Posted on 11/19/2023 3:59:10 AM PST by Chad C. Mulligan
Just in case you were thinking of giving it a try, be warned: Nobody will be able to write a competent history of 20th-century American politics without absorbing the themes and revelations in the new book by Luke Nichter, The Year that Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968. A history professor at Chapman University and the biographer of Henry Cabot Lodge, among others, Nichter is widely understood and rightly admired as a tireless researcher—though "tireless" doesn’t quite cover it: In his quest to transcribe most of the hopelessly garbled and obscure audio tapes left behind by Richard Nixon after his presidency, Nichter eventually lost most of his hearing in one ear. It’s not often that we history buffs get our own martyr.
And now Nichter rewinds, so to speak, to the year that gave us the Nixon presidency. For those generations unlucky enough to succeed the baby boomers, the year 1968 must already linger as a grating cliché. Yes, the pop music was often sublime, and many of the movies were fresh and ingenious, and even American TV showed signs of crawling out from its mewling infancy into something less embarrassing. The cataclysms of 1968—assassinations, campus riots, inner cities in flames—are so familiar they don’t need to be rehearsed.
Nichter directs our attention elsewhere. His argument is that the year’s most enduring significance lies in the presidential election, as the moment when the culture wars emerged in the contours they maintain to this day, gripping us all in a kind of stranglehold.
(Excerpt) Read more at freebeacon.com ...
Not complicated,actually.
How about this for the reason those things followed 6 years later and still ?
https://www.historycentral.com/sixty/60/school.html
In the review there is no mention of Eugene McCarthy, who’s performance in New Hampshire, Oregon, and Wisconsin primaries knocked Lyndon Johnson out of the race.
And the whole opposition to the Vietnam War gets very little mention, except in connection with whether Nixon was secretly negotiating with Hanoi.
“Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
Collusion and Chaos in the 1968 election, the year Nixon won?
Let’s talk about 1960, the year he “lost”.
In Watergate, the Media discovered they were the masters of the politicians, not the other way around. The media was one voice, and the voice was Progressivism, in all its forms.
Thta was too much for whatever forces are behind the FBI and the CIA.
Had it been known in time that the author of all the "Watergate" leaks was the Deputy Director of the FBI, and had the Justice Department staff had not already decided they were not obliged to be governed by the President and the Attorney General, things might have turned out differently.
Tried reading the article until it go to this:
“(Yes, my children! Liberal Republicans once roamed the earth, before dying horribly of exposure.)”
As usual some liberal trained college faculty member is blowing smoke out of both ends. There has been a passel of liberal republicans just the same as conservative democrats (although not near as many) in our political schemes for a couple of hundred years.
Originally most of it was geared to more local targets to fulfill the needs of the states in congress like land deals, roads and grounds, and even shifting the cost of parks to the federal level and away from state control for economic purposes. A congressman was sent to represent “his” voters. But that’s changed only in the pack atmosphere as numbers talk louder than words now whether the project was national or county based.
The main reason for that is we’ve gotten too big that we now are sending congressmen to D.C. to handle our international affairs and have put the local needs on the back burner while both sides “talk” about the failure of the other’s platform and the people in charge of it because they look alike except for bickering purposes whether either or both actually make sense. And while they level their eyes at each other, Rome burns in controlled fires to further the governments causes and not the providers, uh, taxpayers.
So before I can even read the entirety of an article and run into someone trying to sell an absolute lie to smoke screen his trained position on a subject he obviously doesn’t understand or have incite in, it gets folded up and used on the bottom of the bird cage where it can have more contribution from an outside source to finish it.
And for those of you who are going to say, well it was published, so was Mein Kampf, the Satanic Bible, and Knitting with Dog Hair.
wy69
I remember the daily body count reports on the nightly news telling us how many NVA soldiers our army had killed.
Thinking of it now, it is hard to guess, was that pro or anti-war propaganda?
>>was that pro or anti-war propaganda?
I believe that General William Westmoreland and Secretary McNamara believed it was information that would demonstrate progress. Whether it the public took it that way or whether it increased support for the war is debatable.
“Never understood it? The Maoist youth of this country...the same Maoists who *control* the Rat Party today...decided that Ho Chi Minh and his good pals in Moscow and Beijing were the good guys and that *we* were the bad guys.
Not complicated,actually.”
The Communist Vietnamese propagandists advised the newly-minted, self-described “Palestinians” on the media propaganda methods, especially edited and doctored visuals, they had used to turn the U.S. public against the war in Vietnam.
I don’t remember enemy body counts anything like “daily”.
I do remember Friday night at 7 all 3 networks presented the US KIA number for the week. It was very important to LBJ and McNamara to show Ho Chi Minh that we were “serious”, that we could “pay the price” and not “cut and run”.
Of course, it was all a fraud.
Noxious Nixon gave us the EPA and OSHA on whims. The Imperial Presidency.
They were daily.
>>there’s still too many “Freepers” here who hate America and cheer for Russia and China
Opposition to foreign entanglements has been a feature of American politics since George Washington.
Prior to WW I the US was fairly isolationist and anti-British. After all, the Brits had supported the South during the Civil War.
The imperial wing of America became established first by the Spanish American War. Teddy Roosevelt was a great supporter of that war, and was partly responsible for the success of the sneak attack on the Spanish Fleet in Manila Bay.
WW I saw the ascendancy of the Anglophile faction over the isolationists via Wilson under the influence of Colonel House. Even though there was continued isolationist feeling prior to WW II, FDR’s march to war could not be resisted.
The pendulum began to swing backwards against the imperialist pretensions as a result of the Korean War, which was viewed as unwarranted and unnecessary by many. One of my earlier memories is the funeral of a neighborhood kid. Other families in the community also lost sons in Korea.
By 1968, the Vietnam War looked very much like the futility of Korea all over again. Most families knew about war, having dead and wounded in WW II or Korea and the bodies had started to come back from Vietnam.
Many kids in ‘68 also had relatives or family friends who were actual combat veterans of WW II or Korea.
There are lots of veterans who are gung ho patriots. But among those who have shot and been shot at, and who have lost bothers in arms, the attitude toward war is much more reserved.
Washington was an Isolationist Virginia farmer
Somebody once wrote that true ignorance is rejecting something you know nothing about.
You got just four paragraphs in, and then went off on a polemic of your own based on one offhand comment by the reviewer.
I asked a combat veteran of the Vietnam war and he told me they had real no idea of how many of “ charlie “ they killed because they took their dead with them
For any “third-party” cheerleaders out there...
1968 was the last election that a third-party candidate (Wallace) won any electoral votes.
That’s why they are referred to as “third-party”; because they ALWAYS finish third!
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