Howwillthe concepts and critical thinking about historical sources and data learned in this course be applied to real-world situations and increase your chances of career or life success?
Figure 30.1 Pop artist Peter Max designed this postage stamp to commemorate Expo
‘74, a world’s fair held in Spokane, Washington. The fair’s theme was the natural
environment. Unfortunately, and ironically, gasoline shortages prevented many from
attending the exposition.
Chapter Outline
30.1 Identity Politics in a Fractured Society
30.2 Coming Apart, Coming Together
30.3 Vietnam: The Downward Spiral
30.4 Watergate: Nixon’s Domestic Nightmare
30.5 Jimmy Carter in the Aftermath of the Storm
From May 4 to November 4, 1974, a universal exposition was held in the city of
Spokane, Washington. This world’s fair, Expo ‘74, and the postage stamp issued to
commemorate it, reflected many of the issues and interests of the 1970s (Figure 30.1).
The stamp features psychedelic colors, and the character of the Cosmic Runner in the
center wears bellbottoms, a popular fashion at the time. The theme of the fair was the
environment, a subject beginning to be of great concern to people in the United States,
especially the younger generation and those in the hippie counterculture. In the 1970s,
the environment, social justice, distrust of the government, and a desire to end the war
in Vietnam—the concerns and attitudes of younger people, women, gays and lesbians,
and people of color—began to draw the attention of the mainstream as well.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
Describe the counterculture of the 1960s
Explain the origins of the American Indian Movement and its major activities
Assess the significance of the gay rights and women’s liberation movements
Figure 30.2
The political divisions that plagued the United States in the 1960s were reflected in the
rise of identity politics in the 1970s. As people lost hope of reuniting as a society with
common interests and goals, many focused on issues of significance to the subgroups
to which they belonged, based on culture, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and
religion.
HIPPIES AND THE COUNTERCULTURE
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, many young people came to embrace a new wave of cultural
dissent. The counterculture offered an alternative to the bland homogeneity of American
middle-class life, patriarchal family structures, self-discipline, unquestioning patriotism, and the
acquisition of property. In fact, there were many alternative cultures.
“Hippies” rejected the conventions of traditional society. Men sported beards and grew their hair
long; both men and women wore clothing from non-Western cultures, defied their parents,
rejected social etiquettes and manners, and turned to music as an expression of their sense of self.
Casual sex between unmarried men and women was acceptable. Drug use, especially of
marijuana and psychedelic drugs like LSD and peyote, was common. Most hippies were also
deeply attracted to the ideas of peace and freedom. They protested the war in Vietnam and
preached a doctrine of personal freedom to be and act as one wished.
Some hippies dropped out of mainstream society altogether and expressed their disillusionment
with the cultural and spiritual limitations of American freedom. They joined communes, usually
in rural areas, to share a desire to live closer to nature, respect for the earth, a dislike of modern
life, and a disdain for wealth and material goods. Many communes grew their own organic food.
Others abolished the concept of private property, and all members shared willingly with one
another. Some sought to abolish traditional ideas regarding love and marriage, and free love was
practiced openly. One of the most famous communes was The Farm, established in Tennessee in
1971. Residents adopted a blend of Christian and Asian beliefs. They shared housing, owned no
private property except tools and clothing, advocated nonviolence, and tried to live as one with
nature, becoming vegetarians and avoiding the use of animal products. They smoked marijuana
in an effort to reach a higher state of consciousness and to achieve a feeling of oneness and
harmony.
Music, especially rock and folk music, occupied an important place in the counterculture.
Concerts provided the opportunity to form seemingly impromptu communities to celebrate
youth, rebellion, and individuality. In mid-August 1969, nearly 400,000 people attended a music
festival in rural Bethel, New York, many for free (Figure 30.3). They jammed roads throughout
the state, and thousands had to be turned around and sent home. Thirty-two acts performed for a
crowd that partook freely of marijuana, LSD, and alcohol during the rainy three-day event that
became known as Woodstock (after the nearby town) and became the cultural touchstone of a
generation. No other event better symbolized the cultural independence and freedom of
Americans coming of age in the 1960s.
Figure 30.3 The crowd at Woodstock greatly exceeded the fifty thousand expected. Mark Goff
covered Woodstock as a young freelance reporter for Kaleidoscope, a Milwaukee-based
alternative newspaper, and captured this image of Swami Satchidananda, who declared music
“’the celestial sound that controls the whole universe” at the opening ceremony.
MY STORY
Glenn Weiser on Attending Woodstock
On the way to Woodstock, Glenn Weiser remembers that the crowds were so large they
essentially turned it into a free concert:
As we got closer to the site [on Thursday, August 14, 1969] we heard that so many people had
already arrived that the crowd had torn down the fences enclosing the festival grounds (in fact
they were never put up to begin with). Everyone was being allowed in for free. . . .
Early on Friday afternoon about a dozen of us got together and spread out some blankets on the
grass at a spot about a third of the way up the hill on stage right and then dropped LSD. I took
Orange Sunshine, a strong, clean dose in an orange tab that was perhaps the best street acid ever.
Underground chemists in southern California had made millions of doses, and the nation was
flooded with it that summer. We smoked some tasty black hashish to amuse ourselves while
waiting for the acid to hit, and sat back to groove along with Richie Havens.
In two hours we were all soaring, and everything was just fine. In fact, it couldn’t have been
better—there I was with my beautiful hometown friends, higher than a church steeple and
listening to wonderful music in the cool summer weather of the Catskills. After all, the dirty little
secret of the late ‘60s was that psychedelic drugs taken in a pleasant setting could be completely
exhilarating.
—Glenn Weiser, “Woodstock 1969 Remembered”
In this account, Glenn Weiser describes both the music and his drug use. What social trends did
Woodstock reflect? How might the festival have influenced American culture and society, both
aesthetically and behaviorally?
AMERICAN INDIAN PROTEST
As the young, primarily White men and women who became hippies strove to create new
identities for themselves, they borrowed liberally from other cultures, including that of Native
Americans. At the same time, many Native Americans were themselves seeking to maintain their
culture or retrieve elements that had been lost. In 1968, a group of American Indian activists,
including Dennis Banks, George Mitchell, and Clyde Bellecourt, convened a gathering of two
hundred people in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and formed the American Indian Movement (AIM)
(Figure 30.4). The organizers were urban dwellers frustrated by decades of poverty and
discrimination. In 1970, the average life expectancy of Native Americans was forty-six years
compared to the national average of sixty-nine. The suicide rate was twice that of the general
population, and the infant mortality rate was the highest in the country. Half of all Native
Americans lived on reservations, where unemployment reached 50 percent. Among those in
cities, 20 percent lived below the poverty line.
Figure 30.4 This teepee was erected on the National Mall near the Washington Monument as
part of an AIM demonstration (a). Note that the AIM flag (b) combines a Native American
silhouette with the peace sign, the ubiquitous symbol of the 1960s and ‘70s.
On November 20, 1969, a small group of Native American activists landed on Alcatraz Island
(the former site of a notorious federal prison) in San Francisco Bay. They announced plans to
build an American Indian cultural center, including a history museum, an ecology center, and a
spiritual sanctuary. People on the mainland provided supplies by boat, and celebrities visited
Alcatraz to publicize the cause. More people joined the occupiers until, at one point, they
numbered about four hundred. From the beginning, the federal government negotiated with them
to persuade them to leave. They were reluctant to accede, but over time, the occupiers began to
drift away of their own accord. Government forces removed the final holdouts on June 11, 1971,
nineteen months after the occupation began.
DEFINING AMERICAN
Proclamation to the Great White Father and All His People
In occupying Alcatraz Island, American Indian activists sought to call attention to their
grievances and expectations about what America should mean. At the beginning of the nineteenmonth occupation, Mohawk Richard Oakes delivered the following proclamation:
We, the native Americans, re-claim the land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all
American Indians by right of discovery.
We wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with the Caucasian inhabitants of this land, and
hereby offer the following treaty:
We will purchase said Alcatraz Island for twenty-four dollars ($24) in glass beads and red cloth,
a precedent set by the white man’s purchase of a similar island about 300 years ago. . . .
We feel that this so-called Alcatraz Island is more than suitable for an Indian Reservation, as
determined by the White man’s own standards. By this we mean that this place resembles most
Indian reservations in that:
1. It is isolated from modern facilities, and without adequate means of transportation.
2. It has no fresh running water.
3. It has inadequate sanitation facilities.
4. There are no oil or mineral rights.
5. There is no industry and so unemployment is very great.
6. There are no health care facilities.
7. The soil is rocky and non-productive; and the land does not support game.
8. There are no educational facilities.
9. The population has always exceeded the land base.
10. The population has always been held as prisoners and kept dependent upon others.
Further, it would be fitting and symbolic that ships from all over the world, entering the Golden
Gate, would first see Indian land, and thus be reminded of the true history of this nation. This
tiny island would be a symbol of the great lands once ruled by free and noble Indians.
What does the Alcatraz Proclamation reveal about the Native American view of U.S. history?
CLICK AND EXPLORE
Listen to Richard Oakes, one of the leaders of the Alcatraz Island occupation, as he reads
the Alcatraz Proclamation aloud.
The next major demonstration came in 1972 when AIM members and others marched on
Washington, DC—a journey they called the “Trail of Broken Treaties”—and occupied the
offices of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). The group presented a list of demands, which
included improved housing, education, and economic opportunities in Native American
communities; the drafting of new treaties; the return of Native lands; and protections for Native
religions and culture.
The most dramatic event staged by AIM was the occupation of the community of Wounded
Knee, South Dakota, in February 1973. Wounded Knee, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation,
had historical significance: It was the site of an 1890 massacre of members of the Lakota tribe by
the U.S. Army. AIM went to the reservation following the failure of a group of Oglala to
impeach the tribal president Dick Wilson, whom they accused of corruption and the use of
strong-arm tactics to silence critics. AIM used the occasion to criticize the U.S. government for
failing to live up to its treaties with native peoples.
The federal government surrounded the area with U.S. marshals, FBI agents, and other law
enforcement forces. A siege ensued that lasted seventy-one days, with frequent gunfire from both
sides, wounding a U.S. marshal as well as an FBI agent, and killing two Native Americans. The
government did very little to meet the protesters’ demands. Two AIM leaders, Dennis Banks and
Russell Means, were arrested, but charges were later dismissed. The Nixon administration had
already halted the federal policy of termination and restored millions of acres to tribes. Increased
funding for Native American education, healthcare, legal services, housing, and economic
development followed, along with the hiring of more Native American employees in the BIA.
GAY RIGHTS
Combined with the sexual revolution and the feminist movement of the 1960s, the counterculture
helped establish a climate that fostered the struggle for gay and lesbian rights. Lesbian, gay,
bisexual, transgender, and queer people (later abbreviated as LGBTQ) had long been denied
rights and had been perceived as threatening. As discussed earlier, LGBTQ veterans were
dishonorably discharged without benefits, and LGBTQ people were cast under a cloud of
suspicion during the McCarthy era. But that mistreatment was only a small part of the anti-gay
oppression. By most considerations, LGBTQ people’s very existence was criminalized. Sexual
relations between same-sex couples were illegal in most states until the 1980s, and various city
and state ordinances disallowed members of the same sex from dancing or even holding hands
with each other. Other laws were used to require that people wear clothing deemed appropriate to
their gender. These statutes gave authorities the ability to harass, detain, arrest, sexually
humiliate, and prosecute people for their identity. Perhaps worse, it led to extensive anti-LGBTQ
violence that was rarely investigated or prosecuted.
Many gay rights groups were founded in Los Angeles and San Francisco, cities that were
administrative centers in the network of U.S. military installations and the places where many
gay men suffered dishonorable discharges. The first postwar organization for gay and lesbian
civil rights, the Mattachine Society, was launched in Los Angeles in 1950. The first national
organization for lesbians, the Daughters of Bilitis, was founded in San Francisco five years later.
In 1966, the city became home to the world’s first organization for transgender people, the
National Transsexual Counseling Unit (transsexual was a more commonly used term at the
time); and in 1967, the Sexual Freedom League of San Francisco was born.
Through these organizations and others, LGBTQ activists fought against the criminalization and
discrimination of their sexual identities on a number of occasions throughout the 1960s,
employing strategies of both protests and litigation. However, the most famous event in the gay
rights movement took place not in San Francisco but in New York City. Early in the morning of
June 28, 1969, police raided a Greenwich Village gay bar called the Stonewall Inn. Although
such raids were common, the response of the Stonewall patrons was anything but. As the police
prepared to arrest many of the customers, especially transgender people, who were particular
targets for police harassment, a crowd began to gather. Angered by the brutal treatment of the
prisoners, the crowd attacked. Beer bottles and bricks were thrown. The police barricaded
themselves inside the bar and waited for reinforcements. The riot continued for several hours and
resumed the following night. Shortly thereafter, activists formed the Gay Liberation Front and
Gay Activists’ Alliance and began to protest discrimination, homophobia, and violence against
gay people, promoting gay liberation and gay pride.
With a call for gay men and women to “come out”—a consciousness-raising campaign that
shared many principles with the counterculture, gay and lesbian communities moved from the
urban underground into the political sphere. Gay rights activists protested strongly against the
official position of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), which categorized
homosexuality as a mental illness and often resulted in job loss, loss of custody, and other
serious personal consequences. By 1974, the APA had ceased to classify homosexuality as a
form of mental illness but continued to consider it a “sexual orientation disturbance.”
Nevertheless, in 1974, Kathy Kozachenko became the first openly lesbian woman voted into
office in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 1977, Harvey Milk became California’s first openly gay man
elected to public office, although his service on San Francisco’s board of supervisors, along with
that of San Francisco mayor George Moscone, was cut short by the bullet of disgruntled former
city supervisor Dan White.
One of the first steps toward greater LGTBQ rights was the decriminalization of relations. While
police harassment would continue and hate crimes would escalate, the elimination of criminality
simply for being gay was an important and consequential initial victory. Illinois was the first
state to decriminalize same-sex relations in 1962, but was joined by only one other state
(Connecticut) in the 1960s. The next decade saw 18 more states eliminate the bans, and the rest
of the nation gradually reduced penalties or ceased enforcement of their codes. But in many
cases, since nearly half of the states had such laws on the books, they could be used to justify a
range of discriminatory acts and practices. (Consensual same-sex relations would be made legal
nationwide in 2003 due to a Supreme Court decision.)
MAYBE NOT NOW
The feminist push for greater rights continued through the 1970s (Figure 30.5). The media often
ridiculed feminists as “women’s libbers” and focused on more radical organizations like
W.I.T.C.H. (Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), a loose association of
activist groups. Many reporters stressed the most unusual goals of the most radical women—
calls for the abolition of marriage and demands that manholes be renamed “personholes.”
Figure 30.5 In 1970, supporters of equal rights for women marched in Washington, DC.
The majority of feminists, however, sought meaningful accomplishments. In the 1970s, they
opened battered women’s shelters and successfully fought for protection from employment
discrimination for pregnant women, reform of rape laws (such as the abolition of laws requiring
a witness to corroborate a woman’s report of rape), criminalization of domestic violence, and
funding for schools that sought to counter sexist stereotypes of women. In 1973, the U.S.
Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade invalidated a number of state laws under which abortions
obtained during the first three months of pregnancy were illegal. This made a nontherapeutic
abortion a legal medical procedure nationwide.
Many advances in women’s rights were the result of women’s greater engagement in politics.
For example, Patsy Mink, the first Asian American woman elected to Congress, was the coauthor of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, Title IX of which prohibits sex discrimination
in education. Mink had been interested in fighting discrimination in education since her youth,
when she opposed racial segregation in campus housing while a student at the University of
Nebraska. She went to law school after being denied admission to medical school because of her
gender. Like Mink, many other women sought and won political office, many with the help of
the National Women’s Political Caucus (NWPC). In 1971, the NWPC was formed by Bella
Abzug, Gloria Steinem, Shirley Chisholm, Myrlie Evers-Williams, and other leading feminists to
encourage women’s participation in political parties, elect women to office, and raise money for
their campaigns (Figure 30.6).
Figure 30.6 Patsy Mink (a), a Japanese American from Hawaii, was the first Asian American
woman elected to the House of Representatives. In her successful 1970 congressional campaign,
Bella Abzug (b) declared, “This woman’s place is in the House… the House of Representatives!”
Shirley Chisholm personally took up the mantle of women’s involvement in politics. Born of
immigrant parents, she earned degrees from Brooklyn College and Columbia University, and
began a career in early childhood education and advocacy. In the 1950’s she joined various
political action groups, worked on election campaigns, and pushed for housing and economic
reforms. After leaving one organization over its refusal to involve women in the decision-making
process, she sought to increase gender and racial diversity within political and activist
organizations throughout New York City. In 1968, she became the first Black woman elected to
Congress. Refusing to take the quiet role expected of new Representatives, she immediately
began sponsoring bills and initiatives. She spoke out against the Vietnam War, and fought for
programs such as Head Start and the national school lunch program, which was eventually
signed into law after Chisholm led an effort to override a presidential veto. Chisholm would
eventually undertake a groundbreaking presidential run in 1972.
As a Presidential candidate, Chisholm faced pressure from an unexpected source: her closest
colleagues. Men within the Congressional Black Caucus, which she co-founded, disagreed with
her pluralistic political coalition. The Democratic party did not allow her to participate in the
televised primary debates, and she was only allowed one speech. She noted, “Black male
politicians are no different from white male politicians. This ‘woman thing’ is so deep. I’ve
found it out in this campaign if I never knew it before.” Despite all this, Shirley Chisholm earned
ten percent of the total Democratic delegates, and became a nationally influential figure.
The ultimate political goal of the National Organization for Women (NOW) was the passage of
an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The amendment passed Congress in March 1972, and was
sent to the states for ratification with a deadline of seven years for passage; if the amendment
was not ratified by thirty-eight states by 1979, it would die. Twenty-two states ratified the ERA
in 1972, and eight more in 1973. In the next two years, only four states voted for the amendment.
In 1979, still four votes short, the amendment received a brief reprieve when Congress agreed to
a three-year extension, but it never passed, as the result of the well-organized opposition of
Christian and other socially conservative, grassroots organizations.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
Explain the factors responsible for Richard Nixon’s election in 1968
Describe the splintering of the Democratic Party in 1968
Discuss Richard Nixon’s economic policies
Discuss the major successes of Richard Nixon’s foreign policy
The presidential election of 1968 revealed a rupture of the New Deal coalition that had
come together under Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. The Democrats were divided by
internal dissension over the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, and the challenges
of the New Left. Meanwhile, the Republican candidate, Richard Nixon, won voters in the
South, Southwest, and northern suburbs by appealing to their anxieties about civil
rights, women’s rights, antiwar protests, and the counterculture taking place around
them. Nixon spent his first term in office pushing measures that slowed the progress of
civil rights and sought to restore economic stability. His greatest triumphs were in
foreign policy. But his largest priority throughout his first term was his reelection in 1972.
THE “NEW NIXON”
The Republicans held their 1968 national convention from August 5–8 in Miami, Florida.
Richard Nixon quickly emerged as the frontrunner for the nomination, ahead of Nelson
Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan. This success was not accidental: From 1962, when he lost his
bid for the governorship of California, to 1968, Nixon had been collecting political credits by
branding himself as a candidate who could appeal to mainstream voters and by tirelessly working
for other Republican candidates. In 1964, for example, he vigorously supported Barry
Goldwater’s presidential bid and thus built good relationships with the new conservative
movement in the Republican Party.
Although Goldwater lost the 1964 election, his vigorous rejection of New Deal state and social
legislation, along with his support of states’ rights, proved popular in the Deep South, which had
resisted federal efforts at racial integration. Taking a lesson from Goldwater’s experience, Nixon
also employed a southern strategy in 1968. Denouncing segregation and the denial of the vote
to African Americans, he nevertheless maintained that southern states be allowed to pursue racial
equality at their own pace and criticized forced integration. Nixon thus garnered the support of
South Carolina’s senior senator and avid segregationist Strom Thurmond, which helped him win
the Republican nomination on the first ballot.
Nixon also courted northern, blue-collar workers, whom he later called the silent majority, to
acknowledge their belief that their voices were seldom heard. These voters feared the social
changes taking place in the country: Antiwar protests challenged their own sense of patriotism
and civic duty, whereas the recreational use of new drugs threatened their cherished principles of
self-discipline, and urban riots invoked the specter of a racial reckoning. Government action on
behalf of the marginalized raised the question of whether its traditional constituency—the White
middle class—would lose its privileged place in American politics. Some felt left behind as the
government turned to the problems of African Americans. Nixon’s promises of stability and his
emphasis on law and order appealed to them. He portrayed himself as a fervent patriot who
would take a strong stand against racial unrest and antiwar protests. Nixon harshly critiqued
Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and he promised a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam
honorably and bring home the troops. He also promised to reform the Supreme Court, which he
contended had gone too far in “coddling criminals.” Under Chief Justice Earl Warren, the court
had used the due process and equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment to grant
those accused under state law the ability to defend themselves and secure protections against
unlawful search and seizure, cruel and unusual punishment, and self-incrimination.
Nixon had found the political capital that would ensure his victory in the suburbs, which
produced more votes than either urban or rural areas. He championed “middle America,” which
was fed up with social convulsions, and called upon the country to come together. His running
mate, Spiro T. Agnew, a former governor of Maryland, blasted the Democratic ticket as fiscally
irresponsible and “soft on communism.” Nixon and Agnew’s message thus appealed to northern
middle-class and blue-collar White people as well as southern White people who had fled to the
suburbs in the wake of the Supreme Court’s pro-integration decision in Brown v. Board of
Education (Figure 30.7).
Figure 30.7 On the 1968 campaign trail, Richard Nixon flashes his famous “V for Victory”
gesture (a). Nixon’s strategy was to appeal to working- and middle-class suburbanites. This
image of him in the White House bowling alley seems calculated to appeal to his core
constituency (b).
DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY
By contrast, in early 1968, the political constituency that Lyndon Johnson had cobbled together
to win the presidency in 1964 seemed to be falling apart. When Eugene McCarthy, the
Democratic senator from Minnesota, announced that he would challenge Johnson in the
primaries in an explicitly antiwar campaign, Johnson was overwhelmingly favored by
Democratic voters. But then the Tet Offensive in Vietnam exploded on American television
screens on January 31, playing out on the nightly news for weeks. On February 27, Walter
Cronkite, a highly respected television journalist, offered his opinion that the war in Vietnam
was unwinnable. When the votes were counted in New Hampshire on March 12, McCarthy had
won twenty of the state’s twenty-four delegates.
McCarthy’s popularity encouraged Robert (Bobby) Kennedy to also enter the race. Realizing
that his war policies could unleash a divisive fight within his own party for the nomination,
Johnson announced his withdrawal on March 31, fracturing the Democratic Party. One faction
consisted of the traditional party leaders who appealed to unionized, blue-collar constituents and
White ethnics (Americans with recent European immigrant backgrounds). This group fell in
behind Johnson’s vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, who took up the mainstream party’s
torch almost immediately after Johnson’s announcement. The second group consisted of
idealistic young activists who had slogged through the snows of New Hampshire to give
McCarthy a boost and saw themselves as the future of the Democratic Party. The third group,
composed of Catholics, African Americans and other minorities, and some of the young, antiwar
element, galvanized around Robert Kennedy (Figure 30.8). Finally, there were the southern
Democrats, the Dixiecrats, who opposed the advances made by the civil rights movement. Some
found themselves attracted to the Republican candidate Richard Nixon. Many others, however,
supported the third-party candidacy of segregationist George C. Wallace, the former governor of
Alabama. Wallace won close to ten million votes, which was 13.5 percent of all votes cast. He
was particularly popular in the South, where he carried five states and received forty-six
Electoral College votes.
Figure 30.8 In his brother’s (John F. Kennedy’s) administration, Robert (Bobby) Kennedy had
served as attorney general and had spoken out about racial equality.
Kennedy and McCarthy fiercely contested the remaining primaries of the 1968 season. There
were only fifteen at that time. McCarthy beat Kennedy handily in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and
Massachusetts. Kennedy took Indiana and Nebraska before losing Oregon to McCarthy.
Kennedy’s only hope was that a strong enough showing in the California primary on June 4
might swing uncommitted delegates his way. He did manage to beat McCarthy, winning 46
percent of the vote to McCarthy’s 42 percent, but it was a fruitless victory. As he attempted to
exit the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles after his victory speech, Kennedy was shot; he died
twenty-six hours later. His killer, Sirhan B. Sirhan, a Jordanian immigrant, had allegedly targeted
him for advocating military support for Israel in its conflict with neighboring Arab states.
Going into the nominating convention in Chicago in 1968, Humphrey, who promised to pursue
the “Politics of Joy,” seemed clearly in command of the regular party apparatus. But the national
debates over civil rights, student protests, and the Vietnam War had made 1968 a particularly
anguished year, and many people felt anything but joyful. Some party factions hoped to make
their voices heard; others wished to disrupt the convention altogether. Among them were antiwar
protestors, hippies, and Yippies—members of the leftist, anarchistic Youth International Party
organized by Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman—who called for the establishment of a new nation
consisting of cooperative institutions to replace those currently in existence. To demonstrate their
contempt for “the establishment” and the proceedings inside the hall, the Yippies nominated a
pig named Pigasus for president.
A chaotic scene developed inside the convention hall and outside at Grant Park, where the
protesters camped. Chicago’s mayor, Richard J. Daley, was anxious to demonstrate that he could
maintain law and order, especially because several days of destructive rioting had followed the
murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. earlier that year. He thus let loose a force of twelve thousand
police officers, six thousand members of the Illinois National Guard, and six thousand U.S.
Army soldiers. Television cameras caught what later became known as a “police riot”: Armed
officers made their way into crowds of law-abiding protesters, clubbing anyone they encountered
and setting off tear gas canisters. The protesters fought back. Inside the convention hall, a
Democratic senator from Connecticut called for adjournment, whereas other delegates insisted
on proceeding. Ironically, Hubert Humphrey received the nomination and gave an acceptance
speech in which he spoke in support of “law and order.” When the convention ended, Rubin,
Hoffman, and five other protesters (called the “Chicago Seven”) were placed on trial for inciting
a riot (Figure 30.9).
Figure 30.9 Despite facing charges following events at the Democratic National Convention in
Chicago, Abbie Hoffman continued to protest the war on campuses across the country, as here
(a) at the University of Oklahoma. Jerry Rubin (b) visited the campus of the University of
Buffalo in March 1970, just one month after his conviction in the Chicago Seven trial. (credit a:
modification of work by Richard O. Barry)
CLICK AND EXPLORE
Listen to Yippie activist Jerry Rubin’s 1970 interview with Cleveland news journalist Dorothy
Fuldheim.
THE DOMESTIC NIXON
The images of violence and the impression of things spinning out of control seriously damaged
Humphrey’s chances for victory. Many liberals and young antiwar activists, disappointed by his
selection over McCarthy and still shocked by the death of Robert Kennedy, did not vote for
Humphrey. Others turned against him because of his failure to chastise the Chicago police for
their violence. Some resented the fact that Humphrey had received 1,759 delegates on the first
ballot at the convention, nearly three times the number won by McCarthy, even though in the
primaries, he had received only 2 percent of the popular vote. Many loyal Democratic voters at
home, shocked by the violence they saw on television, turned away from their party, which
seemed to have attracted dangerous “radicals,” and began to consider Nixon’s promises of law
and order.
As the Democratic Party collapsed, Nixon successfully campaigned for the votes of both
working- and middle-class White Americans, winning the 1968 election. Although Humphrey
received nearly the same percentage of the popular vote, Nixon easily won the Electoral College,
gaining 301 votes to Humphrey’s 191 and Wallace’s 46.
Once elected, Nixon began to pursue a policy of deliberate neglect of the civil rights movement
and the needs of ethnic minorities. For example, in 1969, for the first time in fifteen years,
federal lawyers sided with the state of Mississippi when it sought to slow the pace of school
desegregation. Similarly, Nixon consistently showed his opposition to busing to achieve racial
desegregation. He saw that restricting African American activity was a way of undercutting a
source of votes for the Democratic Party and sought to overhaul the provisions of the Voting
Rights Act of 1965. In March 1970, he commented that he did not believe an “open” America
had to be homogeneous or fully integrated, maintaining that it was “natural” for members of
ethnic groups to live together in their own enclaves. In other policy areas, especially economic
ones, Nixon was either moderate or supportive of the progress of African Americans; for
example, he expanded affirmative action, a program begun during the Johnson administration to
improve employment and educational opportunities for racial minorities.
Although Nixon always kept his eye on the political environment, the economy required
attention. The nation had enjoyed seven years of expansion since 1961, but inflation (a general
rise in prices) was threatening to constrict the purchasing power of the American consumer and
therefore curtail economic expansion. Nixon tried to appeal to fiscal conservatives in the
Republican Party, reach out to disaffected Democrats, and, at the same time, work with a
Democratic Party-controlled Congress. As a result, Nixon’s approach to the economy seemed
erratic. Despite the heavy criticisms he had leveled against the Great Society, he embraced and
expanded many of its features. In 1969, he signed a tax bill that eliminated the investment tax
credit and moved some two million of the poorest people off the tax rolls altogether. He
federalized the food stamp program and established national eligibility requirements, and signed
into law the automatic adjustments for inflation of Social Security payments. On the other hand,
he won the praise of conservatives with his “New Federalism”—drastically expanding the use of
federal “block grants” to states to spend as they wished without strings attached.
By mid-1970, a recession was beginning and unemployment was 6.2 percent, twice the level
under Johnson. After earlier efforts at controlling inflation with controlled federal spending—
economists assumed that reduced federal spending and borrowing would curb the amount of
money in circulation and stabilize prices—Nixon proposed a budget with an $11 billion deficit in
1971. The hope was that more federal funds in the economy would stimulate investment and job
creation. When the unemployment rate refused to budge the following year, he proposed a
budget with a $25 billion deficit. At the same time, he tried to fight continuing inflation by
freezing wages and prices for ninety days, which proved to be only a temporary fix. The
combination of unemployment and rising prices posed an unfamiliar challenge to economists
whose fiscal policies of either expanding or contracting federal spending could only address one
side of the problem at the cost of the other. This phenomenon of “stagflation”—a term that
combined the economic conditions of stagnation and inflation—outlived the Nixon
administration, enduring into the early 1980s.
The origins of the nation’s new economic troubles were not just a matter of policy. Postwar
industrial development in Asia and Western Europe—especially in Germany and Japan—had
created serious competition to American businesses. By 1971, American appetites for imports
left foreign central banks with billions of U.S. currency, which had been fixed to gold in the
international monetary and trade agreement of Bretton Woods back in 1944. When foreign dollar
holdings exceeded U.S. gold reserves in 1971, President Nixon allowed the dollar to flow freely
against the price of gold. This caused an immediate 8 percent devaluation of the dollar, made
American goods cheaper abroad, and stimulated exports. Nixon’s move also marked the
beginning of the end of the dollar’s dominance in international trade.
The situation was made worse in October 1973, when Syria and Egypt jointly attacked Israel to
recover territory that had been lost in 1967, starting the Yom Kippur War. The Soviet Union
significantly aided its allies, Egypt and Syria, and the United States supported Israel, earning the
enmity of Arab nations. In retaliation, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries
(OAPEC) imposed an embargo on oil shipments to the United States from October 1973 to
March 1974. The ensuing shortage of oil pushed its price from three dollars a barrel to twelve
dollars a barrel. The average price of gasoline in the United States shot from thirty-eight cents a
gallon before the embargo to fifty-five cents a gallon in June 1974, and the prices of other goods
whose manufacture and transportation relied on oil or gas also rose and did not come down. The
oil embargo had a lasting impact on the economy and underscored the nation’s interdependency
with international political and economic developments.
Faced with high fuel prices, American consumers panicked. Gas stations limited the amount
customers could purchase and closed on Sundays as supplies ran low (Figure 30.10). To
conserve oil, Congress reduced the speed limit on interstate highways to fifty-five miles per
hour. People were asked to turn down their thermostats, and automobile manufacturers in Detroit
explored the possibility of building more fuel-efficient cars. Even after the embargo ended,
prices continued to rise, and by the end of the Nixon years in 1974, inflation had soared to 12.2
percent.
Figure 30.10 The oil shortage triggered a rush to purchase gasoline, and gas stations around the
country were choked with cars waiting to fill up. Eventually, fuel shortages caused gas stations
to develop various ways to ration gasoline to their customers (a), such as the “flag policy” used
by gas dealers in Oregon (b).
Although Nixon’s economic and civil rights policies differed from those of his predecessors, in
other areas, he followed their lead. President Kennedy had committed the nation to putting a man
on the moon before the end of the decade. Nixon, like Johnson before him, supported significant
budget allocations to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to achieve this
goal. On July 20, 1969, hundreds of millions of people around the world watched as astronauts
Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin walked on the surface of the moon and planted the
U.S. flag. Watching from the White House, President Nixon spoke to the astronauts via satellite
phone. The entire project cost the American taxpayer some $25 billion, approximately 4 percent
of the nation’s gross national product, and was such a source of pride for the nation that the
Soviet Union and China refused to televise it. Coming amid all the struggles and crises that the
country was enduring, the moon landing gave citizens a sense of accomplishment that stood in
stark contrast to the foreign policy failures, growing economic challenges, and escalating
divisions at home.
NIXON THE DIPLOMAT
Despite the many domestic issues on Nixon’s agenda, he prioritized foreign policy and clearly
preferred bold and dramatic actions in that arena. Realizing that five major economic powers—
the United States, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, China, and Japan—dominated world
affairs, he sought opportunities for the United States to pit the others against each other. In 1969,
he announced a new Cold War principle known as the Nixon Doctrine, a policy whereby the
United States would continue to assist its allies but would not assume the responsibility of
defending the entire non-Communist world. Other nations, like Japan, needed to assume more of
the burden of first defending themselves.
Playing what was later referred to as “the China card,” Nixon abruptly reversed two decades of
U.S. diplomatic sanctions and hostility to the Communist regime in the People’s Republic of
China, when he announced, in August 1971, that he would personally travel to Beijing and meet
with China’s leader, Chairman Mao Zedong, in February 1972 (Figure 30.11). Nixon hoped that
opening up to the Chinese government would prompt its bitter rival, the Soviet Union, to
compete for global influence and seek a more productive relationship with the United States. He
also hoped that establishing a friendly relationship with China would isolate North Vietnam and
ease a peace settlement, allowing the United States to extract its troops from the war honorably.
Concurring that the Soviet Union should be restrained from making advances in Asia, Nixon and
Chinese premier Zhou Enlai agreed to disagree on several issues and ended up signing a
friendship treaty. They promised to work towards establishing trade between the two nations and
to eventually establishing full diplomatic relations with each other.
Figure 30.11 President Nixon and First Lady Patricia Nixon visited the Great Wall on their 1972
trip to China. The Chinese showed them the sights and hosted a banquet for them in the Great
Hall of the People. Nixon was the first U.S. president to visit China following the Communist
victory in the civil war in 1949.
Continuing his strategy of pitting one Communist nation against another, in May 1972, Nixon
made another newsworthy trip, traveling to Moscow to meet with the Soviet leader Leonid
Brezhnev. The two discussed a policy of détente, a relaxation of tensions between their nations,
and signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT), which limited each side to deploying
only two antiballistic missile systems. It also limited the number of nuclear missiles maintained
by each country. In 1974, a protocol was signed that reduced antiballistic missile sites to one per
country, since neither country had yet begun to build its second system. Moreover, the two sides
signed agreements to allow scientific and technological exchanges, and promised to work
towards a joint space mission.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
Describe the events that fueled antiwar sentiment in the Vietnam era
Explain Nixon’s steps to withdraw the United States from the conflict in South
Vietnam
As early as 1967, critics of the war in Vietnam had begun to call for the repeal of the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave President Johnson the authority to conduct
military operations in Vietnam in defense of an ally, South Vietnam. Nixon initially
opposed the repeal efforts, claiming that doing so might have consequences that
reached far beyond Vietnam. Nevertheless, by 1969, he was beginning troop
withdrawals from Vietnam while simultaneously looking for a “knockout blow” against
the North Vietnamese. In sum, the Nixon administration was in need of an exit strategy.
The escalation of the war, however, made an easy withdrawal increasingly difficult.
Officially, the United States was the ally and partner of the South Vietnamese, whose
“hearts and minds” it was trying to win through a combination of military assistance and
economic development. In reality, however, U.S. soldiers, who found themselves
fighting in an inhospitable environment thousands of miles from home to protect people
who often resented their presence and aided their enemies, came to regard the
Vietnamese as backward, cowardly people and the government of South Vietnam as
hopelessly inefficient and corrupt. Instead of winning “hearts and minds,” U.S. warfare in
Vietnam cost the lives and limbs of U.S. troops and millions of Vietnamese combatants
and civilians (Figure 30.12).
Figure 30.12 U.S. soldiers in Hue in 1968 during the Tet Offensive. The frustrating
experience of fighting the seemingly unwinnable war left many soldiers, and the public
in general, disillusioned with the government.
For their part, the North Vietnamese forces and the National Liberation Front in South
Vietnam also used brutal tactics to terrorize and kill their opponents or effectively control
their territory. Political assassinations and forced indoctrination were common. Captured
U.S. soldiers frequently endured torture and imprisonment.
MY LAI
Racism on the part of some U.S. soldiers and a desire to retaliate against those they perceived to
be responsible for harming U.S. troops affected the conduct of the war. A war correspondent
who served in Vietnam noted, “In motivating the GI to fight by appealing to his racist feelings,
the United States military discovered that it had liberated an emotion over which it was to lose
control.” It was not unusual for U.S. soldiers to evacuate and burn villages suspected of shielding
Viet Cong fighters, both to deprive the enemy of potential support and to enact revenge for
enemy brutality. Troops shot at farmers’ water buffalo for target practice. American and South
Vietnamese use of napalm, a jellied gasoline that sticks to the objects it burns, was common.
Originally developed to burn down structures during World War II, in Vietnam, it was directed
against human beings as well, as had occurred during the Korean War.
DEFINING AMERICAN
Vietnam Veterans against the War Statement
Many U.S. soldiers disapproved of the actions of their fellow troops. Indeed, a group of Vietnam
veterans formed the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Small at first, it
grew to perhaps as many as twenty thousand members. In April 1971, John Kerry, a former
lieutenant in the U.S. Navy and a member of VVAW, testified before the U.S. Senate Committee
on Foreign Relations about conditions in Vietnam based on his personal observations:
I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we
had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated,
veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents
but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of
command. . . . They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do.
They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads . . . randomly
shot at civilians, razed villages . . . and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in
addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done
by the applied bombing power of this country. . . .
We could come back to this country, we could be quiet, we could hold our silence, we could not
tell what went on in Vietnam, but we feel because of what threatens this country, not the reds
[Communists], but the crimes which we are committing that threaten it, that we have to speak
out.
—John Kerry, April 23, 1971
In what way did the actions of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam threaten the United States?
On March 16, 1968, men from the U.S. Army’s Twenty-Third Infantry Division committed one
of the most notorious atrocities of the war. About one hundred soldiers commanded by Captain
Ernest Medina were sent to destroy the village of My Lai, which was suspected of hiding Viet
Cong fighters. Although there was later disagreement regarding the captain’s exact words, the
platoon leaders believed the order to destroy the enemy included killing women and children.
Having suffered twenty-eight casualties in the past three months, the men of Charlie Company
were under severe stress and extremely apprehensive as they approached the village. Two
platoons entered it, shooting randomly. A group of seventy to eighty unarmed people, including
children and infants, were forced into an irrigation ditch by members of the First Platoon under
the command of Lt. William L. Calley, Jr. Despite their proclamations of innocence, the villagers
were shot (Figure 30.13). Houses were set on fire, and as the inhabitants tried to flee, they were
killed with rifles, machine guns, and grenades. The U.S. troops were never fired upon, and one
soldier later testified that he did not see any man who looked like a Viet Cong fighter.
Figure 30.13 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai await their fate. They were shot a few minutes
after this 1968 photograph was taken.
The precise number of civilians killed that day is unclear: The numbers range from 347 to 504.
None were armed. Although not all the soldiers in My Lai took part in the killings, no one
attempted to stop the massacre before the arrival by helicopter of Warrant Officer Hugh
Thompson, who, along with his crew, attempted to evacuate women and children. Upon
returning to his base, Thompson immediately reported the events taking place at My Lai. Shortly
thereafter, Medina ordered Charlie Company to cease fire. Although Thompson’s crewmembers
confirmed his account, none of the men from Charlie Company gave a report, and a cover-up
began almost immediately. The army first claimed that 150 people, the majority of them Viet
Cong, had been killed during a firefight with Charlie Company.
Hearing details from friends in Charlie Company, a helicopter gunner by the name of Ron
Ridenhour began to conduct his own investigation and, in April 1969, wrote to thirty members of
Congress, demanding an investigation. By September 1969, the army charged Lt. Calley with
premeditated murder. Many Americans were horrified at the graphic footage of the massacre; the
incident confirmed their belief that the war was unjust and not being fought on behalf of the
Vietnamese people. However, nearly half of the respondents to a Minnesota poll did not believe
that the incident at My Lai had actually happened. U.S. soldiers could not possibly do such
horrible things, they felt; they were certain that American goals in Vietnam were honorable and
speculated that the antiwar movement had concocted the story to generate sympathy for the
enemy.
Calley was found guilty in March 1971, and sentenced to life in prison. Nationwide, hundreds of
thousands of Americans joined a “Free Calley” campaign. Two days later, President Nixon
released him from custody and placed him under him house arrest at Fort Benning, Georgia. In
August of that same year, Calley’s sentence was reduced to twenty years, and in September
1974, he was paroled. The only soldier convicted in the massacre, he spent a total of three-and-ahalf years under house arrest for his crimes.
BATTLES AT HOME
As the conflict wore on and reports of brutalities increased, the antiwar movement grew in
strength. To take the political pressure off himself and his administration, and find a way to exit
Vietnam “with honor,” Nixon began the process of Vietnamization, turning more responsibility
for the war over to South Vietnamese forces by training them and providing American
weaponry, while withdrawing U.S. troops from the field. At the same time, however, Nixon
authorized the bombing of neighboring Cambodia, which had declared its neutrality, in an effort
to destroy North Vietnamese and Viet Cong bases within that country and cut off supply routes
between North and South Vietnam. The bombing was kept secret from both Congress and the
American public. In April 1970, Nixon decided to follow up with an invasion of Cambodia.
The invasion could not be kept secret, and when Nixon announced it on television on April 30,
1970, protests sprang up across the country. The most tragic and politically damaging occurred
on May 1, 1970, at Kent State University in Ohio. Violence erupted in the town of Kent after an
initial student demonstration on campus, and the next day, the mayor asked Ohio’s governor to
send in the National Guard. Troops were sent to the university’s campus, where students had set
fire to the ROTC building and were fighting off firemen and policemen trying to extinguish it.
The National Guard used teargas to break up the demonstration, and several students were
arrested (Figure 30.14).
Figure 30.14 On April 30, 1970, Richard Nixon announces plans for the Cambodia Campaign
(a), provoking protests on college campuses across the country. Within days, the governor of
Ohio had called in the National Guard in response to student demonstrations at Kent State
University. Bill Whitbeck, who was a student majoring in photo illustration at Kent State
University in May 1970, captured this image (b) on campus on May 3, one day before the
shootings that would result in four student deaths. (credit b: modification of work by Bill
Whitbeck)
Tensions came to a head on May 4. Although campus officials had called off a planned
demonstration, some fifteen hundred to two thousand students assembled, throwing rocks at a
security officer who ordered them to leave. Seventy-seven members of the National Guard, with
bayonets attached to their rifles, approached the students. After forcing most of them to retreat,
the troops seemed to depart. Then, for reasons that are still unknown, they halted and turned;
many began to fire at the students. Nine students were wounded; four were killed. Two of the
dead had simply been crossing campus on their way to class. Peace was finally restored when a
faculty member pleaded with the remaining students to leave.
CLICK AND EXPLORE
Read the New York Times account of the shootings at Kent State University and view (under the
headline) one of the most iconic photographs in American history.
News of the Kent State shootings shocked students around the country. Millions refused to
attend class, as strikes were held at hundreds of colleges and high schools across the United
States. On May 8, an antiwar protest took place in New York City, and the next day, 100,000
protesters assembled in Washington, DC. Not everyone sympathized with the slain students,
however. Nixon had earlier referred to student demonstrators as “bums,” and construction
workers attacked the New York City protestors. A Gallup poll revealed that most Americans
blamed the students for the tragic events at Kent State.
On May 15, a similar tragedy took place at Jackson State College, an African American college
in Jackson, Mississippi. Once again, students gathered on campus to protest the invasion of
Cambodia, setting fires and throwing rocks. The police arrived to disperse the protesters, who
had gathered outside a women’s dormitory. Shortly after midnight, the police opened fire with
shotguns. The dormitory windows shattered, showering people with broken glass. Twelve were
wounded, and two young men, one a student at the college and the other a local high school
student, were killed.
PULLING OUT OF THE QUAGMIRE
Ongoing protests, campus violence, and the expansion of the war into Cambodia deeply
disillusioned Americans about their role in Vietnam. Understanding the nation’s mood, Nixon
dropped his opposition to a repeal of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964. In January 1971, he
signed Congress’s revocation of the notorious blanket military authorization. Gallup polls taken
in May of that year revealed that only 28 percent of the respondents supported the war; many felt
it was not only a mistake but also immoral.
Just as influential as antiwar protests and campus violence in turning people against the war was
the publication of documents the media dubbed the Pentagon Papers in June 1971. These were
excerpts from a study prepared during the Johnson administration that revealed the true nature of
the conflict in Vietnam. The public learned for the first time that the United States had been
planning to oust Ngo Dinh Diem from the South Vietnamese government, that Johnson meant to
expand the U.S. role in Vietnam and bomb North Vietnam even as he stated publicly that he had
no intentions of doing so, and that his administration had sought to deliberately provoke North
Vietnamese attacks in order to justify escalating American involvement. Copies of the study had
been given to the New York Times and other newspapers by Daniel Ellsberg, one of the military
analysts who had contributed to it. To avoid setting a precedent by allowing the press to publish
confidential documents, Nixon’s attorney general, John Mitchell, sought an injunction against
the New York Times to prevent its publication of future articles based on the Pentagon Papers.
The newspaper appealed. On June 30, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the government
could not prevent the publication of the articles.
Realizing that he must end the war but reluctant to make it look as though the United States was
admitting its failure to subdue a small Asian nation, Nixon began maneuvering to secure
favorable peace terms from the North Vietnamese. Thanks to his diplomatic efforts in China and
the Soviet Union, those two nations cautioned North Vietnam to use restraint. The loss of strong
support by their patrons, together with intensive bombing of Hanoi and the mining of crucial
North Vietnamese harbors by U.S. forces, made the North Vietnamese more willing to negotiate.
Nixon’s actions had also won him popular support at home. By the 1972 election, voters again
favored his Vietnam policy by a ratio of two to one. On January 27, 1973, Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger signed an accord with Le Duc Tho, the chief negotiator for the North
Vietnamese, ending American participation in the war. The United States was given sixty days to
withdraw its troops, and North Vietnam was allowed to keep its forces in places it currently
occupied. This meant that over 100,000 northern soldiers would remain in the South—ideally
situated to continue the war with South Vietnam. The United States left behind a small number
of military advisors as well as equipment, and Congress continued to approve funds for South
Vietnam, but considerably less than in earlier years. So the war continued, but it was clear the
South could not hope to defeat the North.
As the end was nearing, the United States conducted several operations to evacuate children
from the South. On the morning of April 29, 1975, as North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces
moved through the outskirts of Saigon, orders were given to evacuate Americans and South
Vietnamese who had supported the United States. Unable to use the airport, helicopters ferried
Americans and Vietnamese refugees who had fled to the American embassy to ships off the
coast. North Vietnamese forces entered Saigon the next day, and the South surrendered.
The war had cost the lives of more than 1.5 million Vietnamese combatants and civilians, as well
as over 58,000 U.S. troops. But the war had caused another, more intangible casualty: the loss of
consensus, confidence, and a sense of moral high ground in the American political culture.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
Describe the actions that Nixon and his confederates took to ensure his
reelection in 1972
Explain the significance of the Watergate crisis
Describe Gerald Ford’s domestic policies and achievements in foreign affairs
Feeling the pressure of domestic antiwar sentiment and desiring a decisive victory,
Nixon went into the 1972 reelection season having attempted to fashion a “new
majority” of moderate southerners and northern, working-class White people. The
Democrats, responding to the chaos and failings of the Chicago convention, had
instituted new rules on how delegates were chosen, which they hoped would broaden
participation and the appeal of the party. Nixon proved unbeatable, however. Even
evidence that his administration had broken the law failed to keep him from winning the
White House.
THE ELECTION OF 1972
Following the 1968 nominating convention in Chicago, the process of selecting delegates for the
Democratic National Convention was redesigned. The new rules, set by a commission led by
George McGovern, awarded delegates based on candidates’ performance in state primaries
(Figure 30.15). As a result, a candidate who won no primaries could not receive the party’s
nomination, as Hubert Humphrey had done in Chicago. This system gave a greater voice to
people who voted in the primaries and reduced the influence of party leaders and power brokers.
Figure 30.15 In November 1968, Shirley Chisholm (a) became the first African American
woman to be elected to the House of Representatives. In January 1972, she announced her
intention to run for the Democratic presidential nomination. The nomination eventually went to
George McGovern (b), an outspoken opponent of the war in Vietnam.
It also led to a more inclusive political environment in which Shirley Chisholm received 156
votes for the Democratic nomination on the first ballot (Figure 30.15). Eventually, the
nomination went to George McGovern, a strong opponent of the Vietnam War. Many Democrats
refused to support his campaign, however. Working- and middle-class voters turned against him
too after allegations that he supported women’s right to an abortion and the decriminalization of
drug use. McGovern’s initial support of vice presidential candidate Thomas Eagleton in the face
of revelations that Eagleton had undergone electroshock treatment for depression, followed by
his withdrawal of that support and acceptance of Eagleton’s resignation, also made McGovern
look indecisive and unorganized.
Nixon and the Republicans led from the start. To increase their advantage, they attempted to
paint McGovern as a radical leftist who favored amnesty for draft dodgers. In the Electoral
College, McGovern carried only Massachusetts and Washington, DC. Nixon won a decisive
victory of 520 electoral votes to McGovern’s 17. One Democrat described his role in
McGovern’s campaign as “recreation director on the Titanic.”
HIGH CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS
Nixon’s victory over a Democratic party in disarray was the most remarkable landslide since
Franklin D. Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936. But Nixon’s victory was short-lived, however, for it
was soon discovered that he and members of his administration had routinely engaged in
unethical and illegal behavior during his first term. Following the publication of the Pentagon
Papers, for instance, the “plumbers,” a group of men used by the White House to spy on the
president’s opponents and stop leaks to the press, broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s
psychiatrist to steal Ellsberg’s file and learn information that might damage his reputation.
During the presidential campaign, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) decided to
play “dirty tricks” on Nixon’s opponents. Before the New Hampshire Democratic primary, a
forged letter supposedly written by Democratic-hopeful Edmund Muskie in which he insulted
French Canadians, one of the state’s largest ethnic groups, was leaked to the press. Men were
assigned to spy on both McGovern and Senator Edward Kennedy. One of them managed to
masquerade as a reporter on board McGovern’s press plane. Men pretending to work for the
campaigns of Nixon’s Democratic opponents contacted vendors in various states to rent or
purchase materials for rallies; the rallies were never held, of course, and Democratic politicians
were accused of failing to pay the bills they owed.
CREEP’s most notorious operation, however, was its break-in at the offices of the Democratic
National Committee (DNC) in the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC, as well as its
subsequent cover-up. On the evening of June 17, 1972, the police arrested five men inside DNC
headquarters (Figure 30.16). According to a plan originally proposed by CREEP’s general
counsel and White House plumber G. Gordon Liddy, the men were to wiretap DNC telephones.
The FBI quickly discovered that two of the men had E. Howard Hunt’s name in their address
books. Hunt was a former CIA officer and also one of the plumbers. In the following weeks, yet
more connections were found between the burglars and CREEP, and in October 1972, the FBI
revealed evidence of illegal intelligence gathering by CREEP for the purpose of sabotaging the
Democratic Party. Nixon won his reelection handily in November. Had the president and his
reelection team not pursued a strategy of dirty tricks, Richard Nixon would have governed his
second term with one of the largest political leads in the twentieth century.
Figure 30.16 The Watergate hotel and office complex, located on the Potomac River next to the
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, was the scene of the 1972 burglary and
attempted wiretapping that eventually brought down the presidency of Richard Nixon.
In the weeks following the Watergate break-in, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters
for The Washington Post, received information from several anonymous sources, including one
known to them only as “Deep Throat,” that led them to realize the White House was deeply
implicated in the break-in. As the press focused on other events, Woodward and Bernstein
continued to dig and publish their findings, keeping the public’s attention on the unfolding
scandal. Years later, Deep Throat was revealed to be Mark Felt, then the FBI’s associate director.
THE WATERGATE CRISIS
Initially, Nixon was able to hide his connection to the break-in and the other wrongdoings
alleged against members of CREEP. However, by early 1973, the situation quickly began to
unravel. In January, the Watergate burglars were convicted, along with Hunt and Liddy. Trial
judge John Sirica was not convinced that all the guilty had been discovered. In February,
confronted with evidence that people close to the president were connected to the burglary, the
Senate appointed the Watergate Committee to investigate. Ten days later, in his testimony before
the Senate Judiciary Committee, L. Patrick Gray, acting director of the FBI, admitted destroying
evidence taken from Hunt’s safe by John Dean, the White House counsel, after the burglars were
caught.
On March 23, 1973, Judge Sirica publicly read a letter from one of the Watergate burglars,
alleging that perjury had been committed during the trial. Less than two weeks later, Jeb
Magruder, a deputy director of CREEP, admitted lying under oath and indicated that Dean and
John Mitchell, who had resigned as attorney general to become the director of CREEP, were also
involved in the break-in and its cover-up. Dean confessed, and on April 30, Nixon fired him and
requested the resignation of his aides John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, also implicated. To
defuse criticism and avoid suspicion that he was participating in a cover-up, Nixon also
announced the resignation of the current attorney general, Richard Kleindienst, a close friend,
and appointed Elliott Richardson to the position. In May 1973, Richardson named Archibald Cox
special prosecutor to investigate the Watergate affair.
Throughout the spring and the long, hot summer of 1973, Americans sat glued to their television
screens, as the major networks took turns broadcasting the Senate hearings. One by one,
disgraced former members of the administration confessed, or denied, their role in the Watergate
scandal. Dean testified that Nixon was involved in the conspiracy, allegations the president
denied. In March 1974, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Mitchell were indicted and charged with
conspiracy.
Without evidence clearly implicating the president, the investigation might have ended if not for
the testimony of Alexander Butterfield, a low-ranking member of the administration, that a
voice-activated recording system had been installed in the Oval Office. The President’s most
intimate conversations had been caught on tape. Cox and the Senate subpoenaed them.
CLICK AND EXPLORE
Listen to excerpts from Nixon’s White House tapes. Some of the recordings are a bit difficult to
hear because of static. Transcripts are also available at this site.
Nixon, however, refused to hand the tapes over and cited executive privilege, the right of the
president to refuse certain subpoenas. When he offered to supply summaries of the
conversations, Cox refused. On October 20, 1973, in an event that became known as the
Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon ordered Attorney General Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson
refused and resigned, as did Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus when confronted
with the same order. Control of the Justice Department then fell to Solicitor General Robert
Bork, who complied with Nixon’s order. In December, the House Judiciary Committee began its
own investigation to determine whether there was enough evidence of wrongdoing to impeach
the president.
The public was enraged by Nixon’s actions. A growing number of citizens felt as though the
president had placed himself above the law. Telegrams flooded the White House. The House of
Representatives began to discuss impeachment. In April 1974, when Nixon agreed to release
transcripts of the tapes, it was too little, too late (Figure 30.17). Yet, while revealing nothing
about Nixon’s knowledge of Watergate, the transcripts captured Nixon in a most unflattering
light and helped to dismantle the image of himself he had so carefully curated over his years of
public service.
Figure 30.17 In April 1974, President Richard Nixon prepares to address the nation to clarify his
position on releasing the White House tapes.
At the end of its hearings, in July 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted to pass three of the
five articles of impeachment out of committee. However, before the full House could vote, the
U.S. Supreme Court ordered Nixon to release the actual tapes of his conversations, not just
transcripts or summaries. One of the tapes revealed that he had in fact been told about White
House involvement in the Watergate break-in shortly after it occurred. In a speech on August 5,
1974, Nixon, pleading a poor memory, accepted blame for the Watergate scandal. Warned by
other Republicans that he would be found guilty by the Senate and removed from office, he
resigned the presidency on August 8.
Nixon’s resignation, which took effect the next day, did not make the Watergate scandal vanish.
Instead, it fed a growing suspicion of government felt by many. The events of Vietnam had
already showed that the government could not be trusted to protect the interests of the people or
tell them the truth. For many, Watergate confirmed these beliefs, and the suffix “-gate” attached
to a word has since come to mean a political scandal.
FORD NOT A LINCOLN
When Gerald R. Ford took the oath of office on August 9, 1974, he understood that his most
pressing task was to help the country move beyond the Watergate scandal. His declaration that
“Our long national nightmare is over. . . . [O]ur great Republic is a government of laws and not
of men” was met with almost universal applause.
It was indeed an unprecedented time. Ford was the first vice president chosen under the terms of
the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which provides for the appointment of a vice president in the
event the incumbent dies or resigns; Nixon had appointed Ford, a longtime House representative
from Michigan known for his honesty, following the resignation of embattled vice president
Spiro T. Agnew over a charge of failing to report income—a lenient charge since this income
stemmed from bribes he had received as the governor of Maryland. Ford was also the first vice
president to take office after a sitting president’s resignation, and the only chief executive never
elected either president or vice president. One of his first actions as president was to grant
Richard Nixon a full pardon (Figure 30.18). Ford thus prevented Nixon’s indictment for any
crimes he may have committed in office and ended criminal investigations into his actions. The
public reacted with suspicion and outrage. Many were convinced that the extent of Nixon’s
wrongdoings would now never been known and he would never be called to account for them.
When Ford chose to run for the presidency in 1976, the pardon returned to haunt him.
Figure 30.18 In one of his first actions as president, Gerald R. Ford announced a full pardon for
Richard Nixon on September 8, 1974. Nixon had appointed Ford vice president after the
resignation of Spiro Agnew.
As president, Ford confronted monumental issues, such as inflation, a depressed economy, and
chronic energy shortages. He established his policies during his first year in office, despite
opposition from a heavily Democratic Congress. In October 1974, he labeled inflation the
country’s most dangerous public enemy and sought a grassroots campaign to curtail it by
encouraging people to be disciplined in their consuming habits and increase their savings. The
campaign was titled “Whip Inflation Now” and was advertised on brightly colored “Win”
buttons volunteers were to wear. When recession became the nation’s most serious domestic
problem, Ford shifted to measures aimed at stimulating the economy. Still fearing inflation,
however, he vetoed a number of nonmilitary appropriations bills that would have increased the
already-large budget deficit.
Ford’s economic policies ultimately proved unsuccessful. Because of opposition from a
Democratic Congress, his foreign policy accomplishments were also limited. When he requested
money to assist the South Vietnamese government in its effort to repel North Vietnamese forces,
Congress refused. Ford was more successful in other parts of the world. He continued Nixon’s
policy of détente with the Soviet Union, and he and Secretary of State Kissinger achieved further
progress in the second round of SALT talks. In August 1975, Ford went to Finland and signed
the Helsinki Accords with Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev. This agreement essentially accepted
the territorial boundaries that had been established at the end of World War II in 1945. It also
exacted a pledge from the signatory nations that they would protect human rights within their
countries. Many immigrants to the United States protested Ford’s actions, because it seemed as
though he had accepted the status quo and left their homelands under Soviet domination. Others
considered it a belated American acceptance of the world as it really was.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
Explain why Gerald Ford lost the election of 1976
Describe Jimmy Carter’s domestic and foreign policy achievements
Discuss how the Iranian hostage crisis affected the Carter presidency
At his inauguration in January 1977, President Jimmy Carter began his speech by
thanking outgoing president Gerald Ford for all he had done to “heal” the scars left by
Watergate. American gratitude had not been great enough to return Ford to the Oval
Office, but enthusiasm for the new president was not much greater in the new
atmosphere of disillusionment with political leaders. Indeed, Carter won his party’s
nomination and the presidency largely because the Democratic leadership had been
decimated by assassination and the taint of Vietnam, and he had carefully positioned
himself as an outsider who could not be blamed for current policies. Ultimately, Carter’s
presidency proved a lackluster one that was marked by economic stagnation at home
and humiliation overseas.
THE ELECTION OF 1976
President Ford won the Republican nomination for the presidency in 1976, narrowly defeating
former California governor Ronald Reagan, but he lost the election to his Democratic opponent
Jimmy Carter. Carter ran on an “anti-Washington” ticket, making a virtue of his lack of
experience in what was increasingly seen as the corrupt politics of the nation’s capital. Accepting
his party’s nomination, the former governor of Georgia pledged to combat racism and sexism as
well as overhaul the tax structure. He openly proclaimed his faith as a born-again Christian and
promised to change the welfare system and provide comprehensive healthcare coverage for
neglected citizens who deserved compassion. Most importantly, Jimmy Carter promised that he
would “never lie.”
Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon had alienated many Republicans. That, combined with the
stagnant economy, cost him votes, and Jimmy Carter, an engineer and former naval officer who
portrayed himself as a humble peanut farmer, prevailed, carrying all the southern states, except
Virginia and Oklahoma (Figure 30.19). Ford did well in the West, but Carter received 50 percent
of the popular vote to Ford’s 48 percent, and 297 electoral votes to Ford’s 240.
Figure 30.19 President Gerald Ford (right) and Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter dueled in
Philadelphia in 1976, during the first televised presidential debate since that between Richard
Nixon and John F. Kennedy in 1960.
CLICK AND EXPLORE
In the mid-1970s, the United States celebrated the two-hundredth anniversary of its
independence from Great Britain. Peruse the collection of patriotic bicentennial memorabilia at
the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.
ON THE INSIDE
Making a virtue of his lack of political experience, especially in Washington, Jimmy Carter took
office with less practical experience in executive leadership and the workings of the national
government than any president since Calvin Coolidge. His first executive act was to fulfill a
campaign pledge to grant unconditional amnesty to young men who had evaded the draft during
the Vietnam War. Despite the early promise of his rhetoric, within a couple of years of his taking
office, liberal Democrats claimed Carter was the most conservative Democratic president since
Grover Cleveland.
In trying to manage the relatively high unemployment rate of 7.5 percent and inflation that had
risen into the double digits by 1978, Carter was only marginally effective. His tax reform
measure of 1977 was weak and failed to close the grossest of loopholes. His deregulation of
major industries, such as aviation and trucking, was intended to force large companies to become
more competitive. Consumers benefited in some ways: For example, airlines offered cheaper
fares to beat their competitors. However, some companies, like Pan American World Airways,
instead went out of business. Carter also expanded various social programs, improved housing
for the elderly, and took steps to improve workplace safety.
Because the high cost of fuel continued to hinder economic expansion, the creation of an energy
program became a central focus of his administration. Carter stressed energy conservation,
encouraging people to insulate their houses and rewarding them with tax credits if they did so,
and pushing for the use of coal, nuclear power, and alternative energy sources such as solar
power to replace oil and natural gas. To this end, Carter created the Department of Energy.
CARTER AND A NEW DIRECTION IN FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Carter believed that U.S. foreign policy should be founded upon deeply held moral principles
and national values. The mission in Vietnam had failed, he argued, because American actions
there were contrary to moral values. His dedication to peace and human rights significantly
changed the way that the United States conducted its foreign affairs. He improved relations with
China, ended military support to Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, and helped arrange for
the Panama Canal to be returned to Panamanian control in 1999. He agreed to a new round of
talks with the Soviet Union (SALT II) and brought Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin and
Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to the United States to discuss peace between their countries.
Their meetings at Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, led to the signing of the
Camp David Accords in September 1978 (Figure 30.20). This in turn resulted in the drafting of a
historic peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1979.
Figure 30.20 President Jimmy Carter meets with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat (left) and Israel’s
Menachem Begin (right) at Camp David in 1978. Sadat was assassinated in 1981, partly because
of his willingness to make peace with Israel.
Despite achieving many successes in the area of foreign policy, Carter made a more
controversial decision in response to the Soviet Union’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. In
January 1980, he declared that if the USSR did not withdraw its forces, the United States would
boycott the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow. The Soviets did not retreat, and the
United States did not send a team to Moscow. Only about half of the American public supported
this decision, and despite Carter’s call for other countries to join the boycott, very few did so.
HOSTAGES TO HISTORY
Carter’s biggest foreign policy problem was the Iranian hostage crisis, whose roots lay in the
1950s. In 1953, the United States had assisted Great Britain in the overthrow of Prime Minister
Mohammad Mossadegh, a rival of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the shah of Iran. Mossadegh had
sought greater Iranian control over the nation’s oil wealth, which was claimed by British
companies. Following the coup, the shah assumed complete control of Iran’s government. He
then disposed of political enemies and eliminated dissent through the use of SAVAK, a secret
police force trained by the United States. The United States also supplied the shah’s government
with billions of dollars in aid. As Iran’s oil revenue grew, especially after the 1973 oil embargo
against the United States, the pace of its economic development and the size of its educated
middle class also increased, and the country became less dependent on U.S. aid. Its population
increasingly blamed the United States for the death of Iranian democracy and faulted it for its
consistent support of Israel.
Despite the shah’s unpopularity among his own people, the result of both his brutal policies and
his desire to Westernize Iran, the United States supported his regime. In February 1979, the shah
was overthrown when revolution broke out, and a few months later, he departed for the United
States for medical treatment. The long history of U.S. support for him and its offer of refuge
greatly angered Iranian revolutionaries. On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students and
activists, including Islamic fundamentalists who wished to end the Westernization and
secularization of Iran, invaded the American embassy in Tehran and seized sixty-six embassy
employees. The women and African Americans were soon released, leaving fifty-three men as
hostages. Negotiations failed to free them, and in April 1980, a rescue attempt fell through when
the aircraft sent to transport them crashed. Another hostage was released when he developed
serious medical problems. President Carter’s inability to free the other captives hurt his
performance in the 1980 elections. The fifty-two men still held in Iran were finally freed on
January 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan took office as president (Figure 30.21).
Figure 30.21 The fifty-two American hostages return from Iran in January 1981. They had been
held for 444 days.
Carter’s handling of the crisis appeared even less effective in the way the media portrayed it
publicly. This contributed to a growing sense of malaise, a feeling that the United States’ best
days were behind it and the country had entered a period of decline. This belief was compounded
by continuing economic problems, and the oil shortage and subsequent rise in prices that
followed the Iranian Revolution. The president’s decision to import less oil to the United States
and remove price controls on oil and gasoline did not help matters. In 1979, Carter sought to
reassure the nation and the rest of the world, especially the Soviet Union, that the United States
was still able to defend its interests. To dissuade the Soviets from making additional inroads in
southwest Asia, he proposed the Carter Doctrine, which stated that the United States would
regard any attempt to interfere with its interests in the Middle East as an act of aggression to be
met with force if necessary.
Carter had failed to solve the nation’s problems. Some blamed these problems on dishonest
politicians; others blamed the problems on the Cold War obsession with fighting Communism,
even in small nations like Vietnam that had little influence on American national interests. Still
others faulted American materialism. In 1980, a small but growing group called the Moral
Majority faulted Carter for betraying his southern roots and began to seek a return to traditional
values.
30.1 Identity Politics in a Fractured Society
In the late 1960s and 1970s, Native Americans, LGBTQ people, and women organized to change
discriminatory laws and pursue government support for their interests, a strategy known as
identity politics. Others, disenchanted with the status quo, distanced themselves from White,
middle-class America by forming their own countercultures centered on a desire for peace, the
rejection of material goods and traditional morality, concern for the environment, and drug use in
pursuit of spiritual revelations. These groups, whose aims and tactics posed a challenge to the
existing state of affairs, often met with hostility from individuals, local officials, and the U.S.
government alike. Still, they persisted, determined to further their goals and secure for
themselves the rights and privileges to which they were entitled as American citizens.
30.2 Coming Apart, Coming Together
When a new Republican constituency of moderate southerners and northern, blue-collar workers
voted Richard Nixon into the White House in 1968, many were hopeful. In the wake of antiwar
and civil rights protests, and the chaos of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, many
Americans welcomed Nixon’s promise to uphold law and order. During his first term, Nixon
strode a moderate, middle path in domestic affairs, attempting with little success to solve the
problems of inflation and unemployment through a combination of austerity and deficit
spending. He made substantial progress in foreign policy, however, establishing diplomatic
relations with China for the first time since the Communist Revolution and entering into a policy
of détente with the Soviet Union.
30.3 Vietnam: The Downward Spiral
As the war in Vietnam raged on, Americans were horrified to hear of atrocities committed by
U.S. soldiers, such as the 1968 massacre of villagers at My Lai. To try to end the conflict, Nixon
escalated it by bombing Hanoi and invading Cambodia; his actions provoked massive antiwar
demonstrations in the United States that often ended in violence, such as the tragic shooting of
unarmed student protestors at Kent State University in 1970. The 1971 release of the Pentagon
Papers revealed the true nature of the war to an increasingly disapproving and disenchanted
public. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger eventually drafted a peace treaty with North Vietnam,
and, after handing over responsibility for the war to South Vietnam, the United States withdrew
its troops in 1973. South Vietnam surrendered to the North two years later.
30.4 Watergate: Nixon’s Domestic Nightmare
In 1972, President Nixon faced an easy reelection against a Democratic Party in disarray. But
even before his landslide victory, evidence had surfaced that the White House was involved in
the break-in at the DNC’s headquarters at the Watergate office complex. As the investigation
unfolded, the depths to which Nixon and his advisers had sunk became clear. Some twenty-five
of Nixon’s aides were indicted for criminal activity, and he faced impeachment before becoming
the first president to resign from office. His successor, Gerald Ford, was unable to solve the
pressing problems the United States faced or erase the stain of Watergate.
30.5 Jimmy Carter in the Aftermath of the Storm
Jimmy Carter’s administration began with great promise, but his efforts to improve the economy
through deregulation largely failed. Carter’s attempt at a foreign policy built on the principle of
human rights also prompted much criticism, as did his decision to boycott the Summer Olympics
in Moscow. On the other hand, he successfully brokered the beginnings of a historic peace treaty
between Egypt and Israel. Remaining public faith in Carter was dealt a serious blow, however,
when he proved unable to free the American hostages in Tehran.
Figure 31.1 This striking piece of graffiti from the Berlin Wall (modified), now housed in
the Newseum in Washington, DC, contains the name of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash
Power (ACT UP), a group formed in 1987 in New York City to combat the spread of
AIDS and the perception that AIDS was the product of immoral behavior.
Chapter Outline
31.1 The Reagan Revolution
31.2 Political and Cultural Fusions
31.3 A New World Order
31.4 Bill Clinton and the New Economy
“Act up!” might be called the unofficial slogan of the 1980s. Numerous groups were
concerned by what they considered disturbing social, cultural, and political trends in the
United States and lobbied for their vision of what the nation should be. Conservative
politicians cut taxes for the wealthy and shrank programs for the poor, while
conservative Christians blamed the legalization of abortion and the increased visibility of
gays and lesbians for weakening the American family. When the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control first recognized the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in
1981, the Religious Right regarded it as a plague sent by God to punish gay men for
their “unnatural” behavior. Politicians, many of whom relied on religious conservatives
for their votes, largely ignored the AIDS epidemic. In response, organizations such as
ACT UP were formed to draw attention to their cause (Figure 31.1).
Toward the end of the decade in 1989, protesters from both East and West Berlin
began “acting up” and tearing down large chunks of the Berlin Wall, essentially
dismantling the Iron Curtain. This symbolic act was the culmination of earlier
demonstrations that had swept across Eastern Europe, resulting in the collapse of
Communist governments in both Central and Eastern Europe, and marking the
beginning of the end of the Cold War.
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
Explain Ronald Reagan’s attitude towards government
Discuss the Reagan administration’s economic policies and their effects on the
nation
Figure 31.2
Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981 with strongly conservative values but
experience in moderate politics. He appealed to moderates and conservatives anxious
about social change and the seeming loss of American power and influence on the
world stage. Leading the so-called Reagan Revolution, he appealed to voters with the
promise that the principles of conservatism could halt and revert the social and
economic changes of the last generation. Reagan won the White House by citing big
government and attempts at social reform as the problem, not the solution. He was able
to capture the political capital of an unsettled national mood and, in the process, helped
set an agenda and policies that would affect his successors and the political landscape
of the nation.
REAGAN’S EARLY CAREER
Although many of his movie roles and the persona he created for himself seemed to represent
traditional values, Reagan’s rise to the presidency was an unusual transition from pop cultural
significance to political success. Born and raised in the Midwest, he moved to California in 1937
to become a Hollywood actor. He also became a reserve officer in the U.S. Army that same year,
but when the country entered World War II, he was excluded from active duty overseas because
of poor eyesight and spent the war in the army’s First Motion Picture Unit. After the war, he
resumed his film career; rose to leadership in the Screen Actors Guild, a Hollywood union; and
became a spokesman for General Electric and the host of a television series that the company
sponsored. As a young man, he identified politically as a liberal Democrat, but his distaste for
communism, along with the influence of the social conservative values of his second wife,
actress Nancy Davis, edged him closer to conservative Republicanism (Figure 31.3). By 1962, he
had formally switched political parties, and in 1964, he actively campaigned for the Republican
presidential nominee Barry Goldwater.
Figure 31.3 In 1961, when Congress began to explore nationwide health insurance for the
elderly under Social Security, Reagan made a recording for the American Medical Association in
which he denounced the idea—which was later adopted as Medicare—as “socialized medicine.”
Such a program, Reagan warned his listeners, was the first step to the nation’s demise as a free
society.
Reagan launched his own political career in 1966 when he successfully ran for governor of
California. His opponent was the incumbent Pat Brown, a liberal Democrat who had already
served two terms. Reagan, quite undeservedly, blamed Brown for race riots in California and
student protests at the University of California at Berkeley. He criticized the Democratic
incumbent’s increases in taxes and state government, and denounced “big government” and the
inequities of taxation in favor of free enterprise. As governor, however, he quickly learned that
federal and state laws prohibited the elimination of certain programs and that many programs
benefited his constituents. He ended up approving the largest budget in the state’s history and
approved tax increases on a number of occasions. The contrast between Reagan’s rhetoric and
practice made up his political skill: capturing the public mood and catering to it, but
compromising when necessary.
REPUBLICANS BACK IN THE WHITE HOUSE
After two unsuccessful Republican primary bids in 1968 and 1976, Reagan won the presidency
in 1980. His victory was the result of a combination of dissatisfaction with the presidential
leadership of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in the 1970s and the growth of the New Right. This
group of conservative Americans included many very wealthy financial supporters and emerged
in the wake of the social reforms and cultural changes of the 1960s and 1970s. Many were
evangelical Christians, like those who joined Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and opposed the
legalization of abortion, the feminist movement, and sex education in public schools. Reagan
also attracted people, often dubbed neoconservatives, who would not previously have voted for
the same candidate as conservative Protestants did. Many were middle- and working-class
people who resented the growth of federal and state governments, especially benefit programs,
and the subsequent increase in taxes during the late 1960s and 1970s. They favored the tax
revolts that swept the nation in the late 1970s under the leadership of predominantly older,
White, middle-class Americans, which had succeeded in imposing radical reductions in local
property and state income taxes.
Voter turnout reflected this new conservative swing, which not only swept Reagan into the
White House but created a Republican majority in the Senate. Only 52 percent of eligible voters
went to the polls in 1980, the lowest turnout for a presidential election since 1948. Those who
did cast a ballot were older, Whiter, and wealthier than those who did not vote (Figure 31.4).
Strong support among White voters, those over forty-five years of age, and those with incomes
over $50,000 proved crucial for Reagan’s victory.
Figure 31.4 Ronald Reagan campaigns for the presidency with his wife Nancy in South Carolina
in 1980. Reagan won in all the Deep South states except Georgia, although he did not come from
the South and his opponent Jimmy Carter did.
REAGANOMICS
Reagan’s primary goal upon taking office was to stimulate the sagging economy while
simultaneously cutting both government programs and taxes. His economic policies,
called Reaganomics by the press, were based on a theory called supply-side economics, about
which many economists were skeptical. Influenced by economist Arthur Laffer of the University
of Southern California, Reagan cut income taxes for those at the top of the economic ladder,
which was supposed to motivate the rich to invest in businesses, factories, and the stock market
in anticipation of high returns. According to Laffer’s argument, this would eventually translate
into more jobs further down the socioeconomic ladder. Economic growth would also increase the
total tax revenue—even at a lower tax rate. In other words, proponents of “trickle-down
economics” promised to cut taxes and balance the budget at the same time. Reaganomics also
included the deregulation of industry and higher interest rates to control inflation, but these
initiatives preceded Reagan and were conceived in the Carter administration.
Many politicians, inclu…