Vietnam, protest and the 1970s

As the war in Vietnam grew, so did opposition. Students held teach-ins, young men burned draft cards, and large marches filled Washington. The Tet Offensive of January 1968, a surprise attack by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces on cities across South Vietnam, failed militarily but convinced many Americans that the war could not be won soon. In March 1968 Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection. That year Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and protests outside the Democratic convention in Chicago ended in clashes with police.

Richard Nixon won the presidency in 1968 promising law and order and an honorable end to the war. His policy of Vietnamization shifted the fighting to South Vietnam's army while U.S. troops came home, but he also widened the war into Cambodia in 1970, setting off protests in which National Guard troops killed four students at Kent State University. A 1973 peace agreement brought the last U.S. combat troops home, and South Vietnam fell to the North in 1975. Congress passed the War Powers Resolution (1973) over Nixon's veto to limit a president's power to keep troops in combat without its approval, and the Twenty-sixth Amendment (1971) lowered the voting age to 18.

Abroad, Nixon pursued détente, a relaxing of tensions: he visited China in 1972 and signed the SALT I arms agreement with the Soviet Union the same year. At home his administration created the Environmental Protection Agency (1970), and he signed the Clean Air Act (1970). The Watergate scandal began with a 1972 break-in at Democratic Party headquarters by men tied to Nixon's reelection campaign. When White House tapes showed that he had helped cover it up, Nixon resigned in August 1974, the only president to do so.

The economy struggled. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 sent fuel prices soaring, and stagflation, high inflation together with slow growth and high unemployment, defied the usual remedies. Manufacturing jobs began moving from the industrial Northeast and Midwest to the Sunbelt and overseas. President Jimmy Carter brokered the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel (1978), but inflation, a second oil shock, and the seizure of American hostages in Iran in 1979 weighed on his presidency.

The 1960s and 1970s also produced a backlash. Many Americans, especially in fast-growing Sunbelt suburbs, opposed rising taxes, court-ordered busing to integrate schools, and court rulings on crime and school prayer. Phyllis Schlafly led a successful campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment, which Congress passed in 1972 but too few states ratified. In Roe v. Wade (1973) the Supreme Court recognized a constitutional right to abortion; the ruling became a lasting point of national debate, and the Court overruled it in 2022. These debates fed a new conservative movement that would shape the next period.

When you explain a loss of trust or a political shift, name a specific event and then say what it revealed or changed. A strong answer shows the link in one step: what people learned or saw, and why that made them doubt their leaders or change their views.