Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) June 24, 2016: President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972) was so bent out of shape by World War II that he dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 in an effort to end the war.
Years later, certain radical anti-war Americans, who were decidedly younger than Truman was in August 1945, were, like Truman in 1945, so bent out of shape by the Vietnam War (1961-1975) that they bombed certain American targets in an effort to end the war. But their violence did not end the war. However, it did for understandable reasons contribute to then growing anti-60s backlash.
For a scholarly account of the partly understandable anti-60s over-reaction, which continues to this day, see Philip Jenkins' Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (Oxford University Press, 2006).
Focusing on the crucial period from August 1969 to September 1970, Clara Bingham, a journalist born in 1963 in Louisville and now based in New York City, arrays relevant statements by various participants she interviewed between 2012 and 2015 for her new book Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found its Soul (Random House, 2016).
Compared to President Truman when he dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, most of the people interviewed in Bingham's new book were comparatively young in 1969-1970, as their years of birth show (adapted here from pages 535-553):
1927: Jack Cipperly
1930: Tom McCarthy, and Raymond "Ray" Price, Jr.
1931: Daniel Ellsberg
1932: Richard Moose (d. 2015)
1933: Robert "Bob" Giles
1936: Ralph Metzner, and Richard Reeves
1937: Jane Fonda, Seymour Hersh, and Roger Morris
1938: Morton Halperin, Michael Kennedy (d. 2016), and Howard Wolf
1939: Tom Hayden, Egil "Bud" Krogh, Anthony "Tony" Lake, and Julius Lester
1940: Tod Ensign (d. 2014), John Hartmann, and Thelma Schoonmaker
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