Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"In so many ways, symbolic as well as practical, it would be difficult to exaggerate the impacts of the lengthy American campaign in Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia upon the international power system—or upon the national psyche of the American people themselves, most of whose perceptions of their country’s role in the world still remain strongly influenced by that conflict, albeit in different ways. The fact that this was a war fought by an “open society”—and made the more open because of revelations like the Pentagon Papers, and by the daily television and press reportage of the carnage and apparent futility of it all; that this was the first war which the United States had unequivocally lost, that it confounded the victorious experiences of the Second World War . . . That it coincided with, and in no small measure helped to cause, the fissuring of a consensus in American society about the nation’s goals and priorities, was attended by inflation, unprecedented student protests and inner city disturbances, and was followed in turn by the Watergate crisis, which discredited the presidency itself for a time;" [Kennedy: Great Powers, p. 404-5]