The Legacy of 1967: A Leading Historian Assesses the Year That Split America in Two

The Vietnam War, and the rising opposition to it, dominated the nation's politics in 1967. The U.S. military presence inside the tiny country had skyrocketed from 12,000 "advisers" five years earlier to nearly 500,000 troops, and Operation Rolling Thunder continued to rain millions of tons of bombs on North Vietnam. The U.S. death toll in 1967, computed at 11,153, was nearly double the figure for the previous year - and far surpassed the total number of U.S. personnel killed in Vietnam in the previous eleven years.

In 1967, the protests that had been building against the war became a genuine mass movement. On April 4th, at Riverside Church in New York, Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed that "the madness of Vietnam" disclosed "a far deeper malady in the American spirit." Over the weekend of October 21st, in the first truly national anti-war demonstration, 50,000 protesters marched across the Potomac to confront the war-makers at the Pentagon. And in late November, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara resigned in a dispute with President Johnson over escalating troop levels and the bombing of North Vietnam.

Although the war would drag on for another eight years, the anti-war movement that mobilized in 1967 left a lasting mark on the nation. Not since the Mexican War more than a century earlier had so many Americans repudiated a U.S. military effort. The alienation contributed enormously to the broader rift between patriotic traditionalists and the emerging counterculture. The Johnson administration's deployment of what one historian has called "a policy of minimum candor" about the war also bred widespread cynicism about politics and politicians. The cynicism deepened when Nixon's attempts to silence his critics over the war led to the Watergate scandal and his resignation in 1974.

That lost trust has never completely been regained, especially among the baby boom generation that came of age in the 1960s. Many of those who could still stomach politics would always be on the lookout for candidates who presented themselves as uncompromised outsiders. Even the two Bush presidents, recognizing the shift in the electorate, campaigned as down-home, straight-shooting Texans. The latter, George W., went to the trouble of buying a stage set of a ranch in Crawford, where he could wear bluejeans, clear a little brush and look, on television at least, like a real cowboy.

Vietnam also caused a lasting breach on the left over foreign affairs. For a radical minority, the war proved once and for all the essential malevolence of U.S. military involvement abroad. Ever since, the hard left has regarded virtually every U.S. intervention, from Bosnia to Iraq, as imperialist misadventures. But mainstream liberals - Bill Clinton and Al Gore being the best examples - have perceived a clear role for American military might in a dangerous world, preferably in alliance with other like-minded powers. The divide has been one reason why the Democratic Party has spent much of the past forty years wandering in the political wilderness. The Vietnam experience also sharpened the willingness of Americans to turn against military operations when the government's credibility slips--as it has over the continuing war in Iraq.