I was a 19-year-old college student in the fall of 1968, when Richard Nixon made a campaign promise to bring “an honorable end to the war in Vietnam,” if he won that year’s presidential election.

Nixon captured the White House and became the nation’s 37th president by narrowly defeating Hubert Humphrey on Nov. 7, 1968.

He soon broke that campaign promise, however.

Instead of ending the war and bringing the troops home, he secretly expanded it into Laos and Cambodia and then launched several more years of incessant aerial bombing. Year after year the war raged on, with tragic consequences for everyone involved.

During the fighting that took place in the four-plus years preceding the 1973 peace accords, an additional 22,000 U.S. soldiers and 500,000 Asians would die.

For what?

According to most historians of the Vietnam War, the peace terms of January 1973 were almost exactly the same that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong had offered Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, in 1969.

Like millions of other Americans, I was deeply affected by the continuation of the war.

At first, like so many others, I took the new president at his word.

More than a little frightened and disgusted by the spiraling warfare that had followed the “Tet Offensive” and the “My Lai Massacre” of 1968, I drove from the University of Massachusetts to Washington to watch Nixon’s inauguration in January of 1969.

I’ve never forgotten that day – or the antiwar protesters who surged through the nation’s capital.

Later that year, the first-ever draft lottery got underway, and my birthdate was chosen as No. 41 – which meant I would be drafted and most likely sent to Vietnam as soon as I graduated in June 1970.

I found myself struggling with difficult choices.

While many of my fellow students were thinking seriously about fleeing to Canada or even paying a doctor to make up a phony illness that might provide them with a draft deferment, I felt compelled to fulfill my military obligation.

But I also knew that if were drafted, I’d almost certainly end up being sent to Vietnam.

While I wrestled with all of this in May, 1970, four student Vietnam War protesters were shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University and 4.5 million college students went on strike to protest the expansion of the war into Cambodia.

Like many, I was appalled, disgusted and saddened.

In the end, however, I decided to enlist in the U.S. Army Reserve.

At the end of my six-year obligation, I received an Honorable Discharge in 1976. During those tumultuous years, I watched the social mayhem that had been triggered by Nixon’s betrayal of America’s fighting men and women.

All too often, they returned to “The World” to find themselves mocked and despised by a society that had lost most of its faith in America’s pursuit of the war and most of its trust in a duplicitous president.

That same president’s fate would be decided in the summer of 1974, of course, when he was driven from office by the nation’s outrage over the Watergate scandal.

As many historians have suggested, today’s growing distrust of the federal government (and of politicians in general) can be traced back to the deceit that followed Richard Nixon’s first election to the White House, 50 years ago this week.

Fueled by such scandals as “Iran-Contra” during the Ronald Reagan administration of the 1980s and the “Monica Lewinsky Affair” and subsequent impeachment trial under President Bill Clinton a decade later, the decline in political trust has reached new lows since the election of President Trump in 2016.

Indeed, that precipitous decline has now reached the point where only 18 percent of Americans believe they can trust the federal government, according to a recent poll by the authoritative Pew Research Center.

As each day brings new reports of the political infighting and dishonest-deal-making which threaten to destabilize our country, I worry about my two adult children and five grandchildren.

Fifty years after Richard Nixon’s Vietnam War betrayal triggered the decline in public trust, I’m concerned it may soon destroy the values we treasure most – with consequences impossible to predict.

 

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