the deaths of more than 1m Vietnamese—it was left questioning its power, its purpose and its liberal values. Make love, not warAs the war in Vietnam grew, so did opposition to it. Dismissed early on as a fringe cause of leftist university students, anti-war protests eventually attracted the support of millions of Americans. Students, clergy (including civil-rights leaders) and disillusioned veterans spoke out. A secretive government, prone to spin (and lies), eroded public trust. Outside the Democratic convention in 1968, police clashed with protesters in scenes broadcast nationwide. In 1970 the National Guard killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio, shocking the country. Anti-war feeling became the heart of a broader counterculture that rejected hierarchy, authority and materialism while embracing personal liberation— sexual, spiritual and psychological. But many older Americans were repulsed by people they saw as lawless, drug-addled, naive and unpatriotic. Twice American voters elected a man who promised to restore law and order, and who would become the counterculture’s most despised figure of authority, Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon. 1972-74A crisis of trustIn June 1972 two nosey journalists—Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post—began looking into a break-in at the Watergate complex, home to the Democratic National Committee. Gradually, inexorably, the trail of evidence they uncovered led to the White House. Their reporting sparked congressional hearings which revealed that Nixon kept a secret “enemies list”, sabotaged rivals and secretly recorded his conversations in the Oval Office. Nobody proved Nixon ordered the crime, but Americans came to see he was behind the cover-up. Dirty tricks are as old as the republic. But Nixon’s prevarications caught up with him. Americans were glued to nightly broadcasts of the Watergate hearings. Nixon’s ratings sank and in August 1974, facing certain impeachment, he became the first president to resign. The saga made journalists into heroes—Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman portrayed Mr Woodward and Mr Bernstein on screen. And it badly damaged Americans’ trust in government. It has risen to pre-Watergate levels only once since, after 9/11. (We will let you know in a future chapter how that goes.)
1973That time the Supreme Court legalised abortionIf Brown v Board marked the beginning of a historic, progressive era for the Supreme Court, Roe v Wade was the blockbuster bookend. The 1973 ruling struck down abortion bans across the country by establishing that women had a right to autonomy over their own bodies without government intrusion, unless the government could establish a compelling public interest to the contrary. The court ruled that the government had no such interest in the first trimester of pregnancies, and that even late in pregnancies, restrictions on abortion could not take priority over the health of the mother. The ruling was a triumph for feminist politics, entrenching (so it seemed) for women a constitutional right to privacy, which had been established by the court in 1965 to protect the use of the contraceptive pill. But Roe provoked an angry backlash, fuelling the rise of a Christian conservative movement that was determined to elect anti-abortion candidates, change the political character of the court and overturn the decision. A religious revival: the new rightThe abortion issue was just one catalyst for a political and cultural reaction to the emergence in the 1960s of a progressive and (some would say overly) interventionist state. Conservatives chafed at affirmative action, the women’s-rights movement and the regulatory state. Nixon’s talk of a “silent majority” struck a chord with those who felt disregarded or looked down upon by elites. The mood spread among suburban white voters. They were joined by religious conservatives mobilised by battles over federal authority—not least moves against racially segregated Christian schools, seen as intrusions into church affairs. Evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and organisations like the Moral Majority brought new energy and structure to the movement. Phyllis Schlafly campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment, rebranding feminism as a threat to women—who, she said, would be herded into unisex bathrooms and made eligible for the military draft. The religious right was an upstart at first, consigned to the fringes of mainstream politics. But it quickly became ascendant. 1973-79A real shockIn the 1950s and 1960s a consensus formed around the Keynesian idea that governments could manage the economy by increasing government spending when private demand slacked off and increasing taxes
when inflation threatened to take hold. Then came the oil shocks of the 1970s. America had become dependent on imported energy. When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in 1973, Arab oil producers imposed an embargo on countries supporting the Jewish state, while cutting production to drive up prices. The effects rippled through America’s economy. Price controls on domestic oil and petrol worsened shortages. Queues formed at filling stations. As energy costs surged, firms raised prices. Higher costs reduced output and dampened investment. The result was “stagflation”—simultaneous stagnation and inflation. A second shock came with the Iranian revolution in 1979, disrupting global supply. This was a crisis that politicians could not wish away with Keynesian principles, but they tried: raising taxes worsened stagnation; boosting spending worsened inflation. President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, came to represent America’s feeling of malaise and fecklessness. A new president, a charismatic standard-bearer of the new right, was about to enter the picture, championing a different model.■ This article was downloaded by zlibrary from https://www.economist.com//essay/2026/05/13/the-cold-war-vietnam-and-a-fractured- america
The architects of the Vietnam War knew it was doomed Kennedy, Johnson and McNamara were private realists but chose the path of least resistance, writes Fredrik Logevall May 14th 2026 IN HIS SPRAWLING, captivating 1972 masterpiece, “The Best and the Brightest”, the journalist David Halberstam asked the central question about America’s war in Vietnam: “What was it about the men, their attitudes, the country, its institutions and above all the era which had allowed this tragedy to take place?” They were “the best and the brightest”, after all. Why did it happen? Halberstam’s answer, repeated by countless authors since, contained two parts: hubris and ignorance. American planners, presiding over the greatest military and economic power in the history of the world, believed that with
the resources at their disposal, as well as their intellectual prowess and deep experience, they could wage and win the conflict. They were “swept forward” by faith in their own and their country’s invincibility. But they lacked a sense of history, as well as an understanding of their adversary and the obstacles that stood in the way of victory. Robert McNamara, who as secretary of defence was one of the architects of the war, later offered substantial endorsement of Halberstam’s thesis. Writing in his 1995 memoir, “In Retrospect”, he lamented that he and other leaders were ignorant of Vietnamese history and of Ho Chi Minh’s nationalist motivations. They saw a monolithic communist threat where none existed, and in their arrogance failed to fully examine the stakes of the struggle and whether success was truly achievable at a reasonable cost. “If only we had known” became a kind of mantra for the latter-day McNamara. It’s a tantalising notion, but one that is not supported by the evidence now accessible to historians. Even Halberstam’s and McNamara’s own accounts reveal a more complex picture than their overarching claims suggest: a picture pointing not to an overweening confidence on officials’ part, but to a bleak realism. America’s decision-makers were hardly experts on Vietnam and its history, but among themselves and behind closed doors they acknowledged that they were entering a deeply challenging environment, in which triumph was far from assured. The extensive internal record is clear on this score. It shows the private misgivings of senior Washington officials throughout the years of heavy escalation. The sceptics included McNamara himself, and the two presidents he served: John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. From the time then- Congressman Kennedy visited Vietnam in 1951, during the height of the French-Indochina War, until his death in Dallas in 1963, he expressed doubts that Ho Chi Minh’s revolutionary nationalist cause could be subdued by military means. Johnson—who ordered the “Americanisation” of the conflict in 1965, involving the commitment of major ground forces and sustained air power in order to preserve a non-communist South Vietnam— regularly wondered if the struggle could be won, and indeed whether the outcome really mattered.
“I don’t think it’s worth fighting for and I don’t think we can get out,” Johnson confided to McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, in a phone call in May 1964. “What in the hell is Vietnam worth to me?” In February 1965, at the start of Operation Rolling Thunder, which in due course would drop more bombs on North Vietnam than were dropped on Europe in the second world war, Johnson was downbeat: “Now we’re off to bombing these people,” he told McNamara. “I don’t think anything is going to be as bad as losing, and I don’t see any way of winning.” A few days later, as the first American ground forces were set to disembark, a morose Johnson told Senator Richard Russell of Georgia: “[A] man can fight if he can see daylight down the road somewhere. But there ain’t no daylight in Vietnam. There’s not a bit.” To be sure, master politician that he was, Johnson could say different things to different people; he did not always use such despairing tones. But overall, it can fairly be said that Johnson’s position on Vietnam, from day one to the end, was one of doubt. And McNamara? In June 1965, as the American military effort in South Vietnam ramped up, the defence secretary acknowledged to a senior British official that “none of us at the centre of things talk about winning a victory.” This brings us back to Halberstam’s question: why did these men “allow the tragedy to take place”? Why did Kennedy, though he drew the line on ground troops, expand American military involvement in Vietnam substantially during his thousand days in the White House? Why did Johnson, when he could temporise no longer, take the plunge into a large- scale war? A key part of the answer is that for both men, maintaining the course, through escalation if necessary, offered the path of least immediate resistance. They and their advisers had offered repeated public affirmations of South Vietnam’s importance to American security, and of the certainty of ultimate success. It made sense that they would be tempted to hang on, in the hope that the new military measures would work. It was about credibility— their nation’s, their party’s, their own. Though this posture speaks poorly for their political courage, it has a certain logic behind it. Then again, so did the sceptics’ reply: the credibility would face greater damage if, as seemed