Describe the escalation of the Vietnam War and the growth of the antiwar movement, and explain why 1968 marked a turning point in American politics.
American troop levels in Vietnam rose from a few thousand advisors under Kennedy to over 500,000 by 1968 under Johnson. The draft, with deferments that fell more heavily on working-class and Black draftees early in the war, fueled a growing antiwar movement on college campuses and beyond, part of a broader "counterculture" that rejected mainstream values around authority, war, and consumer conformity, expressed through music, communal experiments, and mass gatherings like the 1969 Woodstock festival. Officials kept projecting steady military progress, opening a "credibility gap" between public assurances and the war's actual difficulty. In January 1968, the Tet Offensive -- coordinated Viet Cong and North Vietnamese attacks across dozens of South Vietnamese cities during a traditional holiday truce -- was a clear military defeat for the attackers but a profound political and psychological shock for Americans, since it starkly contradicted official optimism; veteran news anchor Walter Cronkite's on-air assessment that the war was "mired in stalemate" reportedly convinced Johnson he had lost mainstream American support.
1968 then unfolded as one of the most turbulent years in American history. Johnson announced on March 31 that he would not seek reelection. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis on April 4, triggering riots in over a hundred cities. Robert F. Kennedy, campaigning for the Democratic nomination partly on racial and economic justice, was assassinated in June just after winning California's primary. That August, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago descended into violent clashes between police and antiwar protesters outside the hall, broadcast live on national television. Richard Nixon won the presidency that November, appealing to a "silent majority" of Americans he believed were exhausted by war, protest, and disorder alike -- a single year had shattered the uneasy domestic consensus that had held since World War II.
Mastery looks like: They can explain the Tet Offensive's military-versus-political significance, sequence at least three major events of 1968, and describe the antiwar movement's and counterculture's basic character.
Common stumbles: Assuming Tet was a straightforward battlefield defeat for the U.S. because of its political impact, rather than understanding it was a military failure for the attackers that succeeded politically regardless.