Antiwar activists made attractive enemies for Nixon. He recognized the antiwar movement’s political impact—“the greatest social unrest in America in one hundred years,” he privately called it—and responded in a nationwide television address on November 3. Using his prime-time speech as a counterattack, Nixon belittled antiwar protestors as a “vocal minority” that threatened the country’s “future as a free society” and sought to “impose” its views on others “by mounting demonstrations in the street.”
