Who remembers the sixties?

I was just a little too young back then, and besides I was a Brat and got all my news from the Stars & Stripes, so I don't know the answer to this.

Besides the marches, the protests and riots I was aware of, was there an electoral revolt going on in the last years of the VietNam War? Were the congressmen and senators who backed the Tonkin Resolution getting booted out by the voters by 1970? Or did those who were in office finally come around and follow the will of the voters? Was it a combination of both?

I was aware of presidential election at the time, but being overseas and stateless, congressional politics completely escaped me.

Can anybody offer insights, and maybe, by extrapolation, clues on what to do with the war-Dems of today?

It seems to me that the lies behind the Tonkin Resolution was not on the radar screen of most Americans... but I was a military brat and my dad was serving in Viet Nam at the time of the Tonkin Resolution. (marines).

I didn't even learn of the details until Pentagon papers i think, which was after Nixon's second election.

Ditto.

I was a college student against the war, and for civil rights. For me, the sixities was the Beatles, MLK, JFK, RFK, Malcolm X, The Black Panthers, The '68 Democratic Convention in Chicago, The Kent State killings, Sit-Ins, Wounded Knee, Civil Rights Marches and Voter Registration Drives in the South, and Woodstock. I can't look at a picture from that time without remembering the smell of tear-gas.

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution broke faith with the American people. I can't even imagine what it would have been like to have had a parent in Vietnam. What a horrible thing to have had to live for, for you and for your father.

TC

There was, in '74, quite a change in Congress over Watergate, however, with a number of Republican incumbents being replaced.

Muscle cars from Ford and Chevy. 25 cent per gallon gas. $6.00 501 levi's. Friday night at Pizza Hut. Drive-in Movies. Me and my girlfriend discovering oral sex long before I ever heard of Bill Clinton. Summer's at Devil's Den State Park. Thanks for the memories.

To your point, there was an intense wedge in High School and College campuses between pro and anti war activists. SDS and YAF on campus. It was hard not to have an opinion on the issue. I had a pro war republican congressman who maintained a very low profile on the issue. One of my Senators at the time was J. William Fulbright, one of my first political heroes. He was much loved in Arkansas even though his war views differed from those of most of the state's residents (neanderthal chickenhawks.)

What to do with wardems? Inform them intently of your point of view.

mainly because they couldn't understand why a bunch of little people in black pajamas and with no real industry were so persistently waging a war of attrition against the US. The "body counts" of Vienamese dead would seem to have killed the country twice over, yet every day there were more names of local dead kids in the newspaper. The population was divided into two camps, the "get out" camp and the "nuke em" camps. Both agreed that both Johnson and Nixon had bungled that war.

I remember people my parents' age being disgusted that the Watergate breakin was being used as the pretext to get Nixon out because there were so many real things he did in office that should have been pursued by another do nothing Congress.

The do nothing Congress was getting a little worried about that, and that's why both parties started making impeachment noises to Nixon to save their own precious backsides.

There wasn't much of an electoral revolt. Carter was elected over Ford mostly because Ford had failed to deal with the OPEC oil shocks and resulting inflation (which was only just beginning) and partially because he'd pardoned Nixon and let the whole crooked bunch off the hook.

I remember war protestors, because my parents were of a split opinion on the matter. My mom hated Nixon, thought the war was wrong and just wished the protestors were cleaner and not smoking pot. My dad didn't care about the cleanliness or the pot (as we caught him doing it a couple of times), but as a vet, didn't like the "baby killer" shouts at soldiers. He always took the effort to explain to us that the soldiers are sent to do a job, that they serve their country and it's not their fault if the government misuses them.

My dad liked Nixon until Watergate, which caused him great disappointment. He is a classic swing voter-voted for Reagan, Bush I, and Dole, but also voted for Gore and Kerry because he hates W. He likes Jeb, thinks he's a good governor.

My mom was always a liberal dem, except in 76 when she voted for Ford (we did live in his hometown, and he was a good repub). She thought Reagan was going to get us in a war over the Panama Canal (she was off a few years on that one). But it's funny-Mom now has a conservative boyfriend and is spouting his crap all day. She'll probably start voting that way soon. I'm always amazed when somebody sells out their deepest convictions for sex, especially when it's my mother.

woman and over 18 years old, they may not be having sex.

of Tonkin Resolution, and both lost their subsequent bids for re-election. I remember hearing about the incident at the time, but I don't believe that there was any serious questions about the circumstances until years later. Of course, it was a different time and a different place, and people thought that the news media reported what actually happened, and that the administration would not blatantly lie to support its own agenda.

eom

..remember correctly, that is a Robin Williams quote (Rolling Stone).

And it's a good one! :hippie: :hippie: :hippie: :hippie: :hippie: :hippie:

However I did apparently live through them.... actually, I do remember '60 thru about mid '64. The rest is a purple haze.

there was no major electoral revolt.

Nixon elected on a promise to end the war. The political system was still working, in that respect. There is no way LBJ could have won a second term with most people by that time (1968) against the war. Nixon broke that promise, of course, and started bombing Cambodia as well. The war finally came to an end BECAUSE THE VIETNAMESE WON IT. It was a genuine war for self-determination--after centuries of colonial rule. (The Vietnamese were not about to concede to US-rule after they had just ousted the French--and had been fighting off China for 5,000 years.) They won it in straw hats and sandals, and hiding in and fighting from tunnels, all over Vietnam, and with minimal weaponry. They won it without an air force. They won it because it was their country, and they loved it, and they were determined never, ever to give it over to a foreign power again.

Upwards of 2 million people had been slaughtered in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, including over 55,000 US troops.

God, it was horrible!

There are two very big differences between the 1960s and now:

1. Primary in my opinion--we didn't have electronic voting machines, controlled by rightwing corporations, using "trade secret" proprietary programming code, with virtually no audit/recount controls--a fraudulent election SYSTEM that was put into place in the 2001-2004 period, by the biggest crooks in Congress, Tom Delay and Bob Ney (with the $4 billion "Help America Vote Act" boondoggle). Our election system has become non-transparent, and our elections are now more thoroughly rigged than ever before--with a 5% to 10% "thumb on the scales" favoring Bushites and warmongers (my estimate).

and...

2. We had more honest news reporting in the 1960s. The carnage of Vietnam was on the TV news every night, and news organizations competed with each other to bring us REAL news. Today, we have five CEO's controlling all news and opinion, and all imagery, in the country. These war profiteering corporate news monopolies and Bush lapdog journalists have become a mere arm of the government--a government propaganda machine. Although they have NOT convinced the American people of ANYTHING--their own opinion polls demonstrate this overwhelmingly--they HAVE managed to demoralize and disempower the great progressive, antiwar majority, by promoting the ILLUSION that the country had gone rightwing. It is simply not true, but people believe it, and give up fighting it--or looking for practical mechanisms of people power, like transparent elections. Perhaps the worst journalistic crime of these corporate news monopolies occurred on election night 2004, when they FALSIFIED their own exit polls (Kerry won) to "FIT" the results of Diebold's and ES&S's "trade secret" vote tabulation software (Bush won), thus depriving the American people of major evidence of election fraud. That could not have happened in the 1960s. SOMEBODY would have blown it open. We are living under an "Iron Curtain" of highly controlled news--and not enough people have yet TURNED OFF these fascist news monopoly sources and sought out alternative news (where they might learn about the voting machines, for instance).

The Democratic Party was still a viable and representative political party in the 1960s. Many of its leaders are now bought and paid for, and hogtied to the military-industrial complex and to global corporate predation.

However--interestingly--ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIVE mostly Democratic members of Congress voted AGAINST Bush's war in 2002, as opposed to ONE VOTE against LBJ's war on Vietnam, back then (1964--prior to the big antiwar movement).

The Democratic Party had, until recently, LEARNED THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM. And that is one of the reasons that the fascists took control of the election system in 2001. Democracy was working--at least on matters of unjust war and misuse of the military.

The 1960s was a era of great hope--and also of great horror. We lost three great progressive leaders to assassination in the space of five years, and I am convinced now that they were all killed over matters of war. JFK (assassinated in 1963) had refused to invade Cuba, had de-fused a nuclear war with Russia over Cuba, and, just before he died, signed an executive order withdrawing US military "advisers" from Vietnam. MLK (assassinated in 1968) had recently come out against the Vietnam War, against the advice of many compromising type liberals. RFK (assassinated a few months later) was heading an antiwar campaign for president, and had just won the California primary.

Bang, bang, shoot, shoot.

All three died for world peace--I firmly believe that now--with assassins hired or programmed by the war profiteers. The result was to deny the American people proper representation and leadership. The same fascist forces are doing the same thing now--with an election system now veiled in secrecy.

Having lived through all of this in the 1960s--I was an antiwar protester, and a civil rights worker in Alabama (1965)--my advice is this: GET RID OF THE ELECTION THEFT MACHINES NOW!

The American people are a good and just people on the whole, who want peace and fairness in the world. They tried to vote these criminals out in 2004, but were foiled by the new Bushite-controlled voting machines (combined with the vote suppression in Ohio and other places--that's how big Kerry's win was; he won by a 5% or so margin, even without being strongly antiwar--it was an anti-Bush vote; the electronic rigging wasn't enough to reverse Kerry's win, they had to actively and blatantly stop black and poor voters from voting). Again, the corporate news monopolies FAILED to inform people about this newly rigged electronic voting scam, and were complicit in it.

We can't do anything about the war...
We can't do anything to stop torture and spying and blatant law-breaking...
We can't do anything about the war profiteering corporate news monopoly of our public airwaves...
We can't do anything to curtail corporate predators...
We can't do anything to stop massive looting by the rich...

...without the right to vote. Our right to vote is our mechanism for excercising our sovereignty as a people. In effect, they have stolen our sovereignty. WE are the rulers in this land--in theory. WE are the sovereigns. Not the rich. Not the powerful. We, the people. But without transparent elections, we have no way to rule ourselves, no way to "throw the bums out" when we need to, no way to hold our leaders to account.

----------

Some resources:

www.votersunite.org (MythBreakers - easy primer on electronic voting--one of the myths is that HAVA requires electronic voting; it does not.)
www.verfiedvoting.org (great activist site)
www.UScountvotes.org (monitoring of '06 and '08 elections)
www.solarbus.org/election/index.shtml (fab compendium of all election info)
www.freepress.org (devoted to election reform)
www.bradblog.com (also great, and devoted to election reform)
www.TruthIsAll.net (analysis of the 2004 election)
Sign the petition (Russ Holt, HR 550, great bill-has 169 sponsors). http://www.rushholt.com/petition.html
www.debrabowen.com (Calif Senator running for Sec of State to reform election system)
www.votepa.us (well-organized local group of citizen activists in Pennsylvania, where important legal issues are at stake, including state's rights over election systems)

Also of interest:

Bob Koehler (-- four recent election reform initiatives in Ohio, predicted to win by 60/40 votes, flipped over, on election day, into 60/40 LOSSES!--the biggest flipover we've seen yet; the election theft machines and their masters are now dictating election policy!)
www.tmsfeatures.com/tmsfeatures/subcategory.jsp?file=20051124ctnbk-a.txt&catid=1824&code=ctnbk

Amaryllis (Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia lavish lobbying of election officials - Beverly Hilton, Aug. '05)
www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x380340

----------

Throw Diebold, ES&S and all election theft machines into 'Boston Harbor' NOW!

:think: :patriot: :woohoo: :patriot: :think:

Election fraud,
Maybe you don't remember Mayor Daley, the ward healers, the political machines etc, etc.
Joe Kennedy bought the 1960 election for JFK. Nixon was advised to challenge but declined. Not just Illinois but much of the south was suspect. (you will recall that old Joe Was grooming Joe Jr., but Jr. was Killed in ww2.) Had JFK not been assassinated he may have been run out of town if the media in those days had not kept quiet about his "problems"
MLK? He was part of the Kennedy's "negro problem". Who was the atty general that wiretapped him? Bobby Kennedy? Who killed Bobby because of His support of Israel? A muslim named Sirhan Sirhan.

The Media?
5 CEO's control the media today. Well in my day, the 60's, we had CBS, NBC, And a small upstart ABC. I count 3. 30 minuets each night. Honest news? Just filler between the commercials. Sure they reported the news they wanted to, if it bleeds, it leads.

How about this,
THE DRAFT!!
We all felt it. It hung over our heads like a hammer! What would you? Get off your ass and protest maybe! Show up and support Cindy at a rally? Cassius Clay refused induction, went to JAIL for cripes sake. Would you? People went to Canada, not just typed it into a computer someplace. You want protest? Bring back the draft!

Do you ever wonder how we managed to get things done with out todays "toys"? Maybe a little more dedicated.

Woodstock? Word of mouth. 1968 dem convention? Word of mouth. 1968 rep convention in Miami? Word of mouth. Levitate the Pentagon? Same thing.

What does an activist do today?
Send an E-Mail? How many of those do you delete a day?
Sign an online petition? O boy that'll show em.
Oh I know. Post to a website. Ya thats the ticket.
Get out of the basement, get off your ass, and make some noise.
EOR (end of rant)

Good post.

Welcome to DU.

I had heard rumors of some kind of 'siege by the people' at the Pentagon...

Levitate the Pentagon (1967)

http://www.jofreeman.com/photos/Pentagon67.html

"On October 21, 1967, 70,000 demonstrators came to Washington, D.C. to "Confront the War Makers." This was the first of the biannual Anti-War demonstrations to fuse protest with the whimsicality of the counter culture and to take civil disobedience to new levels of confrontation. It would become the prototype for the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago -- except that the latter was marred by extensive police violence."





<more>

with some of your statements about JFK and MLK.

Both JFK and MLK were victims of the same network made up of corrupt politicians, secret agents, military and some mafia, same network that was behind Watergate and Iran-Contra.
After JFK's assassination Bobby continued going after the mafia.

It's pretty well documented.


JFK II: The Bush Connection
http://madcowpolitics.com/jfk2bb.wmv

--

Jury rules King assassination a conspiracy
"An Act Of State - The Execution of MLK"
by William Pepper (King family attorney)
(ISBN: 1859846955, Verso January 1, 2003)
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1859846955/104-1291585-3918336?v=glance&n=283155

Video of a talk on the matter by William Pepper. 2 hrs, 700MB:
http://www.chomskytorrents.org/TorrentDetails.php?TorrentID=862

Democracy Now
Jury Rules King Assassination a Conspiracy
December 13th, 1999
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/07/0414233&mode=thread&tid=5

CNN
Ray's death won't end assassination controversy
Interview with William Pepper
April 23, 1998
http://www.cnn.com/US/9804/23/james.earl.ray.reax/

The King Center
Complete Transcript of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Assassination Conspiracy Trial
http://www.thekingcenter.org/news/trial.html

I was there as well, an avid election fan in my tender youth, and I did a long report on it in my 5th grade class. In 1960 the election was close, and for years later republicans disparaged the Chicago voter roles as fraudulent. Illinois was indeed very close, but there was fraud of a greater magnitude in Mississippi and Alabama where a "southern Democrat" ticket (which precipitated Nixon's "Southern Strategy" 8 years later) of Byrd/Thurman "won" 15 electoral votes (Oklahoma was split as well).

The POPULAR vote WAS close-34,227,096 (49.7%)to 34,107,646 (49.5%) ; but the electoral vote was not: even if Nixon HAD won Illinois 27 electoral votes he would have fallen short of Kennedy's total. However Nixon privately encouraged GOP chair Thurston Morton to push for a recount, which Morton did in 11 states, keeping challenges in the courts into the summer of 1961; the only result was the loss of the State of Hawaii to Kennedy on a recount.

As to RFK and MLK; the wiretapping was done by J Edgar Hoover, no friend of RFK's and an independent entity with huge political power in the day. It was Hoover who relentlessly wiretapped everyone in the civil rights movement, convinced as he was that it was a part of a "communist plot" to destableize our country. RFK was powerless in the face of Hoovers agency and could only acceed. Kennedy also inherited a CIA plan, well underway and developed, to invade Cuba. JFK ran as an anti-communist and signed on to this ill-fated expedition; some say this was the cause of his assasination.

And YES, children, "word of mouth " was our network. FM "underground" radio helped a LOT.

As an antiwar organizer , I also must thank the Catholic Church, who provided an amazing infrastructure of mailing lists, mimeographs( no Kinkos then)manpower , transportation, and courier networks to avoid Federal Charges with our notices (didn't use US Mail) Back then, the church was liberal and anti-war.

After seeing people's grandmas in '04 being told by their priests a vote for Kerry was a sin, I think they might have lost that previous liberal stance.

See post above for more.
sources: me, President Elect.org, wikipedia.

It always irritates me to hear that. It isn't proven, and even if it were true it would not have changed the outcome.

How odd was that?

I remember an interview at the time with the families priest

link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirhan_Sirhan

I thought he had been born muslim and raised christin and this may have contributed to his imbalance, but I could be wrong, it has been near 40 years.

"Though he is commonly thought to have been a Muslim, he was raised a Christian. However, in his adult years he frequently changed his religious views, to Baptist, Seventh-day Adventist, and Rosicrucianism.<1>"

link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirhan_Sirhan

It took your generation years and many thousands of deaths before there were major protests against Vietnam. What the hell took you people so long? From my perspective, this generation has done a much better job than the boomers who didn't act until they faced a draft.

1st, the draft preceded Viet Nam by many years. Remember Elvis was drafted in the 50's. So the Boomers didn't suddenly face a draft.
2'nd, you are right about many years and many deaths. But the u.s. kinda slunk into 'Nam. No real fist shaking, U.N. resoluting, march the sec. of state out with all sorts of saber rattling, build up on the border shock and awe. I think we had few hundred advisers there by late 50's early 60's. Tell the truth when LBJ came on TV one night yapping about an attack on our forces in the Gulf of Tonkin I was 15-16 years old and my old man had to call me and my buddies in from the garage to tell us to watch because this could mean our butts. None of us could have found S.E. Asia on a map let alone Viet WHO?? (by the way we were trying to slip a 4 speed tranny into an old Studebaker at the time.)

But just as the boomers coming late to the protest movement didn't put an immediate stop to the war in 'Nam, I'm afraid that your early and sincere protests didn't stop the buildup to and invasion of Iraq.

More's the pity, but that seems to be how the world is controlled.

I remember how horrible the war was, and how intense the demonstrations were.

I remember that my mother forbid any talk of Vietnam at the dinner table.

I'm impressed that the current war is as unpopular with the general public as it appears to be when there isn't even a draft. I think the reason the Vietnam war became so unpopular eventually was that the first of the baby boomers became eligable for the draft in 1964, and as more and more people saw their children drafted (18 year olds couldn't vote then, they could however go to war), the war became more and more unpopular with voters.

I wasn't old enough to vote until '69 when Nixon had already been reelected. That would never have happened if 18 year olds had been able to vote in '68. The youth just hated Nixon.

I realize this doesn't answer your question; I'm just reminiscing. John Conyers was my representative in my first election in '70. He was the only rep. I really knew anything about, and he was great then and great now.

and Nixon was re-elected to the shock and horror of the anti-war movement, who assumed that the draft age "youth" would turn out the vote..

it apparently wasn't enough.. or maybe there was massive election fraud then too and none of us realized it.. we just accepted that the Nixon won in a "landslide".

A lot of the youth were already in Vietnam, or maybe in Canada. The people I know at U of Michigan, and later at Wayne State were politically astute, but I'm not sure too many were convinced that the government could work at all, or that voting was worth the bother. I also suspect that my friends were not necessarily typical. I guess I've always been out of touch with the average American.

and a war like today. The difference was people took to the streets and forced the government to get out of Vietnam. I lived in Arlington Virginia at the time about 1/2 million people stormed the Pentagon, DC was a city under siege, there were tanks by the hundreds on the streets. Now people just sit back and bitch, I think if we still had the draft things would be different. Myself at the time I was drafted and would have gone to Vietnam if I had to. I was young and believed all the BS about the Domino Theory.

And I also remember that the last years of the Viet Nam war were in the 70s.

(he posted, waiting for the next blast of spiteful reactionary invective from Benchley the True Arbiter of Party Loyalty...)

I remember Woodstock; I was 12 years old

People were fed up with our government to the max and acted out their part in the play.

Ah yes, where does one start? I suggest that if your truly interested, go out and buy Howard Zinn's books. "Passionate Declarations" is a good one to start with.

But I remember admiring the hippies & wanting to protest like they did. History, however, always passes me by. I have never had my big moment. Yes, there are protests now, but it's nothing like it was back then. I guess my biggest regret is that I have never had what the '60s generation had. I tried to make up for it by protesting things like the cancellation of TV-series, pathetically enough. I tried to get the ABC version of Max Headroom back after it was cancelled in the late-'80s. Strangely enough, that series was my big political awakening. It was probably the most left-wing thing ever on American TV, very anti-corporate. In my frustration over my failure to get it back on TV, I started noticing people like Michael Moore. I started reading a lot. Maybe it was a good thing that MH didn't make it because if it had been a success, it would have appeared on Limbaugh's radar & the conservatives would have targeted it. I can hear it now: "Max Headroom is a 'commie' show, & we must destroy it!" But in the end, MH was so correct about things. I wish they would put it out on DVD. People should see it.

so I do have lots of memories - mainly of the Beatles, and jr high school and high school and the start of college. It was an amazing time of great highs and deep lows - a time of extremes.

But, as to the war. Almost all Senators and Congress people voted for the Tonkin resolution, including many that became important key people in the antiwar movement. Senators McCarthy and both Kennedys voted for it. I think that the legislators were moved by their own views of the situation as much as by the voters.

It was very different than with Iraq - where almost all political dissent is from Democrats. In the 60s their were members of each party for and against the war - it wasn't split on party lines initially. One of the earliest opponents was Senator Wayne Morse, a Republican, who was one of the 2 votes against Tonkin. The President's party became more anti-war than the Republicans, but the Dixiecrats remained pro-war.

This led to there being far more support to ending the war in Congress than there was now, in fact peace in Vietnam was in both party platforms in 1968. After McCarthy's strong 2nd place showing in NH, LBJ took himself out of the race saying he wanted to concentrate on ending the war. There were lots of hearings. The media had also shifted to anti-war. We saw the war for the disaster it was on tv. Can you imagine all the key news shows today, allocating 5 minutes or so of the main news show to cover in detail an indictment of the war given by a young soldier to Congress?

I'm not sure who you include as "war-Dems", but I think each will be considered by his/her constituents. They may have a history with the person that lets them look at his (her) postions and current views - and they will vote for or against them based on a full picture. Using the 60s, it would have been ridiculous for people to have voted out all the Tonkin Resolution people (even if there were fewer) because some like the Kennedys and McCarthy were leading anti war voices - as Morse continued to be.

REALLY happened. :)

....but we learned a lot of lessons. Well, some of did. Obviously not anyone in the Bush Administration. We realized that you can't always trust everything the government is saying to you. Nixon really brought that point home, too. And remember, this was in the Johnson Administration at first. Nixon kept sealing the deal.

All we had to compare to in the sixties were WWII and Korea. NOTHING like Vietnam. NOW we can look back on Vietnam and make the obvious comparisons that leaders who were either hiding out in a senatorial campaign, while hiding out in the National Guard....or had "other priorities" than joining the service, just can't see. And we can see that the same road is the same road no matter WHAT part of the world it is in.

It's very interesting.