780 Chapter 29 From Camelot to Watergate: 1961–1975
concerns were racial bigotry, the bomb, and the “dis-
turbing paradoxes” associated with these concerns.
SDS sought to wrest power from the “military-indus-
trial” complex and institute a radical socialist govern-
ment. They proposed to radicalize college students;
how this was to be accomplished, they did not say.
But SDS grew, powered by rising college enroll-
ments and a seemingly unending list of local campus
issues. The first great student outburst convulsed the
University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1964.
Angry students, many veterans of the 1964 fight for
black rights in the South, staged sit-down strikes in
university buildings to protest the prohibition of polit-
ical canvassing on the campus. This free speech move-
ment disrupted the institution over a period of weeks.
Hundreds were arrested, the state legislature threat-
ened reprisals, the faculty became involved in the con-
troversy, and the crisis led to the resignation of the
president of the University of California, Clark Kerr.
But what transformed student activism from
being a local campus irritation to a mass political
movement was the decision by Lyndon Johnson to
escalate the war in Vietnam.
Timothy Leary, Going Out(1966) at
http://www.myhistorylab.com
Protests Against the Vietnam Warat
http://www.myhistorylab.com
WatchtheVideoHeartheAudioJohnson Escalates the War
After Diem’s assassination in 1963, the situation in
South Vietnam worsened. One military coup followed
another, and political instability aggravated military inca-
pacity. President Johnson nevertheless felt that he had
no choice but to prop up the South Vietnamese regime.
“If I don’t go in now,” he told an adviser, “they’ll be all
over me in Congress. They won’t be talking about my
civil rights bill, or education, or beautification. No sir,
they’ll push Vietnam up my ass every time.”
Johnson decided to punish North Vietnam
directly for prosecuting the war in the South. In early
1964 he secretly ordered American warships to escort
the South Vietnamese navy on commando missions far
into the Gulf of Tonkin. After one such mission,
American destroyers were fired on by North
Vietnamese gunboats. Several nights later during a
heavy storm, American ships reported that they were
being fired on, though the enemy was never spotted.
Using this Tonkin “incident” as pretext, Johnson
demanded, and in an air of crisis obtained, an autho-
rization from Congress to “repel any armed attack
against the forces of the United States and to prevent
further aggression.” With this blank check, known as
theGulf of Tonkin Resolution, and buttressed by his
sweeping defeat of Goldwater in 1964, Johnson autho-
rized air attacks in North Vietnam. By the summer ofFrom 1965 to 1968, American troops in Vietnam conducted “search and destroy” missions to shatter the insurgents. Here a soldier
watches as a village is burned.