VIETNAM AND WATERGATE ★^1039VIETNAM AND
WATERGATE
Nixon and Vietnam
Despite Nixon’s foreign policy triumphs,
one issue would not go away— Vietnam.
Nixon ran for president in 1968 declar-
ing that he had a “secret plan” to end the
war. On taking office, he announced a
new policy, Vietnamization. Under this
plan, American troops would gradually
be withdrawn while South Vietnamese
soldiers, backed by continued Ameri-
can bombing, did more and more of the
fighting. But Vietnamization neither
limited the war nor ended the antiwar
movement. Hoping to cut North Viet-
namese supply lines, Nixon in 1970
ordered American troops into neutral
Cambodia. The invasion did not achieve
its military goals, but it destabilized
the Cambodian government and set in
motion a chain of events that eventually brought to power the Khmer Rouge.
Before being ousted by a Vietnamese invasion in 1979, this local communist
movement attempted to force virtually all Cambodians into rural communes
and committed widespread massacres in that unfortunate country.
As the war escalated, protests again spread on college campuses, partly
because the policy of exempting students from the draft had ended. In the wake
of the killing of four antiwar protesters at Kent State University by the Ohio
National Guard and two by police at Jackson State University in Mississippi, the
student movement reached its high- water mark. In the spring of 1970, more than
350 colleges and universities experienced strikes, and troops occupied 21 cam-
puses. The protests at Kent State, a public university with a largely working- class
student body, and Jackson State, a black institution, demonstrated how antiwar
sentiment had spread far beyond elite campuses like Berkeley and Columbia.
At the same time, troop morale in Vietnam plummeted. For most of the war,
college students had received exemptions. As a result, the army was predomi-
nantly composed of working- class whites and members of racial minorities. Of
the 2.5 million Americans who served in the military during the war, around
80 percent came from poor and working- class families. African- Americans
accounted for one- eighth of American casualties in Vietnam.
Tear gas envelops the campus as members
of the Ohio National Guard prepare to fire on
student demonstrators at Kent State University.
Shortly after this photo was taken, four students
lay dead.How did Vietnam and the Watergate scandal affect popular trust in the government?