FOCUS QUESTIONS

What characterized the social rebellion and struggles for civil rights in the sixties and seventies?

How did the war in Vietnam end?

Why did President Ford issue a pardon to Richard M. Nixon? What was “stagflation”?

S Richard M. Nixon entered the White House in early 1969, he took charge of a nation whose social fabric was in tatters. Everywhere, it seemed, conventional institutions and notions of authority were under attack. The traumatic events of 1968 were like a knife blade splitting past and future, then and now. They revealed how deeply divided society had become and how difficult a task Nixon faced in carrying out his pledge to restore social harmony. In the end, the stability he promised proved elusive. His controversial policies and his combative temperament heightened rather than reduced societal tensions. Ironically, many of the same forces that had enabled the complacent prosperity of the fifties—the baby boom, the cold war, and the burgeoning consumer culture—helped generate the social upheaval of the sixties and seventies. It was one of the most turbulent periods in American history— exciting, threatening, explosive, and transforming.

The Roots of Rebellion

YOUTH revolt By the early sixties, the baby boomers were maturing. Now young adults, they differed from their parents in that they had experienced neither economic depression nor a major war during their lifetimes. In record numbers they were attending colleges and universities: enrollment quadrupled between 1945 and 1970. Many universities had become gigantic institutions dependent upon huge research contracts from corporations and the federal government. As these “multiversities” grew larger and more bureaucratic, they unwittingly invited resistance from a generation of students wary of involvement in what President Dwight D. Eisenhower had labeled the military-industrial complex.

The Greensboro s it-i ns in 1960 not only precipitated a decade of civil rights activism but also signaled an end to the complacency that had enveloped many college campuses and much of social life during the fifties. The sit-ins, marches, protests, ideals, and sacrifices associated with the civil rights movement inspired other groups—women, Native Americans, His-panics, and gays—to demand justice, freedom, and equality as well.

During 1960-1961, a significant number of white students joined African Americans in the sit-in movement. They and many others were also inspired by President Kennedy’s direct appeals to their youthful idealism. Thousands enrolled as volunteers in the Peace Corps and VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America), while others continued to participate in civil rights demonstrations. But as criticism of escalating military involvement in Vietnam mounted, more and more young people grew disillusioned with the government. During the mid-sixties, a full-fledged youth revolt erupted across the nation. The youth revolt grew out of several impulses: to challenge authority; to change the world; and, to indulge in pleasures of all sorts. As a popular song by Steppenwolf declared in 1968, “Like a true nature child/We were born, born to be wild/We have climbed so high/Never want to die.” During the sixties and seventies, rebellious and often idealistic young people flowed into two distinct yet frequently overlapping movements: the New Left and the counterculture.

The new left The explicitly political strain of the youth revolt originated when Tom Hayden and Al Haber, two University of Michigan students, formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1960, an organization very much influenced by the tactics and successes of the civil rights movement. In 1962, Hayden and Haber convened a meeting of sixty upstart activists at Port Huron, Michigan, all of whom shared a desire to remake the

United States into a more democratic society. Hayden drafted an impassioned manifesto that became known as the Port Huron Statement. It begins: “We are the people of this generation, bred in at least moderate comfort, housed in universities, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.” Hayden then called for political reforms, racial equality, and workers’ rights. Inspired by the example of African American activism in the South, Hayden declared that college students had the power to restore “participatory democracy” by wresting “control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy.” He and others adopted the term New Left to distinguish their efforts at grassroots democracy from those of the old Left of the thirties, which had espoused an orthodox Marxism.

In the fall of 1964, students at the University of California at Berkeley took Hayden’s program to heart. Several of them had returned to the campus after spending the summer working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) voter-registration project in Mississippi, where three volunteers had been killed and nearly a thousand arrested. Their idealism and activism had been pricked by their participation in Freedom Summer, and they were eager to bring changes to campus life. When the UC Berkeley chancellor announced that political demonstrations would no longer be allowed on campus, several hundred students staged a sit-in. Thousands more joined in. After a tense thirty-two-hour standoff the administration relented. Student groups then formed the free-speech movement (FSM).

Led by Mario Savio, a philosophy major who had participated in Freedom Summer in Mississippi, the FSM initially protested on behalf of students’ rights. But it quickly mounted a more general criticism of the university and what Savio called the “depersonalized, unresponsive bureaucracy” smothering American life. In 1964, Savio led hundreds of students into UC Berkeley’s administration building and organized a sit-in. In the early-morning hours, six hundred policemen, dispatched by the governor, arrested the protesters. But their example lived on.

The goals and tactics of the FSM and SDS spread to colleges across the country. Escalating U. S. military involvement in Vietnam soon changed the students’ agenda. With the dramatic expansion of the war after 1965, millions of young men faced the grim prospect of being drafted to fight in an increasingly unpopular conflict. In fact, however, the Vietnam War, like virtually every other, was primarily a poor man’s fight. Deferments enabled college students to postpone military service until they received their degree or reached the age of twenty-four; in 1965-1966, college students made up only 2 percent of all military inductees. In 1966, however, the Selective Service

The free-speech movement

Mario Savio, a founder of the free-speech movement, speaks at a rally at the University of California at Berkeley.

System modified the provisions so that even undergraduates were eligible for the draft.

As the war dragged on and opposition mounted, 200,000 young men ignored their draft notices, and some 4,000 of them served prison sentences. Another 56,000 men qualified for conscientious objector status during the Vietnam War, compared with only 7,600 during the Korean conflict. Still others left the country altogether—several thousand fled to Canada or Sweden—to avoid military service. The most popular way to escape the draft was to flunk the physical examination. Whatever the preferred method, many students succeeded in avoiding military service. Of the 1,200 men in the Harvard senior class of 1970, only 56 served in the military, and just 2 of those went to Vietnam.

Throughout 1967 and 1968, the anti-war movement grew more volatile as inner-city ghettos were exploding in flames fanned by racial injustice. Frustration over patterns of discrimination in employment and housing and staggering rates of joblessness among i nner-city African American youths provoked chaotic violence in scores of urban ghettos. “There was a sense everywhere, in 1968,” the journalist Garry Wills wrote, “that things were giving way. That man had not only lost control of his history, but might never regain it.”

During the eventful spring of 1968—when Lyndon B. Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election and Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated—campus unrest exploded across the country. The turmoil reached a climax with the disruption of Columbia University, where Mark Rudd, an SDS leader, joined other student radicals in occupying the president’s office and classroom buildings. The administration was forced to cancel classes and call in the New York City police. The riotous events at Columbia inspired similar clashes among students, administrators, and police at Harvard, Cornell, and San Francisco State.

At the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the polarization of society reached a bizarre climax. Inside the tightly guarded convention hall, Democrats nominated Hubert H. Humphrey while on Chicago’s streets the whole spectrum of antiwar dissenters gathered, from the earnest supporters of Senator Eugene McCarthy to the nihilistic Yippies, members of the new Youth International party. Abbie Hoffman, one of the Yippie leaders, explained that their “conception of revolution is that it’s fun.”

The outlandish behavior of the Yippies and the other demonstrators provoked an equally outlandish response by Mayor Richard J. Daley and his army of city police. As a horrified television audience watched, many police officers went berserk, clubbing and gassing demonstrators as well as

Upheaval in Chicago

The violence that accompanied the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago seared the nation.

Bystanders caught up in the melee. The chaotic spectacle lasted three days and seriously damaged Humphrey’s candidacy. The televised Chicago riots also angered middle-class Americans, many of whom wondered: “Is America coming apart?” At the same time, the riots fragmented the anti-war movement. Those groups committed to nonviolent protest, while castigating the reactionary policies of Mayor Daley and the police, felt betrayed by the actions of the Yippies and other anarchists. By 1971, the New Left was dead as a political movement. In large measure it had committed suicide by

Abandoning the pacifist principles that had originally inspired participants and given the movement moral legitimacy. The larger anti-war movement also began to fade. There would be a wave of student protests against the Nixon administration in 1970-1971, but thereafter campus unrest virtually disappeared as Nixon launched initiatives to end the military draft, which defused the resistance movement.

THE COUNTERCULTURE The numbing events of 1968 led other disaffected young activists to abandon political action in favor of the counterculture. Long hair on men and women, blue jeans, tie-dyed shirts, sandals, mind-altering drugs, rock music, and experimental living arrangements were more important than revolutionary ideology to the “hippies.” The countercultural hippies were primarily middle-class whites alienated by the Vietnam War, racism, political corruption, parental demands, runaway technology, and a crass corporate mentality that equated the good life with material goods. In their view a complacent materialism had settled over urban and suburban life. But they were not attracted to organized political action or militant protests. Instead, they embraced the tactics promoted by the zany Harvard professor Timothy Leary: “Tune in, turn on, drop out.”

For some, the counterculture entailed the embrace of Asian mysticism. For many it meant the daily use of hallucinogenic drugs. Collective living in urban enclaves such as San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district was the rage for a time; rural communes also attracted bourgeois rebels. During the sixties and early seventies, thousands of inexperienced romantics flocked to the countryside, eager to liberate themselves from parental and institutional restraints, live in harmony with nature, and coexist in an atmosphere of love and openness. The participants in the back-to-the-land movement, as it became known, were seeking a path to more authentic living that would deepen their sense of self and life. They equated the good life with living close to nature and in conformity with its ecological imperatives and limits.

Huge outdoor concerts were a popular source of community among the counterculture. The largest of these was the sprawling Woodstock Music and Art Fair (“Aquarian Exposition”). In mid-August 1969 some four hundred thousand young people converged on a six-hundred-acre farm near the tiny rural town of Bethel, New York. For three days the assembled flower children reveled in good music, rivers of mud, cheap marijuana, and casual sex. Drug use was rampant, but there was little crime and virtually no violence. The carefree spirit of the Woodstock festival was short-lived, however. It did not produce the peaceful revolution its sponsors had promised. Just four months later, when other concert promoters tried to replicate the

Woodstock

The Woodstock music festival drew nearly half a million people to a farm in Bethel, New York. The concert was billed as three days of “peace, music, . . . and love.”

“Woodstock Nation” experience at Altamont Speedway, forty miles east of San Francisco, the counterculture encountered the criminal culture. The Rolling stones hired the Hells Angels motorcycle gang to provide “security” for their show. During the band’s performance of “Under My Thumb,” drunken white motorcyclists beat to death an eighteen-year-old African American man wielding a gun in front of the stage. Three other spectators were accidentally killed that night; much of the vitality and innocence of the counterculture died with them. After 1969 the hippie phenomenon began to wane as the counterculture had become counterproductive.

FEMINISM The ideal of liberation spawned during the sixties helped accelerate a powerful women’s rights crusade. Like the New Left, the new feminism drew much of its inspiration and many of its tactics from the civil rights movement. Its aim was to challenge the conventional cult of female domesticity that had prevailed since the fifties.

Betty Friedan, a forty-two-year-old mother of three from Peoria, Illinois, led the mainstream of the women’s movement. Her influential book, The

Feminine Mystique (1963), helped launch the new phase of female protest on a national level. Women, Friedan wrote, had actually lost ground during the years after the Second World War, when many left wartime employment and settled down in suburbia. A propaganda campaign engineered by advertisers and women’s magazines encouraged them to do so by creating the “feminine mystique” of blissful domesticity. Women, Friedan claimed, “were being duped into believing homemaking was their natural destiny.”

The Feminine Mystique, an immediate best seller, inspired many affluent, well-educated women who felt trapped in their domestic doldrums. Friedan helped to transform the feminist movement from the clear-cut demands of suffrage and equal pay to the less-defined but more fulfilling realm of empowerment—in the home, in schools, in offices, on college campuses, and in politics. In 1966, Friedan and other activists founded the National Organization for Women (NOW). NOW initially sought to end discrimination in the workplace on the basis of gender and went on to spearhead efforts to legalize abortion and obtain federal and state support for childcare centers. The membership of NOW soared from one thousand in 1967 to forty thousand in 1974.

In the early seventies, members of Congress, the Supreme Court, and NOW advanced the cause of gender equality politically. Under Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972, colleges were required to institute “affirmative-action” programs to ensure equal opportunities for women in admissions and athletics. Also in 1972, Congress overwhelmingly approved an equal-rights amendment (ERA) to the federal constitution, which had been bottled up in a House committee since the twenties. In 1973 the Supreme Court, in Roe v. Wade, made history by striking down state laws forbidding abortions during the first three months of pregnancy. Meanwhile, the all-male educational bastions, including Yale and Princeton, led a movement for coeducation that swept the country. “If the 1960s belonged to blacks,” said one feminist, “the next ten years are ours.”

During the late sixties, a new wave of younger feminists emerged who challenged everything from women’s economic, political, and legal status to the sexual double standards for men and women. The new generation of feminists was more militant than the older, more moderate generation that had established NOW. The goals of the women’s liberation movement, said Susan Brownmiller, a self-described “radical feminist” who was also a veteran of the civil rights struggles, were to “go beyond a simple concept of equality. NOW’s emphasis on legislative change left the radicals cold.” She dismissed Friedan as “hopelessly bourgeois.” Overthrowing the embedded structures and premises of centuries-old patriarchy, Brownmiller and others believed, required transforming every aspect of society: sexual relations, child rearing, entertainment, domestic duties, business, and the arts. Radical liberationists took direct action, such as picketing the 1968 Miss America Pageant, burning copies of Playboy and other men’s magazines, tossing their bras into “freedom cans,” and assaulting gender-based discrimination in all of its forms.

Whether young or old, conventional or radical, the women’s movement focused on several basic issues: gender discrimination in the workplace, equal pay for equal work, the availability of high-quality day care for children, and easier access to abortions. Women in growing numbers also began winning elected offices at the local, state, and national levels. In 1960, some 38 percent of women were working outside the home; by 1980, 52 percent were doing so.

By the end of the seventies, however, sharp disputes between moderate and radical feminists had fractured the women’s movement in ways similar to the fragmentation experienced by civil rights organizations. The movement’s failure to broaden its appeal much beyond the confines of the middle class also caused reform efforts to stagnate. The ERA, which had once seemed a straightforward assertion of equal opportunity (“Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex”), was stymied in several state legislatures. By 1982 it had died, several states short of passage. And the very success of NOW’s efforts to liberalize local and state abortion laws generated a powerful backlash, especially among Catholics and fundamentalist Protestants, who mounted a potent “right-to-l ife” crusade against abortion that helped fuel the conservative political resurgence in the seventies and thereafter.

Yet the success of the women’s movement endured long after the militant rhetoric had evaporated. A growing presence in the labor force brought women a greater share of economic and political influence. By 1976, over half the married women and nine out of ten female college graduates were employed outside the home, a development that one economist called “the single most outstanding phenomenon of this century.” Women also enrolled in graduate and professional schools in record numbers. Whatever their motives, women were changing traditional gender roles and childbearing practices to accommodate the two-career family and the sexual revolution.

THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION AND THE PILL The feminist movement coincided with the so-called sexual revolution, a much-discussed loosening of traditional restrictions on social behavior. Americans became more tolerant of premarital sex, and women became more sexually active. Between 1960 and 1975 the number of college women engaging in sexual intercourse doubled, from 27 percent to 50 percent. Facilitating this change was a scientific breakthrough in contraception: the birth-control pill, first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960.

Widespread access to the pill, as it came to be known, gave women a greater sense of sexual freedom than had any previous contraceptive device. Although it also contributed to a rise in sexually transmitted diseases, many women viewed the birth-control pill as a godsend. “When the pill came out, it was a savior,” recalled Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation. “The whole country was waiting for it. I can’t even describe to you how excited people were.”

HISPANIC RIGHTS The activism that animated the student revolt, the civil rights movement, and the crusade for women’s rights soon spread to various ethnic minority groups. Hispanic, a term used in the United States to refer to people who trace their ancestry to Spanish-speaking Latin America or Spain, came into increasing use after 1945 in conjunction with growing efforts to promote economic and social justice. (Although frequently used as a synonym for Hispanic, the term Latino technically refers only to people of Latin American descent.) The labor shortages during the Second World War had led defense industries to offer Hispanic Americans their first significant access to skilled-1 abor jobs. And as was the case with African Americans, service in the military during the war years helped to heighten an American identity among Hispanic Americans and excite their desire for equal rights and social opportunities.

But social equality was elusive. After the Second World War, Hispanic Americans still faced widespread discrimination in hiring, housing, and education. Poverty was widespread. In 1960, for example, the median income of a Mexican American family was only 62 percent of the median income of a family in the general population. Hispanic American activists during the fifties and sixties mirrored the efforts of black civil rights leaders. They, too, denounced segregation, promoted efforts to improve the quality of public education, and struggled to increase Hispanic American political influence and economic opportunities.

The chief strength of the Hispanic rights movement lay less in the duplication of civil rights strategies than in the rapid growth of the Hispanic population. In 1960, Hispanics in the United States numbered slightly more than 3 million; by 1970 their numbers had increased to 9 million; and by 2012 they numbered well over 52 million, making them the nation’s largest minority group. By 1980, aspiring presidential candidates were openly courting the Hispanic vote. The voting power of

Hispanics and their concentration in states with key electoral votes has helped give the Hispanic point of view significant political clout.

NATIVE AMERICAN RIGHTS American Indians—many of whom had begun calling themselves Native Americans—also emerged as a political force in the late sixties. Two conditions combined to make Indian rights a priority: first, many whites felt a persistent sense of guilt for the destructive policies of their ancestors toward a people who had, after all, been here first; second, the plight of the Native American minority was more desperate than that of any other group in the country. Indian unemployment was ten times the national rate, life expectancy was twenty years lower than the national average, and the suicide rate was a whopping hundred times higher than the rate for whites.

Although President Lyndon B. Johnson recognized the poverty of the Native Americans and attempted to funnel federal anti-poverty-program funds into reservations, militants within the Indian community grew impatient with the pace of change. They organized protests and demonstrations against local, state, and federal agencies. In 1963 two Chippewas (or Ojibwas) living in Minneapolis, George Mitchell and Dennis Banks, founded the American Indian Movement (AIM) to promote “red power.” In 1973, AIM led two hundred sioux in the occupation of the tiny village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, where the Seventh Cavalry massacred a Sioux village in 1890. Outraged by the light sentences given a group of local whites who had killed a Sioux in 1972, the organizers also sought to draw attention to the plight of the Indians living on the reservation there. After the militants took eleven hostages, federal marshals and FBI agents surrounded the encampment. For ten weeks the two sides engaged in a tense standoff. When AIM leaders tried to bring in food and supplies, a shoot-out resulted, with one Indian killed and another wounded. Soon thereafter the tense confrontation ended with a government promise to re-examine Indian treaty rights.

Indian protesters subsequently discovered a more effective tactic than direct action and sit-ins: they went into federal courts armed with copies of old treaties and demanded that those documents become the basis for restitution. In Alaska, Maine, South Carolina, and Massachusetts they won significant settlements that provided legal recognition of their tribal rights and financial compensation at levels that upgraded the standard of living on several reservations.

GAY RIGHTS The liberationist impulses of the sixties also encouraged gays to assert their right to equal treatment. Throughout the sixties, gay men and lesbians continued to be treated with disgust, cruelty, and violence. On

Wounded Knee

Instigating a standoff with the FBI, members of AIM and local Oglala Sioux occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in March 1973 in an effort to focus attention on poverty and rampant alcoholism among Indians on reservations.

Saturday night, June 28, 1969, New York City vice police raided the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in the heart of Greenwich Village. The patrons bravely fought back, and the chaotic struggle spilled into the streets. Hundreds of other gays and their supporters joined the fracas against the police. Raucous rioting lasted throughout the weekend. When it ended, gays had forged a new sense of solidarity and a new organization, the Gay Liberation Front. “Gay is good for all of us,” proclaimed one of its members. “The artificial categories ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ have been laid on us by a sexist society.”

As news of the Stonewall riots spread across the country, the gay rights movement assumed national proportions. By 1973, almost eight hundred gay organizations had been formed across the country, and every major city had a visible gay community and cultural life. As was the case with the civil rights crusade and the women’s movement, however, the campaign for gay rights soon suffered from internal divisions and a conservative backlash. Gay activists engaged in fractious disputes over tactics and objectives, and conservative moralists and Christian fundamentalists launched a nationwide counterattack. By the end of the seventies, the gay movement had lost its initial momentum and was struggling to salvage many of its hard-won gains.

Nixon and Middle America

The turmoil of the sixties—anti-war protesters, counter-cultural rebellions, liberationist movements, street violence—spawned a cultural backlash that propelled Richard M. Nixon’s narrow election victory in 1968. On many levels he was an unlikely president with a peculiar personality. The hardworking son of poor, unloving parents, he grew up under difficult circumstances in southern California during the Great Depression. Nixon was a loner all of his life who displayed violent mood swings punctuated by raging temper tantrums and anti-Semitic outbursts. Nixon nursed bitter grudges and took politics personally. He was a good hater who could be ruthless and vindictive in attacking his opponents. A leading Republican, Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, characterized young Congressman Nixon in the early fifties as a “little man in a big hurry” with “a mean and vindictive streak.”

But Nixon also had extraordinary gifts: he was smart, shrewd, cunning, conniving, and doggedly determined to succeed in politics. He knew how to get things done, although he did not worry much about the ethics of his methods. He was nicknamed “Tricky Dick” for good reason. One of his presidential aides admitted that “we did often lie, mislead, deceive, try to use [the media], and to con them.” Throughout his long public career, Nixon displayed remarkable grit and resilience. As Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, who later became secretary of state, acknowledged, “Can you imagine what this man would have been like if somebody had loved him?”

The new president selected men for his cabinet and White House staff who would carry out his orders with blind obedience. John Mitchell, the gruff attorney general who had been a senior partner in Nixon’s New York law firm, was the new president’s closest confidant. H. R. (Bob) Haldeman, an imperious former advertising executive, served as Nixon’s chief of staff. As Haldeman explained, “Every President needs a son of a bitch, and I’m Nixon’s. I’m his buffer, I’m his bastard.” He was succeeded in 1973 by Colonel (later General) Alexander Haig, whom Nixon described as “the meanest, toughest, most ambitious son of a bitch I ever knew.” John Ehrlich-man, a Seattle attorney and college schoolmate of Haldeman’s, served as chief domestic-policy adviser.

Nixon tapped as secretary of state his old friend William Rogers, who had served as attorney general under Dwight D. Eisenhower, but the president had no intention of making Rogers the nation’s chief diplomat. Rogers’s control over foreign policy was quickly preempted by Henry Kissinger, a distinguished German-born Harvard political scientist who served as national security adviser before becoming secretary of state in 1973. Kissinger came to dominate the Nixon administration’s diplomatic planning and emerged as one of the most respected and internationally famous members of the staff. Nixon often had to mediate the tensions between Rogers and Kissinger, noting that Rogers considered Kissinger “Machiavellian, deceitful, egotistical, arrogant, and insulting,” while Kissinger viewed Rogers as “vain, emotional, unable to keep a secret, and hopelessly dominated by the State Department bureaucracy.”

NIXON’s southern strategy Nixon was no friend of the civil rights movement, the youth revolt or the counterculture. He had been elected in 1968 as the representative of middle America, those middle-class citizens fed up with the liberal politics and radical culture of the sixties. Nixon explicitly appealed to the “silent majority” of predominantly white working-class and middle-class citizens determined to regain control of a society they feared was in permissiveness, anarchy, and tyranny by the minority. He promised voters that he would return “law and order” to a nation in turmoil.

A major reason for Nixon’s election victories in 1968 and 1972 was the effective “southern strategy” fashioned by his campaign staffers. Of all the nation’s regions, the South had long been the most conservative. The majority of southern white voters were pious and patriotic, fervently antiCommunist, and skeptical of social welfare programs. For a century, the “Solid South” had steadfastly voted for Democrats in national elections. During the late sixties and seventies, however, a surging economy and wave of population growth transformed the so-called Sunbelt states in the South and the Southwest. The southern states had long been the nation’s poorest and most backward-l ooking region, but that changed dramatically, in part because of the rapid expansion of air conditioning. By 1980, over 70 percent of southern homes were air-conditioned. The Sunbelt’s warm climate, low cost of living, low taxes, and promotion of economic development convinced waves of businesses and workers to relocate to the region.

Between 1970 and 1990 the South’s population grew by 40 percent, more than twice the national average. The New South promoted by Henry Grady in the 1880s had finally arrived. The “Sunbelt” states were attractive to migrants not only because of their mild climate and abundant natural resources; they also had the lowest rates of taxation and labor union participation as well as the highest rates of economic growth. In the seventies, southern “redneck” culture suddenly became all the rage, as people across the nation embraced

NASCAR racing, cowboy boots, pickup trucks, and barbecue. As singer Charlie Daniels sang in 1974, “The South’s Gonna Do It Again.”

Nixon and his aides forged a new conservative coalition that included two traditionally Democratic voting blocs: blue-collar ethnic voters in the North and white southerners. In the South, Nixon shrewdly played the race card: he assured southern conservatives that he would appoint justices to the Supreme Court who would undermine federal enforcement of civil rights laws, including mandatory school busing to achieve racial integration and affirmative-action programs designed to give minorities priority in hiring decisions. Nixon also appealed to the economic concerns of middle-class southern whites by promising lower tax rates and less government regulation. Finally, Nixon specialized in hard-hitting, polarizing rhetoric, drawing vivid contrasts between the turmoil in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic nominating convention and the “law-and-order” theme of his own campaign.

Once in the White House, Nixon followed through on his campaign pledges to southern conservatives. In the 1972 election Nixon carried every southern state by whopping majorities. The transformation of the once “solid” Democratic South into the predominantly Republican South was the greatest realignment in American politics since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election in 1932.

President Nixon expressed contempt for the civil rights movement, set out to dismantle the war on poverty, appointed no African Americans to his cabinet, and refused to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus. “We’ve had enough social programs: forced integration, education, housing,” he told his chief of staff. “People don’t want more [people] on welfare. They don’t want to help the working poor, and our mood needs to be harder on this, not softer.”

In 1970, Nixon launched a concerted effort to block congressional renewal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and delay implementation of court orders requiring the desegregation of school districts in Mississippi. Sixty-five lawyers in the Justice Department signed a letter of protest against the administration’s stance. The Democratic Congress then extended the Voting Rights Act over Nixon’s veto. The Supreme Court, in the first decision made under the new chief justice, Warren Burger—a Nixon appointee—mandated the integration of the Mississippi public schools. In Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education (1969), a unanimous Court ordered a quick end to segregation. During Nixon’s first term and despite his wishes, more schools were desegregated than in all the Kennedy-Johnson years combined.

Nixon also failed in his attempts to block desegregation efforts in urban areas. The Burger Court ruled unanimously in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg

Board of Education (1971) that school systems must bus students out of their neighborhoods if necessary to achieve racially integrated schools. Protest over desegregation now began to erupt more in the North, the Midwest, and the Southwest than in the South as white families in Boston, Denver, and other cities denounced the destruction of “the neighborhood school.” Angry parents in Pontiac, Michigan, firebombed school buses. Racial violence was no longer a southern issue.

To transfer greater responsibility from the federal government to the states, President Nixon in 1972 pushed through Congress a five-year revenue-sharing plan that would distribute $30 billion of federal revenues to the states for use as they saw fit. But Nixon was less an ideologue than a shrewd pragmatist. His domestic program was a hodgepodge of reactionary and progressive initiatives. Nixon juggled opposing positions in an effort to maintain public support. He was, said the journalist Tom Wicker, “at once liberal and conservative, generous and begrudging, cynical and idealistic, choleric and calm, resentful and forgiving.” Nixon also had to deal with a stern political fact: the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress during his first term. Congress moved forward with significant new legislation which Nixon signed: the right of eighteen-year-olds to vote in national elections (1970) and in all elections under the Twenty-sixth Amendment (1971); increases in Social Security benefits indexed to the inflation rate and a rise in food-stamp funding; the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970) to ensure safe workplaces; and the Federal Election Campaign Act (1971), which modified the rules of campaign finance to reduce the role of corporate financial donations.

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION Dramatic increases in the price of oil and gasoline during the seventies fueled a major energy crisis in the United States. People began to realize that natural resources were limited— and increasingly expensive. The widespread recognition that America faced limits to economic growth spurred broad support for environmental protection in the 1970s. Bowing to pressure from both parties, as well as polls showing that 75 percent of voters supported stronger environmental protections, President Nixon told an aide to “keep me out of trouble on environmental issues.” Ever the pragmatic politician, the president recognized that the public mood had shifted toward greater environmental protections. Nixon feared that if he vetoed legislative efforts to improve environmental quality, the Congress would overrule him, so he would not stand in the way. In late 1969, he reluctantly signed the amended Endangered Species Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. The latter became effective on

January 1, 1970, the year that environmental groups established an annual Earth Day celebration. In 1970, Nixon by executive order created two new federal environmental agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That same year, he also signed the Clean Air Act to reduce air pollution on a national level. Two years, later, however, Nixon vetoed a new clean water act, only to see Congress override his effort.

ECONOMIC MALAISE The major domestic development during the Nixon years was a floundering economy. Overheated by the accumulated expense of the Vietnam War, the annual inflation rate began to rise in 1967, when it was at 3 percent. By 1973, it was at 9 percent; a year later it was at 12 percent, and it remained in double digits for most of the seventies. Meanwhile unemployment, at a low of 3.3 percent when Nixon took office, climbed to 6 percent by the end of 1970 and threatened to keep rising. Somehow the economy was undergoing a recession and inflation at the same time. Economists coined the term stagflation to describe the unprecedented syndrome that defied the orthodox laws of economics. The unusual combination of a stagnant economy with inflationary prices befuddled experts. There were no easy answers, no certain solutions.

The economic malaise had at least three deep-rooted causes. First, the Johnson administration had financed both the far-flung Great Society social-welfare programs and the Vietnam War without a major tax increase, thereby generating larger federal deficits, a major expansion of the money supply, and price inflation. Second and more important, by the late sixties U. S. companies faced stiff competition in international markets from West Germany, Japan, and other emerging industrial powers. American technological and economic superiority was no longer unchallenged. Third, the post-World War II economy had depended heavily upon cheap sources of energy; no other nation was more dependent than the United States upon the automobile and the automobile industry, and no other nation was more wasteful in its use of fossil fuels in factories and homes.

Just as domestic petroleum reserves began to dwindle and dependence upon foreign sources increased, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) resolved to use its huge oil supplies as a political and economic weapon. In 1973, the United States sent massive aid to Israel after a devastating Syrian-Egyptian attack on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. OPEC responded by announcing announced that it would not sell oil to nations supporting Israel and that it was raising its prices by 400 percent. Gasoline grew scarce, and prices soared. American motorists thereafter faced long lines at gas stations, and factories cut production.

Oil crisis, 1973

The scarcity of oil was dealt with by the rationing of gasoline. Gas stations, such as this one in Colorado, closed on Sundays to conserve supplies.

Another condition leading to stagflation was the flood of new workers— mainly baby boomers and women—entering the labor market. From 1965 to 1980, the workforce grew by 40 percent, almost 30 million workers, a number greater than the total labor force of France or West Germany. The number of new jobs could not keep up with the size of the workforce, leaving many unemployed. At the same time, worker productivity declined, further increasing inflation in the face of rising demand for goods and services.

Nixon responded erratically and ineffectively to stagflation, trying old remedies for a new problem. First he sought to reduce the federal deficit by raising taxes and cutting the budget. When the Democratic Congress refused to cooperate with that approach, he encouraged the Federal Reserve Board to reduce the nation’s money supply by raising interest rates. The stock market immediately collapsed, and the economy plunged into the “Nixon recession.”

A sense of desperation seized the White House as economic advisers struggled to respond to stagflation. In 1969, when asked about the possibility of imposing government restrictions on wages and prices, Nixon had been unequivocal: “Controls. Oh, my God, no! . . . We’ll never go to controls.” But in 1971 he reversed himself. He froze all wages and prices for ninety days. Still the economy floundered. By 1973 the wage and price guidelines were made voluntary and therefore ineffective.

Nixon and Vietnam

During the early 1970s the Vietnam War remained the dominant event of the time. Until the war ended and all troops had returned home, the nation would find it difficult to achieve the equilibrium that President Nixon had promised.

GRADUAL WITHDRAWAL When Nixon was inaugurated as president in January 1969, there were 530,000 U. S. troops in Vietnam. Nixon believed that “there’s no way to win the war. But we can’t say that of course,” because the United States needed to “keep some bargaining leverage” at the Paris negotiations with the North Vietnamese. During the 1968 presidential campaign, he had claimed to have a secret plan that would bring “peace with honor” in Vietnam. Peace, however, was long in coming and not very honorable. Nixon and Kissinger misread their ability to coerce the South Vietnamese government to sign an agreement. By the time a settlement was reached, in 1973, another twenty thousand Americans had died, the morale of the U. S. military had been shattered, millions of Asians had been killed or wounded, and fighting continued in Southeast Asia. In the end, Nixon’s policy gained nothing the president could not have accomplished in 1969.

The new Vietnam policy implemented by Nixon and Kissinger moved along three fronts. First, U. S. negotiators in Paris demanded the withdrawal of Communist forces from South Vietnam and the preservation of the U. S.-backed regime of President Nguyen Van Thieu. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong negotiators insisted on retaining a Communist military presence in the south and reunifying the Vietnamese people under a government dominated by the Communists. There was no common ground on which to come together. Hidden from public awareness and from America’s South Vietnamese allies were secret meetings between Henry Kissinger, then Nixon’s national security adviser, and the North Vietnamese.

On the second front, Nixon tried to quell domestic unrest stemming from the war. He labeled the anti-war movement a “brotherhood of the misguided, the mistaken, the well-meaning, and the malevolent.” He sought to defuse the anti-war movement by reducing the number of U. S. troops in Vietnam, justifying the reduction as the natural result of “Vietnamization”—the equipping and training of South Vietnamese soldiers and pilots to assume the burden of combat in place of Americans. From a peak of 560,000 in 1969, U. S. combat forces were withdrawn at a steady pace. By 1973 only 50,000 troops remained in Vietnam. In 1969, Nixon also established a draft lottery system that eliminated many inequities and clarified the likelihood of being drafted: only nineteen-year-olds with low lottery numbers would have to go—and in 1973 the president did away with the draft altogether by creating an all-volunteer military. Nixon was more successful in reducing anti-war activity than in forcing concessions from the North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris.

On the third front, while reducing the number of U. S. combat troops, Nixon and Kissinger expanded the air war over Vietnam in hopes of persuading the North Vietnamese to come to terms. In March 1969 the United States began a fourteen-month-long bombing campaign aimed at Communist forces that were using Cambodia as a sanctuary for raids into South Vietnam. Congress did not learn of those secret raids until 1970, although the total tonnage of bombs dropped was four times that dropped on Japan during the Second World War. Still, Hanoi’s leaders did not flinch. Then, on April 30, 1970, Nixon announced what he called an “incursion” into “neutral” Cambodia by U. S. troops to “clean out” North Vietnamese military bases. Nixon knew that sending troops into Cambodia would ignite ferocious criticism. Secretary of State William Rogers predicted that “this will make the [anti-war] students puke.” Nixon told Kissinger, who strongly endorsed the decision to extend the fighting into Cambodia, “If this doesn’t work, it’ll be your ass, Henry.”

News of the Cambodian “incursion” prompted explosive demonstrations on college campuses in the spring of 1970. Student protests led to the closing of hundreds of colleges and universities. At Kent State University, the Ohio National Guard was called in to quell rioting. The poorly trained guardsmen panicked and opened fire on the rock-throwing demonstrators, killing four student bystanders. Eleven days after the Kent State tragedy, on May 15, Mississippi highway patrolmen riddled a dormitory at Jackson State College with bullets, killing two students. In New York City, anti-war demonstrators who gathered to protest the deaths at Kent State and the invasion of Cambodia were attacked by “hard-hat” construction workers, who forced the protesters to disperse and then marched on City Hall to raise the U. S. flag, which had been lowered to half staff in mourning for the Kent State victims.

The following year, in June, the New York Times began publishing excerpts from The History of the U. S. Decision-Making Process of Vietnam Policy, a secret Defense Department study commissioned by Robert McNamara before his resignation as Lyndon Johnson’s secretary of defense in 1968. The so-called Pentagon Papers, leaked to the press by a former Defense Department official,

Kent State University

National guardsmen shot and killed four student bystanders during anti-war demonstrations on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio.

Daniel Ellsberg, confirmed what many critics of the war had long suspected: Congress and the public had not received the full story on the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964, and contingency plans for American entry into the war were being drawn up while President Johnson was promising that combat troops would never be sent to Vietnam. Moreover, there was no plan for bringing the war to an end so long as the North Vietnamese persisted. Although the Pentagon Papers dealt with events only up to 1965, the Nixon administration blocked their publication, arguing that they endangered national security and that their publication would prolong the war. By a vote of 6 to 3, the Supreme Court ruled against the government. Newspapers throughout the country began publication of the controversial documents the next day.

Nixon Triumphant

Amid the ongoing controversies about the Vietnam War, Nixon, in tandem with Henry Kissinger, achieved several major breakthroughs in foreign policy. Nixon displayed his savvy and flexibility by making dramatic changes in U. S. relations with the major powers of the Communist world—China and the Soviet Union—changes that transformed the dynamics of the cold war.

By 1969, Nixon and Kissinger had come to envision a new multipolar world order replacing the conventional bipolar confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union. Since 1945 the United States had lost its monopoly on nuclear weapons and its overwhelming economic dominance and geopolitical influence. The rapid rise of competing power centers in Europe, China, and Japan complicated international relations—the People’s Republic of China (Communist China) had replaced the United States as the Soviet Union’s most threatening competitor—but the competition between the two largest communist nations also provided strategic opportunities for the United States, which Nixon and Kissinger seized. Their grand vision of the future world order entailed cultivating a partnership with Communist China, slowing the perennial arms race with the Soviet Union, and ending the war in Vietnam.

In early 1970, Nixon announced a significant alteration in U. S. foreign policy. The United States could no longer be the world’s policeman containing the expansion of communism: “America cannot—and will not—conceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions, and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.” In explaining what became known as the Nixon Doctrine, the president declared that “our interests must shape our commitments, rather than the other way around.” The United States, he and Kissinger stressed, must become more selective in its commitments abroad, and it would begin to establish selected partnerships with Communist countries in areas of mutual interest. That Nixon, a Republican with a history of rabid anti-communism, would pursue such a policy of detente shocked many observers and demonstrated yet again his innovative flexibility.

CHINA In 1971, Nixon sent Henry Kissinger on a secret trip to Beijing to explore the possibility of U. S. recognition of Communist China. Since 1949, when Mao Zedong’s revolutionary movement established control in China, the United States had refused to recognize Communist China, preferring to regard Chiang Kai-shek’s exiled regime on the island of Taiwan as the legitimate Chinese government. But now the time seemed ripe for a bold renewal of ties. Both the United States and Communist China were exhausted from prolonged wars (in Vietnam and clashes along the Sino-Soviet border) and intense domestic strife (antiwar protests in America, the Cultural Revolution in China). Both nations were eager to resist Soviet expansionism around the world.

During their secret discussions, Kissinger and Chinese leaders agreed that continuing confrontation made no sense for either nation. Seven months later, on February 21, 1972, stunned Americans watched on television as President Nixon drank toasts in Beijing with prime minister Zhou Enlai and Chairman Mao Zedong. In one simple but astonishing stroke, Nixon and Kissinger had ended two decades of diplomatic isolation of the People’s Republic of China. They had seen a geopolitical opportunity and seized it. The United States and China agreed to scientific and cultural exchanges, steps toward the resumption of trade, and the eventual reunification of Taiwan with the mainland. A year after the Nixon visit, “liaison offices” were established in Washington and Beijing that served as unofficial embassies, and in 1979 diplomatic recognition was formalized. Richard Nixon had accomplished a diplomatic feat that his Democratic predecessors could not.

The United States and China

With President Richard M. Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, the United States formally recognized China’s Communist government. Here Nixon and Chinese premier Zhou Enlai drink a toast.

DETENTE In truth, China welcomed the breakthrough in relations with the United States because its festering rivalry with the Soviet Union, with which it shares a long border, had become more threatening than its rivalry with the West. The Soviet leaders, troubled by the Sino-American agreements, were also eager to ease tensions with the United States. This was especially true now that they had, as a result of a huge arms build-up following the Cuban missile crisis, achieved virtual parity with the United States in nuclear weapons. Once again President Nixon surprised the world, announcing that he would visit Moscow in 1972 for discussions with Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet premier. The high drama of the China visit was repeated in Moscow, with toasts and elegant dinners attended by world leaders who had previously regarded each other as incarnations of evil.

What became known as detente with the Soviets offered the promise of a more restrained competition between the two superpowers. Nixon and

Brezhnev signed pathbreaking agreements reached at the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT), which negotiators had been working on since 1969. The SALT agreement did not end the arms race, but it did limit the number of missiles with nuclear warheads each nation could possess and prohibited the construction of antiballistic missile systems. The Moscow summit also produced new trade agreements, including an arrangement whereby the United States sold almost a quarter of its wheat crop to the Soviets at a favorable price. In sum, the Moscow summit revealed the dramatic easing of tensions between the two cold war superpowers. For Nixon and Kissinger the agreements with China and the Soviet Union represented monumental changes in the global order that would have lasting consequences. Over time, the detente policy with the Soviet Union would help end the cold war by lowering Soviet hostility to Western influences penetrating their closed society, which slowly eroded Communist rule from the inside.

SHUTTLE DIPLOMACY The Nixon-Kissinger initiatives in the Middle East were less dramatic and less conclusive than the agreements with China and the Soviet Union, but they did show that the United States at long last recognized the legitimacy of Arab interests in the region and its own dependence upon Middle Eastern oil, even though the Arab nations were adamantly opposed to the existence of Israel. In the Six-Day War of 1967, Israeli forces routed the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and seized territory from all three nations. Moreover, the number of Palestinian refugees, many of them homeless since the creation of Israel in 1948, increased after the 1967 Israeli victory.

The Middle East remained a tinderbox of tensions. On October 6, 1973, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur, Syria and Egypt, backed by Soviet weapons, attacked Israel, igniting what became the Yom Kippur War. It created the most dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union since the Cuban missile crisis. President Nixon asked Henry Kissinger, now secretary of state, to keep the Soviets out of the Middle Eastern war. On October 20, Kissinger flew to Moscow to meet directly with Leonid Brezhnev just as “all hell had broken loose” in the White House with Nixon’s firing of the attorney general and his staff for their unwillingness to cover up the Watergate mess. Kissinger deftly negotiated a cease-fire and exerted pressure to prevent Israel from taking additional Arab territory. In an attempt to broker a lasting settlement, Kissinger made numerous flights among the capitals of the Middle East. His “shuttle diplomacy” won acclaim from all sides, but Kissinger failed to find a comprehensive formula for peace in the troubled region and ignored the

Henry Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy”

President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, during one of Kissinger’s many visits to the Middle East, talk with reporters in an effort to bring peace.

Palestinian problem. He did, however, lay groundwork for the accord between Israel and Egypt in 1977.

WAR WITHOUT END During 1972, the mounting social divisions at home and the approach of the presidential election influenced the negotiations in Paris between the United States and representatives of North Vietnam. In the summer of 1972, Henry Kissinger again began meeting privately with the North Vietnamese negotiators, and he now dropped his insistence upon the removal of all North Vietnamese troops from the South before the withdrawal of the remaining U. S. troops. On October 26, only a week before the U. S. presidential election, Kissinger announced, “Peace is at hand.” But this was a cynical ploy to win votes. Several days earlier the Thieu regime in South Vietnam had rejected the Kissinger plan for a cease-fire, fearful that allowing North Vietnamese troops to remain in the south would virtually guarantee a Communist victory. The Paris peace talks broke off on December 16, and two days later the newly reelected Nixon ordered massive bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, the two largest cities in North Vietnam. These

So-called Christmas bombings and the simultaneous mining of North Vietnamese harbors aroused worldwide protest.

But the bombings also made the North Vietnamese more flexible at the negotiating table. The Christmas bombings stopped on December 29, and the talks in Paris soon resumed. On January 27, 1973, the United States, North and South Vietnam, and the Viet Cong signed an “agreement on ending the war and restoring peace in Vietnam.” While Nixon and Kissinger claimed that the bombing had brought North Vietnam to its senses, in truth the North Vietnamese never altered their basic stance; they kept 150,000 troops in the South and remained committed to the reunification of Vietnam under one government. What had changed since the previous fall was the willingness of the South Vietnamese, who were never allowed to participate in the negotiations, to accept the agreement, albeit reluctantly, on the basis of Nixon’s promise that the United States would respond “with full force” to any Communist violation of the agreement. Kissinger had little confidence that the treaty provisions would enable South Vietnam to survive on its own. He told a White House staffer, “If they’re lucky, they can hold out for a year and a half.”

THE ELECTION OF 1972 Nixon’s foreign-policy achievements allowed him to stage the presidential campaign of 1972 as a triumphal procession. The main threat to his re-election came from Alabama’s Democratic governor George Wallace, a populist segregationist who had the potential as a third-party candidate to deprive the Republicans of conservative southern votes and thereby throw the election to the Democrats or to the Democratic-controlled Congress. That threat ended, however, on May 15, 1972, when Wallace was shot by a man eager to achieve a grisly brand of notoriety. Wallace survived but was left paralyzed below the waist, forcing him to withdraw from the campaign.

Meanwhile, the Democrats were further ensuring Nixon’s victory by nominating Senator McGovern of South Dakota, a steadfast anti-war liberal. In the 1972 election Nixon won the greatest victory of any Republican presidential candidate in history, capturing 520 electoral votes to only 17 for McGovern. The popular vote was equally decisive: 46 million to 28 million, a proportion of the total vote (60.8 percent) that was second only to Lyndon B. Johnson’s victory over Barry Goldwater in 1964. After his landslide victory, Nixon promised to complete his efforts at a conservative revolution. He planned to promote the “more conservative values and beliefs of the New Majority throughout the country and use my power to put some teeth in my new American Revolution.”