“...I found about 50 National Review magazines spilling out of an overfilled dumpster at Clemson University...”
Same here! I found a stack of National Review’s about to be thrown out. I devoured the contents and that cemented my conservatism to this day. I even read it while in Vietnam.
William F. Buckley Jr. started and sustained the conservative movement in this country from 1955 on. As bad as things are now, it would be much worse without his influence.
Yes, indeed.
I remember well articles in NR describing the rise of political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses, in parallel with the adoption of those ideologies in European countries in the early 80s.
NR under WFB was very nice.
Thanks for what you did there. I missed the draft literally by a few months; I turned 18 in June of 1973.
I didn't realize I might very well have ended up going to the war that some of my high-school classmates were protesting. I was so preoccupied with other things, I wasn't even aware of the draft possibly affecting me.
Vietnam was such a constant thing with us back here. My family watched the 6:30 national news every night, on a small TV that was perched at one end of the dinner table. My parents didn't say too much about the war. My father had been in the Army in the early 1950s, but hadn't gone to Korea.
The main thing I remember was the nightly casualty counts. 32 Americans, 106 ARVN, 1261 VC. Every night, the numbers fluctuated but the ratios were like that.
I also remember when the USAF (or maybe it was the Navy) blew a bridge in North Vietnam using a single TV-guided "smart bomb," as they called it. I thought it was incredibly cool, and would make us unbeatable. It was shown on the evening news one night.
The Tet Offensive was a huge thing. All three news networks seemed to coordinate their coverage to make it look like a desperate situation for us. Khe Sanh, I remember the footage from that. It looked like a repeat of The Alamo. Now we know it was all MSM manipulation.