VIETNAM AND WATERGATE ★^1041many hundreds of millions of dollars and diverted funds from needs at home.
But the nonmonetary price was far higher. Vietnam undermined Americans’
confidence in their own institutions and challenged long- standing beliefs
about the country and its purposes. The divisions caused by the war continued
in debates over its legacy that persisted for many years. The war’s supporters
blamed critics at home for undermining a successful and winnable military
effort. Others took the lesson that the United States should be extremely reluc-
tant to commit its armed forces overseas— an outlook sometimes called the
Vietnam Syndrome.
Two decades after the war ended, former secretary of defense Robert
McNamara published a memoir in which he admitted that the policy he had
helped to shape had been “terribly wrong.” Ignorance of the history and cul-
ture of Vietnam and a misguided belief that every communist movement in the
world was a puppet of Moscow, he wrote, had led the country into a war that he
now profoundly regretted. The New York Times rejected McNamara’s apology.
The “ghosts of those unlived lives,” the young men sent to their death “for no
purpose,” it declared, could not so easily be wished away. But the Times itself,
like the rest of the political establishment, had supported the war for most of its
duration. For far too long, they had accepted its basic premise— that the United
States had the right to decide the fate of a faraway people about whom it knew
almost nothing.
Watergate
By the time the war ended, Richard Nixon was no longer president. His domestic
policies and foreign policy successes had contributed greatly to his reelection in
- He won a landslide victory over liberal Democrat George McGovern, receiv-
ing 60 percent of the popular vote. Nixon made deep inroads into former Demo-
cratic strongholds in the South and among working- class white northerners. He
carried every state but Massachusetts. But his triumph soon turned into disaster.
Nixon was obsessed with secrecy and could not accept honest difference of
opinion. He viewed every critic as a threat to national security and developed
an “enemies list” that included reporters, politicians, and celebrities unfriendly
to the administration. When the Pentagon Papers were published, Nixon cre-
ated a special investigative unit known as the “plumbers” to gather informa-
tion about Daniel Ellsberg, the former government official who had leaked
them to the press. The plumbers raided the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in
search of incriminating records. In June 1972, five former employees of Nixon’s
reelection committee took part in a break- in at Democratic Party headquarters
in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C. A security guard
called police, who arrested the intruders.
How did Vietnam and the Watergate scandal affect popular trust in the government?