Era of the Vietnam War

The **Era of the Vietnam War** lasted from about 1963 AD until 1973 AD. It began with the dramatic escalation of US involvement in the Vietnam War in response to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident. It then ended on the eve of the 1973 Oil Crisis that would stall the world’s economic growth.

In the early 1960s, the world economy was still in the midst of the post-World War II economic boom, and many believed they were standing at the dawn of a golden age. The era saw the rise of counterculture, revolutions in individual freedom, clothing, music, and drugs, and the relaxation of social taboos especially relating to racism and sexism. Yet the golden age never materialised. Although direct tensions between the United States and Soviet Union cooled, America’s heavy handed involvement in the Vietnam War, led to protests not just against the war, but other movements such as for African-American civil rights and women's liberation. This mood of civil unrest in the United States spread around the world, from France during May 1968, to the civil right movement of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland. Meanwhile, the situation in the Middle East was fundamentally altered by the Six Days and Yom Kippur Wars.

## History

### Vietnam War

France had obtained control over Vietnam in 1887 as part French Indochina. As in many other countries, the upheaval of World War I prompted the rise nationalism and anti-colonialism in Vietnam. Various existing movements opposed to French rule surged in Vietnam during World War II, with the Japanese occupation from 1940 to 45. Nationalist leaders like **Ho Chi Minh** of the Viet Minh were able to convince the United States to secretly supply them with weapons to fight their new Japanese oppressors. Throughout the course of the war, the Viet Minh successfully expanded their power base in the north, as well as their popularity with the people especially through helping peasants in their region during a wartime famine. Weeks before the end of the war, the Viet Minh captured the major northern city of Hanoi. With the Japanese formal surrender in 1945, Ho Chi Minh declared Vietnam to be independent as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). However, the French refused not recognise his declaration. When French forces returned to Vietnam, they drove the Viet Minh out of the south of the country, but they were unable to penetrate further. Ho Chi Minh appealed to the United States for official recognition of the DRV, as courageous fighters against French imperialism, but President Truman was wary of his Communist leanings; Ho took inspiration for his cause from the Communist victory in China. During the eight long year of the First Indochina War (1946-54), the Viet Minh in the north and the French controlled government in the south under Bao Dai fought to a standstill. After a crushing defeat at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (March-May 1964), the French lost their will to fight on, and a cease-fire was finally declared.

The French granted all of Indochina (Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam) her independence, and the Geneva Conference officially split Vietnam at the 17th parallel DMZ, into the Communist North and independent South, with the promise of Vietnamese re-unification after free elections to be held in 1956. The United States, obsessed with the containment of Communism and well aware of Ho Chi Minh’s immense popularity in both North and South Vietnam, sought to forestall these Vietnam-wide elections. They threw their support behind politician Ngo Dinh Diem. In 1955, Diem rejected the proposed elections, and instead held elections limited to the southern half of the country. Using fraud and intimidation, he ousted the feeble Bao Dai from power, and proclaimed South Vietnam to be the Republic of Vietnam (RVN). As the French completed their withdrawl, the United States sent in military advisers to help organise the RVN army. Ngo Dinh Diem quickly developed a reputation as corrupt, undemocratic and repressive. Fearful of Viet Minh's popularity in rural areas, he uprooted thousands of villagers and moved them to settlements under army surveillance. The RVN government contained several members of Diem’s own family, and was overwhelming Catholic, despite Buddhists making-up 90% of the Vietnamese population; Diem himself was Catholic. The government also engaged in often vicious persecution of Buddhists. In 1959, Diem established military tribunals to hunt out Viet Minh guerilla fighters in South Vietnam, whom he derisively referred to as Viet Cong or "Communist Traitor to Vietnam"; American soldiers referred to the Viet Cong as Victor Charlie or V-C or simply Charlie. These tribunals were unconcerned with justice, and brutal in their application. Diem, paranoid and unable to take criticism, frequently imprisoned anyone who even mildly criticised his corrupt regime. Yet under Diem, the number of active southern Viet Cong increased dramatically. Meanwhile, as the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962) intensified the Cold War world-wide, the United States sent thousands more and more military advisors and weapons to South Vietnam. During the Kennedy presidency, the American presence rose from around 1,000 men to over 15,000. Embarrassingly, many of the weapons sent ended up in the hands of the Viet Cong, via peasants resentful at being forcibly drafted into the RVN army. The corruption and brutality of the Diem regime provoked outrage on the front pages of world newspapers in May 1963, when a Buddhist monk doused himself in gasoline and burned himself to death, in protest at troops who had opened fire on unarmed Buddhist protesters in the city of Hue. In August 1963, a military coup, secretly backed by the CIA and United States government, overthrew Ngo Dinh Diem. Yet the coup only escalated South Vietnam’s political chaos and rampant corruption.

New US president Lyndon B. Johnson inherited a difficult situation in Vietnam, as the South Vietnamese government was in shambles and the Viet Cong were making big inroads in rural areas of the South. During the early part of his term, he strived to continue Kennedy’s limited troop commitments in Vietnam, but in August 1964 the situation dramatically changed. Early that month, two US Navy destroyers off the coast of North Vietnam reported that northern gunboats had attacked them unprovoked; the **Gulf of Tonkin Incident**. The American public was incensed, and within days Congress voted 533 to 2 to take “*all necessary steps*” to protect US interests in Vietnam. The incident has remained controversial ever since. Declassified files released in 2005 reveal that the US destroyers were actually on a covert mission against North Vietnam at the time, and that the Americans opened fire first. Nevertheless in March 1965, President Johnson launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a series of intense bombing campaigns against North Vietnam and Viet Cong in the south; over three and half years some 3 million tons of bombs had dropped on Vietnam, more than all the bombs dropped in Europe during World War II by both sides. Despite the vast number of bombs used, the campaign had little effect. Target selection was difficult against the hidden Viet Cong and non-industrialised North Vietnam, and it failed to demoralise the North Vietnamese who saw themselves as fighting a centuries-long crusade to finally push out foreign imperialists and reunite their homeland. Meanwhile, more and more US combat troops were directly committed to the war; by 1966 there were more than 300,000 US troops in Vietnam, and this number reached 500,000 by the end of 1968. Unlike previous conflicts, these draftees were young and disproportionately from the lower classes, because enrolment in higher-education or a skilled profession earned a deferment. The US implemented a war of attrition strategy against the Viet Cong with search-and-destroy missions, sending troops out into the field to find and kill the enemy. An early success at the Battle of Ia Drang (November 1965), one of the largest battles of the war, seemed to convince the Americans that the strategy would work. However, it also convinced the North Vietnamese to return to guerrilla warfare. The Viet Cong harassed US troops incessantly in small groups, striking quickly and then disappearing into the jungle or the peasant population. Searching South Vietnamese homes made the US troops vulnerable to ambush, and they got stuck in a vicious circle where the more aggressive they became, the more Vietnamese people turned against them. Although more than ten Viet Cong soldiers were dying for each US soldier killed, it did not help American morale because their objectives were rather undefined; claims of defending democracy in South Vietnam were patently false, and Vietnam was merely a symbolic prize in the Cold War.

By 1966, President Johnson authorised the use of chemical weapons such as Napalm and Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant used to destroy jungle vegetation and expose Viet Cong hideouts. Although both were effective, they inflicted horrific devastation, and caused unforeseen health problems among Vietnamese civilians as well as American troops, that would persist for decades. At the same time, covert operations were stepped-up such as the CIA-led Phoenix Program, intended to assassinate the Viet Cong leadership. However, the programs were plagued by corruption, mismanagement, and faulty intelligence; in many cases unscrupulous South Vietnamese officials simply named their political opponents as Viet Cong. Meanwhile, manpower and supplies continued to stream into South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a rough track through the jungles of neutral Laos and Cambodia.

Throughout 1967, Viet Cong guerrillas stepped up their attacks on US servicemen. Needing a dramatic breakthough, in January 1968, Ho Chi Minh launched the **Tet Offensive**, a large general offensive that had been planned for years. It began with an attack on the US base at Khe Sanh, the western-most stronghold south of the 17th parallel DMZ. It seemed that at last the Americans were to get the major pitched battle they’d long been waiting for, and US reinforcements flooded into the region to hold the base. Yet, Khe Sanh was a diversion. Under the cover of the Tet celebrations for the Lunar New Year on 30 January 1968, wave after wave of Viet Cong cells attacked more than 100 different US military installations in the towns and cities throughout South Vietnam. In a propaganda coup, they even briefly seized the United States Embassy in the heart of Saigon, the symbol of American power and presence in Vietnam, sending a shockwave across the world. Yet the Americans managed to restore control almost everywhere very quickly. Everywhere except for in the old imperial capital of Hue, one of the most revered places in the country. Viet Cong forces seized control of the entire city, and held it for over a month. The Battle of Hue saw some of the bloodiest fighting of the entire Vietnam War, and was only ended after the South Vietnamese government lifted a ban on using air-attacks and artillery on the city.

One of the great ironies of the war was that the Tet Offensive was a resounding tactical defeat for the Viet Cong. It was quashed relatively quickly and failed to provoke the general uprising of the people that Ho Chi Minh had sought; 40,000 Viet Cong died compared to just 3,000 Americans and South Vietnamese. Yet it was an enormous political defeat for President Johnson. Throughout the weeks that it raged, the evening news flooded into American homes with a far uglier version of the war than they were expecting. Amid the chaos, an Associated Press photographer captured the summary execution of a captured Viet Cong prisoner by a South Vietnamese military officer in the streets of Saigon; a brutal image that shocked the American public and became a symbol of the Vietnam quagmire in the name of a vaguely defined war that seemed suddenly unwinnable. The Tet Offensive seemed to expose the lie that victory in Vietnam was imminent or even possible.

In February 1968, Walter Cronkite, the most trusted news anchor in America, expressed an **opposition to the Vietnam War** view that an increasing majority of Americans would soon share, “*It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honourable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.*” It led to a huge shift in American public opinion against the war. Because the draft exempt college students, critics increasingly denounced the conflict as a rich man’s war but a poor man’s fight; young African-Americans in particular suffered some of the highest casualty rates. Many in the peace movement were students, mothers, or anti-establishment hippies, but veterans’ groups also became increasingly vocal and hundreds of them threw their medals on the West Steps of the Capitol building. Meanwhile, the entire US government was split into anti-war and pro-war factions. In February 1968, Johnson’s own secretary of defence, Robert McNamara, resigned. In March 1968, a request for 200,000 additional troops was denied. With eroding support at home, American soldiers became increasingly disillusioned with the war. Drug abuse among soldiers grew rampant, and cases even appeared of soldiers killing their own superior officers to avoid being sent on missions. Plummeting moral also contributed to one of the most horrible incidents of the war; the **My Lai Massacre**. In March 1968, US soldiers, frustrated at their inability to find Viet Cong during a search-and-destroy mission in the tiny South Vietnamese village of My Lai, killed approximately 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians, including women, children, and elderly. The incident was covered up and did not become public knowledge until late 1969. Meanwhile, the US government came under further fire in June 1971 when the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, leaked documents revealing that presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson, had all authorized a number of covert actions that increased US involvement in Vietnam unbeknownst to the American public. They caused public distrust of the government grew deeper, and pushed the already unpopular war into even murkier moral territory.

Something had to change. On 31 March 1968, to the surprise of even his closest colleagues, President Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election; the Tet Offensive had taken its most high-profile victim. Richard M. Nixon easily won the 1968 election. He chose former political science professor Henry Kissinger as his national security advisor, who saw the Vietnam War as a mistake and pushed for disengagement. Not long into his term, Nixon announced a new policy of the **gradual withdrawal** of the more than 500,000 American soldiers from Vietnam, and the return of control of the war to the South Vietnamese. He did not intend to abandon Saigon; the United States would still fund, supply, and train the army. By early 1972, Nixon had reduced the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam to 150,000, who would all departed Vietnam by August, leaving behind only a small number of military advisors who would themselves depart by March 1973. To persuade North Vietnam to end the war, Nixon authorized the Christmas Bombing, another intense bombing campaign. The pressure worked, and a cease-fire was finally announced in January 1973.

Under the terms of the peace agreement, North Vietnam promised that elections would be held to determine the fate of the entire country. Nixon insisted that the agreement brought “*peace with honour,*” though South Vietnamese leaders complained that it amounted to little more than a surrender. The elections never took place. As it became increasingly unlikely that the United States would intervene again, North Vietnamese troops began to move into South Vietnam in 1974; in September 1974, Congress refused to approve additional funding for the South Vietnamese army. The North Vietnamese launched a massive offensive in the spring of 1975, and on 30 April 1975 **Saigon fell**; the city was renamed Ho Chi Minh City in honour of Ho, who died of heart failure in 1969. The Vietnam War was over, and all of Vietnam was united under Communist rule. More than two decades of violent conflict had inflicted a devastating toll on the Vietnamese people: an estimated 2 million were killed, while 3 million were wounded, and another 12 million became refugees. Warfare had also demolished the country’s infrastructure and economy. In the United States, the effects would linger long after the "last" troops returned home in 1973. Considerable speculation has gone to a hypothesis that a significant number of men missing-in-action were captured and kept as prisoners after the war's conclusion; the most thorough congressional investigation of 1991–93 found no compelling evidence of this. Meanwhile, the United States spent more than $120 billion on the conflict from 1965-73, leading to widespread inflation exacerbated by a worldwide 1973 Oil Crisis. Psychologically, the effects ran even deeper, piercing the myth of American invincibility and bitterly dividing the nation. Many returning veterans faced hostility from both opponents and supporters of the war, along with physical damage such as the long-term effects of exposure to Agent Orange. In 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was unveiled in Washington. On it were inscribed the names of 57,939 American men and women killed or missing in the war; later additions brought that total to 58,200.

### Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge

The Vietnam War also destabilised neighbouring Cambodia. Upon gaining her independence from France in 1954, Norodom Sihanouk, the former king of Cambodia, became her prime minister. The Cambodian ruler attempted an elaborate middle path between the various domestic and international forces at work in the troubled region. While Cambodia was officially neutral during the war in Vietnam, in practice Sihanouk was friendlier toward the Communists, alienating conservatives and the army. Meanwhile, Cambodian radicals were opposed his domestic policies, which were economically conservative and intolerant of dissent. By 1970, clashes between the army and Communist guerrillas had become more serious, when in March a military coup led by Lon Nol seized power while Sihanouk was out of the country, apparently with the tacit consent of the United States. In exile, Sihanouk forged an alliance with an indigenous Cambodian revolutionary movement known as the **Khmer Roug**e led by Pol Pot. Most peasants revered the former king as a semi-divine figure, and the Khmer Rouge exploited this to draw new recruits into their small organisation. The lines were drawn for a bloody era of the **Cambodian Civil War** (1967-75). In 1970, the Americans briefly invaded Cambodia to try and disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail, driving the Viet Cong deeper into Cambodia, where they help the Khmer Rouge seize more territory including the ultimate humiliation, the occupation of the Temples of Angkor. The subsequent US bombing campaign in Cambodia that lasted until 1973 further helped the Khmer Rouge recruit more and more dispossessed peasants. As large parts of the country fell to the rebels, Lon Nol’s regime became increasingly isolated and in April 1975 he fled the country.

The regime of the Khmer Rouge that ruled until 1979 represented the absolute worst that Communism had to offer. Its goal was a "pure" revolution, to transform Cambodia into one huge peasant-dominated agrarian cooperative. The entire population was ordered to abandon the cities and take up life in rural areas. Currency was essentially abolished, postal services were halted, and the country cut itself off from the outside world. All of the senior government and military figures who had been associated with Lon Nol were executed within days of the takeover. Then the grotesque cleansing turned inwards. Disobedience of any sort often brought immediate execution. Many victims were moderates who had only joined the Khmer Rouge as a show of loyalty to Sihanouk. Hundreds of thousands more died of famine and disease. It is still not known exactly how many Cambodians died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge during nearly four years of their rule. Modern historians estimate the figure at two million. Some 20,000 mass graves have been analysed; the infamous **Killing Fields**. By 1979, even the peasants who had supported the revolution could no longer support such madness, but nobody had an ounce of strength to do anything about it. Except the Vietnamese. In 1979, Communist Vietnam invaded Cambodia and toppled the Khmer Rouge regime in just two weeks. Pol Pot and other leaders were condemned to death in staged show trials for their acts of genocide. Over the next decade, Cambodia fell under the relatively benign tutelage of a Communist Vietnamese puppet regime.

### United States

After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, former vice president **Lyndon B. Johnson** (1963-69) began his unexpected presidency with plans for a range of social and welfare measures which shared one primary purpose: to help the poor in society in education, medical aid and household income; many of which were carried over from the Kennedy administration. The speed with which he accomplished most of the **Great Society Programme** was extraordinary. In 1964 alone: the Revenue Act reduces taxes across the board by approximately 20%; the Economic Opportunity Act established agencies tasked with reducing poverty; and a third major achievement that year was the Civil Rights Act. After his overwhelming re-election victory in 1964, in which he carried 46 of the country's 50 states, Johnson was able to sign numerous more. The Higher Education Act provided support for poorer students in higher education. Medicare and Medicaid were launched, national programmes guaranteeing medical insurance to Americans aged over sixty-five, to younger people with disabilities, as well as to people of any age who are unable to pay for commercial health care. In addition there was support provided in the field of culture: the National Endowment for the Humanities gave grants to institutions such as museums and libraries, colleges and universities, television and radio stations. Every one of these Acts is still, in revised and updated form, in use today. During Johnson's presidency the percentage of Americans living below the poverty line fell from 23% to 12%.

Yet by the end of 1967, US troops were being killed in the Vietnam War at the rate of about 1000 a month, and Johnson's previously very high approval rating was declines steadily. One reason was the nation's increasing disillusionment with the war, but the other was a mounting number of urban race riots, accompanied by looting, arson, and violent clashes with the police. Two of the first were in Harlem in 1964 and in South Central Los Angeles in 1965. Far more violent were the riots in Newark and in Detroit in 1967. In Newark, the riots last six days and left the city devastated by fire, with 26 dead and about 1500 injured. Detroit was even more dramatic, and only ended when Johnson sent in federal troops with machine guns and tanks. In the following year there was rioting nation-wide in more than a hundred cities after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. By this time President Johnson was a spent force, and declared in March 1968 that he would not seek re-election.

**Richard Nixon** (1969-74) won the 1968 election, after a chaotic Democratic nominee race during which Bobby Kennedy, the younger brother of former president John F. Kennedy, was assassinated. He campaigned as the candidate of the silent majority of Americans who weren’t anti-war protestors, who didn’t admire the free-love ideals of hippies, and who were concerned with the breakdown of traditional values and law-and-order. In fact, conservatives who had voted for Nixon hoping to roll-back Johnson’s liberal reforms were to be disappointed. Across the south, the Nixon administration established bi-racial committees to plan and implement school desegregation; by the end of 1970 only about 18% of black children were attending all-black schools, down from 70% in 1968. He also increased the number of female appointments in government, created a Presidential Task Force on Women's Rights, and encouraged the Department of Justice to bring sex-discrimination suits against blatant violators. Though initially uninterested in environmental concerns, after millions demonstrated across the country on 1970 Earth Day, he pushed for the Clean Air Act of 1970, and established the Department of Natural Resources and the Environmental Protection Agency. In foreign affairs, with the assistance of his brilliant but taciturn national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, Nixon was able to achieve détente with China and the Soviet Union, playing one off against the other. Since the mid-1960s, tensions between China and the Soviet Union had increased, and Nixon sensed an opportunity to shift the Cold War balance of power toward the West. In December 1970, he reduced trade restrictions against China, and then in February 1972, President Nixon and his wife travelled to China, where he engaged in direct talks with Chairman Mao. The visit pressured the Soviet Union to agree to better relations with the United States, with Nixon and Brezhnev meeting at the Moscow Summit of May 1972.

Yet, Nixon often adopted a stance of confrontation rather than conciliation or compromise, as demonstrated when Congress overrode his veto on the Clean Water Act of 1972, which he generally supported but felt was too expensive. In retaliation, he used his presidential powers to impound half the money earmarked. In his ambition to push through his agenda, he took the attitude that the executive branch was exempt from many of the checks-and-balances imposed by the Constitution. This attitude would lead to his downfall. With the war in Vietnam winding down, Nixon looked invincible in the 1972 election. Yet on 17 June 1972, five months before the presidential election, five men were caught breaking into the Democratic headquarters in the **Watergate** complex in Washington D.C. The Washington Post puts onto the case two of its leading investigative reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. They immediately suspected that the event had something to do with the Republican Party, but they had no firm evidence until they were approached by an anonymous source who became known as Deep Throat; subsequently revealed to be Mark Felt, associate director of the FBI. He revealed that cash found on the burglars had links to a slush fund of Nixon’s re-election committee. Gradually the story unravelled, revealing numerous illegal activities carried out by the top level of the Republican Party, including bugging the offices of political rivals, and ordering the FBI and the tax authority to harass opponents. As more and more evidence emerged, Nixon denied any knowledge of them, famously declaring, "*I'm not a crook.*" An attempt at an elaborate cover-up inevitably made matters worse. Eventually prosecutions followed and forty-eight Nixon aides were convicted of crimes ranging from obstruction of justice to perjury, from wire-tapping to burglary; John N. Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney-General received the longest sentence, four years in prison. Gradually the investigation crept nearer to Nixon, particularly when it was discovered that he taped all conversations and phone calls in the Oval Office. When Congress finally compelled him to release them, eighteen minutes of one tape had been erased; accidentally he claimed. In May 1974, the House of Representatives opened impeachment proceedings against the president; the only other such impeachments were against Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Bill Clinton in 1998. When Nixon was advised by colleagues that he was almost certain to be impeached, he resigned on 9 August 1974. He was succeeded in office by his vice-president, Gerald Ford, whose first action in office was controversial: an unconditional pardon for Richard Nixon. Nixon left a legacy of fundamental mistrust of government with its roots in Vietnam and Watergate.

### Swinging Britain

By the late 1950s, the recovery was strong enough for prime minister Harold Macmillan to famously tell the British people that they’d “*never had it so good*”. Some saw this as a warning of difficult times ahead, but most didn’t care because soon it was the **Swinging Sixties**. The first teenage generation free from conscription emerged in Britain, and the parents of this post-war baby boom, who’d spent their own youth mired in World War II, wanted their children to enjoy their freedom. Gloomy and grey old London was suddenly transformed into the bright shining epicentre of fun-loving hedonism, especially if you were under 30. There was the music of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, the Who, and the Kinks. The arrival of the miniskirt championed by fashion designer Mary Quant, stimulated fashionable shopping areas such as Carnaby Street and King's Road, and icons like Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton. Audiences flocked to the cinema to see Michael Caine, Peter Sellers, and James Bond. And young people began to stand up for their individuality, and cast off the older generation's social mores. They became increasingly political aware with movements like feminism, equal pay for women, anti-nuclear, and issues of racism. The contraceptive pill gave women the opportunity to dreams far more than motherhood and marriage. By the end of the sixties, people were full of hope and optimism for a better future. As Charles Fleischer said, “*If you remember the ’60s, you really weren’t there*”.

### Ireland and the beginning of The Troubles

After the formal partition of the Island of Ireland in 1922 into the 26-county Irish Free State, and 6-county Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom, each territory was strongly aligned to either Catholic or Protestant ideologies, although this was more marked in Northern Ireland. In the **Irish Free State**, in contrast with many European states of the 1920s and 30s, she remained a democracy. Testament to this came when the losing faction in the Irish Civil War, Éamon de Valera's Fianna Fáil, was able to take power peacefully by winning the 1932 general election; the lingering division of the civil war remains even today in the country’s two largest political parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. The undisputed leader of the nation during its revolutionary period (1919-21) was now back at the helm of a free state, but still constitutionally connected with the Britain. Gradually amending that detail would be high on de Valera's agenda. In 1932, de Valera halted the annuities by Irish farmers to the British government for loans to purchase formally British owned land, prompting Britain to respond with a trade war with Ireland. That same year, the Oath of Allegiance to the British Crown was abolished. In 1937, de Valera introduced a new constitution replacing the Governor General (the representative of the British Crown) with an elected President. The new constitution also controversially claimed sovereignty over all 32 counties, though even de Valera admitted that 6-counties were at present beyond his reach. Though Northern Ireland protested vociferous, with the approach of World War II, the mood of the British government was for reconciliation; Neville Chamberlain accepted the constitutional changes without objection, the trade war was brought to an end, and he relinquished the right to use certain naval bases in Ireland agreed under the 1921 treaty. Despite pressure from Britain and later the United States, de Valera declared Ireland neutral at the outbreak of World War II, and was able to maintain that position through the six year war; a demonstration of Ireland's independence in foreign policy matters. The last constitutional connection with the Britain was severed in 1949, with Ireland’s withdrawal from the British Commonwealth; the point was emphasised by officially renaming the nation the Republic of Ireland. A feeling of goodwill towards Ireland was evident in the response of the British government which declared that Irish citizens would retain existing rights in border controls and rights of residence. Although the Irish Constitution (1932) avoided making Catholicism the state-religion, instead offering a vaguer “special position”, Church power was deeply embedded in the Republic of Ireland: the vast majority of children were educated in Church run schools, it was a country of mass devotion, and deeply conservative social policies prevailed, forbidding divorce, contraception, abortion, pornography as well as encouraging the banning of many books and films. Yet, the trade war with Britain of the 1930s and the economic difficulties of the war years had damage Ireland, and even as most Europe experienced a sustained economic boom from the 1950s, Ireland did not and emigration remained high; around 50,000 per year. It was only in the 1960s that Ireland underwent major economic growth under reforming prime minister Seán Lemass, who invested in industrial infrastructure, dropped many protective tariffs, and gave tax incentives to foreign manufacturers to set up in Ireland. These economic plans yielded a growth of 4% per year between 1959–1973, and with more public revenue came more investment in social infrastructure such as free secondary education introduced in 1968.

Meanwhile in **Northern Ireland**, a sense of unchanging rigidity quickly settled in, symbolised by James Craig, who served as Unionist prime minister for an unbroken spell of nineteen years from 1921 until his death in 1940. Unionists would form every government until 1972, and it was a very much a Protestant state for a Protestant people, and a place of discrimination and exclusion for the 35% Catholic minority. They were systematically denied access to jobs and housing, and totally excluded from political power via unrestrained gerrymandering; in Armagh there were 68,000 Protestants and 56,000 Catholics, yet the council was 75% Protestant. Despite this, the industrial clout of Belfast and greater economic strength of Northern Ireland made for most Catholics moving over the border unappealing. During World War II, Belfast boomed both for its strategic importance in protecting the Irish Sea and its shipbuilding; between 1939 and 1945 its yards produced 123 merchant ships and 140 warships, including six aircraft carriers. Beginning in 1943, Basil Brooke outdid Craig’s record, serving as Unionist prime minister for twenty years until 1963. He was known for his vitriolic anti-Catholic speeches and deep distrust of Ulster's minority. He was followed in office by Terence O'Neill, the first prime minister of Northern Ireland to try to distance himself from the Protestant triumphalism. He offered a friendlier face to his Catholic minority and to the south. It is a measure of how much ground needs to be made up that he caused something of a sensation by visiting a Catholic school. More significant, in January 1965 the prime ministers north and south made history by meeting together in Belfast, an all-too-brief détente. Events were forcing a pace of change faster than the Protestant community could cope with.

Inspired by the African-American Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements in the United States, in October 1968 a march was staged to publicise discrimination against Catholics in local housing in the city of Londonderry; or Derry to the Catholics, for in Northern Ireland even a place name can be controversial. Believing the march to be provocative to Protestants, the authorities instruct the police to halt it. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) did so with baton attacks and water cannon. Ireland was on the brink of **The Troubles**. In November, some limited reforms were rushed through by the Northern Irish parliament, but they were too little too late to stem a rising tide of sectarian unrest. In January 1969, another civil rights march was attacked by 200 Protestants at Burntollet Bridge south of Derry; nearby members of the RUC did little to prevent the violence. The IRA, long in decline, re-emerged to present themselves as the people’s protector against a hostile state. Their terrorist activities in turn prompt the formation of Protestant paramilitary groups. Acts of violence by both sides caused the British government to send troops to the province to maintain order, who were initially welcomed by the Catholic community. Yet it proved an almost impossible task, with riots and sectarian violence flaring up spasmodically over the next two years especially in Belfast and Derry. It was further hindered by the introduction of internment without trial of suspected paramilitaries with a strong bias towards the Catholic IRA; based on very faulty intelligence provided by the notoriously sectarian RUC. The early defining moment of The Troubles came in Derry on 30 January 1972, when British troops open fire on a banned civil rights march in which 26 unarmed civilians were shot and 14 died; subsequently known as **Bloody Sunday**. The incident was largely covered-up by the British government at the time; it was only in 2010 that the Saville Inquiry concluded that the killings were both "unjustified" and "unjustifiable". It marked a definite end to the British army and government being viewed by the Catholic community as neutral in the conflict. The IRA immediately upped their campaign to its greatest intensity, killing over 100 British soldiers in that year and devastating the centre of Belfast and Derry with car bomb attacks. In 1973, the British government dissolved the Northern Ireland parliament indefinitely, and imposed direct rule from Westminster. Yet, the British army found themselves in an unwinnable war with the IRA who soon took the fight to the British mainland, and in which they as often allied themselves with Protestant paramilitary groups, as tried to suppress them. An impasse had been reached that would take until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 to resolve; and perhaps not even then.

### France and the May 1968 Crisis

In a rare instance of stability of government in France, Charles de Gaulle was re-elected in 1965, on the back of the achievements of his first term: disengaging France from the Algerian War of Independence, and solid economic growth helped by membership of the European Common Market. De Gaulle could indulge in such luxuries as assertive foreign policy, like blocking Britain’s entry into the Common Market, distancing France from NATO out of fears that the United States had too much control, and traveling to Canada to call for greater autonomy for French-speaking Quebec. His foreign policy enjoyed broad domestic support, but beneath the surface, discontent was startlingly revealed by the eruption in May 1968, the **May 1968 Crisis** (May-June 1968). Recent sporadic disorder in the university districts of the Paris exploded on 3 May, when a rally of student radicals at the Sorbonne became violent and was broken up by the police. Things quickly escalated as barricades went up in the streets and students occupied the university as a huge Commune. The unrest spread to other universities and to labour strikes across France involving several million workers. De Gaulle seemed incapable of grappling with the crisis or of even understanding its nature. Not without reason for the causes were confused and often contradictory: from riling against conservative French society with the rise of the libertarian movement, to more tangible demands like improved working conditions for workers and the lack of professors and university facilities for students, to simple idealism and zeal inspired by the African-American Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements in the United States. Yet de Gaulle survived the crisis by appealing to the nervous moderates that they too would be swept away in a revolution led by extremists and anarchists. The repercussions of the May Crisis were considerable. The government made a series of concessions: higher wages for workers; university reform to modernise higher education; and a greater voice for students and unions in running their institutions. The economy had also suffered from the upheaval, and austerity measures were reintroduced to stabilise things. In 1969, de Gaulle called for fresh elections, and although he won in a landslide, May 1968 still led to his downfall. Perhaps in an attempt to reaffirm his leadership, he called a referendum on two minor constitutional amendments. He lost, and resigned the presidency in 1969. Yet he remains in powerful figure in French politics, with many political parties and leaders attempting to claim the Gaullist legacy.

### Germany and Ostpolitik

Until 1970, relations between the East and West German states were icy at best. West Germany had refused even to diplomatically recognise East Germany as a sovereign state, and propaganda barrages passed in each direction. This changed under Wet Germany Chancellor **Willy Brandt**, and the more flexible leadership of Erich Honecker in the east. Brandt’s government embarked upon a bold new policy known as the Ostpolitik. From 1970, various treaties helped to normalise relations between the two parts of Germany, leading to East Germany gaining admission to the United Nations in 1973, and the exchange of “permanent missions” in 1974, a step just short of full diplomatic relations; the East German head of state would eventually pay an official visit to West Germany in 1987. Improved relations were bitterly opposed by the conservative elements in West Germany, but it won Brandt the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971 and an increased majority in the 1972 elections. It meant that larger number of West Germans were allowed visit East Germany. It also benefited the East Germany economy greatly from increased trade with the West, although the material gap between the two Germanys remained wide. In East Germany, the acute housing shortage persisted, maintenance of roads and railways was often neglected, and the waiting period for the purchase of even crudely manufactured consumer items such as cars remained years.

### Franco’s Spain

The regime that Francisco Franco established in Spain in 1939 after the Spanish Civil War was an authoritarian state in which a vast secret police network spied on her citizens. Even Franco himself admitted in the mid-1940s that he had imprisoned 26,000 political prisoners, although historian estimate the figure as closer to 200,000. Tens-of-thousands of the children of Franco's victims simply disappeared, probably to child trafficking and illegal adoption. Meanwhile, the regime made Catholicism the only tolerated religion, banned other political parties and labour unions, and promoted economic self-sufficiency policies. He also banned the Catalan and Basque languages outside the home, forbade Catalan and Basque names for newborns, and even traditional dance was forbidden; this would prompt the surge of separatist movements that have dogged Spain ever since. Though he was sympathetic to the Axis powers, Franco largely stayed neutral during World War II. Until after the war, Spain was largely diplomatically, economically and culturally isolated from the outside world. This began to thaw as the Cold War heated up, with Spain gaining admission to the United Nations in 1953, and gaining military and economic aid from the United States in return for the construction three US military bases on her soil. Yet British Gibraltar remained a thorn in Franco’s side, and he gained some support for its return in the United Nations. During the 1960s, Spain began imposing restrictions on Gibraltar, culminating in the closure of the border in 1969, which was not fully reopened until 1985. In the 1960s, the regime began to relax its control of Spain: some of the restraints on press censorship were removed, some free-market reforms were introduced; and protests became more commonplace. The 60s also saw the birth of the tourist industry in Spain, and it began to catch-up economically with its European neighbours. As Franco’s health began to decline, he increasingly stepped-back from day-to-day political affairs, and named Prince Juan Carlos as his successor in 1969, whom he believed would maintain his authoritarian apparatus as king. Yet, two days after Franco’s death from a series of heart attacks in 1975, King Juan Carlos I set about dismantling Franco’s regime and began the Spanish transition to democracy.

### Soviet Union and the Prague Spring

After the downfall of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964, **Leonid Brezhnev** (1964-1982) gradually emerged as the dominant leader of the Soviet Union. The care Brezhnev took to reach decisions by consensus with the Politburo resulted in sustained political stability within the country, and he would retain the leadership for 18 years. Yet his hostility to reform and cultivation of cronyism also ushered in a period of pervasive corruption and socio-economic stagnation. Internal problems were further compounded by an enormous arms build-up that would eventually see the Soviet Union acquire nuclear parity with the United States by the mid-1970s. As heavy industry was prioritised, and the arms industry comprised 12.5% of the nation's GNP, Soviet consumer goods were increasingly neglected. On the world stage, Brezhnev pushed hard to relax Cold War tensions, but despite such diplomatic gestures, his regime presided over an aggressive foreign policy characterised by the response to the **Prague Spring** of 1968. Of all the Eastern Bloc, Czechoslovakia had long been the most totally obedient to Moscow, to the point that her economy was focused entirely on providing for Russia’s needs, leading to dramatically declining standards of living. In early 1968, Alexander Dubček came to power in Czechoslovakia, and introduced a reform program that he called "*socialism with a human face*", including some freedom of the press, limits to the power of the secret police, and improved working conditions. Although Brezhnev was initially supported by Dubček, the people of Czechoslovakia, once given a taste of reform, began to demand more and faster. The Soviet leadership became increasingly alarmed and fearful that political liberalisation would spread to other Eastern Bloc counties. In August 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia with 200,000 troops and 2,000 tanks. Dubček called upon his people not to resist. There were only sporadic acts of violence, but a great deal of civil disobedience that continued for eight months. Under new leader Gustáv Husák, Czechoslovakia was returned to a strict regime of Communism. The reaction to the Prague Spring deteriorated the Cold War détente, but with the West preoccupied by the Vietnam War, it was only brief, and in 1972 the SALT I Treaty was signed by the United States and Soviet Union limiting the number of strategic ballistic missile. The culmination of this era of cooperation between the Soviet Union and United States came in July 1975, when the Apollo spacecraft docked with the Soyuz space-station and the historic first handshake in space through the open hatch.

### Middle East and the Arab-Israeli Wars

Israel had been on a war footing with its neighbours ever since the First Arab–Israeli War (1948). After the escalation of Suez Crisis (1956), tensions in the region gradually returned to their usual simmer. Then in the mid-1960s, Israel began to use canals connected to the Sea of Galilee as fresh water reservoir for her entire country. Many countries in the Middle East were outraged at this over-exploitation of what they saw as a shared resource. In response, Syria began to divert rivers in their territory away from the Sea of Galilee, and exchange border clashes with Israel. Abdel Nasser of Egypt could not tolerated Syria becoming the main aggressors against the Israelis, and see his leadership in the Arab world slip away. He bullied Jordan into joining an Egyptian / Syrian military alliance, and began making increasingly bellicose threats against Israel. In 1967, Nasser ordered United Nations peacekeepers who had been in the region since the Suez Crisis out of Sinai, and a first step in preparation for war. Yet it was the Israeli who took the initiative. With very long hostile borders, preemptive attack had become an important part of Israel’s defensive strategy. On 5 June 1968, Israel staged a sudden series of incredibly well coordinated airstrikes against Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian airfields; the **Six Days War** (5-10 June 1967). Every airbase within range of Israel was destroyed, as well as 451 aircraft. Israel lost just 19 aircraft in the operation, and had gained absolute air-supremacy over the region. They would use this to great advantage to be more mobile and to project their relatively few forces over wider distances. In the south, the Egyptian army had developed plans for a relatively defensive war, but President Nasser insisted on a more offensive strategy. The redeployment caused chaos in the Egyptian army, which the Israelis exploited brilliantly. Once the Israelis managed to break-through the Egyptian forward defences, the Egyptian army was always on the back foot. After just four days on 8 June, Nasser accepted a cease fire, with the Israelis having captured the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula up to the east bank of the Suez Canal. With the Egyptian campaign going well, on 5 June the Israelis threw their reserves into battle in the east against the Jordanians in eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank. While the Jordanians had a well-trained army, in order to keep them in the fight, Nasser blatantly lied to King Hussein of Jordan that the Israeli airforce had been severely damaged during the opening air-offensive. It would prove disastrous for Jordan. Caught unprepared, many Jordanian armoured division were destroyed from the air by Israeli close support missions. After fierce and often heroic fighting on both sides, Israeli forces drove the Jordanians out of East Jerusalem and most of the West Bank. On 7 June, King Hussein, betrayed by false Egyptian intelligence and empty promises of Syrian support, accepted a cease-fire. As things were going badly for Egypt and Jordan, the Syrians, who had largely prompted the war, sat in defensively on the Golan Heights. On 9 June, the Israelis rapidly recycled their available resources from other fronts, to the northern front. Just a year after the Ba'ath Party military coup in Syria, the Syrians were more concerned with preserving their army than retaining the heights. They did not commit their full forces to the conflict, and after a day of gruelling fighting on the harsh slopes and difficult country, the Israelis captured the Golan Heights. On 10 June, Syria and Israel agreed to a cease-fire. In an extraordinary six days, Israel had defeated three Arab armies, and seized the Gaza Strip, the Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, massive buffer zones around Israel. The United Nations urged Israel to give up some of its territory, in return for recognition and peace. Yet the Arab states still refused to recognise Israel, and Israel refused to return any territory, as both side became entrenched, as famously enshrined in the Arab League's Khartoum Resolution, "no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it..."

Nowhere was this hostility more evident that in the new border with Egypt, the Suez Canal, where sporadic fighting virtually closed the shipping lane. In order to gain anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, who succeeded Nasser on his death in 1970, forged ever closer relations with the Soviet Union. On 6 October 1973, the holiest day of the Jewish year, Yom Kippur, Egypt launched a surprised amphibious attack across the Suez Canal; the **Yom Kippur War** (6-25 October 1973). Israeli prime minister Golda Meir was briefly forewarned of the attack, but she was determined that this time Israel would be seen as the victim in this conflict. Within hours the Egyptians had progressed a mile into Sinai. The Israeli aircraft and tanks were immediately scrambled but the new Egyptian weapons caused havoc. Meanwhile in the north at the same time, the Syrians launched a massive attack with over 1,200 tanks all across the defensive lines in the Golan Heights. Israel mobilised every reservist in the country and after two days mount a counter attack. In the north the Syrians were pushed back, but in the south the Israeli counter offensive was halted. Yet a subsequent Egyptian advance to relieve their Syrian allies was also pushed back. The war turned with the arrival in Israel of masses of American supplies of fresh tanks and ammunition. On 17 October, the Israelis forced a crossing of the Suez Canal, cutting off Egyptians on the east bank. On 22 October the United Nations called for a cease fire, largely negotiated between the United States and Soviet Union. Both side agreed to it, but on the ground the Israelis ignored the cease-fire pressing on to secure more of the western side of the canal. The Soviet Union was outraged, and threatened to intervene directly. The United States responded by putting its nuclear forces on alert. This sudden escalation made its mark, and on 25 October the Israelis finally heeded the cease fire they had signed. The war was over, with no clear victor. The Israelis had made an astonishing military comeback and arguably won the war, but the over-confidence they had gained from the Six Days War was shattered. The Egyptians had crossed the Suez Canal, restoring Arab pride and giving President Sadat the confidence to make a spectacular bid for peace. In November 1977, he became the first Arab leader to officially recognise Israel, and in exchange Israel agreed to eventually withdraw from the Sinai Peninsula; the **Camp David Accords**. The Arab world was horrified by Sadat's efforts to make a separate peace with Israel, and he would eventually be assassinated in 1981 before the last Israeli soldier left the Sinai.

Yet neither the Six Days War nor the Yom Kippur War resolved the fundamental dispute between the Israelis and the Arabs. The Arab states realised that they could not militarily defeat Israel, and instead used oil price as a weapon against supporters of Israel leading to the 1973 Oil Crisis. Meanwhile, Israel’s “occupation” of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights containing large Muslim Arab majorities led to their own problems; they have never been internationally recognised. Although their status has subtly changed over the years, they remain today under Israeli military occupation. More than 50 years later, the best that legal scholars can say about the areas is that they are disputed, and Israelis do not feel any more secure than they did before the war on June 1967.

Meanwhile in September 1972 at the Summer Olympics in Munich, eleven members of the Israeli Olympic team were taken hostage by a Palestinian terrorist group; the **Munich Massacre**. After a tense stand-off during which two of the hostages were killed, the Palestinians and their hostages were taken to a military airport outside Munich. Yet West Germany never intended to let terrorist take-off. A rescue was attempted but tragically it was botched. During a fierce firefight on the tarmac, all the hostages were killed as well as five of the terrorist. The three surviving Palestinians were arrested but subsequently released the next month following the hijacking of a Lufthansa passenger-plane. The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad responded to the release with a covert operation known as codenamed Wrath of God, in which Palestinians suspected of involvement in the massacre were tracked down and assassinated. Munich also gave us our contemporary sense of international terrorism as highly theatrical symbolic acts of violence to bring international attention to specific political grievances.

### Libya and Gaddafi

After World War II, the future of Libya, a former Italian colonial possession, gave rise to long discussions. Finally desperately poor Libya was granted her independence in 1951, while retaining close ties to the West. The country’s fortunes were abruptly transformed by the discovery of significant oil reserves in 1959, that changed Libya over the subsequent decade from an economic backwater into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Yet the country was far from immune from the rise of passionate Pan-Arab nationalism. Inspired by Abdel Nasser’s coup in Egypt, in September 1969, a bloodless military coup led by a little-known but charismatic 27-year-old Muammar al-Gaddafi overthrew the king and seized power as essentially a military dictatorship. Fervently anti-Western, Colonel Gaddafi’s regime closed British and American military bases, deported thousands of Italian and Jewish settlers, and took control of foreign-owned oil fields. He reinstated traditional Islamic laws such as prohibition of alcoholic beverages and gambling, but also liberated women and launched social programs that improved the standard of living in Libya. During his 42 year reign, Qaddafi's ruling style was oppressive, often using highly eccentric antics to distract from his brutality: he had a cadre of female bodyguards, erected a tent to stay in when he travelled abroad, and dressed in outlandish outfits. He also became an international pariah by financing a wide variety of terrorist groups worldwide, including Palestinian guerrillas, the IRA in Ireland, and Basque separatists in Spain. Despite expressed concern for Arab unity, Gaddafi’s relations with most Arab and African countries were often poor, leaving Libya increasingly isolated.

### India

Jawaharlal Nehru died in 1964, and though he had groomed his daughter **Indira Gandhi** as his successor, his party instead chose Lal Bahadur Shastri. Almost immediately after Shastri took office, India and Pakistan again went to war over Kashmir; the Second Kashmir War (August-September 1965). The seventeen-day war caused thousands of casualties on both sides, but without any definitive outcome or alteration of the Kashmir border. Shastri was hailed as a hero in Delhi, but, days after the peace agreement was signed, he suffered a fatal heart attack. In 1966, Indira Gandhi’s soft-spoken personality masked an iron will and considerable political prowess that saw her elbow her rivals aside to become India’s prime minister. Several years of poor summer monsoon rains had conspired with wartime spending to undermine India’s economy, forcing Indira to devalue the rupee, creating much hardship for Indian businesses. Despite a rocky start, she gained enormous popularity from the success of the Green Revolution that transformed India into a country self-sufficient in feeding her own population.

In 1971, India fought her third war with Pakistan in support of self-rule for East Pakistan or Bangladesh; the **Indo-Pakistani War of 1971**. Tensions between West and East Pakistan reached snapping point when the pro-independence party of East Pakistan led by Sheikh Mujib won 167 out of 313 seats in the combined parliament in 1970. In March 1971, Pakistani leader General Yayha Khan, who had succeeded Ayub Khan in 1969, imposed martial law in East Pakistan. Most of the East Pakistanis troops in the army mutinied. Mujib was quickly arrested, but the army failed to cow the population into submission, and violent clashes and numerous civilian massacres might have gone on for years had not India decided to intervene in early December. Half a million Indian troops supported by overwhelming air supremacy were ordered into East Pakistan. Outnumbered and operating in territory with a hostile population, the West Pakistan army surrendered after just 13 days. In the aftermath, Mujib was released and flew home to a hero’s welcome; in January 1972 he became the first prime minister of an independent Bangladesh. The Indian victory was so quick that the war ended before the arrival of two aircraft carriers from the United States and Britain deployed to support Pakistan, against the wishes of the United Nations; the US sought to build bridges with China to create rift between the Soviet Union. In one of the most ironic moments of the Cold War, the West’s two leading democracies tried to intervene in support of a country that the overwhelming majority of historians accept were responsible for one of the five largest genocides in the twentieth century. The war led to a brief deterioration of relations between India and the United States. By 1972, India had launched a nuclear program of its own, detonating its first successful nuclear bomb test in May 1974, joining the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France, and China as a state with nuclear weapons.

### China and Mao's Cultural Revolution

Though he remained the most powerful individual in China, Chairman Mao Zedong had personally lost considerable prestige from the monumental failure of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). Mao became convinced that the Communist Party and China itself was headed down the road to complacency, and of the need for a revival of her revolutionary spirit. Chairman Mao began the **Cultural Revolution** in May 1966 with the stated aim of imposing “true” Communist orthodoxy and purging the remnants of bourgeois and traditional elements from Chinese society. As the movement escalated, students formed the Red Guard, a paramilitary groups that attacked and humiliated China’s intellectuals and ordinary citizens deemed counter-revolutionaries, as well as the destruction of religious and cultural artefacts and sites. Daily life involved the shouting slogans and quotes from Mao’s *Little Red Book* published from 1964. Many cities reached the brink of anarchy, and the Chinese economy plummeted. Mao also took the opportunity to purge many prominent political leaders from the top echelons of the party. Yet the chaos of the Cultural Revolution could not last, and worried by the increasing violence, the army forced the Red Guards off the streets in late 1969. The Cultural Revolution is often seen as a greatly disruptive period for China, but some measures were taken to make the educational system less elitist, and force urban medical staffs to devote more effort to the needs of the peasants. It also saw the unprecedented elevation of Mao's personality cult. As the Cultural Revolution wound down, with Mao suffering a series of strokes from 1972, the political battle to determine who would inherit Mao’s legacy intensified. The power struggle tipped back and forth, nudged by Mao first this way, then that. By the time of Mao’s death at the age of 82 in 1976 from complications of Parkinson's disease, little-known Hua Guofeng was elevated to the premiership, a compromise candidate between the various factions after numerous purges. Chairman Mao Zedong is one of the most controversial individuals in modern world history. Revered by many as a great political and military mastermind who set the stage for China’s rise as a superpower, and condemned by others as an oppressive genocidal tyrant whose crimes led to the deaths of tens of millions of people.