A SHORT HISTORY OF RIGHT WING DESTRUCTION PART 22

Richard M. Nixon entered the White House in a time of tremendous disillusionment.  The 1960's had been a turbulent decade.  We almost had a nuclear war with the Soviet Union.  We entered a proxy war in Vietnam instead.  In 1969 we fulfilled JFK's vision of landing men on the moon and returned them safely to the earth.

For a time it appeared the 1960's would take the United States and the world in a new direction.  The young generation preached about making love, not war.  But the election of Richard Nixon and running mate Spiro Agnew was a decisive endorsement of the establishment.

We didn't know then that the Nixon campaign probably sabotaged attempts to end the Vietnam war.  Had LBJ succeeded in finally ending the Vietnam nightmare, there is a good chance Hubert Humphrey would have been president.  The country had been prosperous in the Kennedy-Johnson years.  We had fulfilled a dream of all mankind in going to the moon.  The possibilities were boundless.

But Richard Nixon, who won the election largely because of Vietnam, made very little effort to end the war.  He even expanded the war into Cambodia.  Protesters at Kent State University and Jackson State were gunned down by the National Guard and by the police, respectively.  Exercising the right to freedom of speech suddenly was a deadly exercise.

More to come