The ultra-narrow policy resonated deeply with Richard Nixon. Nixon had cut his political teeth as a young member of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1950s. His home district in Orange Country, California, was widely known as a Birch stronghold Society. The Los Angeles area Birch Society claimed membership among 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, once described as "the most rabid anti-labor and most red-hating newspaper in the United States," virtually created Richard Nixon. Nixon's approach to the war was Birchesque. He campaigned for the presidency in 1968 as a peace candidate by 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 war. After his election as president, he launched a fierce air attack against the Vietnamese and expanded the ground war into Laos and Cambodia. When the antiwar movement criticized these measures, Nixon did what any Bircher would do: he denounced the antiwar movement as a communist conspiracy that was prolonging the war and deserved to be treated as a threat to internal security. Strategy: Crush the Left, Capture the Center The origin of the myth of spitting on Vietnam veterans lies in the Nixon-Agnew administration's propaganda campaign aimed at undermining the credibility of the anti-war movement and prolonging the war in Southeast Asia. Nixon had won the election as a peace candidate, but he was also determined not to be the first American president to lose a war. It was a contradictory program. When Vietnam... in the middle of the newspaper... of the struggle over how the war would be remembered. Covered by the discourse on disability, the fight for the memory of veterans and the country would be carried out with such indiscretion that it would surpass even the most veiled operations of Nixon's henchmen. While Nixon's plumbers prepared the Gainesville trial against VVAW in the spring of 1972, mental health professionals and the media were tinkering with the figure of the mentally disabled Vietnam veteran. More than any other, this image is the one that will remain engraved in the minds of the American people. The psychologically damaged veteran raised a question that demanded an answer: What happened to our boys that was so traumatic that they would never be the same? As it was told, the story of what happened to them had less to do with the war itself and more to do with the war against the war..