hi guyss!! happy pride and such! sorry its been so long i know i said id update this blog semi regularly but school got like intense loll. but uhm! anyway! 1969! president sorensen!
yeah so basically first out of the gate he was elected to deal with vietnam so thats what he would get to first, laying out terms for a total end to the war by 1970, with an internationally supervised ceasefire and reconstruction effort. when anderson went to paris then to propose all this, he found the negotiations with the reds went quite smoothly. in fact, they were absolutely giddy to sign. the only party that was less keen on the deal was then, south vietnam. president thieu refused to sign any of it, being fully aware that the reds intended to break the ceasefire as soon as the time was right. in response sorensen threatened to cut all military aid immediately, to which thieu would famously respond "now or in a year, what does it matter?!". this standoff would last until anderson was able to give thieu enough concessions from the north (whether they were truly meaningful is another story) to get him to begrudgingly sign the deal. and so finally in early october there was an agreement signed that sorensen could point to and say we're bringing our boys back. but of course, on everyone but the hippies and radicals' minds was "at what cost?".
anderson in an interview about the paris peace conference, 1977
though sorensen and his crew were mostly focused on the war there was also like things happening at home. the president's main domestic push was on the american opportunity act, championed by the administration as a boon for workers and the middle class but derided by the gop as more deficit spending that will balloon inflation. of course while the president was the main proponent of the bill, given his distraction with the peace accords, he mostly had to rely on congressional allies. those congressional allies were up against tough odds though because the gop's senate whip billy dane would be a tough nut to crack. senator dane was able to ensure not a single defection from his camp, and so it would be the southern democratic caucus in play. after all, the democrats could only suffer two defections if they wanted the bill to survive a filibuster. in the end, a call was made from byrd to sorensen and the bill passed on party lines, but everyone knew the president owed the south now.
bobby.
theres a few other things i should probably mention, uhm. yeah so the president also tried to pass an environmental bill, only to fail because of some out of touch rockefeller republican's speech making the bill seem much more radical than it really was, and soon after the "treehugger hippie bill" would flop, in a pretty big blow to the green movement. this was also the year that shot jack cartnell to relative fame as he wrote an infrastructure bill that was called a "work of art" by budget hawks across the country. and finally of course, i cant forget about the whole reason june is pride month. on june 28 1969, the nypd conducted a police raid on the stonewall inn, a gay bar that catered to and was popular with the most marginalized of the city's lgbt community. most of the patrons had no where to go and knew being arrested would effectively be the end of their lives. so they resisted, and police would eventually lose control of the situation, leading to hundreds of lgbt new yorkers marching the streets in what would become known as the stonewall riots. the demonstrations would last until july 3 and hundreds more would join their ranks over those next 5 days. the stonewall riots are credited with shedding a light on the oppression lgbt americans faced, and would spark the start of the gay liberation movement properly.
the police raid on stonewall inn