Matthew Dallek
Matthew Dallek is associate professor at George Washington University’s Graduate School of Political Management and author, most recently, of Defenseless Under the Night: The Roosevelt Years and the Origins of Homeland Security.
Articles From This Author
RFK: What Would Have Happened if He Had Lived?
Historians have long wondered what would have happened had Robert F. Kennedy lived. What if he had continued his 1968 presidential campaign 50 years ago? Could he have forged a working-class political coalition that might have cauterized the nation’s racial wounds, arrested the ...read more
Was 1968 America’s Bloodiest Year in Politics?
Two short years after 1968, the year the United States endured a series of cataclysmic episodes of politically tinged bloodletting, historian Richard Hofstadter observed that “Americans certainly have a reason to inquire whether…they are not a people of exceptional violence.” ...read more
LBJ Announced He Wouldn’t Run Again. Political Chaos Ensued
Fifty years ago, on March 31, 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson appeared on national television and announced that he was partially halting the U.S. bombing of Vietnam, and that he had decided not to seek his party’s nomination for president. “There is division in the American house now,” ...read more
How the Army’s Cover-Up Made the My Lai Massacre Even Worse
On the morning of March 16, 1968, U.S. Army soldiers entered a Vietnamese hamlet named My Lai 4 on a search-and-destroy mission in a region controlled by Viet Cong forces that the Army referred to as “Pinkville.” The soldiers didn’t encounter any enemy troops. Yet they proceeded ...read more
How the Tet Offensive Shocked Americans into Questioning if the Vietnam War Could be Won
From the time U.S. combat troops began shipping over to Vietnam in 1965 to fight the spread of communism, Americans weren’t quite sure what to make of the war playing out in jungles and rice paddies halfway across the world. But in the eyes of millions of Americans, one thing ...read more