A History of the Vietnam War: An American Tragedy

To wage the war in Vietnam, Johnson and Nixon turned the White House into a nest of criminal conspiracies. The war was the precondition for Johnson's not running for reelection and Nixon's ignominious resignation. The war was a good fit for their tyrannical tendencies, which were eventually rolled back because they overreached the limits of their power. The antiwar insurgency that brought America to its senses was so sweeping a challenge to authority as to reverberate for decades. A war that had been so popular at first, however undeclared and thinly grounded in law, was brought to an end with an impressive boost from popular action. There is a lesson here about the life of a democracy. Democracy is not a synonym for a periodic majority vote. A living democracy depends not just on the rules for choosing a leader, but it requires an ongoing process. It depends on what the populace does. It requires that minorities have a chance to become majorities by resorting to popular action, and it requires respect for the Constitution.