When Lyndon Johnson succeeded John F. Kennedy as president following the latter's assassination in 1963, he pledged to continue the policy of containment, especially in Vietnam, a former French colony in Southeast Asia threatened with a Communist takeover. Those who supported intervention in Vietnam did so largely on the basis of containment. They argued that Ho Chi Minh, the revolutionary leader of Communist forces in the north, was an aggressor and an agent of the Soviet Union and China, both of which were giving him substantial aid. Once again, analogies were drawn between the 1930s and the 1960s. This time, however, a formidable opposition developed, especially in American colleges and universities. Opponents of the war in Vietnam not only rejected the analogy with Nazi Germany but also began to challenge the whole philosophy of containment itself. For one thing, it was clear by 1965 that China and the Soviet Union were no longer allies but rivals competing for leadership in the Communist world. If there ever had been an international Communist conspiracy coordinated in Moscow, it was clearly over. It was also clear, at least to the war's critics, that the Vietnam conflict was not a case of external aggression but a protracted civil war, in which the United States had chosen the losing side.

The Vietnam War divided America as it had not been divided since the Civil War. It split families and friendships, churches and political parties. It alienated the United States from many of its traditional allies. It provided a platform for a growing number of critics, both at home and abroad, who had come to resent the American cultural and economic hegemony of the post-1945 world. It coincided with the struggle of African Americans and their white allies to end racial oppression in the South and elsewhere. It stimulated a new sense of activism among the newly arrived baby boomers in the nation's colleges and universities. And it gave rise to charges that the Cold War had undermined American democracy by promoting an overly powerful or imperial presidency, by creating a culture of secrecy and an obsession with national security, and by limiting political debate in the country. Many recalled President Eisenhower's prophetic warning about the misplaced power of a "military-industrial complex," and not a few came to see America itself as an imperialist power. All of this caused many Americans to reexamine not only their place in the present world, but their past as well. Perhaps America was not so exceptional after all.

As Americans reexamined their history, a substratum of violence and oppression appeared: the institution of slavery and its continued legacy of racism, the subjugation and near eradication of Native American societies, the exploitation of America's underclass. American prosperity was shown to be flawed, distributed unevenly and to the disadvantage of ethnic minorities and the working poor. There had always existed, said the Socialist writer Michael Harrington, the "Other America," which those in power had largely ignored.

Ironically, President Lyndon Johnson, more com-mitted to domestic reform than perhaps any other president in U.S. history, shared many of Harrington's views. He hoped to remedy many of the country's ills through what he called the Great Society: a dazzling array of reforms and expenditures designed to pick up where the New Deal left off a generation before. He even announced a War on Poverty. But his other war, in Vietnam, came to overshadow all other considerations. In the end, the opposition to the war in Vietnam persuaded Johnson not to run for reelection.

The failure of the Great Society reforms to produce the results they promised marked the beginning of the breakdown in the liberal consensus that had controlled American domestic policy since the 1940s. Conservatives who had never been comfortable with the Great Society, as well as liberals and radicals who thought it had not gone far enough, pronounced it a failure. But no new consensus arose to take its place. Similarly, containment suited neither conservatives who wished to see communism over thrown, nor liberals and radicals who had come to see containment at best as unworkable and at worst a cloak for imperialism and expansion.

By l970, the United States had more than a million soldiers in thirty countries, participated in five regional military alliances, had defense treaties with over forty nations, and was committed to various forms of military or economic aid to nearly one hundred countries." Despite President Kennedy's soaring rhetoric of a decade before, were Americans really prepared to "pay any price" or "bear any burden" in pursuit of the war in Vietnam? In the early 1970s President Richard Nixon concluded that they were not, and gradually extricated the United States from that destructive conflict. It cost more than fifty thousand American lives and many times that number of Vietnamese.

The defeat left the United States weakened at home both economically and psychologically. A nation whose history had appeared to be unique, untrammeled by failure or humiliation, now seemed no different from any other. Although the war had ended, the bitter debate over America's role in the world did not. Was the "American Century" over? Was the United States a great power in decline? On the international front, the evidence was mixed. The chasm between the Soviet Union and China enabled President Nixon to restore American diplomatic relations with China and to negotiate a strategic arms limitation agreement with the Soviet Union that many expected to slow down or end the arms race. At the same time, a series of apparent Soviet gains in the developing nations during the late 1970s and a growing belief that the United States was slipping behind the Soviet Union in the arms race provided ammunition for those concerned about America's declining role in the world.

But the United States already had been declining in relative economic terms for many years. As Europe and Asia were still recovering from the effects of World War II, America's economic, military, and political preeminence remained unchallenged outside the Communist bloc. But the recovery of Western Europe and Japan, the accelerated industrialization of new nations such as Taiwan and South Korea, and the increasing importance of the oil-rich Middle East were combining to create a multipolar world of several powers that would replace the bipolar world of only two superpowers. And while U.S. industry bestrode the world in 1945, controlling 50 percent of capacity, it slipped to 45 percent by 1953 and to 32 percent in 1980. The post-World War II boom had ended, a victim of the inflation touched off by spending for the Vietnam War and Great Society programs without corresponding tax increases. Unemployment had increased, along with prices, a puzzling phenomenon to most economists. A series of oil shocks in the 1970s, generated by the mostly Middle Eastern oil-producing countries (OPEC), tripled the price of imported oil and doubled that of gasoline. In politics, the Watergate scandal had destroyed the presidency of Richard Nixon in 1974, calling into question the integrity of the entire U.S. political system.

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