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5 - Civic Virtue in Richard Nixon's America

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

William O. Walker III
William O. Walker III
Affiliation:
University of Toronto
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Summary

Damn it, I happen to love this country.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1953

[I]f Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., 1957

Have our values been so twisted…that we are prepared to rationalize murder as an acceptable counter-insurgency weapon?

Viron P. Vaky, 1968

One cannot adhere to values of individual liberty and then remain silent while those values are destroyed.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, 1973

If the U.S. Census of 1890 announced the closing of the old frontier, then NSC-68 proclaimed the “free world” as America's new frontier. Yet, that world seemed a fearful place to many Americans by mid-1950. The flight to Taiwan by Jiang Jieshi in January 1949 and Guomindang officials in the wake of the victory of Mao Zedong and the Communist Party in China by October, the successful atomic test by the Soviet Union, the public emergence of Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, and the beginning of the Korean War – all combined to tear at the fabric of national memory about security. The resultant uncertainty about the present and the future affected how Americans thought about core values over the next quarter-century. When confronted with the consequences of the globalist turn in foreign policy, more than a few citizens saw in the world around them a betrayal of the past by their leaders.

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National Security and Core Values in American History , pp. 131 - 164
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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