The consensus that had united the nation to fight the cold war cracked during the Vietnam conflict, as Americans fought in Vietnamese jungles and in the streets of American cities. In a guerrilla war without battle lines and against an often unseen enemy, the identities of friends and foes became unclear. At home, Americans faced the same confusion as both the supporters of the war and its opponents claimed to represent the best interests of the nation.

The Road to Vietnam

The struggle that wracked Vietnam for some 30 years had deep roots in history. Ho Chi Minh drew as much or more on the traditions of his people as he did on Marxist-Leninist ideas. Before Lyndon Johnson committed the United States fully to the war, presidents from Franklin Roosevelt to John Kennedy made decisions interlocking the fate of the two nations.

An incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 led President Johnson to launch retaliatory air strikes on North Vietnam. More importantly, Congress adopted the Tonkin Gulf resolution, effectively giving Johnson a blank check to retaliate. The following year, in Operation Rolling Thunder, the American military began bombing selected targets in the North, but Ho Chi Minh refused to negotiate unless the bombing stopped and all U.S. troops went home. With air bases to defend in the region, the United States eventually had to send in ground troops, and as the original forces became involved in combat, President Johnson continued to deploy reinforcements, until American forces had assumed the major fighting role in the South.

Social Consequences of the War

Due to a draft system that made it easier for students and the more affluent to receive exemptions, the soldiers that served in Vietnam tended to be younger, poorer, and less well educated. Still, morale at first remained high in the face of unrelenting combat, booby traps, and the physical rigors of the jungle. Yet American forces made little headway against the enemy. Even as the United States poured in supplies, men, and modern equipment, the Viet Cong maintained control of much of the countryside. The advanced technologies of war that the American military used (including napalm, cluster bombs, and defoliants) too often destroyed the land, villages, and people that American policymakers intended to help.

By 1967, antiwar protest at home had spread outward from college campuses. Hundreds of thousands of people rallied to halt the bombing and end the war. In 1968 protesters ringed the Pentagon. The grim lack of progress in Vietnam eventually led to defections even from within Johnson's Cabinet, most notably Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. And as the cost of the war rose, so did inflation.

The Unraveling

The issues of the war came to a head in 1968, after the shock of the Vietcong's Tet offensive. Americans won a costly military victory, but the Vietcong achieved a political triumph. Johnson's Defense Secretary Clark Clifford led a movement to de-escalate. When antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy almost beat Johnson in the New Hampshire primary, the president announced he would not run for reelection.

Four days later, an assassin gunned down Martin Luther King, sparking riots in the nation's major cities. Two months later, Robert Kennedy was shot and killed while campaigning for the presidency. In rapid succession, America had lost its most articulate liberal leaders. Frustrated protesters clashed with hostile police at the Democrats' Chicago convention, and rioting erupted in the streets. The presidential race of 1968 came down to a contest among Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey, conservative Republican Richard Nixon, and the former segregationist Governor of Alabama, George Wallace. Despite Humphrey's last-minute surge, Nixon won a narrow victory.

Nixon's War

While Richard Nixon admitted in private that the United States needed to end its involvement in Vietnam, publicly he escalated the bombing to force North Vietnamese concessions. In 1970, he briefly extended the war into Cambodia. As a result, domestic protest mounted, and Congress repealed the Tonkin Gulf resolution. Meanwhile, Nixon steadily withdrew American troops—"Vietnamizing" the war. That reduced both American casualties and the morale of American troops.

Nixon saw Vietnam as part of a larger pattern of America's declining world power. In the Nixon Doctrine, he announced a shift of increased responsibility to allies such as the South Vietnamese and the Shah of Iran. He also made a dramatic trip to China and initiated a policy of détente with the Soviet Union that included a Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT) agreement limiting some nuclear weapons.

At home, Johnson's insistence on pursuing both the war and his domestic welfare programs (both "guns and butter") without paying for them through tax increases had led the economy into stagflation (low growth combined with inflation). Nixon sought to stem the economic slide and shift power from Washington to state and local governments through his "New Federalism" program. Despite a reputation as a conservative, the president accepted a number of reforms, including the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. He even resorted to Keynesian wage and price freezes to stem inflation. Nixon aimed to bring together a middle-class coalition of voters he called "the silent majority" to win reelection in 1972.

The New Identity Politics

By 1970, the liberal belief in a common humanity shared by all Americans had begun to lose influence to movements of identity politics, which substituted a pluralistic model for the unified one sought by integrationists. Minority groups began to forge their own identities in opposition to those created by the dominant culture. These movements accelerated through the growing influence of not only black nationalists but a wave of post-World War II Latino immigrants. These newcomers had grown increasingly vocal in insisting that they, like African Americans, had been held back by discrimination and poverty. They campaigned for a greater political voice and for economic power. César Chávez organized Mexican American migrant farm workers, while more militant groups such as La Raza Unida sought to gain power in communities where Chicanos constituted a majority. Indians, whose population had swelled during the twentieth century (to about 800,000 by 1970), became similarly active. Through various forms of protest and legal challenges they sought to reclaim old tribal rights and more responsive government policy. Homosexuals, one of the most long-silent minority groups, also gave voice to new demands for respect and equal rights. The feminist movement used its growing influence to push both a cultural and political agenda with mixed results.

Other groups sought reforms based on their ideas and values rather than their personal identities. Consumer advocates and environmentalists worried that excessive materialism wasted natural resources and that corporations exploited the public through misleading advertising and the manufacture of shoddy, and even dangerous products. Their efforts led President Nixon to establish the Environmental Protection Agency and to the creation of Earth Day, but the desertion of the liberal coalition by whites disenchanted by the civil rights movement and the counterculture and the fragmentation of the liberals and the radical left helped to stall further advancement of the agendas of these and other reform movements of the era.

Value Politics: The Consumer and Environmental Movements

Reform crusades did not simply disappear as the United States passed from the turbulent 1960s into the 1970s. Rather, the sense of a "movement" splintered into more varied causes with more particular agendas. The Santa Barbara oil spill was one of many issues that advertised the importance of ecology to a healthy environment. Environmentalists also fought the Alaska pipeline, the Florida Everglades jetport, and the Supersonic Transport project (the SST). At the same time, Ralph Nader sparked a consumer movement dedicated to forcing corporations to be more responsible to their customers, workers, and the public interest. Despite innovative use of tactics like the "class-action suit," the broad focus of the consumer agenda for reform dissipated its impact.

Pragmatic Conservatism

As American citizens divided along issues of equality, President Nixon attempted to steer a pragmatic course through dangerous political waters. His recognition of the nation's conservative political trend resulted in a New Federalism policy that channeled money and power back to state and local governments. He attempted to fight "stagflation" through wage and price controls that many conservatives deemed heretical but that won him additional support from the working classes.

Even with Nixon appointee Warren Burger replacing the liberal Earl Warren as chief justice, social activists still looked to the Supreme Court to redress their grievances. The Court upheld school busing as one way to remedy segregation. When President Nixon tried to make two controversial appointments to shift the Court's balance to the right, Congress rejected them. Faced with opposition from groups he perceived as enemies, Nixon increasingly resorted to legal harassment by federal agencies to crush dissent. When the Democrats nominated George McGovern, an antiwar liberal, to run for president in 1972, Nixon and his vice president, Spiro Agnew, won a smashing victory. Yet despite this triumph, Nixon continued to pursue his grievances against his opponents, a decision that ultimately led to the Watergate break-in and his resignation.

The Road's End for Vietnam and Liberalism

The combination of the war in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal crippled the liberal vision of an active government. President Ford's pardon of Nixon only deepened the nation's cynicism. Congress attempted to restrain the imperial presidency through the War Powers Act of 1973 and efforts to increase oversight of FBI and CIA intelligence operations. Yet the nation sunk further into malaise when an energy crisis developed as a result of an oil boycott by Middle Eastern Arab nations. Shuttle diplomacy by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger helped to lift the boycott, but the energy crisis was only one factor limiting American power at home and abroad. When in 1973, after untold material and personal loss, the United States ended its almost 30-year involvement in Vietnam's internal conflicts, the withdrawal marked the closure of not only the war but also of the dominance of the liberal consensus that had unified Americans in the decades after World War II.