In the 1970s, now-Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown was Yale-bound senior at Mansfield High School and president of his high school student council.
Active in politics, Brown campaigned for George McGovern while at Yale. Brown also maintained a sporadic correspondence with the Mansfield News-Journal, writing an array of left-of-center opinions to the editor on McGovern and Vietnam.
In an op-ed as a high school senior, Brown says the Nixon Administration is turning the United States into a "fascist police-state."
Brown takes aim at what he calls "inordinate and overzealous nationalism" on the part of the United States. Brown describes the "general atmosphere of America" as "one of paranoia, intolerance, and injustice."
Brown responds to a letter from another person about George McGovern's tax proposals by lamenting corporate welfare, writing that he supports McGovern for president because he wants to "make the tax system more equitable."
In another op-ed, Brown railed against the Nixon Administration's Vietnam policy, discussing what he calls the government's "imperialist intentions" including "exploiting dark-skinned people" in the name of capitalism.
Nixon's and the governmental hierarchy's imperialistic intentions i.e., extending American ideology, creating new American markets, and exploiting dark-skinned people through a repressive and selfish form of capitalism -- are evident in Southeast Asia as elsewhere."
Brown also asks people to think of the Vietnam War from the perspective of the citizens of Laos or Cambodia.
