How much involvement did the US have in the Vietnam conflict after Jan. 27 1973? Serious question, not rhetorical.
USA bombed the hell out of Cambodia as the Khmer Rogue closed in on Phom Penh. I was wrong in my assertion but I feel like McGovern was more of an embodiment of someone who actually opposed the Vietnam War while I feel as if Nixon did it simply for political salvage as he had no problem sabotaging the previous peace talks for political gain.
Plus, McGovern wasn't Nixon. That's good enough for me. But too bad his own party killed him.
The irony is Nixon called McGovern the candidate of "acid, amnesty, and abortion" and we got two of those by the end of the decade anyway.
Ironically it wasn't Nixon who started it.. it was McGovern's own VP candidate Thomas Eagleton who himself also crashed the campaign with that statement plus his hospitalization scandal and subsequent McGovern gaffes.
From Wikipedia on Thomas Eagleton.
On April 25, 1972, George McGovern won the Massachusetts Democratic primary, and conservative journalist Robert Novak phoned Democratic politicians around the country. On April 27, 1972, Novak reported in a column his conversation with an unnamed Democratic senator about McGovern.
Novak quoted the senator as saying "The people don't know McGovern is for amnesty, abortion, and legalization of pot. Once middle America — Catholic middle America, in particular — finds this out, he's dead." Because of the column McGovern became known as the candidate of "amnesty, abortion, and acid."
On July 15, 2007, several months after Eagleton's death, Novak said on Meet the Press that the unnamed senator was Eagleton. Novak was accused in 1972 of manufacturing the quote, but stated that to rebut the criticism, he took Eagleton to lunch after the campaign and asked whether he could identify him as the source; the senator refused. "Oh, he had to run for re-election", said Novak, "the McGovernites would kill him if they knew he had said that." Political analyst Bob Shrum says that Eagleton would never have been selected as McGovern's running mate if it had been known at the time that Eagleton was the source of the quote. "Boy, do I wish he would have let you publish his name. Then he never would have been picked as vice president", said Shrum. "Because the two things, the two things that happened to George McGovern — two of the things that happened to him — were the label you put on him, number one, and number two, the Eagleton disaster. We had a messy convention, but he could have, I think in the end, carried eight or 10 states, remained politically viable. And Eagleton was one of the great train wrecks of all time."