The Vietnam War

In between those events, the war in Vietnam cost America nearly seventy thousand soldiers' lives, and approximate half a trillion dollars (in present-day value). It helped to lauch the inflationary spiral that dominated the economy of the 1970s and early 1980s; an inflation which requires us to make the specification of "present-day value" above, and which still remains a lurking spectre in our economic life. It brought down the presidency of Lyndon Johnson, and was a central factor in the election of his successor, Richard Nixon. Five years later, it brought down Nixon in turn. Two decades and four presidencies later still, Vietnam, in the form of the "draft issue" (Rockman, 333) lurks behind the electorate's deeply polarized attitudes toward Bill Clinton.

Nearly a third of a century after the Vietnam War thrust itself onto the front pages and the evening news, its divisive influence still hangs over American public life. In the early 1960s, a large majority of Americans had confidence in the

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ican Richard Nixon was able to win a narrow election victory. At the same time, divisions over the war spilled over into a broader national cultural divide. The race riots and the counterculture or hippie movement among college students might both have taken place even had there been no war in Vietnam, but the latter in particular overlapped with and fused into the antiwar movement. Opposition to the counterculture became on the one hand a rallying point for conservatives, while on the otherhand the disorderliness and counterculture associations of the antiwar movement alienated it even from many Americans who were disenchanted with the war itself. Thus, four years later, the antiwar Democratic nominee, George McGovern, went down to a landslide defeat as overwhelming as Goldwater's defeat eight years later. From its heights, liberalism had been plunged into the depths. Vietnam continued to exert its force on American politics. Fear that antiwar activists were sabotaging his policies led Nixon into the illegal measures known collectively as Watergate, and thence to his resignation in the face of impeachment in 1974. Yet, six years later, it was the combination of a sense of social disorder at home and weakness abroad
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Approximate Word count = 2026
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)

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