Nixon & Cambodia. Kent State. Jackson State. "Ohio."
The 44th anniversary of these events, and more importantly, of the stunning campus eruption of May 1970 that they were a part of, the most massive wave of student protest in US history, is upon us.
This article is the first in what turned out to be a 19 part (!) series I posted here as I wrote it in 2010.
And now I need advice. I suddenly have nibbles from a couple of small left-ish publishers asking if I want to turn it into a book! Is this historical rescue mission worth a big investment of time over the next year? Would I have to abandon my somewhat casual personalist style to make it worth reading?
To read the whole series at once (if you haven't already), you can go to Fire on the Mountain. It's chainlinked, and illustrated, there.]
MAY '70: 1. FINALLY ON OUR OWN...
Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We’re finally on our own...
Forty-four years ago, on Thursday, April 30, 1970, Richard Milhouse Nixon, the president of the United States, appeared on television for a special announcement about the Vietnam War. He told us that US troops, tens of thousands of them, had moved into Cambodia, expanding an already prolonged and costly war into another country. He claimed it was a necessary step toward ending the war, and toward insuring that the US would not be perceived in the world as "a pitiful helpless giant."
Nixon's announcement kicked off the most intense wave of campus struggle this country has ever seen, a month of bitter and exhilarating clashes which triggered huge changes that echo to this day. May, 1970 also changed forever the lives of some significant number of the hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of students and others who took part.
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