Interesting history: 26th Amendment, passed in 1971, lowered the minimum voting age to 18.

Nixon, I recall, was elected in 1968, which would be when baby boomers born in 1950 would turn 18, but in some states may not have the right to vote. After the passage, voter participation among 18 to 24 was at its historic high, but began declining afterwards.

I have to wonder whether the voters voted against Nixon. If they voted for Nixon, and then Watergate happened, I can see

So I can see the confluence between young voters for the first time exercising their right to vote, and probably have chosen a president that betrayed them by spying on the Democratic party, expanding government, creating a for-profit health care system, subsidizing excessive farm bills that made Iowa the Corn King (and not only that, it was in 1972 that Iowa's monopoly on being first state in the Democratic and Republican presidential elections); the war on drugs, which itself started because much of the heroin came on American service planes flying from Vietnam.

The movie American Gangster correlated this aspect as part of a larger story on the rise and fall of Frank Lucas, the African-American heroin kingpin. Prior to him, the Italian mafia was in control of the drugs, but Lucas was able to, as it were, cut out the middlemen by making a deal with black servicemen in Vietnam that could carry the drugs grown in China underneath the coffins and body bags of the dead US soldiers.

We can see how "the shining city on the hill" suffered a deep decline as a result of the Vietnam War. As drug problems grew rampant, many families fled to the suburbs. The cities, suffering from the lack of revenues to support the police, and from the police's own corruption, couldn't handle the rising crime rate. Many neighborhoods were blighted and demolished, many communities destroyed.

But, Nixon did have substantive legacies: the Emily Dickinson stamps, for example; the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts, which probably arose out of a populist response to Rachel Carson's Silent Spring; the opening of communication with China (with its corresponding benefits and costs); the ending of the war with Vietnam.

Watergate happened. Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon. Carter got elected, but his involvement in the middle east and his call for national unity and trust upset many people. Then Iran took hostages of the American visitors, which might have been a blowback to the CIA's overthrow of democratically-elected Mossadegh in 1951, and the CIA was established in 1947 by Truman.