Restless Giant, page 2
Ford faced a particularly delicate domestic problem: What should he do about his predecessor? Should Nixon stand trial for the crimes he was alleged to have committed in covering up the Watergate break-in of 1972? Some Americans demanded that he be prosecuted: No one, not even a president, should be above the law. Others disagreed, believing that Nixon had already paid a high price and that prosecution would prolong the “national nightmare.” Braving predictable outrage, Ford sided with advocates of clemency. Barely a month after taking office—and before Nixon might have been indicted, tried, or convicted—he acted suddenly and decisively, giving Nixon a “full, free, and absolute pardon” for any crimes he might have committed.
A storm of criticism erupted around this “thunderbolt,” as some people called it. Ford’s press secretary resigned in protest. Democratic senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, the majority leader, observed, “All men are created equal,” and “that includes presidents and plumbers.” Many Americans, inclined to believe in conspiracies since the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., were convinced that Ford had earlier struck a deal with Nixon in order to be selected as Vice President Agnew’s successor in 1973: In the event that Nixon had to resign, Ford would pardon him. In any event, Ford’s public approval rating plummeted after the pardon. As measured by a Gallup poll, it had been 71 percent in late August. It fell sixteen points overnight and plunged further, to 50 percent by the end of September.11
NOT EVERYONE, OF COURSE, was absorbed by these front-page events. Most Americans did not pay sustained attention to politics. Instead, they were normally concerned with day-to-day developments closer to home, some of which advanced personal comforts. Among the consumer goods that appeared for the first time in 1974 were microwave ovens, fully programmable pocket calculators, and automatic icemakers in refrigerators. The first bar codes greeted shoppers in stores. Automated teller machines, introduced a few years earlier, were slowly increasing in number and rendering obsolete the constraints of “bankers’ hours.” Touch-tone phones, an innovation of the 1960s, were spreading rapidly and replacing dials.
There was more to please people in 1974. CAT scans for medical diagnoses were becoming widely available. Tobacco ads praised the blessings of “low tar” cigarettes that would supposedly be safer for the 45 million or so Americans—35 percent of the adult population—who still smoked.12 Consumers in the mid-1970s could choose from a wide range of automobiles, many of which—Toyotas, Datsuns, Audis, Volvos—were manufactured abroad. In 1975, there were 106.7 million passenger cars registered in the United States, in a car-crazy country that had 129.8 million licensed drivers among the 156.7 million people who were sixteen years of age or older.13
The very wealthy, of course, had nearly infinite choices. The cover of Time during the week following Nixon’s resignation featured the actor Jack Nicholson, who had recently starred in Chinatown and who was due in 1975 to appear in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest. His compensation for Chinatown was said to be $750,000, a huge sum for that time. Other luminaries of popular culture included Robert Redford and Paul Newman (both stars of The Sting in 1973), Barbra Streisand, and Clint Eastwood. They, too, reaped munificent rewards in a culture of celebrity that lavished near-worshipful attention on film stars, singers, and athletes. Muhammad Ali earned millions by taking the heavyweight title from George Foreman in Zaire in October 1974.14
The first issue of People magazine appeared earlier in the year, displaying on its cover the actress Mia Farrow (star of The Great Gatsby) nibbling on a string of pearls. People’s arrival as a hugely successful addition to American newsstands broadened the reach of tabloid-style journalism in the United States and ensured that millions of readers and consumers might know all—or almost all—about the beautiful, the rich, and the famous. Britain’s Princess Diana was to grace fifty People covers in later years.
The explosive power of America’s consumer culture, while liberating in many ways, was seductive and disorienting: The more people bought, the more they seemed to crave. Wants became needs. In the 1970s, as later in the century, the “lifestyles” of the rich and famous fostered a great deal of materialistic emulation. A miasma of cupidity, critics complained, was suffocating the culture and overwhelming traditional values that had made the nation strong.
Popular anxieties about the economy loomed especially large in 1974—larger, in fact, than Ford’s political difficulties, racial divisions, or controversy over abortion, vexing though those issues were. The economy had been ailing since 1969, afflicted by inflation as well as rising unemployment. Nixon, struggling to cure these maladies, had astounded Americans by proclaiming, “I am now a Keynesian in economics,” and by imposing controls on prices and wages. To increase the attractiveness of American exports, he had taken steps to devalue the dollar. Alas, after a brief upturn that helped him win reelection in 1972, the economy sickened again. Some contemporaries, badly affected by economic distress that worsened thereafter, referred to the next three years, between 1973 and 1975, as the Great Recession.
“Stagflation,” as it came to be called, mystified a great many economists, who had educated people to be prepared for the ills of inflation or unemployment at any given time but not to anticipate suffering from both at once. In the aftermath of American support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, an oil embargo, followed by price hikes ordered by OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), had led to dramatic jumps in America’s energy prices. The cost of overseas oil rose from $1.77 per barrel in October 1973 to $10 by early 1974.15 The spike in oil prices further favored Japanese automobile manufacturers, who far outdid Detroit in producing fuel-efficient cars.
Worse, the embargo intensified already widespread feelings of vulnerability in the United States. Rocked by losing a war in Vietnam, which President Johnson had called a “piss-ant country,” Americans now fretted as their economy took a battering from Third World nations rich in oil. Politicians, economists, educators, and business leaders scrambled to reduce demand for oil and gasoline, supporting among other measures a national speed limit of fifty-five miles per hour.16 Hoping to save on heating costs, a number of colleges and universities shortened their winter terms. Still, the stagflation persisted.
A host of other economic numbers at the time were equally disturbing. Between March and December 1974, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell from 892 to 577, a loss of 37 percent.17 As indicated by the growing appeal of foreign cars, some of America’s leading heavy industries, notably steel and automobile manufacturing, suffered from sharply declining sales and a record number of work stoppages. A Rust Belt was encircling industrial parts of the Midwest. Unemployment, which had averaged 4.7 percent in 1973, rose to 7.5 percent by 1975. Inflation, at 6.2 percent in 1969, doubled to 12.4 percent for 1974, the worst peacetime inflation in American history. The gross national product (GNP) actually fell by 2.3 percent per capita in both 1973 and 1974.18
Facing discouraging numbers like these, George Shultz, a private citizen who had earlier served as secretary of labor, head of the Office of Management and Budget, and secretary of the treasury, exclaimed at a White House meeting in July 1974, “The country is in terrible shape, and I wish you guys in government would do something about it.”19 His comment exposed an often profound ambivalence that Americans—then and later—harbored about the proper role of the state: Again and again, people damned the federal government as bloated and bumbling, but they rarely stopped demanding that it act to help them and to expand their rights and entitlements.
THESE DEVELOPMENTS, NOTABLY WATERGATE, divisions over race and gender, and economic distress, caused many Americans in 1974 to fear the passing of what they had imagined as the golden age of American history that had followed World War II. The cherished American Dream of upward social mobility, sustained for many people in those prosperous years by vigorous economic growth, seemed endangered. Americans who fell prey to fears such as these were a bit too quick to dwell on the troubles of the country, which remained immensely powerful in international affairs and which—the economic doldrums notwithstanding—was still by far the world’s most affluent society. America’s per capita GNP in 1974 remained considerably higher than that of its closest rivals, West Germany and Japan.20 The nation’s official poverty rate, at 11.6 percent of the population in 1974, was slightly below what it had been (12.6 percent) in 1970, and roughly half as high as it had been (22.2 percent) in 1960.21 And, as the chief justice had exclaimed, the constitutional system had survived. With the soldiers home from Vietnam and the Watergate crisis resolved, Americans might well have looked forward to less tumultuous times and to celebrations of their nation’s bicentennial in 1976. Young men, moreover, no longer had to worry about the draft, which had been ended in 1973. This was a significant freedom—one of many that endured in the future.
Yet many disgruntled Americans in 1974, and later, practiced a form of selective amnesia, which blotted from their consciousness some of the blights that had afflicted the nation in the 1950s—among them constitutionally protected racial segregation, a Red Scare that launched angry assaults on civil liberties, blatant religious intolerance, and systematic discrimination against women. Many of the people who yearned nostalgically for a return of the supposedly halcyon 1950s, and for a resurgence of the unity and patriotism that had seemed to motivate what would later be called the “greatest generation” (of the World War II era), assumed that progress had always graced America’s historical development. Shaken by the problems of the 1970s, they appeared to believe that almost everything about the postwar years between 1945 and the assassination of President Kennedy had been better than the present.22
Nostalgic distortions aside, pessimists in 1974 were correct to remember that most years between 1945 and 1970 had featured vibrant economic growth. This had been especially true of the 1960s, when per capita GNP had risen by nearly 33 percent.23 Growth of this magnitude had enabled rising percentages of people to earn higher real wages and salaries and move upward into middle-class occupations and “lifestyles.” Young Americans in those years had seemed especially confident about the future. They had married early, produced a baby boom (of 75 million new arrivals between 1946 and 1964), bought houses in the suburbs, and acquired cars and many other consumer goods. They had sailed, or so it seemed, on a boundless sea of prosperity.24
In the process, these optimistic Americans had developed higher expectations—about the economy, government benefits, their marriages and friendships, their jobs, their health, and the futures of their children. Like Adam and Eve, they were restless in their new paradise, and they yearned for more. They expected to enjoy greater personal freedom, choice, and self-fulfillment. Having witnessed the powerful civil rights movement, they had seen dramatic expansions of freedom in their own lifetimes, and they developed ever more hopeful visions both about their rights and entitlements and (before taking a beating in Vietnam) about the capacity of the country to do good in the world.
Numerous groups—women, blacks, the aged, the handicapped—had already organized to seek greater support from government. Backed by public interest lawyers—whose numbers and influence increased in coming decades—these groups engaged in battles on behalf of an ever larger cluster of rights, thereby advancing the role of government and of the courts in American life. Though they won many of these struggles—entitlements expanded in these and later years—they remained impatient to improve their own situations in life as well as to advance a “rights revolution,” as it came to be called, that would benefit others. In America’s open, rights-conscious, and future-oriented culture, it was possible to believe that one step forward would lead straightaway to another.25
The contentious mood of the mid-1970s prompted a spate of jeremiads, many of which echoed throughout the next thirty years in a culture that was to abound—even in better times—in complaints about cultural conflict and prophecies of national decline. As Commager remarked just before Nixon’s resignation: “There is no consensus. There is less harmony in our society, to my mind, than at any time since, say, Reconstruction. Perhaps the ’60s and ’70s are a great divide—the divide of disillusionment.”26
Americans who shared Commager’s worries came to see the 1970s as the onset of a problematic new era, variously perceived as an “Age of Limits,” a “Time of Conflict,” or an “Era of Decline.” Conditioned to expect progress, they were impatient, and they resisted leaders who asked them to sacrifice. Suspicious of authority figures, they were quick to direct their wrath at Ford, congressional leaders, big businessmen, lawyers—anyone in a position of power. No leaders—no institutions—seemed immune in the 1970s from criticism, a great deal of which flowed from the media, whose leaders had become considerably more skeptical and confrontational as a result of the travails of Vietnam and Watergate, and which questioned if any authorities could be trusted. As Harvard University president Derek Bok put it, “There is a very obvious dearth of people who seem able to supply convincing answers, or even to point to directions toward solutions.”27
These were among the many developments that had worried Americans during the late 1960s, one of the most tempestuous times in modern United States history, and that still seemed to threaten national unity in 1974. Whether the country could surmount its problems and move ahead were questions that understandably chipped away at the confidence of many contemporary Americans.
THIS BOOK, PAYING SPECIAL ATTENTION to concerns such as these, also explores a wider range of trends and controversies over the next quarter of a century and more, from 1974 until early 2001. It looks at major developments both at home and abroad, and at social and cultural as well as political and economic events. It has a good deal to say about the many flaws that continued to trouble American society after 1974, notably racial injustice. An especially worrisome trend was rising income inequality, which became sharp during this period. Many public schools, especially in poverty-stricken areas of inner cities, remained wretched.
But this is not primarily a tale of Limits, Decline, or Conflict, for after the doldrums of the mid- and late 1970s, a number of more positive developments, many of which were driven by successive generations of aspiring young people, helped to raise popular hopes. Many social and cultural conflicts, loudly contested by partisan political antagonists and given exaggerated play in the media, turned out to be neither so profound nor so implacable as they seemed.
By 2001, Americans lived in an economy that had expanded to promote considerably greater affluence, convenience, and comfort for most people, and in a physical environment that had become cleaner and safer. Toleration—of various religions, styles of life, and sexual practices—had widened substantially. Discrimination against minorities and women had weakened. Important rights and entitlements had expanded. Well before 2001, the Cold War was history, positioning the United States as a giant on the world stage.
Flourishing in an open, competitive, and pluralistic society, popular complaints about decline and conflict—and about government—continued to proliferate after 1974. “Culture wars” appeared to splinter the country, especially in the 1990s. But the quality of life in the United States, bolstered by the bounteous resources and receptivity to change that had always been hallmarks of American history, improved in manifold ways between 1974 and 2001. Most people of the affluent and enormously powerful United States, though often dissatisfied, had more blessings to cherish in early 2001 than they had had in 1974.
AFTER WRITING A FINAL VERSION of this book, I labored over drafts of an epilogue that attempted to explore the impact of September 11, 2001. The horrors of that terrible day provoked widespread fear and anger among Americans, banishing complacency about terrorism and inciting calls for revenge. The killings led the New York Times to editorialize that 9/11 was “one of those moments in which history splits, and we define the world as before and after.”28
As I write these words in 2005, it is obvious that this editorial was prescient: A great deal has changed since that world-shaking day, especially America’s foreign and military policies, which have become far more interventionist—and divisive—than most people could have imagined in early 2001. Efforts to combat domestic terrorism have raised widespread fears about threats to civil liberties and personal privacy. Federal deficits have exploded in size. Still, it is also clear that many key developments of American life, having taken root between 1974 and 2001, have continued to flourish. Not even a disaster such as 9/11 completely “splits” history.
Following many rewrites of the epilogue, I decided to drop it. I believe that a span of four years is too short to provide a very reliable historical perspective on the legacies of dramatic events such as those of 9/11/2001. So, while my book tries to help readers understand why America was so poorly prepared for the attacks of September 11, it has little to say about the years since then. I ask readers to put themselves back a bit in time and to receive this book as an interpretive history of the United States during a fascinating era that helped to shape many characteristics of our own.
1
The Troubled 1970s
In 1996, a popular comic strip, “The Buckets,” offered a characteristically unflattering picture of American culture in the 1970s. Successive frames of the strip, which normally poked fun at the haplessness of the Bucket family, depict Mr. Bucket’s recollections of the era: bell bottoms, disco, mood rings, “stupid hair,” and a drawing of Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Nixon is jowly, dark-browed, and menacing; Ford looks determined though a little empty-headed; Carter wears a huge, moronic, buck-toothed smile. Mr. Bucket then appears and muses, “I can think of only one thing worse than the ’70s.” In the last frame, he stares at two long-haired young people clad in styles reminiscent of those from the 1970s and explains what that “one thing” is: “Doing them again!”1
