The 1960s and early 1970s were a distinctive and
decisive period in American history. They were
years of rapidly growing prosperity, but they were
also the years of the Vietnam War, disillusionment
and protest.
The post-war economic boom passed all
expectations. The standard of living of most
Americans increased nearly every year. Was this
not a vindication of American free enterprise?
Americans had become citizens of an affluent
society – at least most of them had – and had discovered
the wonders of credit. Millions moved to
a better life in the sunbelt from Texas to
California. Florida became a haven for an older
generation. But in 1962 one in four Americans,
over 42 million, were still living in dire poverty.
That included nearly half the Afro-American population,
single parents and children, the old and
sick, and the poor, who lacked education and
skills. From poverty-stricken Mexico, immigrants
entered California and Texas illegally to work for
low wages which Americans would not accept.
From Puerto Rico and Latin America the poor,
seeking a better life, finished up in the deprived
housing of the inner cities. Here they joined the
native Americans, who had left their own barren
reservations. But the lot of the poor improved
dramatically.
President Johnson in his first State of the
Union address in 1964 declared ‘unconditional
war on poverty’. The federal government pumped
billions of dollars into welfare and ambitious antipoverty
projects. Johnson’s Great Society programmes
worked. By 1973, the number of poor
had more than halved to 11 per cent. The antiliberal
Nixon, though faced with increasing
federal deficits when he became president in
1969, did not retrench seriously on welfare.
Positive anti-poverty measures taken by his
administration included increased social security
benefits and greater expenditure on education;
federal housing subsidies were also continued.
Nevertheless, the US was still a deeply divided
society; the liberal 1960s of welfare, of protest,
of student revolt and anti-Vietnam draft boycotts
was creating a backlash by construction workers
and outraged Middle America, which attributed
the rising crime rates and the disrespect shown
by youth to excessive licence and softness. The
Americans who turned to Nixon saw in him a
president who would uphold America’s traditional
virtues.
After his narrow defeat by Kennedy in 1960
and, two years later, his devastating drubbing in
the contest for governor of California, Nixon’s
controversial political career seemed to have
ended. At what he thought would be his last press
conference, he hit back at the newsmen, who he
felt had never treated him fairly: ‘You won’t have
Nixon to kick around any more.’ A few days later,
ABC Television broadcast a special, The Political
Obituary of Richard Nixon. Nixon left his
California base and joined a law firm in New York,
though in 1964 he supported the presidential
campaign of Barry Goldwater, who was well to the
right of mainstream Republicans. In 1966 and
1967 he rebuilt his political support as the man
best able to unite Republicans. By the time of the
party’s convention in 1968, he was once more the
obvious candidate to contest the next presidential
election.
Driving ambition and sheer hard work rather
than privilege and a silver spoon got Nixon to the
White House. He saw himself as the underdog
who had had to make his own way. As president he
retained a sense that he faced danger from many
unscrupulous enemies and from an ill-disposed
establishment. Determined to defeat them, he
responded with conspiratorial ruthlessness. There
was a loneliness about his White House years, with
his reliance on a small team of White House political
staff, from whom he demanded absolute loyalty.
For Nixon, safety would be guaranteed only if
he could gain control over those he believed
wished to discredit him and his policies. It all
ended with the Watergate fiasco and his resignation
to avoid impeachment. But his performance as
president during his first administration won him
the trust and confidence of a far greater majority of
American voters in the 1972 election than in the
lacklustre election of 1968.
Nixon’s passion was to devise for America a
new global strategy that would extricate it from
the rigidities of the Cold War. He appointed
William P. Rogers, a former attorney-general
under Eisenhower, secretary of state. But in
shaping a new foreign policy he called on the help
of a Harvard professor, Henry A. Kissinger, to act
as national security adviser. Kissinger replaced
Rogers as secretary of state when Rogers resigned
in the autumn of 1973. Kissinger proved a brilliant
strategist in tackling contemporary international
problems. The most pressing need was
to extricate the US from fighting an endless war
in Vietnam.
Vietnam had divided the nation. During his
election campaign Nixon promised that he had a
plan to end the war. The plan was to roll the film
backwards, to the point before massive numbers
of US combat troops had been sent to Vietnam,
and the hope continued to be that the Americanequipped
South Vietnamese army plus punitive
bombing by the US would force the North
Vietnamese to give up, the struggle. Kissinger was
as tough-minded as Nixon about the war, determined
that it should not end in a humiliating
defeat. The US position he put forward at the
Paris peace negotiations – these had begun during
Johnson’s presidency in May 1968 – was that all
foreign forces should leave South Vietnam, which
should then be left to decide its future in free
elections. This was unacceptable to the North
Vietnamese; they knew that whichever side organised
the free elections would be sure to win
them. They demanded a coalition government in
South Vietnam, to include the communist South
Vietnamese National Liberation Front, which
they easily dominated after the Tet offensive had
inflicted terrible losses on the Vietcong.
The Nixon plan was to Vietnamise the war on
land and to bring US combat troops home in
stages. The Americans suffered heavy casualties in
1969 and were increasingly demoralised, many
soldiers resorting to cheap drugs. In 1968 US
forces had reached their maximum of 536,100
men; in 1969 they were reduced to 475,200; by
1971 their number had dropped to 157,800 and
when the armistice was signed in January 1973
only 23,500 were still left in Vietnam. But while
US troop reductions took place the air war was
secretly extended to Cambodia along the North
Vietnamese supply routes, the Ho Chi-minh trail.
(Kissinger’s plan and need for secrecy was due to
circumventing Congress which would have had to
approve war against a neutral state; the secrecy of
the operations could not be maintained.) In April
1970 American and South Vietnamese troops
actually invaded Cambodia, to the dismay of
American public opinion, which wanted to get
out of the war and not into a new one. On the
ground the North Vietnamese and Vietcong were
showing no signs of weakening. Nixon’s only
response was to step up again the bombing of
North Vietnam. Kissinger meanwhile had made
secret contact with the North Vietnamese negotiator
in Paris, Le Duc Tho, in February 1970.
Not until the Americans were prepared to
abandon their insistence that the North Vietnamese
forces in the South should withdraw at
the same time as the Americans could a deal be
struck. With this vital concession, might a deal
have been made sooner saving many lives? It
was bitterly opposed by the president of South
Vietnam, General Nguyen Van Thieu. If the
Americans left, the South Vietnamese would have
to face the full weight of the Vietminh in the
South alone. There were hitches in the final negotiations
in Paris when the North Vietnamese
resisted amendments to the peace agreement.
To persuade them, Nixon ordered the horrific
Christmas bombing of Hanoi in December 1972.
The savage bombing causing indiscriminate civilian
casualties was also a departing present for the
South Vietnamese. On 27 January 1973 the communist
negotiators accepted a ceasefire and concluded
a comprehensive agreement to end the
Vietnam war; the South Vietnamese were left no
alternative but to join, since they were totally
dependent on US support. Kissinger and Le Duc
Tho received the Nobel Prize for ending a war
that did not end.
The last long-drawn-out stages from 1970 to
1973 of what had become the most unpopular
war in US history continued to be accompanied
by protests at home. Nixon’s own reactions
tended to polarise the conflict between ‘conservatives’
and ‘liberals’. In May 1970 National
Guardsmen fired into a crowd of student demonstrators
at Kent State University; four students
were killed and several wounded, which shocked
even the conservatives. Protest swept American
university campuses. The war was still not over in
November 1972 when Nixon again presented
himself to the electors.
That Nixon won the presidential election by a
landslide, with more than 60 per cent of the
popular vote, reveals the change in public feeling.
Nixon personally, shy, aloof and not entirely
trusted, was not popular; ‘Would you buy a
second-hand car from him?’ it was asked. But he
also appeared moderate and competent at home.
He and Kissinger capitalised on the conservative
backlash that was demanding law and order and
a return to health of the American economy, and
was disillusioned with the costly Great Society
and the exaggerated aspirations of the Johnson
years. The boys were coming home from Vietnam
and few now remained. Kissinger’s skilful handling
of foreign affairs, the evidence of relaxation
of tension with the Soviet Union, the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty and the arms-limitation
talks with Russia all helped to enhance the administration’s
image. The greatest Nixon–Kissinger
coup and the most surprising was the establishment
of friendly relations with Mao’s China.
Their secret diplomacy began to show results
when the Chinese in April 1971 invited an
American table-tennis team to China. This was
followed by Kissinger’s own secret trip to Beijing
to prepare the way for Nixon’s spectacular visit in
February 1972. The reorientation of US policy
strengthened the hand of US diplomacy the
world over. In May 1972 Nixon was in Moscow
signing an arms-limitation agreement; detente
was in full swing.
That Nixon’s posture as a successful world
statesman restoring US prestige after the frustrations
of Vietnam helped him to win a second term
in the presidency there can be no doubt. But his
electoral victory was also aided by the weakness
of a divided opposition. The Democratic candidate,
Senator George McGovern, did not prove a
strong vote-winner. Edward Kennedy, the last of
the Kennedy brothers, might have done, but his
chances of selection had disappeared three years
earlier in the shallow waters at Chappaquiddick,
where, in an accident when the car he was driving
plunged off a bridge, his lady companion was
drowned. The senator had not immediately raised
the alarm after the accident which led to controversy
blighting his presidential ambitions.
Within the space of less than two years Nixon
fell from triumph to disgrace. But the world did
not entirely revolve around Watergate. The
‘Agreement to end the Vietnam war’ in January
1973 and the accompanying international declaration
of support for it signed by twelve nations
in the presence of the secretary-general of the
United Nations was, despite its solemn promises,
bound to fail in its main purpose: the achievement
of peace. It left the opposing communist and anticommunist
forces in control of their own areas
and regions of South Vietnam. The advantage lay
with the North Vietnamese forces, which did not
have to withdraw north of the 17th parallel. Nor
was Vietnam any closer to a political solution.
The South Vietnamese government felt it had
been sold down the river, as the remaining US
forces progressively withdrew, the last departing
in March 1973. It was not quite like that. The
Americans handed over their installations to the
South Vietnamese and supplied enormous quantities
of equipment, until South Vietnam possessed
the fourth-largest air force in the world. It
was up to the South Vietnamese government to
win the war, if it could.
Neither the Vietcong nor the North Vietnamese
nor the South Vietnamese had any intention
of honouring the armistice – though the communists
were also on their own, both the Chinese and
the Russians having refused to help them further.
If the communists broke the agreement, as they
did, Nixon could have ordered new air strikes, but
this would have been unlikely to restrain them. By
the autumn of 1973, when fighting resumed,
Nixon was weakened by Watergate. The fighting
continued until April 1975, when the communists
took Saigon. The end came swiftly. For the US the
indescribable scenes as South Vietnamese men and
women, allies of the US, crowded on the stairs to
the roof of a CIA safe house close to the Embassy,
mostly in vain, desperately trying to join the helicopter
evacuation of the American staff, marked a
graphic and humiliating end to America’s efforts to
save South Vietnam from communism. The men
who had died in the war and those who had
returned – the Vietnam veterans – received little
honour or thanks. Americans wanted to forget the
war. In the words of Nixon’s successor President
Gerald Ford, ‘Today, Americans can regain the
sense of pride that existed before Vietnam.’ He
rightly insisted that the tragic events ‘portend neither
the end of the world nor of America’s leadership
in the world’. But this was wisdom after the
events. If only it had existed when Johnson massively
involved the US between July 1965 and
March 1966.
At home during his second administration
Nixon had to grapple with inflation and the deteriorating
financial situation. He began by
cutting back on some of the Great Society social
programmes. He devalued the dollar, and for a
time his administration imposed wage and price
controls. With the huge rise in Arab oil prices all
Western economies were in trouble in 1973 and
1974. In the US, unemployment and inflation
were rising while production was falling, a state
of affairs that prevailed in most Western countries.
According to Keynesian economics, inflation
should have led to a growth in production and
falls in unemployment. Now the economic world
was topsy-turvy. A new term was coined to
describe what was afflicting the West – ‘stagflation’,
stagnation plus inflation.
In the political world, however, the Watergate
scandal soon overshadowed all else. America’s
allies were puzzled by the way US newspapers and
media hounded a president who had arguably
showed himself more successful in securing
American and Western interests, more far-sighted
than any other president in the twentieth century.
Domestically, too, the Nixon presidency seemed
to be following moderate and sensible policies.
But American politics are rough, and dirty tricks
are nothing new. Illegal telephone-tapping,
bribery and misuse of funds have been practised
by some of America’s most eminent leaders. The
press did not expose discreditable information
about all politicians or even all presidents. J. F.
Kennedy’s love-life was kept quiet; Martin Luther
King was bugged. The CIA and the FBI were
engaged in activities beyond anything that had
been sanctioned. Nixon believed he had many
enemies determined to get at him. The knives
were certainly out for him, but he had himself
contributed to this beleaguered atmosphere. The
White House staff were becoming a second secret
administration. They plotted how to strengthen
the president and how best to lay low his enemies.
Nixon was no outsider to these secret discussions.
They proved not to be so secret in the end
because he had them all taped.
The Watergate story really began a year before
the famous break-in with Nixon’s determination
to get at the opponents of his policies in Vietnam
and at home – at those, especially, who from
inside the civil service were leaking secret documents
to the press. The White House set up the
Special Investigations Unit in the pursuit of their
undercover investigations. The Unit’s staff
became known as the Plumbers. It was they who
organised the break-in at the Democratic Party
campaign headquarters in the Watergate Building
in Washington in June 1972; the purpose was to
steal information to help Nixon and discredit the
Democrats during the presidential election campaign.
The burglars were caught. Nixon had not
known about the burglary beforehand, nor had
he authorised the break-in, but some of his principal
aides were implicated. The White House
managed to keep the scandal from affecting the
elections in November 1972, which Nixon won
with a landslide majority, but the Watergate fuse
had been lit, to detonate early in 1973 as the culprits
were tried and threatened with severe sentences.
Some broke down and implicated the
president’s staff.
Criminal charges against senior White House
staff were nothing new in the 1970s, so why
did it touch the president himself? The judicial
investigations dragged on for months, with the
president defending himself with ever-less conviction.
The administration lost even more credibility
when Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned
after a tax investigation unconnected with Watergate.
When Nixon was forced by the Supreme
Court finally to hand over the White House tapes
it became irrefutably clear that early on the
president had with his advisers tried to obstruct
justice, desperately trying to distance the White
House from Watergate and other dirty tricks. The
cover-up proved Nixon’s undoing. To liberals,
Nixon and the White House conspiracies had
become a real danger to American civil liberties
and constitutional government. With impeachment
imminent, Nixon was the first president to
resign. On 9 August 1974 he took off in a helicopter
from the White House lawn, waving
goodbye to a small, tearful party. Outside the US,
where Nixon’s prestige stood high, the assessment
was more cynical – Nixon’s mistake had
been to get caught. He continued to be received
with respect in China and elsewhere after his fall;
his advice and help in international affairs has also
been sought by succeeding presidents. The good
that emerged from Watergate was that it acted as
a warning to subsequent administrations; the
‘fourth estate’, the press, with its rights of investigation
and freedom to publish and uncover
wrong doing, criminal breaches through executive
abuses, is a deterrent.
The vice-president, Gerald Ford, was sworn in
and saw Nixon’s term out. He began with an
unpopular move, granting a pardon to Nixon. He
gave the impression of a decent man, a clean
politician, but one who did not inspire and who
simply did not seem up to the job of running the
presidency. He frequently stumbled, sometimes
literally. His relations with Congress were poor
and American economic prospects worsened in
1974 and 1975. In foreign affairs detente made a
little dubious progress but this was overshadowed
by sweeping communist victories in Vietnam and
Cambodia. To be sure, the blame for these cannot
be placed at Ford’s door; they were the results of
a situation he had inherited.
Kissinger, appointed secretary of state, was the
star of the administration as he established new
records for ‘shuttle diplomacy’. During the
Middle Eastern crisis between Israel and the
Arabs (1973–5), world television showed the tireless
secretary of state stepping out of his personal
plane in Arab and Israeli airports at a dizzying
speed. He accomplished a provisional disengagement
and an end of hostilities between Egypt and
Israel in September 1975. The achievement was
all the more remarkable in that he won acceptance
by all sides concerned as a mediator of goodwill,
although he had entered the US in the 1930s as
a Jewish refugee from Nazi German persecution.
Gerald Ford has probably been underrated. His
calm and reassuring manner helped to re-establish
the integrity of the presidency. He provided a transition
from one of the lowest periods of American
self-confidence, a period of violence and assassinations
at home, of Watergate and Vietnam. Middle
America was learning to appreciate less dynamic,
less obviously ambitious politicians. They recognised
that Gerald Ford was an American like millions
of others. The Democratic candidate for the
presidency, James Earl Carter, was another seemingly
ordinary American with whom millions could
identify. In November 1976 the US electorate
had a choice between two contenders ready to
lead the world, neither of whom some two years
earlier had been heard of outside their immediate
constituencies. Ford had been catapulted from
obscurity by Agnew’s resignation and the demise
of Nixon. Carter, former navy officer and, after the
death of his father, successful peanut farmer, had
risen to become governor of Georgia – a reforming
and successful governor. By a narrow margin,
Carter beat Ford and thereby ended eight years
of Republican power in the White House. But
the economic fortunes of the US had changed
since the last Democratic president, Johnson, had
launched his Great Society with the grand vision of
abolishing poverty in America. Carter did not have
an easy time before him.
Carter was the first president since the civil
war to come from the South. He was also a
Washington outsider, and owed his electoral
victory partly to this fact. The credibility of government
had fallen, and the American people
were looking for a change from the old gang.
Ford was intelligent and his integrity was above
reproach, but the pardon he gave to Nixon had
damaged him badly, though seen in longer perspective
it was both in the national interest and a
courageous step in the face of public feeling at
the time. Ford lacked charisma, though, and a
good tele-image. Carter also lacked a commanding
presence, but his warm, folksy manner and
broad grin won him friends. He was patently
honest, untouched by sordid Washington politics
or past scandals. Even so, the margin of electoral
votes that carried him to the White House was
small; his strength in the south and north-east
carried the day, but he was weak in the west and
so lacked a broad national base of support.
Carter was determined to emphasise that his
presidency would represent a break with the past,
especially with Nixon’s ‘imperial presidency’. He
would be the people’s president, a trustee for
their needs, concerned with the wider national
interest. This implied not a weak presidency but
strong leadership, ‘doing what’s right, not what’s
political’. He saw himself as above party politics,
acting differently from Congress, whose senators
and representatives were actuated by political
considerations, having to bear in mind the special
interests of their constituents and their financial
backers, and having to keep a constant eye on reelection.
Although Carter had comfortable
majorities in both Houses, this did not mean
automatic support for all that he wished to
accomplish. He avoided any distinctive label: he
was liberal in some aspects of policy and conservative
in others.
After so much turmoil and change, Carter saw
a need for consolidation at home, efficiency and
honesty in government, a pruning of wasteful
welfare programmes, a reduction in government
interference and a lightening of the regulations
imposed on business and industry. American
politics do not neatly divide between one party
right of centre in its outlook and the other to the
liberal left of centre. Rather, the more conservative
and the more liberal social policies cut
through each party. Trusteeship for Carter meant
a careful husbandry of the money demanded in
taxation. Sound government finance required the
balancing of the budget, not spending more than
the money in the coffers. Carter hoped to reduce
armaments and military expenditure. But he was
also sensitive to immediate needs, especially the
scourge of unemployment. To stimulate the
economy and reduce unemployment he adopted
a Keynesian approach, sending to Congress a
moderate tax-cutting bill and making federal
grants to create jobs. Congress changed the proposals
in detail but approved of the general thrust.
During the later years of his presidency, Carter
became more cautious, avoiding any costly reshaping
of welfare as he became more concerned about
inflation and a rising federal deficit. The 1970s,
after the shock of the oil-price rise of 1973–4,
were a difficult period of economic management
throughout the Western world, and of course
throughout the Third World. Governments are
lucky or unlucky when it comes to world economic
conditions and the business cycle, over
which they have very little control. But they get
the blame when unemployment rises and living
standards fall. Carter in 1978 fell back on the
old remedies of regulation, limiting the salary
increases of federal employees and setting voluntary
– and ineffective – guidelines on wages and
prices. The classic remedy for inflation of raising
interest rates was also employed. There was a
coal strike and Carter invoked the anti-union
Taft–Hartley Act. Other federal regulatory measures
were passed that protected the environment
in Alaska and limited the damage done to the land
by strip-mining.
Carter did not achieve anything like all the
reforms he had hoped for during his presidency.
He would have had better relations with Congress
had he employed a less high moral tone
and more flexibility. His White House staff, also
Georgian outsiders, lacked the necessary experience
to handle Congress more skilfully. They
were surprised by how long it took for the legislative
process to be completed; they sent many
measures to Congress without having established
a clear idea of their priorities. A centrepiece of
Carter’s endeavours in the wake of the oil-price
rise of 1973–4 was to cut down on the extravagantly
wasteful use of energy in the US. But his
energy plan ran into opposition from many interest
groups. For the average American, freedom is
a car and cheap gasoline. After more than a year
of wrangling, a watered-down National Energy
Act became law in the autumn of 1978.
In the relations of the US with the rest of
world, Carter was determined to strike a new
note. He wanted to reduce tensions, especially
with the Soviet Union, but was also determined
to stand up for human rights, ‘the soul of our
foreign policy’. He promised to be positive, to
give as much attention to relations with the poor
Third World as to East–West relations. In June
1979, SALT II was concluded with the USSR, by
which the superpowers accepted a balance of
nuclear missile capacity between them. Although
bitterly criticised it left each side with far more
warheads and missiles than would be needed to
turn any nuclear war into a holocaust. MAD
(mutual assured destruction) remained intact as
the doctrine of the day. This required that some
US missiles should survive any first strike. In
pursuit of this doctrine, a number of crazy
schemes were devised, but in the end none was
adopted. At the heart of the administration, there
was a conflict between the policies advocated by
Carter’s aggressive National Security Adviser
Zbigniew Brzezinski and the more conciliatory
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, with the State
Department supported by the military.
In Latin America the perceived need to
combat communism led to a drift of policy, but
the Panama Canal Treaty of 1977, by which the
US agreed the eventual transfer of sovereignty
over the Canal Zone to Panama, was one of the
clear successes of the Carter foreign policy. But
uncertainty was evident in the administration’s
dealings with the revolution in Nicaragua.
The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December
1979 reinvigorated the Cold War. The Carter
administration was particularly alarmed by the
strategic threat now presented to the Gulf and its
oil and warned the Soviet Union off in forthright
terms, Carter declaring that an
attempt by any outside force to gain control of
the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an
assault on the vital interests of the United
States of America, and such an assault will be
repelled by any means necessary, including
military force.
What made the situation doubly grave were the
upheavals in Iran.
The conduct of US policy in the Middle East
earned for Carter both the biggest praise and the
most severe condemnation. For thirteen days he
tirelessly laboured at Camp David in September
1978, and the Accords reached there between
Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat had laid a firm
basis for peace between Israel and Egypt.
In Iran, Carter had continued the US policy
of unconditional support for the Shah despite his
human-rights abuses. Until late in 1979, given
the support of the army he had modernised, the
Shah was believed safe, the ally of the US and
policeman of the Gulf. But it appears that the
administration was badly served by the advice it
received from intelligence sources and diplomats.
Assessment of the Shah’s chances of survival was
not made until the autumn of 1978. In January
1979 he fled the country. The fanatical new rulers
of Iran, who gained power the following month,
condemned the US as the ‘Great Satan’, and the
moderates lost control. When the terminally sick
Shah was admitted to the US for medical treatment
in October 1979, the radicals in Teheran
used it as a pretext to escalate their attacks on the
US. Demanding that the Shah be returned
to stand trial, they seized the US Embassy that
same month and took hostage the sixty-three
Americans they found there. The hostage crisis
overshadowed Carter’s last year in the White
House. He opposed using force, fearing that the
hostages’ lives would be in danger. Instead he
imposed economic sanctions, froze all Iranian
assets in the US and broke off diplomatic relations
in April 1980. Later that same month he
approved a mission to rescue the hostages by aircraft
and a specially trained task force. It went
tragically wrong. Eight men of the rescue mission
were left dead in the desert for the Iranians to
gloat over. It was a profound humiliation and
contributed to Carter’s loss of the presidential
election in November, although the hostages’
release was negotiated later by the administration.
Spitefully, they were not allowed to leave by air
from Iran until half an hour after the inauguration
of Ronald Reagan on 20 January 1981.
The Carter administration had ended with a
period of inflation and economic troubles in the
wake of the second oil-price rise in 1979–80.
Carter looked like a perpetual loser. The energy
crisis was only temporary, but somehow the
president became fixated on it. Congress was
proving recalcitrant, so Carter addressed the
American people on nationwide television in July
1979, claiming that ‘energy will be the immediate
test of our ability to unite this nation’. It was
an extraordinary exaggeration. In what became
known as the ‘crisis of confidence’ speech, he
attacked Congress and painted a dire picture of
the future. The problems of America, he claimed,
had their origins in a ‘crisis of confidence’. Ronald
Reagan, by contrast, was upbeat and optimistic.
He promised a new beginning, an America that
would ‘stand tall’; he appealed for a renewal of
patriotism, a new beginning. Many Americans did
not bother to vote in the presidential election in
November 1980, but those who did gave Reagan
a decisive majority over the luckless Carter.
World History
