The politics of the extremists had a profound resonance with Richard Nixon. Nixon had cut his political teeth as a young, red-baiting member of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. His home district in Orange Country, California was widely known as a stronghold of the Birch Society. The Los Angeles-area Birch Society claimed membership from several political and economic elites, including members of the Chandler family, which owned and published the Los Angeles Times. According to writer David Halberstam (1979, 118) the Times, which was once described as “the most ardently anti-labor, red-hating newspaper in the United States,” virtually created Richard Nixon. Nixon's approach to the war was Birchesque. He campaigned for president in 1968 as a peace candidate emphasizing that he had been raised as a Quaker and promising to bring the troops home. His path to peace, however, involved an escalation of the war. After his election as president, he unleashed a ferocious air attack against the Vietnamese and extended the ground war to Laos and Cambodia. When the antiwar movement criticized these measures, Nixon did what any Bircher would have done: he decried the antiwar movement as a Communist conspiracy that was prolonging the war and that deserved to be treated as a threat to internal security. Strategy: Destroy the Left, Capture the Center The origin of the myth of Vietnam veterans being spat on lies in the Nixon-Agnew administration's propaganda campaign to undermine the credibility of the anti-war movement and prolong the war in Southeast Asia. Nixon had won the election as a peace candidate, but he had also pledged not to be the first American president to lose a war. It was a contradictory program. When Vietnam... at the center of the paper... of the struggle over how the war would be remembered. Covered by disability discourse, the fight for the memory of veterans and the country would be waged with such obliquity that it surpassed even the most veiled operations of Nixon's minions. While Nixon's plumbers were piecing together the Gainesville case against the VVAW in the spring of 1972, mental health and media professionals were piecing together the figure of the mentally incompetent Vietnam veteran. More than any other, this image is the one that will remain imprinted in the minds of the American people. The psychologically damaged veteran raised a question that demanded an answer: What happened to our kids that was so traumatic that they will never be the same? As it turns out, the story of what happened to them had less to do with the war itself than with the war against the war..