamerican voters, but also to successfully paint goldwater as an extremist, someone who could not be trusted. The electoral map in 1964 was a landslide victory for the democrats. Here is what is interesting goldwater does not win very much. He wins his home state of arizona. He takes states that had been solidly blue, democratic for decades and decades. He is the deep south, the electoral votes of the deep south gopher very well very goldwater. Why do they do that . Because of civil rights. This is after the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by johnson. Something the whites of the deep south find something that is a great betrayal of their states rights and their way of life by the federal government. Goldwater is a states rights guy. He is a believer in freedom. Little believer in as government intrusion as possible including any business of the south. Have stateshat you going red in the south of the first time, but hardly the last time. 1968, fastforward. Johnsons electoral victory is enables him to get major pieces of social legislation passed in the wake of 1964 to advance his antipoverty agenda that he and john f. Kennedy did. To pass programs of what he calls the Great Society, including the centerpieces of medicare and medicaid, major social programs, Health Insurance for the elderly and lower income people. A whole host of other antipoverty programs, job creation programs, and enlargement of the domestic side of the government. Ist johnson also oversees the large meant of the military side of the government because of the war in vietnam. He oversees this massive escalation of the conflict. It is ironic because in he comes into office, he is very conflicted about it. This is kennedys war. This is not something, from the getgo, we hear this in the phoneof johnsons conversations with friends and colleagues in the oval office saying, i dont know how we will get out of this, but we cannot just pull out. Losing is not an option. When losing a war is not an option remember, look at the 20th century wars. World war ii only a couple of decades in the rearview mirror, this Great American victory. Ferment for america to lose a war, to pull out of a conflict in a small, less developed country, to not be able to win that war, that would be a terrible blow. It would be a cold war blow because this was a proxy war for american democracy versus soviet communism. Soviet and chinese communism, vietnam is one of those dominoes in the middle. So he escalates. By 1968 the escalation has been quite massive. One of the things that is propelling it is now that men are being drafted. As the war escalates, you need to draft more young men in the military. You need more soldiers. The draft is instituted in the runup to world war ii by roosevelt. We do not have now we have an all volunteer military, we did not then. The escalation of vietnam means the escalation of those being called up in the draft. During the nearly 10 years of heavy american involvement in the war, a total of 11. 7 million served in the armed forces. A little over 2 million of those went to vietnam. Within that number, 1. 6 million saw combat. Entire 1825he population, it is a little over a quarter of the population drafted up. The uncertainty of the draft, the fact that every young man makes itgister for it, a possibility and probability for everyone. At the peak of the draft, in 1966, 3 hundred 47,000 americans were drafted. By 1968, going into 1968, one third of the 20yearold men were in the service. One in 320yearold males in the United States were in the military. Evenly distributed by race, there was a disproportionate number of the men of color drafted up. That is something that thread through the Antiwar Movement and becomes a rallying cry for and connects the problem of the war overseas with the problems of Race Relations at home. It is something that you cannot get exempted from. No one is exempted from it. Even though some people are more easily able to dodge than others. The draft increases the antiwar base. Coming into 1968 there is already incredible antipathy about vietnam and a very vibrant Antiwar Movement. In the early days of 1968, towards the end of january, there is a north viennese assault on south vietnamese strongholds including cities that changes the visibility of the war and amps up pressure and broadbased antiwar sentiment beyond just those who are getting drafted. Mrs. This is a vietnamese holiday in early 1968, there is that the Johnson Administration did not see coming. And itme to the citys goes from major cities over the next three weeks of this, over 12,000 civilians are killed. A million refugees are created. It has a huge toll on the north vietnamese. Many more north vietnamese depths than south the enemy soldiers or american soldiers. Ultimately the American Forces prevail. It is not a win. The north vietnamese push back. This type of attack, this coordinated attack is something the Johnson Administration did not predict what happened. They were saying there was no way they north vietnamese had this capacity to do this. Y also do not have the there is no way they will prevail. They were right on the second point. One of the things that made it so visible is that because it. As fighting in the cities the fighting in the range of Television Cameras. It is where all of the foreign correspondents were located. So the fighting is beamed from the streets of the cities in vietnam back to the nine states. United states. It becomes more visible. When you hear about guerrilla warfare in the jungles, it is different. Actually seeing this erupt in the streets, that changes the dynamic. Hasantiwar basement which at its core these Young College students, vulnerable to the draft, and at institutions where they had time on their hands to protest, and a platform to get people to listen to them start to expand. It becomes a more broadbased youth movement. It is enabled in part by the fact that there are so many young people. Another reason that vietnam becomes such a political flashpoint is demographics. It is the baby boom. It is a new generation of young people. Female isat male and termed man of the year by Time Magazine in early 1967. By r start to be understood by their elders as this new generation that is not only large and numbers, but care more about social justice and steal it geopolitical issues than their previous generations did. They are intensely engaged in many of them in rectifying the injustices of the world and increasingly starting to talk about vietnam alongside civil rights and other injustices at home. They are connecting his problems these problems. It is a different sort of politics than we see an earlier Civil Rights Movements, which are about fighting for consumerbased citizenship. By withholding your buying power to get what you want, by using the front of respectability and Good Behavior as a way to commence convince people to go along with your cause. This is the way political protests have been conducted for quite some time in united take, not just the 1950s and 1960s, but well before that. This new generation has different tactics. Very quickly, Lyndon Johnson, the person who thinks these people should be my people, they should be my supporters, very soon these young people turn on lbj. Lbj is the war criminal. Lbj is the person responsible for this debacle in vietnam. Lbj is the person sending people there. Starts to takely over Everything Else that johnson is trying to do. It starts taking over fiscally because it is eating up a giant chunk of the budget. You cannot also have the generous antipoverty programs and welfare programs of the Great Society and have the big spend of increasingly expensive war. It also is eroding political support. By the time you get to 1968 it is not just the kids on the street. There are other people protesting for peace. There are other people out on the street or sitting in the tetng room watching the offensive and fold on the television and wondering what is going on. Somehow things are going wrong. Warscope and scale of the and the sneak attack, surprise offensive,the tet something where the u. S. Back troops eventually prevailed, but it goes against what the leaders in washington had been telling you can public about how the war is going. It is showing a different more than what leaders are saying. Everything is going fine, we are working towards peace, we are deescalating, etc. The moment that really turns the tide politically, or maybe it is the final straw that breaks the camels back, is when the person who is the arbiter of how americans understand the news of as day, someone who is seen a trusted source not fake news, but real, serious news Walter Cronkite, the veteran cbs reporter who had reported extensively from vietnam, he now sits at the anchor desk. The person who told america that john f. Kennedy had been shot and killed. He is the person who later informs america of the men landing. He is the person who is delivering the news of the day to millions of american households. How many people how many watched the Network Nightly News in the last month . Ok. There are a few. Network, not cable. Network. How many people make a point to watch it every day . No hands. One hand. All right. But you probably know walter conk right cronkite. [laughter] this is where news came from. It is not likely of all tend out from the news. How many people consulted a new source of the last one in four hours . It is not like you are tuning out. Youre probably tuning in getting more news than you want. We have too many places to find it. But then Walter Cronkite, or the other anchors were the places you went. The nightly news, you got 30 minutes of what to think. Anza very 28, cronkite and his broadcast with a threeminute speech about the war in vietnam. He looks at the camera, he reads from the script, looks up at the viewer sitting in the living room and says it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of vietnam is to end in a stalemate. To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe in the face of evidence to be optimistic have been wrong in the past. To say we are mired in stalemate seems the only real and unsatisfactory conclusion. On the off chance the political analysts are right, and the next few months we must test the enemys intentions before negotiations. It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy so to the best they could. While all of this is playing out there is a president ial election going on. And the summer of 1967 the democrats a group of left, young leftleaning democrats have started a dump Johnson Movement determined to find someone else to run for the democratic nomination. About for a number of potential candidates, landing first on trying to persuade robert kennedy, the brother of the former president , now senator from new york to run, he says he is not interested. After going through and looking at a few short list, they finally come to the senior senator from minnesota, euGene Mccarthy. Anccarthy was in unlikely person the ru

© 2025 Vimarsana