Who was the guy who lost the presidential election, perhaps primary, because he answered, “What are you going to do election night?” by replying, “Go home, take a couple of belts and go to sleep”?
I liked the guy until I found out that as a senator, he wanted to make Christianity the official religon of the USA.
Perhaps his name was Anderson?
I just have a feeling that with the Democrats winning the 1960, 1964, and 1968 elections, the country would be looking for a change by 1972. And besides, even without Vietnam as a major cause, there were still plenty of other issues that would have been causing protests in that era. Nixon would have found plenty of fertile ground to appeal to “Middle America” on.
Back to my sheet of paper. In 1968 the Democratic Convention ended in shambles and Nixon went on to win …50.6% of the 2 party vote. But he actually did better than expected given the economy… by 9/10 of a percentage point. Enough to make a difference in that campaign, but not really the most important factor. The two most important factors are incumbency and economic growth during the election year. You can actually manage the economy rather horribly, but if things look good once year out of every four, the incumbent is golden.
Then again, Nixon beat the model by 3.3 percentage points in 1972, which is pretty good. So maybe middle American appeals helped. But recall that Democrats received 38.2% of the 2 party vote that year: other effects (election year economy plus incumbency) were more important.
That said, Nixon consciously stimulated the economy in 1972 and it’s not clear whether another President would have generated such a strong electoral environment. Jimmy Carter famously ran the political business cycle in reverse.
There would have civil rights protestors if there hadn’t been Vietnam protestors. The war made it easier for people to forget about what was happening (or rather not happening) here in the US. Had Vietnam never advanced beyond a minor conflict in SE Asia and had the Second Korean Conflict in the late 1960s not occurred, the US would have been faced with serious political unrest on its domestic front.
Nixon may not have been the GOP’s candidate for the election in 1968 (assuming that Johnson’s heart had held out) as he wasn’t that popular among many groups. Had he not been as gaffe prone as his son has shown himself to be George Romney (then Governor of Michigan) could have easily defeated Johnson.
Romney could have done two terms (with perhaps Harold Stassen or Charles Percy as his VP) and then the field in 1976 would have open for RFK ( assuming that he had not been assassinated) to have run.
You’re wrong about Malaysia. They had already been fighting their own Communist insurgency and they defeated it, with the UK’s help but not the United States’s. Tunku Abdul Rahman was a popular, respected leader, the antonym of the sordid Diem clique. The Americans asked the British General Templer, who defeated the Malaysian Communist insurgents, for advice on jungle counterinsurgency. Templer told them the situation in Vietnam was completely different from Malaysia, and what they hoped to do in Vietnam would never work. They ignored him and got themselves neck-deep in shit. (And the big fools said to press on.)
It would have been so much better for Vietnam to have enjoyed an open and fair election. If Ho Chi Minh had won the election fair and square when it was supposed to happen, he would have become a respected leader too, and there probably would have been no insurgency. There would have been no Diem and no Madame Nhu and certainly less corruption. By freezing out Ho and instead attempting to prop up Diem, they royally screwed the pooch, hell, they screwed the whole damn kennel.
The key factor was that Communism in Malaysia was seen as an outside force being imposed upon the country (as it was in Eastern Europe) rather than an internal movement (as it was in Russia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam).
Well, sort of. The counterinsurgency was able to isolate it from the population because of deep ethnic divisions. The Malay people controlled the country politically, while the insurgency was ethnically Chinese. It was not actually imposed from outside; the ethnic Chinese Communists in Malaya had organized the resistance to the Japanese occupation during the war. But it could be framed as “outside” because the Chinese minority of Malaya were “outsiders” of the Malay centers of power.
Regardless, things shook out the way they did for the reason you describe, Little Nemo. The perception of outsiderness was sufficient. The Viet Cong was an indigenous movement of the Vietnamese people themselves and could not be isolated in that way, which made a very big difference.
P.S. I reckon Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and company probably did channel funds or arms to the Malayan Chinese Communists. I’d be surprised if they hadn’t. But that was only after Malaya’s Chi Com underground had already started the struggle on their own, years previously.
I emphasize “on their own” for both the Chi Com insurgency and the Malaysian counterinsurgency. It was an internal conflict that got internationalized by foreign world powers trying to get their Cold War fought by proxy in countries of the global South.
Edit: If one faults Chairman Mao’s China for interfering in the Malayan Emergency, the British Empire had already been involved there on the other side of the Cold War. No tu quoque. I’m just sayin.
Sleazy sure, but Nam is the taint of his legacy, The Civil rights act was the greatest domestic social policy since the New Deal. He would have been revered at least as much as FDR on the domestic front.
Even if they weren’t, an insurgency led by an ethnic minority is not going to have an easy time blending in with the population.
As for the Viet cong, yeah they were indiginous, but they too were defeated. It was the NVA that beat South Vietnam, not the Viet Cong. Although really it’s impossible to separate the two: the VC may have been made up of southerners, but it was led and directed from North Vietnam. The Viet Cong’s commander was a North Vietnamese Lt. General and a member of North Vietnam’s Central Committee:
So really, both arguments are right: the VC was indigenous, and not, at least if by indigenous you mean South vietnamese.