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: 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. Nonetheless, U.S. soldiers fought and died there for another seven years. In March 1968, American troops committed what became the most notorious mass slaughter of civilians of that war, the massacre at My Lai. The fighting and killing went on and on. So much time has passed that it is almost impossible now to convey how different it was, then, to have a military draft. Suppose you don’t like the president of the moment, or America’s war of the moment.