1971 War Quotes & Sayings

The Circus-Circus is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the sixth Reich. The ground floor is full of gambling tables, like all the other casinos ... but the place is about four stories high, in the style of a circus tent, and all manner of strange County-Fair/Polish Carnival madness is going on up in this space. — Hunter S. Thompson

Bradlee had been recruited with the idea that the New York Times need nod exercise absolute preeminence in American journalism.
That vision had suffered a setback in 1971 when the Times published the Pentagon Papers. Though the Post was the second news organization to obtain a copy of the secret study of the Vietnam war, Bradlee noted that 'there was blood on every word' of the Times' initial stories. Bradlee could convey his opinions with a single disgusted glance at an indolent reporter or editor.
Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward — Carl Bernstein

ON AUGUST 15, 1971, United States President Richard Nixon announced that foreign-held U.S. dollars would no longer be convertible into gold - thus stripping away the last vestige of the international gold standard.1 This was the end of a policy that had been effective since 1931, and confirmed by the Bretton Woods accords at the end of World War II: that while United States citizens might no longer be allowed to cash in their dollars for gold, all U.S. currency held outside the country was to be redeemable at the rate of $35 an ounce. By doing so, Nixon initiated the regime of free-floating currencies that continues to this day. — David Graeber

Richard Nixon had made a fatal error in ignoring the politico-meteorological dimension when he announced the expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia on April 30, 1970. The invasion of Laos, on the other hand, happened in February 1971, and the campuses were quiet. Who wants to stage a walkout in February? — Rebecca Goldstein

I would say that the Pentagon Papers case of 1971 - in which the government tried to block the The New York Times and The Washington Post that they obtained from a secret study of how we got involved in the war in Vietnam - that is probably the most important case. — Floyd Abrams

Hillary Clinton will travel to Vietnam with the president this Friday. It's a fact that at the height of the war in 1971, she tried to enlist in the Marines, but they turned her down. Apparently we weren't that mad at the Viet Cong. — Argus Hamilton

Public service announcements were first created by the Ad Council during World War II to get Rosie to work and to tighten loose lips. In 1971, on the second Earth Day, the world met "the crying Indian," played by Iron Eyes Cody. The famous anti-pollution ad, which showed Cody paddling a canoe and watching motorists litter, effectively gave the new ecology movement a huge boost. As it turns out, Cody was of Italian descent (real name Espera DeCorti), but he appeared in hundreds of movies and TV shows as a Native American and denied his European ancestry until his death in 1999. — Mark Jacob

If the war had a noble purpose, it was this - to end the inhumanity those photographs showed. While India rarely spoke about its imperative as the moral one, and few people steeped in realpolitik can shed their cynicism when a politician speaks in moral terms, and the intervention certainly suited India's strategic interests, the fact remains that in the annals of humanitarian interventions, few were as swift, successful, purpose-driven and with humanitarian goals as the Indian intervention to liberate Bangladesh. India went in when it was attacked, and left before its troops became unpopular. — Salil Tripathi

I was hitchhiking to Washington to an anti-war demonstration in 1971, and I was in an accident, and that's how I became disabled; that's how I came into disability, in a sense. — Simi Linton

When President Nixon declared war on drugs on June 17, 1971, about 110 people per 100,000 in the population were incarcerated. Today, we have 2-3 million prisoners: 743 people per 100,000 in the population. The U.S. has 5% of the world's population, but 25% of its prisoners. As Senator Jim Webb once put it, Either we are home to the most evil people on earth or we are doing something different and vastly counterproductive. — Maia Szalavitz