En janvier 1969, lorsque Melvin Laird devient secrétaire à la Défense, son département doit faire face à la guerre du Vietnam. Il se retrouve avec un poste en crise de crédibilité, un département qui draine une grande partie du budget national et un puissant mécontentement populaire qui exige que les choses changent. Laird est devant un défi de taille. Alors que la seule option réellement mise de l'avant par le gouvernement Nixon est celle des négociations entreprises à Paris avec le Nord Vietnam, Laird réussit à influencer Nixon afin que soit appliqué en parallèle un nouveau programme qu'il nomme la vietnamisation. Ce programme vise à assurer le retrait des troupes américaines du Vietnam, indépendamment des résultats des négociations, en équipant et en formant les forces sud-vietnamiennes pour qu'elles prennent en charge la poursuite des combats. Afin d'assurer la pérennité de l'État sud-vietnamien après le départ des États-Unis, ce programme est aussi doublé d'objectifs civils (politiques, économiques et sociaux). L'historiographie de cette époque laisse généralement de côté l'apport du secrétaire à la Défense dans les évènements entourant la fin de la guerre du Vietnam. Elle concentre plutôt son attention sur les négociations de Paris en soulignant l'influence et l'importance qu'eut Henri Kissinger sur leur conclusion bienheureuse en 1973. Grâce aux nombreuses monographies sur le sujet, aux mémoires publiés par les politiciens, conseillers et militaires de l'époque, mais surtout grâce aux archives personnelles de Melvin Laird lui-même, nous nous proposons de démontrer la grande influence qu'eut Laird sur le président Nixon et sur les évènements ayant mené à la fin de la guerre du Vietnam. En passant en revue son long parcours professionnel, débutant au Sénat du Wisconsin en 1946, nous avons voulu faire ressortir l'évolution de sa pensée et de ses positions politiques, ainsi que retracer les liens qu'il a entretenus avec Richard Nixon au cours des deux décennies précédents leur arrivée au pouvoir. Ensuite, nous nous sommes concentrés sur l'année 1969, alors qu'en tant que secrétaire à la Défense, Laird travaille avec acharnement pour que soit mise en place la vietnamisation. Nous avons constaté le rôle déterminant qu'a tenu ce programme dans le retrait des troupes américaines du Vietnam, réalisant concrètement le désengagement américain, pendant que les négociations de Paris demeuraient dans l'impasse. Ce programme, qui fut institué comme la nouvelle stratégie des États-Unis au Vietnam, a permis de satisfaire une partie de l'opinion publique américaine, donnant le temps nécessaire au président et à Kissinger de poursuivre les négociations. La vietnamisation a donné au Sud Vietnam la force requise pour tenir tête au Nord Vietnam. De cette résistance ont découlé les accords de Paris ayant mené à la fin de la guerre, permettant ainsi aux États-Unis de tourner la page. Grâce à cette étude, il a été possible de cerner l'influence à long terme de la vietnamisation sur l'histoire américaine. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Melvin Laird, guerre du Vietnam, vietnamisation, Richard Nixon, Doctrine Nixon.

The purpose of this study is to investigate a contemporary model of argument analysis and pass judgment on the value of employing the Toulmin model in the analysis of complex arguments. This study investigates the nature of the model in its working relationship to variou arguments chosen for analysis, and form this process conclusions are drawn as to the model’s value and workability

In 1969, President Richard Nixon declared that the “spiraling costs” of medical care constituted a “crisis.” Medicare and Medicaid had been passed only four years previously, and had dramatically changed the way Americans accessed and paid for medical care. The ensuing three decades ushered in a renewed period of advocacy for health care reform with costs remaining a consistent focus. Proponents for national health insurance framed health as a human right emphasizing equitable access. Those advocating for private health insurance touted the power of the marketplace to contain costs through competition and freedom of choice. Throughout the debates, health reform advocates, insurance industry representatives, medical providers, and legislators repeatedly referred to the “health consumer” as the potential benefactor of such reforms. But this ubiquitous term remained ambiguous. Who exactly was the “health consumer”? The contests over the rhetoric of the health consumer as an identity, its uses and political alignments, were engaged through print, in research, in organized campaigns, and in discrete individual interactions with health insurance and the health care system. These interconnected systems of power informed and were informed by the language used to describe them, in the sense of “structuring structures,” extending to economics and the consumer movement, social movements and civil rights. Thus the ideological orientations of the terms of the debate, focused on the “health consumer,” have shifted often and have continued to be contested in a dialectic relationship. This analysis therefore takes place at those intersections where health consumers as individuals have confronted the private, for-profit sphere by making claims for health consumer rights. The utility and ethical implications of commodification versus rights language have consistently been at the center of these opposing views. This dissertation examines the evolution of the dialectic dynamic of these two approaches to better understand how health consumer rights advocates have confronted challenges to include their voices in health care debates from the 1970s to the late 1980s at the local, state, and national levels. Specific sites include the Office of the Commissioner of Insurance and the Center for Public Representation, both located in Wisconsin, as well as the national grassroots organization Citizen Action and the local chapter Massachusetts Fair Share. Moving beyond binary understandings such as "patients" and "non-patients," or even the "patient/consumer," the health consumer identity blurs distinctions of inclusion and exclusion and dramatically expands the framing of "who counts" in health social movements. The health consumer thereby has remained a locus of contestation and potential rhetorical power that can inform the more political use of the term for making rights claims, as well as the more economic approach that advocates for free market principles. As such, it is readily co-opted in movement/counter-movement shifts in language and political alignment. Such contests and co-optation frame each chapter in this dissertation. Ultimately, health social movements and the dynamic, even equivocal orientation of the “health consumer” identity may play a determinative role in how to move forward with health care policy reform that seeks to provide all Americans with equitable access to wellness, rather than vying to purchase health.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the arguments used by Richard Nixon relative to the key issues in the 1968 presidential campaign. The objective is to record and illustrate the persuasive appeals employed. This analysis makes an attempt to reveal what of substance was said by Mr. Nixon.

In Chicago on July 28th, 1960, Richard M. Nixon, vice-president of the United States was nominated as Republican candidate for president. This took place two weeks after the Democrats in Los Angeles chose John F. Kennedy, United States senator from Massachusetts as their candidate. The nominations of these two men marked the beginning of an historic race for office - the 1960 presidential campaign. Beginning with Mr. Kennedy’s nomination in July and continuing until election day, the campaign lasted for over sixteen weeks. This was a campaign of firsts. It was the first time two men so young had run for president. The election of either would have put America’s youngest elected president into office. It was the first time either candidate had visited fifty states in the union during a campaign. In the field of communication, this campaign marked the beginning of an era. For the first time in history, the two presidential candidates faced each other in nationwide television debate. On November 8th, the voters of America went to the polls and elected John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate, president of the United States. The New York Times in an article which showed the popular vote margin to be 112,801 states that “it was the closest Presidential race in 76 years”. The electoral college gave Mr. Kennedy a lead of 81 electoral votes over Mr. Nixon. Speech-making played a vital role in the campaign from the beginning to the end. This study is directed specifically toward the speeches of the Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon.

the decades after World War II the United States became the most prosperous nation in the world. Yet, that prosperity and growth had a negative impact on the environmental quality of the nation. By the mid 1960s there was a rise in concern over environmental issues in the American public. Consequently, President Richard M. Nixon in his determination to give the American people what they sought decided to enact policies to bring the environmental crisis to an end. Among the environmental policies of the Nixon Administration was the Clean Air Act of 1970, a highly controversial piece of legislation that placed tough regulations on the automobile industry. Due to the significant role of the auto industry in the American economy, and Nixon's concerns over reelection, there were two major shifts in business/government relations during this era. The first one was characterized by determination to protect the environment with little attention to complaints from the industry. The second one was about protecting the profitability of the industry while giving little attention to environmental problems. / by Erwin Mauricio Escobar. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

This dissertation examines the political, social, and economic responses to the end of the Bretton Woods system from 1971-1988 in the United States. It offers a “pre-history” of globalization which focuses on a period when international economic entanglement became a question of serious political debate within the U.S., but before “globalization” became common parlance. Contemporaries referred to the world after Bretton Woods as newly characterized by “interdependence,” a concept which highlighted vulnerability to external economic forces and declining national autonomy. This dissertation argues that far from enthusiastically embracing market globalization in this period, U.S. policymakers worked to supervise and manage global integration, and insulate workers, consumers, businesses, and themselves from the full force of the world economy. Restoring domestic social conflict to the center of our understanding of international economic policy, it investigates how labor unions and federations like the UAW and the AFL-CIO, business lobbying organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce, and officials in the Treasury, Congress, and the Federal Reserve conflicted over their response to growing economic entanglement deep into the 1980s. It excavates a history of protectionism, planning, subsidies, industrial policy, currency politics, and other forms of state intervention—often driven by elites in the industrial Midwest and Northeast. The result of these collisions was an ambivalent and fragmented national approach to global integration which persisted until more recently than typically assumed. Rather than being driven by a coherent ideological vision for American power, or a clear-cut embrace of neoliberal theory, foreign economic policy was propelled forward by a much more contingent, ad-hoc, and conflictual process across this period. When globalization took on truly historical force in the 1990s, it was not because social conflicts over interdependence had been resolved, but because a more reluctant and resistant approach to global integration had lost its political and institutional foothold.