Don't Know Much About History, Anniversary Edition: Everything You Need to Know About American History but Never Learned (Don't Know Much About®) (76 page)
Authors: Kenneth C. Davis
November 12
President Nixon announces the withdrawal of 45,000 more men, leaving an American force of 156,800 in Vietnam.
1972
January 13
President Nixon announces withdrawal of an additional 70,000 troops.
January 25
President Nixon reveals that Henry Kissinger has been in secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese, and makes public an eight-point peace proposal calling for a cease-fire and release of all U.S. POWs, in exchange for U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.
February 21
Nixon and Kissinger arrive in China to meet with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier.
March 30
The North Vietnamese launch a massive offensive across the Demilitarized Zone into the South. In five weeks, Hanoi’s troops have penetrated deep into the South.
April 15
President Nixon orders resumption of bombing in the North, suspended three years earlier.
May 1
The city of Quang Tri is captured by the North.
May 8
President Nixon announces the mining of Haiphong Harbor and stepped-up bombing raids against the North.
June 17
Five men are arrested at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Office Building. They work for the Committee to Reelect the President. Subsequently, two former intelligence operatives, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, are arrested for their involvement in the break-in, and the ensuing cover-up by the White House begins to unravel as “Watergate.”
October 8
Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho achieve a breakthrough in their Paris negotiations. Henry Kissinger returns to the United States to say that peace is “within reach.” The announcement is made two weeks before the presidential election, in which Nixon is opposed by the Democratic senator from South Dakota, George McGovern, an outspoken opponent of the war.
November 7
Nixon is reelected in a landslide victory. Following the election, Kissinger’s talks with Le Duc Tho break down.
December 18
The United States resumes bombing raids over North Vietnam, which continue for eleven days. Communists agree to resume talks when bombing stops.
By year’s end, American troop strength has been reduced to 24,000.
1973
January
Kissinger resumes talks with the North. A cease-fire agreement is signed and formally announced on January 27. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird announces the end of the draft as the army shifts to an all-volunteer force. During the Vietnam War, 2.2 million American men have been drafted.
March 29
The last American ground troops leave Vietnam.
April 1
All American POWs held in Hanoi are released.
April 30
President Nixon’s aides H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and John Dean resign amid charges that the White House has obstructed justice in the Watergate investigation. On June 25, Dean accuses Nixon of authorizing a cover-up, and another White House aide reveals the existence of a secret taping system that has recorded conversations in the Oval Office.
July 16
The Senate begins an investigation of the secret air war against Cambodia.
August 14
The U.S. officially halts bombing of Cambodia.
August 22
Henry Kissinger becomes secretary of state.
October 10
Vice President Spiro Agnew resigns after pleading “no contest” to charges of tax evasion. House minority leader Gerald Ford is nominated by Nixon to replace Agnew under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which allows the president to fill a vacancy in the vice presidency.
October 23
Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which Le Duc Tho rejects because fighting continues in Vietnam.
November 7
Over the president’s veto, Congress passes the War Powers Act, which restricts the president’s power to commit troops to foreign countries without congressional approval.
1974
January
South Vietnam’s President Thieu announces that war has begun again. Communists proceed to build up troops and supplies in the South.
July 30
The House Judiciary Committee votes to recommend impeachment of President Nixon on three counts of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”
August 9
Nixon resigns and is replaced by Gerald Ford.
September 8
Ford pardons Nixon for all crimes he “committed or may have committed.”
1975
In an offensive that lasts six months, combined Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces overrun South Vietnam and Cambodia.
April 13
The United States evacuates its personnel from Cambodia.
April 17
Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia (renamed Kampuchea), falls to the Communist Khmer Rouge.
April 23
President Ford calls the war “finished.”
April 25
High-ranking South Vietnamese officials evacuate Saigon.
April 29
The last Americans are evacuated from Saigon, on the same day that the last two American soldiers are killed in Vietnam. On the following day, Communist forces take Saigon.
1977
January 21
President Jimmy Carter unconditionally pardons most of the 10,000 men who evaded the draft during the war.
1982
November 11
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is unveiled in Washington, D.C. It commemorates the 58,000 American lives lost in Vietnam between 1959 and 1975.
Must Read:
The Best and the Brightest
by David Halberstam;
Vietnam: A History
by Stanley Karnow;
Our Vietnam: The War, 1954–1975
by A. J. Langguth.
In the tumultuous decade after Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat (see Chapter 7), the civil rights movement coalesced behind the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., achieved some gains through the courts and legislation, and moved the question of racial equality to the front burner of American life. For most of those ten years, blacks seemed willing to accept King’s nonviolent vision of overcoming the hurdles of racism and segregation. But sometimes the front burner gets very hot. Before long, the pot was boiling over.
By 1965 the rhetoric and the actions of the civil rights movement changed because the country had changed. The war in Vietnam was moving into full swing. The year 1963 brought the assassination of President Kennedy, and Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers (1925–63) was gunned down in front of his home in Jackson. The nonviolent integration movement was being met by violence and death. A Birmingham church was bombed, with four little girls killed. Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney (see p. 464) were murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. In February 1965, it was Malcolm X who went down. A month later, after thousands of marchers led by Martin Luther King, with U.S. Army protection, walked from Selma to Montgomery, a white civil rights worker named Viola Liuzzo was murdered. In the car with the Klansmen who shot her was an FBI informer.
Once solidly anchored by King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council and the NAACP, with their emphasis on peaceful, court-ordered remedies, the movement was coming under fire. The violence in the air was producing a new generation of activists who lacked King’s patience. Men like Floyd McKissick of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were no longer willing to march to Dr. King’s moderate tune. They preferred the martial drumbeat of Malcolm X’s aggressive rhetoric. Built on frustration and anger, this basic split in tactics splintered the movement. By the summer of 1965, only days after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, strengthening protection of black voter registration, the anger no longer just simmered. It boiled over. The scene was a section of Los Angeles called Watts.
This was not the Los Angeles of Hollywood, Malibu, and Bel Air. Watts was a rundown district of shabby houses built near the highway approaching Los Angeles International Airport. Ninety-eight percent black, Watts was stewing in a California heat wave. In the stewpot were all the ingredients of black anger. Poverty. Overcrowding. High unemployment. Crime everywhere. Drugs widely available. The nearly all-white police force was seen as an occupation army.
On August 11, a policeman pulled over a young black man to check him for drunken driving. A common occurrence for blacks, it happened much less frequently to white drivers. When the young man was arrested, a crowd gathered, at first joking and taunting, then growing more restive. Rumors of police brutality started to waft through the summer heat. The crowd grew larger and angrier. Soon the lone policeman called for reinforcements, and when the police arrived, they were met by hurled stones, bottles, and chunks of concrete. Within a few hours, the crowds had grown to a mob, and the frustration was no longer simmering in the August heat. It had exploded.
Watts was sealed off, and for a while all was quiet. But the next day the anger returned. By nightfall the small, roving bands had grown to a mob of thousands, hostile, angry, and beyond control. The rocks and bottles were replaced by Molotov cocktails as the riot erupted into a full-blown street rebellion. Black storeowners posted signs that read, “We Own This One.” The signs didn’t always help. Among the most popular looted items were weapons, and when police and firefighters responded to the violence and fires, they were met with a hail of bullets and gasoline bombs. All of the pent-up rage and helplessness boiled over in white-hot fury. Reason lost out. When Dick Gregory, the well-known standup comic and activist, tried to calm the crowds, he was shot in the leg. Mob frenzy had taken over. Watts was in flames.
The battle—for that was what it had become—raged on for days as thousands of national guardsmen poured in to restore order. There was open fighting in the streets as guardsmen set up machine-gun emplacements. Vietnam had seemingly come to L.A. By the sixth day of rioting, Watts was rubble and ashes. One European journalist even commented, “It looks like Germany during the last months of World War II.”
The toll from six days of mayhem was thirty-four killed, including rioters and guardsmen; more than 1,000 injured; 4,000 arrested; and total property damage of more than $35 million.
But the aftermath of Watts was more than just a body count, police blotters, and insurance estimates. Something fundamental had occurred. There had been race riots before in America. In Detroit, during World War II, as many people had died as were killed in Watts. There had been smaller riots in other northern cities in previous years. But Watts seemed to signal a sea change in the civil rights movement. When Martin Luther King toured the neighborhood, he was heckled. Saddened by the death and destruction, he admonished a local man, who responded, “We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us.” The time of King’s “soul power” was passing. The new call was for “black power.”
The Watts summer of 1965 was only the first in a string of long, hot summers that left the cities of the North and Midwest smoldering with racial unrest. In the summer of 1966, several cities saw rioting. But the worst came in 1967, particularly when Newark and Detroit were engulfed in more rebellions. The death toll due to urban violence that year rose to more than eighty.
In the wake of these rebellions, presidential commissions were appointed, studies made, and findings released. They all agreed that the problem was economic at its roots. As Martin Luther King had put it, “I worked to get these people the right to eat hamburgers, and now I’ve got to do something to help them get the money to buy them.” One of these studies, conducted by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, warned forebodingly that America was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
That was on February 29, 1968. About a month later, Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis. His death set off another wave of riots that left cities smoldering. James Earl Ray, who confessed to the killing, was imprisoned. But nagging doubts, just as with the death of JFK, remain about the guilt of Ray—who died in 1998—and the existence of a wider conspiracy.
A
MERICAN
V
OICES
R
ALPH
N
ADER,
from
Unsafe at Any Speed
(1965):
