Narrator/Co-host (15:55)
Back in the United States, while President Nixon was trying to work out if he could attend the party to beat all parties, 30s, a man named Jennings Randolph kept on trying and trying and trying. Jennings Randolph was a Democrat from West Virginia, and what he believed passionately in was lowering the voting age in the United States from 21 to 18. Congress didn't appear hip to the idea Immediately because it took him nine tries before he succeeded. 9. Prior to President Nixon signing into law the 26th Amendment on July 5, 1971, both states and the federal government had their own rules about young adults voting. Georgia was the first in the nation to lower the voting age to 18 back in 1943. But throughout the 1940s, Jim Crow laws restored restricted the rights of black Americans. The drafting of 18 year old men during World War II was a catalyst for increased rights. And the slogan old enough to fight, old enough to vote appeared on buttons and advertisements across the nation. President Eisenhower was a former general who spent most of his life in the military, and he voiced support for a constitutional amendment to change the voting age in his 1954 State of the Union speech when he said, for years our citizens between the ages of 18 and 21 have in times of peril been summoned to fight for America. They should participate in the political process that produces this fateful summons. But nothing happened in the 1960s. Disenfranchised youth who wanted to use the power of the ballot to affect change were dismayed that it was not an available avenue, especially as it became clear that the United States would soon involve itself in Vietnam. So the slogan old enough to fight, old enough to vote gained traction again. In April of 1970, Congress voted to lower the voting age. But a few months later, in December, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress didn't have the authority to do that. So with an eye on the upcoming presidential election, Congress wrote and passed a constitutional amendment lowering the voting age to 18. And it took three quarters of the states only four months to ratify it, making it the fastest ratification of an amendment to date in history. Perhaps the biggest story in American politics began with a brilliant man whose conscience about the morality of what was happening in Vietnam and subsequent actions earned him the label the most dangerous man in America. Daniel Ellsberg was academically gifted from a young age, and he remembered everything he read. As a child. He went on a Detroit radio show and recited the entire Gettysburg Address from memory. He studied economics at Harvard and graduated in 1952, after which he, with a scholarship in hand, traveled abroad to study at Cambridge for a year before returning home to enlist in the Marines. There he climbed the ladder from platoon leader to rifle company commander. Daniel Ellsberg served during the Suez Canal crisis and returned to Harvard for graduate studies in economics. And he then took a job at the RAND Corporation, a California based think tank used by the Defense department. As he did in the military, Daniel worked his his way up and Onto several important assignments. He became quite an expert on matters of war, and he worked directly with the secretary of defense on multiple projects. Daniel wrote reports for secretary of defense mcnamara about conditions on the ground in cambodia, Laos, and vietnam. Information he gleaned by traveling to and living in Vietnam for two years, where he befriended the locals. When he returned to the United States in 1967, Secretary McNamara directed Daniel ellsberg to collaborate in the writing of a report. Daniel, along with 35 other employees of RAND and academics, historians, defense analysts, and military personnel, wrote U.S. decision Making in Vienna, Vietnam, 1945-1968, which was also known as the mcnamara study and was eventually dubbed the Pentagon papers. A Gallup poll in 1971 asked Americans if they approved of the way Nixon was handling the Vietnam War. 41% did. Yeah, that was one poll, but it reflected the country's political turmoil. The Vietnam war was the first television war, and people's ability to access information through the nightly news Brought light to its horrors. By 1966, 93% of American homes had TV. By the way, the average age of American casualties in Vietnam was 22. Journalists reported from on site, and often the news was not good. Yet many Americans wanted to roust out communism and spread democracy. The cost, though, was immeasurably high. And the pressure on Nixon to wind down what became known as an unwinnable war was immense. So Daniel decided to release information to the press. And this was not just a like, hey, you know what? The president said one thing and did another. No, no. It was the very foundation of what we have been told about how imperative our involvement and how noble the sacrifice we're making. It's all a lie. And if you've already forgotten the title of the report, Let me contextualize it for you. It covered our involvement in southeast Asia from the end of World War II until 1968. Ellsberg didn't believe that this was just one lie. It was decades of them. Mountains of lies. Initially, the report was a classified document labeled as secret, which indicated that the contents might be embarrassing politically if they were publicized. Daniel knew that what he saw firsthand on the ground did not reflect the information that had been told to the American public. So Daniel and his former colleague at Rand Anthony russo, decided to work together to reveal to the world what was really happening in the White house. By releasing the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000 page report, the Pentagon papers revealed how the White House, going back four presidential administrations, had not given americans the full truth of what was happening in Vietnam. It Dated back to president truman who told people there was a connection between the soviets and the vietnamese, Even though he knew there wasn't. President eisenhower believed in the domino theory which argued that if vietnam became a communist country, the rest of southeast asia and beyond would follow. And so they backed an anti communist south vietnamese leader, diem. Diem turned out to be terrible, as was predicted, and almost a decade later, he was president kennedy's problem. Guided by secretary of defense McNamara, the u. S. Backed a couple coup that killed DM although the administration said no, we definitely didn't have anything to do with that. Shortly thereafter, kennedy himself was assassinated, and this entire mess landed in president johnson's lap. Johnson sought congressional approval to fight in vietnam without officially declaring war. The administration pushed congress, congress to pass the gulf of tonkin resolution which allowed for, quote, the determination of the president as commander in chief to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack
