Vietnam, Protest, and Counterculture 471motivate Johnson’s withdrawal from the race. In mid-March, European
nations, alarmed by events in Vietnam and fearful of more escalation, began
to exchange billions of American dollars for gold, as devised under the
Bretton Woods System, leaving the United States with a serious shortage of
hard currency and thereby triggering a world financial crisis that, Johnson
and Wall Street feared, could lead to an economic crisis on par with 1929.
On April 4th, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, setting off
uprisings in many major urban areas. Two months later, Robert Kennedy was
killed after winning the California primary, ending the dream of a new
Camelot and giving Vice-President Hubert Humphrey a clear path to the
Democratic nomination. Police-incited riots at the Democratic convention
in Chicago that August, however, ruined his candidacy. In 1968, the so-called
American century—a celebration of unrivaled U.S. power after World War
II—had come to an end.
Going Out With a Bang
Tet ended American hopes for victory in Vietnam. Militarily, the offensive had
exposed the U.S. failure to stop infiltration or destroy the enemy. Politically it
showed that the NLF remained popular throughout Vietnam while large num-
bers of mainstream Americans—those who got their opinions from Walter
Cronkite—seemed ready to throw in the towel. American leaders recognized
failure too and so began a strategy of Vietnamization–shifting the burden for
warfare to the southern Vietnamese while continuing to support Saigon with
huge amounts of material and money, but also withdrawing American soldiers
to quiet the antiwar movement–in hopes of winding down the war. The irony,
if not absurdity, of turning over the Vietnam War to the Vietnamese cannot be
understated. The U.S. role would continue for 5 more years and the war for
7 more–and in that time, with no real hope of “winning” the Americans would
continue to pummel and devastate Vietnam so the eventual victory of the VC
and DRVN would come at a catastrophic cost. The U.S., as it were, was going
out with a huge bang. The new President, Richard Milhous Nixon, had promised
to end the war quickly with a “secret plan” for Vietnam, but he actually esca-
lated the air war and expanded the conflict into the neighboring countries of
Cambodia and Laos. If the Communists were to win, it would be at a tremen-
dous cost.