Title: 1968 and 2020: Lessons From America’s Worst Year - The Atlantic
Headings: Is This the Worst Year in Modern American History?
Ideas
Is This the Worst Year in Modern American History?
Comparing 2020 to 1968 offers some disquieting lessons for the present.
James Fallows
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Content: Draft calls ramped up. So did casualties. I was 18, and in my second year of college, as the year began. My public-high-school classmates were ages 18 through 20. Many of them had been drafted or had enlisted. Several of them had already been killed by the start of the year, and more would be by its end. On average through 1968, nearly 50 American servicemen died in combat in Vietnam every day— plus many more Vietnamese. In early February, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong forces launched their Tet Offensive. Military historians might eventually have judged this a Pyrrhic victory for the anti-U.S. forces, from a strictly military perspective (as some have argued ), but at the time, it had a huge effect in underscoring the futility of the American effort. Late in February, Walter Cronkite of CBS News, an authoritative figure for whom there is no counterpart now (imagine, perhaps, a combination of Oprah, Anthony Fauci, Tom Hanks, and Michelle Obama), delivered a downbeat newscast arguing that the military cause in Vietnam was lost.