Solitary traveler

I will give the long answer. I have slightly amended a reference of Nixon's: "the silent majority" to the silence of the majority. Nixon was besieged by protests against continuing the Vietnam war. Because he had concerns about the United States "losing" its first war, as well as aspects of "domino theory", he insisted on negotiating "peace with honour." And because the North Vietnamese were slow to offer the "honour", Nixon widened the war by authorizing the illegal bombing of Laos and Cambodia, there the roads bringing logistics from North Vietnam to the South were located. This bombing led, in part, to the unauthorized release of the Pentagon Papers, a secret History of the Vietnam War written in part by members of the Rand Corporation. That history was not favourable to the U.S. administration's public accounts of the war and its release gave full vent to Nixon's sense of paranoid embattlement. He created the "Plumbers" to curtail such leaks, and then used them in the political arena against the Democrats. It was Plumbers caught in the National Offices of the Democratic Party in the Watergate Hotel which began the series of steps to Nixon's bitter end as President. But while President, and attempting to resist the pressure for a "dishonourable" end to the war, he, or his writers, invented the term "the silent majority" to bolster his position with the support of Americans who were not showing any support... the silent majority who he claimed were in his corner. Brian

I have to be nit-pickey, because your poems are so good, I have to look for slight errors, for perfection, Leonard! _____________________________________________________ Income-tax forms should be more realistic by allowing the taxpayer to list "Uncle Sam" as a dependent Anonymous