“Nixon talked about bringing us all back together and
rang in his presidency with an uplifting and unifying
speech.” (“We have endured a long night of the
American spirit,” the new President said at his
inauguration. “But as our eyes catch the dimness of
the first rays of dawn, let us not curse the remaining
dark. Let us gather the light.”)
Darkness persisted, however. The war raged on,
protests intensified, and Nixon would become an
increasingly paranoid, divisive leader—with an assist
from his incendiary wingman, Vice President Spiro T.
Agnew. The Sisyphean nature of the Vietnam conflict
was encapsulated in a battle in South Vietnam to shut
down a strategically insignificant enemy camp atop
a mountain designated “Hill 937.” Met with rocket
grenades, mines, and automatic weapon fire, the
Americans pulled back. For 10 days, they charged up
the hill and retreated, over and over, until finally, on
May 20, the United States took the objective, at a cost
of 84 American troops killed and 480 wounded. But
less than a week later, after Army brass had declared
a “tremendous, gallant victory,” U.S. forces abruptly
gave up control of the ground that Army grunts,
during the carnage, had dubbed Hamburger Hill. For
many Americans, Perlstein suggests, the battle
symbolized the futility of the whole misadventure in
Southeast Asia “and the impossibility of any hope or
redemption. In a sense, 1969 was not so much about
division but dashed hopes and disillusionment,
especially after the terrible year of 1968. But if 1968
gets all the ink, 1969 was arguably more melodramatic.”
T WASN’T JUST THE WAR. If you think our
Internet-goosed news cycles are dizzying, con-
sider all the earthshaking events that trans-
pired just in the late spring and summer of ’69.
A month after Hamburger Hill, on June 28, the
Stonewall riots broke out as the gay community in
New York City’s Greenwich Village rose up and
lashed back at police after a raid on a popular gay
bar. On July 18, Senator Ted Kennedy drove his car
off a bridge into Poucha Pond on Chappaquiddick
Island, Massachusetts, resulting in the death of his
28-year-old passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne. Kennedy
admitted leaving the scene. “All our national myths
were unraveling, including the myth of Camelot,”
Perlstein says. “Here Kennedy got drunk, drove this
girl into the water, and didn’t rescue her. It’s the
absolute reversal of JFK heroically saving all his fel-
low sailors in the Pacific in the PT boat.” On the
night of August 8, the idealism of the counterculture
took a traumatic hit when members of failed musi-
cian Charles Manson’s cultish, drug-addled
“Family” invaded the Los Angeles home of director
BY 1969, THE WAR IN VIETNAM
had become a political and
military quagmire, fully
symbolized by the ultimately
futile battle of Hamburger
Hill. Here, wounded soldiers
were evacuated. Young
Americans rose in protest;
many of them would be drawn
together by Woodstock.