Shawyer dissertation May 2008 final version - The University of ...

Republican candidate Richard Nixon; their focus was on the Democratic contest. Thiswas because they held the Democratic Party responsible for the intensification of theUnited States’ military involvement in Vietnam into an expensive and devastating war.After all, the Democratic Party had held majority power in Washington for over a decade:there had been Democratic majorities in both the House of Representatives and Senatesince 1955, and a Democratic President ever since John F. Kennedy’s inauguration inJanuary, 1960. When Vice-President Hubert Humphrey entered the race in May, stealingYippie thunder by proclaiming a new “politics of joy” to inspire the war-weary nation,Abbie Hoffman gloomily felt that any national Yippie political action “seemedmeaningless” (Revolution 104).As the Yippies despaired that spring, the horrified nation watched violenceintensify in Vietnam and at home. On 31 January, communist NLF forces began the Tetoffensive on Saigon and other South Vietnam territory controlled by the United Statesmilitary. 60 This bloody weeks-long assault resulted in the deaths of thousands of civiliansbranded as collaborators by both sides. Network television coverage of the violence“jumped almost fivefold,” while reports on American casualties rose “almost threefold”(Gitlin, Sixties 300). With more than 500,000 troops in Vietnam and almost 23,000deaths by April, 1968, the nation began to fear that, contrary to what they had been toldby the Johnson administration, the war was not winnable (McWilliams 49). Also thatspring, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on 4 April set off violent riotingin more than 120 cities across the nation. At the end of the month, militant student60 The Tet offensive is named after the Vietnamese New Year holiday on which it began.153