Nixon's War with Students Campus Unrest in the Vietnam Era

J. Samuel Walker recounts the dramatic standoff between a populist Republican president and protesting college students—and what the crisis of higher education under President Nixon can teach us today.

College students frustrated with the state of American society and foreign policy under a Republican president, rising up in protest across the country. Sound familiar? With new sources and fresh perspective, esteemed historian J. Samuel Walker studies the campus crisis of the late 1960s and early 1970s under President Richard Nixon, during the protracted conflict in Vietnam and roiling racial tensions in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement.

Walker tells how Nixon’s administration responded to the intense, and sometimes violent, unrest on college campuses across the United States, which became a prominent policy issue during the first four years of his presidency. A Gallup poll taken in May 1970 showed that campus unrest was rated as the “country’s leading problem,” outranking the war, other international questions, racial conflict, crime, and inflation. Nixon was so concerned that he created a presidential commission to study the problem, identify its origins, and recommend ways to restore calm to the nation’s colleges that had erupted in disorder.

But Nixon was of two minds when it came to campus turmoil. On the one hand, he saw it as a problem that needed to be fixed because it threatened the ability of institutions of higher learning to educate their students and to sponsor vital research. On the other hand, it was an irresistible opportunity to take advantage of the popular outrage with student protests. He hoped that attacking dissidents would appeal to the “silent majority” and build a new political coalition that would support his reelection campaign and the fortunes of the Republican Party going forward. Opting for political gain, Nixon dismissed and privately denounced the findings of his own presidential commission before he had even read its report.

Drawing on many unused or littleknown sources, Nixon’s War with Students is the first book to examine campus disturbances as a national political issue—one that is as relevant and important today as it was then.