Of Martin Luther king jr. And robert kennedy. Her class is about an hour and 10 minutes. Margaret lets get started. Welcome. Today we are talking about 1968, a year when a heck of a lot happened, including a president ial election. A year where there were a lot of social, economic, political parallels that are in some ways familiar to us now because, in part, some of the changes the early 21st Century America has experience particularly in politics were set in motion in this late period. 1960slets get started. Start with an unlikely as official News Conference or address to the american people. March 31, 1968. President Lyndon Johnson gave a televised address to the nation. His subject but was the vietnam war. By this point the vietnam had escalated into a bloody conflict involving over half a million american soldiers. A war that had gradually started as a small engagement against communist, put potential Prime Minister aggression in Southeast Asia in the 1950s had escalated into a ma
Today we are talking about 1968, a year when a heck of a lot happened, including a president ial election. A year where there were a lot of social, economic, political parallels that are in some ways familiar to us now because, in part, some of the changes the early 21st Century America has experience particularly in politics were set in motion in this late 1960s period. Lets get started. I want to start with an unlikely as official News Conference or address to the American People. March 31, 1968. President Lyndon Johnson gave a televised address to the nation. His subject but was the vietnam war. By this point the vietnam had escalated into a bloody conflict involving over half a million american soldiers. A war that had gradually started as a small engagement against communist, put potential Prime Minister aggression in Southeast Asia in the 1950s had escalated into a major conflict that was tearing america apart. Johnson gives a speech about the war. He looks tired. He looks old. T
Term,tly aware is a corny ok . But we live in a society that is in need of that quality, and many historians serve as officers in their universities, as officers in their colleges, and officers in their department. We when we were on graduate school, no one ever said anything about that subject. None of us were trained to be Department Chairs. No none of us were trained to be dealings deans. And none of us were trying to be historians. I mean, historians. [laughter] oh dear. Pa so, we thought this would be an interesting panelnel that you would like because we have a number of distinguished president s who are historians and most of us it is a little awkward because most of those are greeting each other because we know each other as historians. We have seen drew and earl and ed on panels, giving papers. We have read their books. Here they are as president s former president of the university, president of the university, president at one of the major universities of the United States,
As a tourist, as a former resident of washington, d. C. And a resident of other parts of the United States, and its just such an honor and a pleasure to be here as a speaker and to talk about my book pivotal tuesdays. Im also so pleased that you all exhibited this interest in a such an obscure subject that no one seems to pay any attention to, president ial elections. Why cant we get the papers to write about president ial candidates, i dont know. But more seriously, were more than a year away from election day. 2016. Or maybe less than a year now, arent we . But we have already seen some remarkable moments emerge in this election cycle. We have had a huge celebrity who put the political establishment on the run, a whole slew of outsider candidates on both the right and the left ends of the political spectrum. Were seeing how new media, social media is changing campaigning, changing the way candidates and the campaigns communicate to voters, the way in which voters interact with one an
War games that were waged, you know, between allied commanders, nato warsaw pact, the exchange of Nuclear Weapons was off the charts. The tactical Nuclear Weapons would be expanded to the point where in three or four days hundreds of them would be fired by both sides. So what were seeing in these kind of books i met hackett before he died, a great officer, captured at arnham, et cetera. But here hes writing a book about conventionally stopping the soviets. And i think there was sort of a fantasy about that, that we frankly still live with. We still have Nuclear Weapons in the world. We still are numb to this. And i wonder what you think about that. Because the reality is that when the war games occurred in classified settings, they would just shoot those damn things off and destroy humanity. Those god damn things off and destroy humanity. Thats not necessarily reflected in sort of techno porn books like clancy does, which are basically feel good things that sort of america wins. The ba