Textbook assignments

When Nixon took office, more than half a million US troops were in Vietnam. His principal objective was to find a way to reduce US involvement in the war while at the same time avoiding the appearance of conceding defeat. In a word, Nixon said that the United States was seeking nothing less than “peace with honor.”

Nixon and Kissinger strengthened the US position in the world by taking advantage of the rivalry between the two Communist giants, China and the Soviet Union. Their diplomacy was praised for bringing about détente- a deliberate reduction of Cold War tensions. Even after Watergate ended his presidency in disgrace, Nixon’s critics would admit that his conduct of foreign affairs had enhanced world peace.

Nixon tried to slow down the growth of Johnson’s Great Society programs by proposing the Family Assistance Plan, a reform of the welfare system. The Democratic majority in Congress easily defeated this initiative. The Republican president did succeed, however, in shifting some of the responsibility for social programs from the federal to the state and local levels. In a program known as revenue sharing, or the New Federalism, Congress approved giving local governments $30 billion in block grants over five years to address local needs as they saw fit (instead of specific uses of federal money being controlled by Washington). Republicans hoped revenue sharing would check the growth of the federal government and return responsibility to the states, where it had rested before the New Deal. Nixon attempted to bypass Congress by impounding (not spending) funds appropriated for social programs. Democrats protested that such action was an abuse of executive powers. The courts agreed with the president’s critics, arguing that it was a president’s duty to carry out the laws of Congress, whether or not he agreed with them.

Starting with a recession in 1970, the US economy throughout the seventies faced the unusual combination of economic slowdown and high inflation- a condition referred to as stagflation (stagnation plus inflation). To slow inflation, Nixon at first tried to cut federal spending. When this policy contributed to a recession and unemployment, however, he adopted Keynesian economics and deficit spending in order not to alienate middle-class and blue-collar Americans. In August 1971, he surprised the nation by imposing a 90-day wage and price freeze. Next, he took the dollar off the gold standard, which helped to devalue it relative to foreign currencies. This action, combined with a 10% surtax on all imports, improved the US balance of trade with foreign competitors. By the election year of 1972, the recession was over. Also in that year, Congress approved automatic increases for Social Security benefits based on the annual rise in the cost of living. This measure protected seniors, the poor, and the disabled from the worse effects of inflation but also contributed to budget problems in the future.

Having received just 43% of the popular vote in 1968, Nixon was well aware of being a minority president. He devised a political strategy to form a Republican majority by appealing to the millions of voters who had become disaffected by antiwar protests, black militants, school busing to achieve racial balance, and the excesses of the youth counterculture. Nixon referred to these conservative Americans as the “silent majority.” Many of them were Democrats, such as southern whites, Catholic ethnics, blue-collar workers, and recent suburbanites who were dismayed by the liberal drift of their party. To win over the South, the president asked the federal courts in that region to delay integration plans and busing orders. He also nominated two southern conservatives (Clement Haynsworth and G. Harold Carswell) to the Supreme Court. The Senate refused to confirm them, and the courts rejected his requests for delayed integration. Nevertheless, his strategy played well with southern white voters. At the same time, Nixon authorized Vice President Spiro Agnew to make verbal assaults against both war protestors and the liberal press.

Four resignations of older justices from the Supreme Court gave Nixon the opportunity to replace liberal, activist members of the Warren court with more conservative, strict constructionist justices. In 1969 he appointed Warren E. Berger of Minnesota as chief justice to succeed the retiring Earl Warren. After the two conservative nominees were rejected by Congress, the president then compromised by selecting a more moderate Harry Blackmun (who would write the pro-abortion ruling in Roe v. Wade 1973). His next two appointments, Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist, were both approved. Ironically, in the last days of his Watergate agony, the Court that Nixon tried to shape would fail him by denying his claims to executive privilege and ordering him to turn over the Watergate tapes (United States v. Nixon 1974).

The success of Nixon’s southern strategy became evident in the presidential election of 1972 when the Republican ticket won majorities in every southern state. Nixon’s reelection was practically assured by (1) his foreign policy successes in China and the Soviet Union, (2) the removal of George Wallace from the race by an assassin’s bullet that paralyzed the Alabama populist, and (3) the nomination by the Democrats of a very liberal, antiwar, anti-establishment candidate, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota. McGovern’s campaign quickly went off track. After some indecision, he dropped his vice presidential candidate, Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, when it was discovered that he had undergone electroshock treatment for depression. On Election Day, Nixon overwhelmed McGovern in a landslide popular vote. The Democrats still managed to keep control of both houses of Congress. Nevertheless, the voting patterns for Nixon indicated the start of a major political realignment of the Sunbelt and suburban voters forming a new Republican majority. Nixon’s electoral triumph in 1972 made the Watergate revelations and scandals of 197 all the more surprising.

In June 1972, a group of men hired by Nixon’s reelection campaign were caught breaking into the offices of the Democratic national headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. This break-in and attempted bugging were only part of a series of illegal activities and “dirty tricks” conducted by the Nixon administration and the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP). Earlier, Nixon had ordered wiretaps on government employees and reporters to stop news leaks such as one that had exposed the secret bombings of Cambodia. The president’s aides created a group, called the “plumbers,” to stop leaks a well as to discredit opponents. Before Watergate, the “plumbers” had burglarized the office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the person behind the leaking of the Pentagon Papers, in order to obtain information to discredit Ellsberg. The White House had also created an “enemies list” of prominent Americans who opposed Nixon, the Vietnam War, or both. People on this list were investigated by government agencies, such as the IRS. The illegal break-in at Watergate reflected the attitude in the Nixon administration that any means could be used to promote the national security- an objective that was often confused with protecting the Nixon administration from its critics.

There was no solid proof that President Nixon ordered any of these illegal activities. After months of investigation, however, it became clear that Nixon did engage in an illegal cover-up to avoid scandal. Tough sentencing of the Watergate burglars by federal judge John Sirica led to information about the use of money and a promise of pardons by the White House staff to keep the burglars quiet. A Senate investigating committee headed by Democrat Sam Ervin of North Carolina brought the abuses to the attention of Americans through televised hearings. A highlight of these hearings was the testimony of a White House lawyer, John Dean, who linked the president to the cover-up. Nixon’s top aides, H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, resigned to protect him and were later indicted, as were many others, for obstructing justice. The discovery of a taping system in the Oval Office led to a year-long struggle between Nixon, who claimed executive privilege for the tapes, and investigators, who wanted the tapes to prove the cover-up charges. The Nixon administration received another blow in the fall of 1973, when Vice President Agnew was forced to resign for having taken bribes when governor of Maryland.

Although the Watergate affair absorbed most of Nixon’s attention during his shortened second term, other developments at home and abroad were also important.

In 1974, Nixon made triumphal visits to Moscow and Cairo, but at home his reputation continued to slide. In October 1973, the president fired Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor assigned to the Watergate investigations, and the US attorney general resigned in protest. The start of impeachment hearings in the House encouraged Nixon to reveal some transcripts of the Watergate tapes in April 1974, but it took a Supreme Court decision in July to force him to turn over the tapes to the courts and Congress. Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee voted three articles of impeachment: (1) obstruction of justice, (2) abuse of power, and (3) contempt of Congress. The conversations recorded on the tapes shocked friends and foes alike. The transcript of one such White House conversation clearly implicated Nixon in the cover-up only days after the Watergate break-in. Faced with certain impeachment in the House and a trial in the Senate, Richard Nixon chose to resign on August 9, 1974. His appointed Vice President, Gerald Ford, then took the oath of office as the first unelected president in US history.

The Watergate crisis had begun in June 1972 as a “third-rate burglary” of the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate building complex. By late March 1973 the burglary had been laid at the door of the White House. By late June, Americans were asking themselves whether their President had or had not ordered the payment of “hush money” to silence a Watergate burglar. Investigated by a special Senate committee headed by Sam Ervin of North Carolina, the scandal continued to deepen and ramify during the summer of 1973. By March 1974 the third-rate burglary of 1972 had grown into an unprecedented constitutional crisis.

By then it was clear beyond doubt that President Richard M. Nixon stood at the center of a junta of henchmen without parallel in our history. One of Nixon’s attorneys general, John Mitchell, was indicted for obstructing justice in Washington and for impeding a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation in NY. Another, Richard Kleindienst, had criminally misled the Senate Judiciary Committee in the President’s interest. The acting director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, L. Patrick Gray, had burned incriminating White House documents at the behest of a presidential aide. Bob Haldeman, the President’s chief of staff, John Erhlichman, the President’s chief domestic adviser, and Charles Colson, the President’s special counsel, all had been indicted for obstructing justice in the investigation of the Watergate burglary. John Dean, the President’s legal counsel and chief accuser, had already pleaded guilty to the same charge. Dwight Chapin, the President’s appointments secretary, faced trial for lying to a grand jury about political sabotage carried out during the 1972 elections. Ehrlichman and two other White House aides were under indictment for conspiring to break into a psychiatrist’s office and steal confidential information about one of his former patients, Daniel Ellsberg [a former aide to Henry Kissinger, Ellsberg had leaked to the NY Times a file of classified Pentagon papers that exposed American policy in Vietnam up to 1968; the Nixon administration vowed to “get” Ellsberg in retaliation]. By March 1974 some 28 presidential aides or election officials had been indicted for crimes carried out in the President’s interest. Never before in American history had a president so signally failed to fulfill his constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

It also had been clear for many months that the 37^th President of the United States did not feel bound by his constitutional duties. He insisted that the requirements of national security, as he and he alone say fit to define it, released him from the most fundamental legal and constitutional constraints. In the name of “national security,” the President had created a secret band of private detectives, paid with private funds, to carry out political espionage at the urging of the White House. In the name of “national security,” the President had approved the warrantless wiretapping of news reporters. In the name of “national security,” he had approved a secret plan for massive, illegal surveillance of American citizens. He had encouraged his aides’ efforts to use the Internal Revenue Service to harass political “enemies”- prominent Americans who endangered “national security” by publicly criticizing the President’s Vietnam War policies.

The framers of the Constitution had provided one and only one remedy for such lawless abuse of power: impeachment in the House of Representatives and trial in the Senate for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” There was absolutely no alternative. If Congress had not held President Nixon accountable for lawless conduct of his office, then Congress would have condoned a lawless Presidency. If Congress had not struck from the President’s hands the despot’s cudgel of “national security,” then Congress would have condoned a despotic Presidency.

Looking through the back issues of The NY Times, I recollected in a flood of… memories what it was that had filled me with such foreboding. It was the reluctance of Congress to act. I felt anew my fury when members of Congress pretended that nobody really cared about Watergate except the “media” and the “Nixon-haters.” The real folks “back home,” they said, cared only about inflation and the gasoline shortage. I remembered the exasperating actions of leading Democrats, such as a certain Senate leader who went around telling the country that President Nixon could not be impeached because in America a person was presumed innocent until proven guilty. Surely the senator knew that impeachment was not a verdict of guilt but a formal accusation made in the House leading to trial in the Senate. Why was he muddying the waters, I wondered, if not to protect the President?

It had taken one of the most outrageous episodes in the history of the Presidency to compel Congress to make even a pretense of action. Back on July 16, 1973, a former White House aide named Alexander Butterfield had told the Ervin committee that President Nixon secretly tape-recorded his most intimate political conversations. On two solemn occasions that spring the President had sworn to the American people that he knew nothing of the Watergate cover-up until his counsel John Dean had told him about it on March 21, 1973. From that day forward, Nixon had said, “I began intensive new inquiries into this whole matter.” Now we learned that the President had kept evidence secret that would exonerate him completely- if he were telling the truth. Worse yet, he wanted it kept secret. Before Butterfield had revealed the existence of the tapes, the President had grandly announced that “executive privilege will not be invoked as to any testimony [by my aides] concerning possible criminal conduct, in the matters under investigation. I want the public to learn the truth about Watergate…” After the existence of the tapes was revealed, however, the President showed the most ferocious resistance to disclosing the “truth about Watergate.” He now claimed that executive privilege- hitherto a somewhat shadowy presidential prerogative- gave a President “absolute power” to withhold any taped conversation he chose, even those urgently needed in the ongoing criminal investigation then being conducted by a special Watergate prosecutor. Nixon even claimed, through his lawyers, that the judicial branch of the federal government was “absolutely without power to reweigh that choice or to make a different resolution of it.”

In the US Court of Appeals the special prosecutor, a Harvard Law School professor named Archibald Cox, called the President’s claim “intolerable.” Millions of Americans found it infuriating. The court found it groundless. On October 12, 1973, it ordered the President to surrender 9 taped conversations that Cox had been fighting to obtain for nearly 3 months. Determined to evade the court order, the President on October 19, announced that he had devised a “compromise.” Instead of handing over the recorded conversations to the court, he would submit only edited summaries. To verify their truthfulness, the President would allow Sen. John Stennis of Mississippi to listen to the tapes. As an independent verifier, the elderly senator was distinguished by his devotion to the President’s own overblown conception of a “strong” Presidency. When Nixon had ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia, he had vouchsafed the fact to Senator Stennis, who thought that concealing the President’s secret war from his fellow senators was a higher duty than preserving the Senate’s constitutional role in the formation of US foreign policy.

On Saturday afternoon, October 20, I and millions of other Americans sat by our television sets while the special prosecutor explained why he could not accept “what seems to me to be non-compliance with the court’s order.” Then the President flashed the dagger sheathed within his “compromise.” At 8:31 pm television viewers across the country learned that he had fired the special prosecutor; that attorney general Elliot Richardson had resigned rather than issue that order to Cox; that the deputy attorney general, William Ruckelshaus, also had refused to do so and had been fired for refusing: that it was a third acting attorney general [Robert Bork] who had finally issued the order. With trembling voices, television newscasters reported that the President had abolished the office of special prosecutor and that the FBI was standing guard over its files. Never before in our history had a President, setting law at defiance, made our government so tawdry and gimcrack. “It’s like living in a banana republic,” a friend of mine remarked.

Now the question before the country was clear. “Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men,” the ex-special prosecutor said that evening, “is now for the Congress and ultimately the American people to decide.” Within 10 days of the “Saturday night massacre,” one million letters and telegrams rained down on Congress, almost every one of them demanding the President’s impeachment. But congressional leaders dragged their feet. The House Judiciary Committee would begin an inquiry into whether to begin an inquiry into possible grounds for recommending impeachment to the House. With the obvious intent, it seemed to me, of waiting until the impeachment fervor had abated, the Democratic-controlled committee would consider whether to consider making a recommendation about making an accusation. Republicans hoped to avoid upholding the rule of law by persuading the President to resign. This attempt to supply a lawless remedy for lawless power earned Republicans a memorable rebuke from one of the most venerated members of their party: 81-year-old Sen. George Aiken of Vermont. The demand for Nixon’s resignation, he said, “Suggests that many prominent Americans, who ought to know better, find the task of holding a President accountable as just too difficult… To ask the President now to resign and thus relieve Congress of its clear congressional duty amounts to a declaration of incompetence on the part of Congress.”

The system was manifestly not working. But neither was the President’s defense. On national television Nixon bitterly assailed the press for its “outrageous, vicious, distorted” reporting, but the popular outrage convinced him, nonetheless, to surrender the 9 tapes to the court. Almost at once the White House tapes began their singular career of encompassing the President’s ruin. On October 31 the White House disclosed that 2 of the taped conversations were missing, including one between the President and his campaign manager, John Mitchell, which had taken place the day after Nixon returned from a Florida vacation and 3 days after the Watergate break-in. Three weeks later the tapes dealt Nixon a more potent blow. There was an 18 and a half minute gap, the White House announced, in a taped conversation between the President and Haldeman, which had also taken place the day after he returned from Florida. The White House suggested first that the President’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, had accidentally erased part of the tape while transcribing it. When the loyal Miss Woods could not demonstrate in court how she could have pressed the “erase” button unwittingly for 18 straight minutes, the White House attributed the gap to “some sinister force.” On January 15, 1974, court-appointed experts provided a more humdrum explanation. The gap had been produced by at least 5 manual erasures. Someone in the White House had deliberately destroyed evidence that might have proved that President Nixon knew of the Watergate cover-up from the start.

At this point the Judiciary Committee was in its third month of considering whether to consider. But by now there was scarcely an American who did not think the President guilty, and on February 6, 1974, the House voted 410 to 4 to authorize the Judiciary Committee to begin investigating possible grounds for impeaching the President of the United States. It had taken 10 consecutive months of the most damning revelations of criminal misconduct, a titanic outburst of public indignation, and an unbroken record of presidential deceit, defiance, and evasion in order to compel Congress to take its first real step. That long record of immobility and feigned indifference boded ill for the future.

The White House knew how to exploit congressional reluctance. One tactic involved a highly technical but momentous question: What constituted an impeachable offense? On February 21 the staff of the Judiciary Committee had issued a report. Led by two distinguished attorneys, John Doar, a 52-year-old Wisconsin Independent, and Albert Jenner, a 67-year-old Chicago Republican, the staff had taken the broad view of impeachment for which Hamilton and Madison had contended in the Federalist papers. Despite the constitutional phrase “high Crimes and Misdemeanors,” the staff report had argued that an impeachable offense did not have to be a crime. “Some of the most grievous offenses against our Constitutional form of government may not entail violations of the criminal law.”

The White House launched a powerful counterattack. At a news conference on February 25, the President contended that only proven criminal misconduct supplied grounds for impeachment. On February 28, the White House drove home his point with a tightly argued legal paper: If a President could be impeached for anything other than a crime of “a very serious nature,” it would expose the Presidency to “political impeachments.” The argument was plausible. But if Congress accepted it, the Watergate crisis could only end in disaster. Men of great power do not commit crimes. They procure crimes without having to issue incriminating orders. A word to the servile suffices. “Who will free me from this turbulent priest,” asked Henry II, and four of his barons bashed in the skull of Thomas a Becket. The ease with which the powerful can arrange “deniability,” to use the Watergate catchword, was one reason the criminal standard was so dangerous to liberty. Instead of having to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, a President, under that standard, would only have to take care to insulate himself from the criminal activities of his agents. Moreover, the standard could not reach the most dangerous offenses. There is no crime in the statute books called “attempted tyranny.”

Yet the White House campaign to narrow the definition of impeachment met with immediate success. In March one of the members of the House of Representatives said that before voting to impeach Nixon, he would “want to know beyond a reasonable doubt that he was directly involved in the commission of a crime.” To impeach the President for the grave abuse of his powers, lawmakers said, would be politically impossible. On the Judiciary Committee itself the senior Republican, Edward Hutchinson of Michigan, disavowed the staff’s view of impeachment and adopted the President’s. Until the final days of the crisis, the criminal definition of impeachment was to hang over the country’s fate like the sword of Damocles.

The criminal standard buttressed the President’s larger thesis: In defending himself he was fighting to protest the “Presidency” from sinister forces trying to “weaken” it. On March 12 the President’s lawyer, James D. St. Clair, sounded this theme when he declared that he did not represent the President “individually” but rather the “office of the Presidency.” There was even a National Citizens Committee for Fairness to the Presidency. It was America’s global leadership, Nixon insisted, that made a “strong” Presidency so essential. Regardless of the opinion of some members of the Judiciary Committee, Nixon told a joint session of Congress, he would do nothing that “impairs the ability of the Presidents of the future to make the great decisions that are so essential to this nation and the world.”

I used to listen to statements such as these with deep exasperation. Here was a President daring to tell Congress, in effect, that a lawless Presidency was necessary to America’s safety, while a congressional attempt to reassert the rule of law undermined the nation’s security. Fortunately for constitutional government, however, Nixon’s conception of a strong Presidency included one prerogative whose exercise was in itself an impeachable offense. Throughout the month of March the President insisted that the need for “confidentiality” allowed him to withhold 42 tapes that the Judiciary Committee had asked of him. Nixon was claiming the right to limit the constitutional power of Congress to inquire into his impeachment. This was more than Republicans on the committee could afford to tolerate.

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison had written in The Federalist. On April 11 the Judiciary Committee voted 33 to 3 to subpoena the 42 tapes, the first subpoena ever issued to a President by a committee of the House. Ambition, at last, was counteracting ambition. This set the stage for one of the most lurid moments in the entire Watergate crisis. As the deadline for compliance drew new, tension began mounting in the country. Comply or defy? Which would the President do? Open defiance was plainly impeachable. Frank compliance was presumably ruinous. On Monday April 29, the President went on television to give the American people his answer. Seated in the Oval Office with the American flag behind him, President Nixon calmly announced that he was going to make over the Judiciary Committee- and the public- “edited transcripts” of the subpoenaed tapes. These transcripts “will tell it all,” said the President; there was nothing more that would need to be known for an impeachment inquiry about his conduct. To sharpen the public impression of presidential candor, the transcripts had been distributed among 42 thick, loose-leaf binders, which were stacked in 2-foot-high piles by the President’s desk. As if to warn the public not to trust what the newspapers would say about the transcripts, Nixon accused the media of concocting the Watergate crisis out of “rumor, gossip, innuendo,” of creating a “vague, general impression of massive wrongdoing, implicating everybody, gaining credibility by its endless repetition.”

The next day’s NY Times pronounced the President’s speech “his most powerful Watergate defense since the scandal broke.” By May 1 James Reston, the newspaper’s most eminent columnist, thought the President had “probably gained considerable support in the country.” For a few days it seemed as though the President had pulled off a coup. Republicans on the Judiciary Committee acted accordingly. On the first of May, 16 of the 17 committee Republicans voted against sending the President a note advising him that self-edited transcripts punctured by hundreds upon hundreds of suspicious “inaudiables” and “unintelligibles” were not in compliance with the committee’s subpoena. The President, it was said, had succeeded in making impeachment look “partisan” and consequently discreditable.

Not even bowdlerized transcripts, however, could nullify the destructive power of those tapes. They revealed a White House steeped in more sordid conniving than Nixon’s worst enemies had imagined. They showed a President advising his aides on how to “stonewall” a grand jury without committing perjury: “You can’t say, ‘I don’t remember.’ You can say, ‘I can’t recall.’” They showed a President urging his counsel to make a “complete report” about Watergate but to “make it very incomplete.” They showed a President eager for vengeance against ordinary election opponents. “I want the most comprehensive notes on all those who tried to do us in… They are asking for it and they are going to get it.” It showed a President discussing how “national security grounds” might be invoked to justify the Ellsberg burglary should the secret ever come out. “I think we could get by on that,” replied Nixon’s counsel.

On May 7 Pennsylvania’s Hugh Scott, Senate Republican Minority Leader, pronounced the revelations in the transcript “disgusting, shabby, immoral performances.” Joseph Alsop, who had long been friendly toward the President in his column, compared the atmosphere in the Oval office to the “back room of a second-rate advertising agency in a suburb of hell.” A week after Nixon’s seeming coup Republicans were once again vainly urging him to resign. On May 9 the House Judiciary Committee staff began presenting to the members its massive accumulation of Watergate material. Since the presentation was made behind closed doors, a suspenseful lull fell over the Watergate battleground. Over the next two months it was obvious that the Judiciary Committee was growing increasingly impatient with the President, who continued to insist that, even in an impeachment proceeding, the “executive must remain the final arbiter of demands of its confidentiality.” When Nixon refused to comply in any way with a second committee subpoena, the members voted 28 to 10 to warn him that “your refusals in and of themselves might constitute a ground for impeachment.” The “partisanship” of May 1 had faded by May 30.

Undermining these signs of decisiveness was the continued insistence that only direct presidential involvement in a crime would be regarded as an impeachable offense in the House. Congressmen demanded to see the “smoking gun.” They wanted to be shown the “hand in the cookie jar.” Alexander Hamilton had called impeachment a “National Inquest.” Congress seemed bent on restricting it to the purview of a local courtroom. Nobody spoke of the larger issues. As James Reston noted on May 26, one of the most disturbing aspects of Watergate was the silence of the prominent. Where, Reston asked, were the educators, the business leaders, and the elder statesmen to delineate and define the great constitutional issues at stake? When the White House began denouncing the Judiciary Committee as a “lynch mob,” virtually nobody rose to the committee’s defense.

On July 7 the Sunday edition of the NY Times made doleful reading. “The official investigations seem best by semitropical torpor,” the newspaper reported in its weekly news summary. White House attacks on the committee, said the Times, were proving effective in the country. In March, 60% of those polled by Gallup wanted the President tried in the Senate for his misdeeds. By June the figure had fallen to 50%. The movement for impeachment, said the Times, was losing its momentum. Nixon, it seemed, had worn out the public capacity for righteous indignation. Then, on July 19, John Doar, the Democrats’ counsel, did what nobody had done before with the enormous, confusing mass of interconnected misdeeds that we labeled “Watergate” for sheer convenience. At a meeting of the Judiciary Committee he compressed the endlessly ramified scandal into a grave and compelling case for impeaching the 37^th President of the United States. He spoke of the President’s “enormous crimes.” He warned the committee that it dare not look indifferently upon the “terrible dead of subverting the Constitution.” He urged the members to consider with favor 5 broad articles of impeachment, “charges with a grave historic ring,” as the Times said of them.

In a brief statement, Albert Jenner, the Republicans’ counsel, strongly endorsed Doar’s recommendations. The Founding Fathers, he reminded committee members, had established a free country and a free Constitution. It was now the committee’s momentous duty to determine “whether that country and that Constitution are to be preserved.” How I had yearned for those words during the long, arid months of the “smoking gun” and the “hand in the cookie jar.” Members of the committee must have felt the same way, too, for Jenners’ words were to leave a profound mark on their final deliberations. That I did not know yet, but what I did know was heartening. The grave maxims of liberty, once invoked, instantly took the measure of meanness and effrontery. When the President’s press spokesman, Ron Ziegler, denounced the committee’s proceedings as a “kangaroo court,” a wave of disgust coursed through Congress. The hour of the Founders had arrived.

The final deliberations of the House Judiciary Committee began on the evening of July 24, when Chairman Peter Rodino gaveled the committee to order before some 45 million television viewers. The committee made a curious spectacle: 38 strangers strung out on a 2-tiered dais, a huge piece of furniture as unfamiliar as the faces of its occupants. Chairman Rodino made the first opening remarks. His public career had been long, unblemished, and thoroughly distinguished. Now the representative from Newark, NJ, linked hands with the Founding Fathers of our government. “For more than 2 years, there have been serious allegations, by people of good faith and sound intelligence, that the President, Richard M. Nixon, has committed grave and systematic violations of the Constitution.” The framers of our Constitution, said Rodino, had provided an exact measure of a President’s responsibilities. It was by the terms of the President’s oath of office, prescribed in the Constitution, that the framers intended to hold Presidents “accountable and lawful.” That was to prove the keynote. That evening and over the following days, as each committee member delivered a statement, it became increasingly clear that the broad maxims of constitutional supremacy had taken command of the impeachment inquiry. “We will by this impeachment proceeding be establishing a standard of conduct for the President of the United States which will for all time be a matter of public record,” Caldwell Butler, a conservative Virginia Republican, reminded his conservative constituents. “If we fail to impeach… we will have left condoned and unpunished an abuse of power totally without justification.”

There were still White House loyalists of course: men who kept demanding to see a presidential directive ordering a crime and a documented “tie-in” between Nixon and his henchmen. Set against the great principle of constitutional supremacy, however, this common view was now exposed for what it was: reckless trifling with our ancient liberties. Can the US permit a President “to escape accountability because he may choose to deal behind closed doors,” asked James Mann, a South Carolina conservative. “Can anyone argue,” asked George Danielson, a California liberal, “that if a President breaches his oath of office, he should not be removed?” In a voice of unforgettable power and richness, Barbara Jordan, a black legislator from Texas, sounded the grand theme of the committee with particular depth of feeling. Once, she said, the Constitution had excluded people of her race, but that evil had been remedied. “My faith in the Constitution is whole, it is complete, it is total and I am not going to sit here and be an idle spectator to the diminution, the subversion, the destruction of the Constitution.”

On July 27 the Judiciary Committee voted 27 to 11 (6 Republicans joining all 21 Democrats) to impeach Richard Nixon on the grounds that he and his agents had “prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice” in “violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” On July 29 the Judiciary Committee voted 28 to 10 to impeach Richard Nixon for “violating the constitutional rights of citizens, impairing the due and proper administration of justice and the conduct of lawful inquiries, or contravening the laws governing agencies of the executive branch…” Thus, the illegal wiretaps, the sinister White House spies, the attempted use of the IRS to punish political opponents, the abuse of the CIA, and the break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office- misconduct hitherto deemed too “vague” for impeachment- now became part of a President’s impeachable failure to abide by his constitutional oath to carry out his constitutional duty. Lastly, on July 30 the Judiciary Committee, hoping to protect some future impeachment inquiry from a repetition of Nixon’s defiance, voted 21 to 17 to impeach him for refusing to comply with the committee’s subpoenas. “This concludes the work of the committee,” Rodino announced at 11 o’clock that night. Armed with the wisdom of the Founding Fathers of America’s republican principles, the committee had cut through the smoke screens, the lies, and the pettifogging that had muddled the Watergate crisis for so many months. It had subjected an imperious Presidency to the rule of fundamental law. It had demonstrated by resounding majorities that holding a President accountable is neither “liberal” nor “conservative,” neither “Democratic” nor “Republican,” but something far more basic to the American republic.

For months the forces of evasion had claimed that impeachment would “tear the country apart.” But now the county was more united than it had been in years. The impeachment inquiry had sounded the chords of deepest patriotism, and Americans responded, it seemed to me, with quiet pride in their country and themselves. On Capitol Hill, congressional leaders reported that Nixon’s impeachment would command three hundred votes at a minimum. The Senate began preparing for the President’s trial. Then, as countless wits remarked, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum. Back on July 24, the day the Judiciary Committee began its televised deliberations, the Supreme Court had ordered the President to surrender 64 taped conversations subpoenaed by the Watergate prosecutor. At the time I had regarded the decision chiefly as an auspicious omen for the evening’s proceedings. Only Richard Nixon knew that the Court had signed his death warrant. On August 5 the President announced that he was making public 3 tapes that “may further damage my case.” In fact they destroyed what little was left of it. Recorded 6 days after the Watergate break-in, they showed the President discussing detailed preparations for the cover-up with his chief of staff, Bob Haldeman. They showed the President and his henchmen discussing how to use the CIA to block the FBI, which was coming dangerously close to the White House. “You call them in,” says the President. “Good deal,” says his aide. In short, the 3 tapes proved that the President had told nothing but lies about Watergate for 26 months. Every one of Nixon’s 10 Judiciary Committee defenders now announced that he favored Nixon’s impeachment.

The President still had one last evasion: on the evening of August 8 he appeared on television to make his last important announcement. “I no longer have a strong enough political base in Congress,” said Nixon, doing his best to imply that the resolution of a great constitutional crisis was mere maneuvering for political advantage. “Therefore, I shall resign the Presidency effective at noon tomorrow.” He admitted to no wrongdoing. If he had made mistakes of judgment, “they were made in what I believed at the time to be in the best interests of the nation.” On the morning of August 9 the first President ever to resign from office boarded Air Force One and left town. The “system” had worked. But in the watches of the night, who has not asked himself now and then: How would it all have turned out had there been no White House tapes?
“I Knew It Was Wrong”- Confessions of a Watergate Bagman by Tony Ulasewicz

A scandal unfolded during the 1970s that shook the foundations of American government and ruined the presidency of Richard Nixon. In June 1972, 5 people- including James McCord, security chief for Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP)- were arrested for the attempted burglary of the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate complex in Washington, DC. Nixon was reelected in 1972 by a landslide, but Congress set up a special committee to investigate the Watergate burglary. White House tapes eventually revealed that Nixon had been actively involved in a cover-up of the crime, and the House Judiciary Committee vote to impeach the president in July 1974. On August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon became the first US president to resign the office. Tony Ulasewicz, a former police officer in NYC, worked as a private investigator for the White House. He delivered much of the money funneled through the White House to the Watergate defendants. He recalls his Senate testimony.
My Watergate souvenir is a chrome busman’s money changer which sits on a bookshelf in my den and glints in the afternoon sun. In the summer of 1972, after the Watergate break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, I almost wore out my pants pockets carrying the change I needed to call lawyers and some of their burglar clients to whom I was trying to deliver chunks of cash the White House wanted passed around. I bought the money changer to save my pants and clipped it on my belt. The money changer remains tagged with a label that marked it as “Exhibit 112” in the Watergate conspiracy trial held before Judge John Sirica in November 1974. I carried most of the cash around in a brown paper bag. I called it my “lunch”…

I made my first appearance before the Senate Watergate Committee on Wednesday May 23 [1973]. Before stepping into the spotlight, I waited alone in a room in the New Senate Office Building. Initially, I had no idea what I was going to be asked about when I sat down before the world. While waiting to be called before the cameras, I got hungry. When I found out that I had plenty of time before I went on stage, I left to get some lunch. To avoid the curious onlookers… lurking in the Senate cafeteria, I walked to the railroad station.

Upon entering, I passed a newsstand and there, on a rack, is saw something that made my heart sink. There in stone black-and-white blistering silence was my picture on the front page of the Washington Star. The picture was a close-up full face, and the headline, in bold black letters, read: SPY. Suddenly, I lost my appetite. I felt caged and expendable. I was no spy. I was a licensed private investigator who had broken no law and breached no confidence. I felt my guts harden like quick-drying cement. My picture had been leaked to the press…

Before being called in to testify, Lenzner introduced me to [the] chief counsel to the Senate committee, Sam Dash, in front of a water cooler. Lenzner acted as if he was showing off a specimen, not a human being. The meeting with Dash was perfunctory. Dash said he was only going to ask me about the call Caulfield [a retired NY police detective who worked undercover for the White House] made to me about wanting to contact McCord right after the Watergate burglary and the call I made to McCord in January 1973 to deliver the veiled clemency message if McCord kept his mouth shut and pled guilty. That was it. Nothing more, nothing less. I understood immediately what Dash was trying to do: build a case against the president of the United States. If Nixon was behind the clemency offer to McCord, he was finished. I was just one small piece of Dash’s case. He was going to try and present it like a trial lawyer in a courtroom, piece by piece, building block by building block…

…. Starting off as planned, Dash’s questions centered on my anonymous contacts with McCord: these were the only specifics he asked about. When Dash finished his questions, the rest of the committee’s questioning just filled time. I was surprised. Some of the things I said while answering Senator Howard Baker’s questions triggered a lot of laughter, but comedy wasn’t my intent. I was just being myself, as when Baker asked me if I thought my “wiremen were better than McCord’s wiremen.” I wasn’t a wireman, but I told Baker that “any old retired man in the NYC Police Department who would become involved in a thing like that… would not have walked in with an army, that is for sure.” The questions… focused primarily on how much money was involved and how I delivered it to the Watergate burglars and their lawyers. I was pressed to explain what I understood was the purpose of the money and the real purpose of the message I delivered to McCord. These… questions were clearly designed to get me to admit whether I knew it was “hush” money when I delivered it or an offer of White House clemency to McCord, in exchange for his silence, when I called him. These efforts were now linked to proving that the White House (and the president) tried to sabotage the Watergate investigation.

… Senator Inouye asked me whether I considered the activities I was involved with “were completely legal.” I answered, “Yes, Sir,” but when Inouye asked me whether I was aware that I was an accessory “to the crime of obstructing a criminal investigation” when I delivered the message to McCord, I answered, “Yes, I knew that it was wrong.” In hindsight of course it was, and that’s what I meant by my answer, but the message itself should have never existed.

In his first months in office, President Ford lost the goodwill of many by granting Nixon a full and unconditional pardon for any crime that he might have committed. The pardon as extended even before any formal charges or indictment had been made by a court of law. Ford was accused of making a “corrupt bargain” with Nixon, but he explained that the purpose of the pardon was to end the “national nightmare,” instead of prolonging it for months, if not years. Critics were angered that the full truth of Nixon’s deeds never came out, while the former president’s aides (including Haldeman and Ehrlichman) were convicted and served prison terms.

During Ford’s presidency (1974-1977), the Democratic Congress continued to search for abuses in the executive branch, especially in the CIA. This intelligence agency was accused of engineering the assassination of foreign leaders, among them the Marxist president of Chile, Salvador Allende. Ford appointed former Texas Congressman George H. Bush to reform the agency.

President Ford was unable to get additional funds from Congress for the South Vietnamese, who in 1974 were facing strong attack from Communist forces.

On domestic matters, Ford proved less accommodating and more conservative than Nixon. His chief concern was bringing inflation under control. He urged voluntary measures on the part of businesses and consumers, including the wearing of WIN buttons (Whip Inflation Now). Not only did inflation continue, but the economy also sank deeper into recession, with the unemployment rate reaching over 9%. Ford finally agreed to a Democratic package to stimulate the economy, but he vetoed 39 other Democratic bills.

Watergate still cast its gloom over the Republican Party in the 1976 elections. President Ford was challenged for the party’s nomination by Ronald Reagan, a former actor and ex-governor of California, who enjoyed the support of the more conservative Republicans. Ford won the nomination in a close battle, but the conflict with Reagan hurt him in the polls.

Ford’s chief domestic problem was the accelerating inflation. By 1974 prices were rising at the double-digit rate of 11%. The next year they slowed somewhat but then in 1979 and 1980 they soared to 12 and then 13%. Inflation would be the most severe economic problem of the late 70s. Some of this surge could be traced to petroleum price rises by the OPEC oil cartel, newly confident of its strength following the Yom Kippur War. For decades the United States had been a major oil producer and exporter. Gasoline and other petroleum derivatives had been cheap, and Americans had been extravagant in their use of energy. American automobiles, for example, had been notorious gas-guzzlers, getting often no more than 8 or 10 miles per gallon. By the mid-70s, however, the United States no longer produced enough oil for its needs and was importing millions of barrels annually. Dependence on imported oil made the OPEC price rises reverberate through the economy. Every item that used large amounts of energy to manufacture immediately leaped in cost. In addition, the soaring price of energy required major redesign of automobile engines, electric generator stations, and housing insulation systems to increase energy efficiency. All of these efforts were expensive and all added further impetus to inflation. But soaring oil prices were not the only economic problem. By the mid-70s the United States was suffering from a condition that the wordsmiths called “stagflation.” This was the worse of two worlds: stagnation and inflation simultaneously. Not only were prices rising, economic growth was slowing. Annual decreases in GNP, which had averaged almost 4% a year the previous decade, slowed to about 3% during the 1970s. This leveling off was felt in the paycheck of American working people. From 1948 to 1966 average yearly growth in real spendable earnings had run 2.1%. Between 1966 and 1973 it dropped to half that rate. During the last two or three years of the 1970s real spendable income actually declined, on average, for American wage and salary earners. Family incomes would continue to rise slowly, but only because more family members, especially wives and mothers, joined the work force.

Several pieces of legislation during the Ford years reflected the lessons learned during Watergate. In October 1974 Congress strengthened an earlier Freedom of Information Act to allow the public access to data accumulated by the federal government concerning individuals. Ford vetoed the measure on the grounds that it might jeopardize national security. Congress passed it over his veto. The president approved, however, a new law to reduce the influence of money in politics. The Campaign Finance Law of 1974 established spending limits for primary campaigns, required disclosure of sources and uses of campaign money, and allowed taxpayers to contribute money to presidential campaigns through a tax deduction from their income tax returns. The new law was intended to help make candidates less dependent on fat-cat campaign contributors and lobbyists, but it did not. With each campaign the costs of embarking on the long ordeal of caucuses, primaries, and conventions that preceded nomination continued to grow. Despite the law’s intent, money continued to count. In fact, with each successive national election there were more numerous and more powerful political action committees (PACs) representing special ideologies or special social and economic interests. Critics claimed that if existing trends persisted the United States would become a plutocracy, a nation ruled by the wealthy. Ford’s foreign policy was an extension of Nixon’s. Since most Americans considered the disgraced president more successful at foreign than domestic affairs, this was not surprising. Ford and Kissinger continued to seek some sort of peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Like his predecessor the new president visited China and reaffirmed Sino-American friendship. In November 1974 Ford met with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev in Vladivostok and the two continued the nuclear arms limitation process launched with the SALT I agreements by signing a document limiting the number of each country’s missile launchers, warheads, and other strategic weapons. Proponents of nuclear disarmament hoped the agreement would soon be incorporated into formal treaties as SALT II.

The highpoint of the Ford years was the 1976 bicentennial celebration of American independence. One hundred years earlier, the country had mounted an international exposition in Philadelphia to commemorate the centennial of American independence. The great 1876 Philadelphia World’s Fair had displayed the confident nation’s new industrial might and technological prowess. It was here that Alexander Bell’s great invention, the telephone, was unveiled. But in 1976 a vastly richer nation could not find an equivalent focus for the celebration. World’s fairs were now enormously expensive events that often produced large deficits. The nation was also too divided. Attempts by Philadelphia promoters to organize an international exposition fell afoul of racial squabbling over employment, land use, and other matters. Moreover, newer parts of the country wanted their own local celebrations. In the end, the bicentennial became a decentralized, scattershot affair. Washington DC held a major parade down Pennsylvania Avenue with 500,000 spectators, 60 floats, and 90 marching bands. In San Francisco 6,000 people gathered at Golden Gate Park to celebrate both the US bicentennial and the 200^th anniversary of the arrival of the first Spanish settlers at the site of the future city. The closest thing to a national event took place in New York harbor as sailing ships from many lands cruised through the harbor while millions of spectators watched the tall ships’ stately procession. Most Americans did feel a surge of pride on the nation’s 200^th birthday; yet those with a sense of history felt the occasion also reflected a nation afflicted with a new sense of limits.

In 1974 the voters expressed their dismay over Watergate by giving the Democrats a smashing victory in the midterm congressional elections. Even Ford’s own congressional district, which had been safely Republican since 1912, went Democratic. As the 1976 presidential election approached, it looked as if the national mood had made nonsense of Kevin Phillips’ prediction that the Republicans were becoming the normal majority party. The chief beneficiary of the Democratic surge was the one-term governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, a Naval Academy graduate, a southerner, and a born-again Christian. Carter’s chances for the Democratic presidential nomination would have been virtually nil if not for Watergate. That chamber of political horrors had made millions of voters skeptical of old politicos like Nixon and anxious for a fresh face. The former governor, who prayed daily, also seemed a deeply moral man who would never permit the sort of shabby behavior that had pervaded the White House during the Nixon years. True, Gerald Ford was an honest man, but he was closely identified with the Washington establishment and he had squandered much of his moral capital by pardoning Nixon. Starting with a name-recognition factor of only 2%, Carter campaigned ceaselessly for delegates during the primary period. By the time of the 1976 Democratic convention in New York he had the nomination sewed up and won on the first ballot. He chose for his running mate Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota.

An incumbent president seldom encounters serious competition for his party’s re-nomination, but Ford, who had not been elected to the office and was a man without much personal magnetism, had to beat off the serious challenge of Ronald Reagan, the conservative former governor of California. Ford narrowly won on the first ballot. He chose Senator Robert Dole of Kansas as his vice-presidential running mate. The Democrats campaigned as friends of the “little man” and enemies of the big corporations. They appealed to African-American voters and women but avoided too close an identification with the “outsiders” who had been such a prominent part of McGovern’s campaign four years earlier. Ford campaigned as the more experienced leader and attacked Carter as a man with only the vaguest idea of what he would to as president. As the weeks passed the voters, initially enthusiastic about Carter, began to waver and on Election Day gave the Democratic candidates a shaky victory of 40.2 million popular votes to their opponents’ 38.6 million, and 297 electoral votes to the Republicans’ 241. When the analysts examined the returns they concluded that Carter had fashioned his victory from a combination of the South, including states that had been recently drifting into the Republican column, and the traditional Democratic constituency of northern African American, ethnics, Catholics, Jews, and trade unionists. It seemed doubtful, however, that anyone but a southerner could have carried it off.

JIMMY CARTER’S PRESIDENCY

The informal style of Jimmy Carter signaled an effort to end the imperial presidency. On his inaugural day, he walked down Pennsylvania Avenue to the White House instead of riding in the presidential limousine. Public images of the president carrying his own luggage may have impressed average Americans. Veteran members of Congress, however, always viewed Carter as an outsider who depended too much on his politically inexperienced advisers from Georgia. Even Carter’s keen intelligence and dedication to duty may have been partly a liability in causing him to pay close attention to all the details of government operations. Critics observed that, when it came to distinguishing between the forest and the trees, Carter was a “leaf man.”
Foreign Policy:

The hallmark of Carter’s foreign policy was human rights, which he preached with Wilsonian fervor to the world’s dictators.

At home, the biggest issue was the growing inflation rate. At first Carter tried to check inflation with measures aimed at conserving oil energy and reviving the US coal industry. The compromises that came out of Congress, however, failed either to reduce the consumption of oil or to check inflation. In 1979-80, inflation seemed completely out of control and reached the unheard of rate of 13%.

Intelligence, effort, and integrity were not enough to get Jimmy Carter through the Iranian hostage crisis and the worsening economic crisis. In 1979, in what the press called Carter’s “national malaise” speech, he blamed the problems of the United States on a “moral and spiritual crisis” of the American people. By that time, however, many Americans blamed the president for weak and indecisive leadership. By the election year 1980 his approval rating had fallen to only 23%. In seeking a second term, the unpopular president was clearly vulnerable to political challenges from both Democrats and Republicans.

The new administration’s domestic policies were dominated by the energy crisis. After the OPEC nations lifted the oil embargo in March 1974, petroleum and gasoline once more became abundant, although at much higher prices than ever before. Meanwhile Americans continued to consume energy supplies wastefully, daily increasing American dependence on the Middle East and other foreign regions for their oil supply. Carter, a former nuclear submarine officer, understood the dangers of American oil dependence. The world’s most powerful nation could not permit itself to become hostage to the goodwill of Middle East oil sheiks; Saudi Arabia could not be allowed to make American foreign policy. There was also the matter of international economic relations. If America continued to be dependent on foreign oil, it would have to pay out billions of dollars to the Middle East. This would worsen an already large imbalance of payments deficit.

The energy dearth also created problems by shifting the nation’s regional power balance. The South and West, with their lower costs of living and their warm climate, had long attracted retirees from the North. By midcentury, with so many Americans living into their 70s and even 80s and with federal and private pension plans giving people the freedom to live anywhere in the country, the populations of Florida, Arizona, California, Texas, and other Sunbelt states soared. Now rising oil prices engineered by OPEC brought further prosperity to Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and other states in the southwestern “oil patch” while simultaneously hurting the northern industrial and farm regions that consumed energy but produced relatively little of their own. Oil patch residents were not always generous in their response to the plight of other Americans. Observers during these years reported bumper stickers on cars in Texas and other oil-producing states saying “Freeze a Yankee” and “Let the SOB’s Freeze in the Dark.”

Carter first addressed the energy crisis soon after the inauguration in the midst of one of the most severe eastern cold snaps in years. Before the cameras the president wore a heavy wool sweater to show the need to keep home thermostats low. On this occasion he said that his program would “emphasize conservation” and he asked the public to lower its thermostats to 65 degrees during the day and 55 at night. In late April he appeared before Congress and outlined a major energy program. The prices of petroleum, natural gas, and other fuel sources, until now held down artificially by government regulation, should be deregulated to find their own level. This would stimulate exploration for oil and natural gas and help increase domestic sources of supply. At the same time the government should encourage conservation by placing a high tax on imported oil and providing tax credits for people who insulated their houses. But the president’s energy program, incorporated into over a hundred separate measures, quickly stalled in Congress. Part of the problem was regional rivalries. The program promised to shift wealth still further from the North and East to the Sunbelt, where most of the nation’s energy derived. There was also ideological difficulties. Liberal critics claimed that making higher prices the chief incentive to conservation hurt the poor far more than the rich. Conservatives responded that the only alternative was some unacceptable bureaucratic system of rationing.

The public was also divided over the role of atomic power in any scheme to ease the energy shortage. Since the 1950s the number of power-generating stations based on radioactive fuel had been increasing across the nation. It soon became clear that atomic energy was not the revolutionary breakthrough to cost-free energy that had been predicted just after WWII, but by the late 1970s about 3.5% of all US electricity was generated by nuclear power plants. This was a smaller proportion than in many major industrial nations, yet it raised a storm of controversy. As we have seen, ever since Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) the public had worried about human-made environmental disaster and Congress had acted to limit sources of air and water pollution. The passionate environmentalists felt that these controls were too feeble and pointed to recent disasters as warnings: major oil spills along the California coast that threatened to damage Pacific coast ecology; forest damage inflicted by acid rain, the by-product of northeastern and Midwestern fossil-fuel consumption; the disastrous erosion of the quality of life by unrestricted suburban growth. The country, they said, must clamp down hard on dangerous environmental practices, even if this mean limits on economic growth. The proper response to the energy shortage, they insisted, was conservation- lowering energy use. Cars must be made smaller and more fuel efficient; houses must be better insulated; people must lower their thermostats, walk more, and turn off their lights. If energy output had to be increased it should be done by harnessing wind power and natural thermal power. For a time solar panels that could convert the sun’s rays into hot water became the rage in some parts of the country. Often connected with such views was a concern for population limitation. People polluted the environment and used up scarce resources, and the sooner the country brought its rate of natural increase to bare “replacement level,” the better. The environmentalists particularly deplored nuclear energy. Atomic energy plants produced thermal pollution of the water used to cool them, thereby endangering fish and local flora. Their spent nuclear fuel created severe problems of radioactive waste disposal. Most serious of all was the possibility of nuclear accident where failure of equipment or human error might cause a radioactive leak, or worse, a meltdown that would release vast quantities of radioactive gas and soot into the atmosphere. If such an accident occurred thousands might die or contract cancer.

In the last half of the 70s environmental groups used the protest tactics of the 60s to block construction or completion of nuclear power plants. In April 1977 for example, 2,000 Clamshell Alliance demonstrators occupied the construction site of a new atomic energy plant going up at Seabrook, New Hampshire. The police arrested 1,400 demonstrators. The anti-atomic energy groups also pressed legal challenges to nuclear power plant construction. The anti-nuclear cause received a big lift when a leak developed at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in March 1979. Although the leak was contained and no one died, the American public quaked at the apparent narrow escape from a meltdown. Conservatives and power industry spokespeople continued to insist that atomic energy was safe and potentially cheap, but by the early 1980s it had become too difficult and expensive to overcome the public’s fears and the environmentalists’ challenges. The atomic energy industry soon stopped dead in its tracks. Half-completed plants were abandoned; planning for new ones ceased.
Carter’s Political Failings

But the slow progress of Carter’s energy program was not just a product of ideological and regional differences. There were serious flaws in the president’s way of presenting the energy problem to the American people. Carter often sounded like a preacher calling his flock to repentance. He scolded the public for its energy extravagance. It was their disregard of the future, he said, that had gotten the United Sates into its current energy bind in the first place. He referred to “limits” and the need to accept a future less prosperous than the past. In July 1979, in a talk from his Camp David retreat often referred to as the “malaise” address, he described the country’s “crisis of confidence” brought on by the energy crisis. Soon after, to signal a new beginning for his administration, he fired three of his cabinet members. Much of what the president said was valid, but the American public did not enjoy being told that it could not have its cake and eat it too. Carter’s political sermonizing, moreover, seemed self-righteous and depressing.

The president and his staff also proved inept in the infighting and horse-trading that marks legislative success in Washington. Carter had no experience of the federal government. Indeed, that had been one of his political assets in the eyes of the post-Watergate public. But his ignorance and the arrogance of his young staff hurt him seriously in his relations with Congress. The administration offended Democratic leaders by not informing them of impending nominations for major executive positions or by failing to consult powerful members of Congress on matters that came under their legislative purview. Early in his administration Carter vetoed 19 pet water projects for the West without telling their congressional sponsors in advance; the Carter staff lacked tact and courtesy. Hamilton Jordan, a close Carter aide, refused to grant House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill’s request for extra seats to the inaugural festivities. Thereafter O’Neill always referred to Jordan as “Hannibal Jerkin.” Some of the administration’s severest setbacks came on the economic front. As we have seen, ever since the lifting of the Nixon price ceilings, inflation had soared out of control. As prices rose, so did interest rates, in part to discount higher prices and ensure lenders a reasonable return on their money in the future. High interest rates in turn depressed the housing industry because home buying depended on borrowed mortgage money. After 1979 the new head of the Federal Reserve Board, Paul Volcker, deliberately raised the Fed’s rediscount rate, its interest charge to private banks, to reduce consumption and hold down prices. The move was unavoidable, but positive results were slow in coming.

For a time in the late 1970s it looked as if inflation had become a way of life and people sought to accommodate to its effects. The results were deplorable. Investors shifted their money from income-generating factories and enterprise into real estate and “collectibles,” anything that promised to appreciate in price. The inflation surge also discouraged efficiency. If each month prices were higher, businesspeople, no matter how wasteful their practices, could count on profits. The incentive to increase productivity fell sharply. The inflation also shifted income from some groups to others. People who could pass along their costs to others gained; those on fixed incomes lost. Carter seemed to have no answers. He favored reduced federal spending and continued high taxes to cool the economy but was unable to inspire the public or Congress with any clear policy. During much of his administration the economy just drifted with inflation seemingly built into the system.

The president’s foreign policy balance sheet showed both debits and credits. Carter was determined to put the Vietnam era behind him and to ease Cold War tensions further. In his view this meant avoiding the hard-nosed Kissinger era response of putting America’s short-term advantage first. The United States would no longer support authoritarian regimes abroad but use its good offices to induce undemocratic foreign governments to respect human rights. Washington would criticize harsh Soviet policy towards its dissidents who opposed Moscow’s repressive domestic policies or who, as Jews, suffered religious persecution. Few Americans quarreled with this response. But the human rights principle was applied inconsistently. At times Washington attacked anti-Communist, pro-American authoritarian governments in the Americas and elsewhere. Conservatives, placing success in the Cold War first, deplored such attacks. At other times the administration overlooked the human rights violations of the United States’ authoritarian friends. On these occasions liberals, less concerned with gaining Cold War advantages than with perceived international injustice, complained. The president offended anti-Communist hard-liners by going beyond Nixon and opening formal diplomatic relations with the People’s Republic of China in January 1979. The previous year he had succeeded in inducing the Senate to approve a new treaty with Panama that provided for the eventual transfer of control over the Panama Canal and the Canal Zone from the US to Panama. Various super-patriot groups considered the treaty a shameful surrender of America rights.

Despite the increasing public disenchantment with Carter and a serious challenge from Senator Edward Kennedy, the president could not be denied renomination by the Democrats in 1980. The Republicans turned to Ronald Reagan, the former two-term governor of California and heir of the Goldwater right within the party. They gave the vice presidential nomination to George Bush, a man closer to the Republican center. Some voters who did not like either Carter or Reagan supported Congressman John B. Anderson, a liberal Republican from Illinois, who ran on the Independent ticket. A former movie actor and erstwhile New Deal liberal, Reagan had drifted to the political right in the 1950s and for a time, after his movie career declined, became a paid spokesman for General Electric. He had been carried into the California governor’s mansion in 1966 on a wave of resentment against high taxes and student militancy. In Sacramento Reagan painfully learned the art of compromise and, despite predictions, had moved to the political center. Yet in 1980 liberals saw his nomination for the presidency as a dangerous challenge to the entire post-twenties political era, and some indulged in loose talk of the coming “fascism” if he won. In fact, like George Wallace and Richard Nixon before him, Reagan did appeal to the backlash against the perceived excesses of the 60s and early 70s. By 1980 African-American militancy, student unrest, and peace marches were things of the past, yet the old resentments- on both sides- lingered. Reagan profited especially from the 70s’ surge of Protestant fundamentalism. He was a product of fundamentalist education- although a divorced man and a lax churchgoer- and he appealed to the fundamentalists’ ardent anticommunism, their concern for traditional “family values,” their opposition to abortion (which had been legalized by the Supreme Court in 1973) and militant feminism, and their desire to encourage traditional Christianity over a “secular humanism” they claimed had become the nation’s predominant faith.

Before the 1960s, most immigrants to the United States had come from Europe and Canada. By the 1980s, 47% came from Latin America, 37% from Asia, and less than 13% from Europe and Canada. In part, this dramatic shift was caused by the arrival of refugees leaving Cuba and Vietnam after the Communist takeovers of these countries. Of far greater importance was the impact of the Immigration Act of 1965, which ended the ethnic quota acts of the 1920s favoring Europeans and thereby opened the United States to immigrants from all parts of the world.

One aspect of the protest movements of the 1960s that continued into later decades was the movement by different minorities to gain both relief from discrimination and recognition of their contributions to US society.

The participation of 20 million citizens in the first Earth Day in 1970 reflected the nation’s growing concerns over pollution and the destruction of the natural environment. It also was a vital example of the increased questioning of technological progress in the last decades of the 20^th century. Massive oil spills around the world, such as the Exxon Valdez tanker accident in Alaska in 1989, reinforced fears about the deadly combination of human error and modern technology. Public opinion also turned against building additional nuclear power plants after an accident at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania (1979) and the deadly explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in the Soviet Union (1986).

I guess you receive thousands of fan letters every day at the White House, but this is not a fan letter. This is an important letter so I hope you will read it. I need a job very badly. My name is Howard and I am 12 years old and I live in Dallas with my mother and grandmother. We don’t have much money and my mother gets Social Security and so does my grandmother and that is all the money we have. When my father died, we didn’t even have enough money to pay for his funeral and we had to borrow money to bury him like a good Christian.

That is why I need a job. Any kind of job. I want to help my mother and my grandmother so they can buy a new dress and we don’t have to buy old bread at that bakery store because it only costs five cents. Could you please help me find a job in Dallas? I will work very hard.

Thank you,

Howard V.

Dear Mr. Carter:

I am going to try and help with the energy crisis. Every night before I go to sleep, I am going to turn off my TV set even if my mother doesn’t yell at me to do it.
Love,

Gwen S.
Dear President Carter:

Why are we going to give away the Panama Canal? I don’t think we should give away the Panama Canal for 1,000 years. If we gave away the Panama Canal, then our ships won’t be able to get through the canal and there will be trouble with the US Navy. The USA doesn’t need any more trouble. We have enough problems in Korea, the Middle East, and the rest of the world. So please, Mr. President, don’t give away the Panama Canal for a long time. The Panama Canal is important for the USA like the Statue of Liberty and Disneyland.
Your loyal citizen,

Victoria J.

My father doesn’t think you did the right thing when you decided to stop the building of the B-1 bomber. My father says that America has to be stronger than the Russians and if we don’t have the B-1 bomber we won’t be as strong as the Soviet Union. My father says we should never trust the Russians; even if they say they are our friends, they really aren’t. President Nixon wasn’t fooled by the Russians. President Ford wasn’t fooled by the Russians. Don’t let the Russians fool you even if they write you nice letters and send you a present for your birthday.

Stephanie J.

Do you believe there will be a war in the Middle East between the Arabs and Israel? If there is a war, will Americans have to fight like they did in Korea and Vietnam? Will there be a draft again so that me and my friends will have to serve in the Army like my father and my uncle? I don’t think I would want to be in the army because I was once in the Boy Scouts for two weeks and I didn’t even like that.

When I became involved with the union, I felt I had to get other women involved. Women have been behind men all the time, always. In my sister-in-law and brother-in-law’s families the women do a lot of shouting and cussing and they get slapped around. But that’s not standing up for what you believe in. It’s just trying to boss and not knowing how. I’d hear them scolding their kids and fighting their husbands and I’d say, “Gosh! Why don’t you go after the people that have you living like this? Why don’t you go after the growers that have you tired from working out in the fields at low wages and keep us poor all the time?”…

I was well known in the small towns around Fresno. Wherever I went to speak to them, they listened. I told them about how we were excluded from the NLRB [National Labor Relations Board] in 1935, how we had no benefits, no minimum wage, nothing out in the fields- no restrooms, nothing. I’d ask people how they felt about all these many years they had been working out in the fields, how they had been treated. And then we’d all talk about it.

They would say, “I was working for so-and-so, and when I complained about something that happened there, I was fired.” I said, “Well! Do you think we should be putting up with this in this modern age? You know, we’re not back in the 20s. We can stand up! We can talk back! It’s not like when I was a little kid and my grandmother used to say, “’You have to especially respect the Anglos. Yessir, Yes Ma’am!’ That’s over. This country is very rich, and we want a share of the money those growers make [off] our sweat and our work by exploiting us and our children!” I’d have my sign-up book and I’d say, “If anyone wants to become a member of the union, I can make you a member right now.” And they’d agree!

So I found out that I could organize them and make members of them. Then I offered to help them, like taking them to the doctor’s and translating for them, filling out papers that they needed to fill out, writing their letters for those that couldn’t write. A lot of people confided in me. Through the letter-writing, I knew a lot of the problems they were having back home, and they knew they could trust me, that I wouldn’t tell anyone else about what I had written or read. So that’s why they came to me.

I guess when the union found out how I was able to talk to people, I was called into Delano to one of the meetings, and they gave me my card as an organizer. I am very proud to say I was the first woman organizer out in the fields organizing the people…

In Kern Country we were sprayed with pesticides. They would come out there with their sprayers and spray us on the picket lines. They have these big tanks that are pulled by a tractor with hoses attached and they spray the trees with this. They are strong like a water hose, but wider…

Fresno County didn’t give food stamps to the people- only surplus food. There were no vegetables, no meat, just staples like whole powdered milk, cheese, butter. At the migrant camp in Parlier the people were there a month and a half before work started, and since they’d borrowed money to get to California they didn’t have any food. I’d drive them into Fresno to the welfare department and translate for them and they’d get food, but half of it they didn’t eat. We heard about other counties where they had food stamps to go to the store and buy meat and milk and fresh vegetables for the children. So we began talking about getting that in Fresno.

Finally we had senate hearings at the Convention Center in Fresno. There were hundreds of people listening. I started in Spanish, and the senators were looking at each other, you know, saying, “What’s going on?” So then I said, “Now, for the benefit of those who can’t speak Spanish, I’ll translate. If there is money enough to fight a war in Vietnam, and if there is money enough for Governor Reagan’s wife to buy a $3,000 dress for the inauguration ball, there should be money enough to feed these people. The nutrition experts say surplus food is full of vitamins. I’ve taken a look at that food, this corn meal, and I’ve seen them come up and down, but you know, we don’t call them vitamins, we call them weevils!” Everybody began laughing and whistling and shouting. In the end, we finally got food stamps.
“A Helluva Smoke Signal”- The Rise of the American Indian Movement by Mary Crow Dog

Native Americans also protested for their rights in the 1960s and 1970s. The American Indian Movement (AIM), founded in 1968, grew up in opposition to tribal leaders who many believed had been coopted by white officials in the federal government’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Celebrating traditional ways, AIM took radical action to oppose mistreatment of Native Americans. Mary Crow Dog, a member of the Lakota Sioux tribe, describes the appeal of AIM to many Native Americans.
The American Indian Movement hit our reservation like a tornado, like a new wind blowing out of nowhere, a drumbeat from far off getting louder and louder. It was almost like the Ghost Dance fever that had hit the tribes in 1890, old uncle… Fool Bull said, spreading like a prairie fire… … Some people loved AIM, some hated it, but nobody ignored it. I loved it. My first encounter with AIM was at a pow-wow held in 1971 at Crow Dog’s place after the Sun Dance [a Sioux ritual of self-sacrifice]… I noticed that almost all of the young men wore their hair long, some with eagle feathers tied to it. They all had on ribbon shirts. They had a new look about them, not that hangdog reservation look I was used to. They moved in a different way, too, confident and swaggering- the girls as well as the boys…

One man, a Chippewa, stood up and made a speech. I had never heard anybody talk like that. He spoke about genocide and sovereignty, about tribal leaders selling out... He talked about giving up the necktie for the choker, the briefcase for the bedroll, the missionary’s church for the sacred pipe. He talked about not celebrating Thanksgiving, because that would be celebrating one’s own destruction. He said that white people, after stealing our land and massacring us for 300 years, could not come to us now saying, “Celebrate Thanksgiving with us: drop in for a slice of Turkey.” He had himself wrapped up in an upside-down American flag, telling us that every star in this flag represented a state stolen from the Indians. Then Leonard Crow Dog spoke, saying that we had talked to the white man for generations with our lips, but that he had no ears to hear, no eyes to see, no heart to feel. Crow Dog said that now we must speak with our bodies and that he was not afraid to die for his people. It was a very emotional speech. Some people wept. An old man turned to me and said, “These are the words I always wanted to speak, but had kept shut up within me”…

Something strange happened… The traditional old, full-blood medicine men joined in with us kids. Not the middle-aged adults. They were of a lost generation which had given up all hope, necktie-wearers waiting for the Great White Father to do for them. It was the real old folks who had spirit and wisdom to give us. The grandfathers and grandmothers who still remembered a time when Indians were Indians, whose own grandparents or even parents had fought Custer, gun in hand, people who for us were living links with a great past…

The Trail of Broken Treaties [a march to Washington in 1972] was the greatest action taken by Indians since the Battle of the Little Big Horn… Each caravan was led by a spiritual leader or medicine man with his sacred pipe. The Oklahoma caravan followed the Cherokees’ “Trail of Tears,” retracing the steps of dying Indians driven from their homes by President Andrew Jackson. Our caravan started from Wounded Knee. This had a special symbolic meaning for us Sioux, making us feel as if the ghosts of all the women and children murdered there by the 7^th Cavalry were rising out of their mass grave to go with us.

I traveled among friends from Rosebud and Pine Ridge… When we arrived in Washington we got lost. We had been promised food and accommodation, but due to government pressure many church groups which had offered to put us up and feed us got scared and backed off. It was almost dawn and still we were stumbling around looking for a place to bed down… [I]n the predawn light we drove around the White house, honking our horns and beating our drums to let President Nixon know that we had arrived…

Somebody suggested, “Let’s all go to the BIA.” It seemed the natural thing to do, to go to the Bureau of Indian Affairs building on Constitution Avenue. They would have to put us up. It was “our” building after all. Besides, that was what we had come for, to complain about the treatment the bureau was dishing out to us. Everybody suddenly seemed to be possessed by the urge to hurry to the BIA. Next thing I knew we were in it. We spilled into the building like a great avalanche. Some people put up a tipi on the front lawn. Security guards were appointed… Tribal groups took over this or that room… Children were playing while old ladies got comfortable on couches in the foyer. A drum was roaring...

The various tribal groups caucused in their rooms, deciding what proposals to make… the building had a kitchen and a cafeteria, and we quickly organized cooking, dishwashing, and garbage details. Some women were appointed to watch the children, old people were cared for, and a medical team was set up. Contrary to what some white people believe, Indians are very good at improvising this sort of self-government with no one in particular telling them what to do. They don’t wait to be told. I guess there were altogether 600 to 800 people crammed into the building, but it did not feel crowded.

The original caravan leaders had planned a peaceful and dignified protest. There had even been talk of singing and dancing for the senators and inviting the lawmakers to an Indian fry bread and corn soup feast. It might have worked out that way if somebody had been willing to listen to us. But the word had been passed to ignore us. We were not wanted. It was said that we were hoodlums who did not speak for the Indian people. The half-blood tribal chairmen with their salaries and expense accounts condemned us almost to a man…

… I learned that as long as we “behaved nicely” nobody gave a damn about us, but as soon as we became rowdy we got all the support and media coverage we could wish for. We obliged them. We pushed police and guards out of the building. Some did not wait to be pushed but jumped out of the ground-floor windows like so many frogs. We had formulated 20 Indian demands. These were all rejected by the few bureaucrats sent to negotiate with us… [T]he occupation turned into a siege. I heard somebody yelling, “The pigs are here.” I could see from the window that it was true. The whole building was surrounded by helmeted police armed with all kinds of guns…

At last the police were withdrawn and we were told that they had given us another 24 hours to evacuate the building. This was not the end of the confrontation. From then on, every morning we were given a court order to get out by 6 pm. Came 6 o’clock and we would be standing there ready to join battle. I think many brothers and sisters were prepared to die right on the steps of the BIA building… For me the high point came not with our men arming themselves, but with Martha Grass, a simple middle-aged Cherokee woman from Oklahoma, standing up to Interior Secretary Morton and giving him a piece of her mind, speaking from the heart, speaking for all of us. She talked about everyday things, women’s things, children’s problems, getting down to the nitty-gritty… It was good to see an Indian mother stand up to one of Washington’s highest officials. “This is our building!” she told him. Then she gave him the finger.

When we moved into our house on 101^st Street in 1972, I didn’t even know Love Canal was there. It was a lovely neighborhood in a quiet residential area, with lots of trees and lots of children outside playing. It seemed just the place for our family… I liked the idea of my children being able to walk to the 99^th Street School. The school’s playground was part of a big, open field with houses all around. Our new neighbors told us that the developers who sold them their houses said the city was going to put a park on the field. It is really something, if you stop and think of it, that underneath that field were poisons, and on top of it was a grade school and a playground. We later found out that the Niagara Falls School Board knew the filled-in canal was a toxic dump site. We also know that they knew it was dangerous because, when the Hooker Chemical Corporation sold it to them for one dollar, Hooker put a clause in the deed declaring that the corporation would not be responsible for any harm that came to anyone from chemicals buried there. That one-dollar school site turned out to be some bargain!

Love Canal actually began for me in June 1973 with Mike Brown’s articles in the Niagara Falls Gazette. At first, I didn’t realize where the canal was… Then when I found out the 99^th Street School was indeed on top of it, I was alarmed. My son attended that school… I decided I needed to do some investigating. I went to my brother-in-law, Wayne Hadley, a biologist and, at the time, a professor at the State University of NY at Buffalo. He had worked on environmental problems and knew a lot about chemicals. I asked him to translate some of that jibber jabber in the articles into English. I showed Wayne Mike Brown’s articles listing the chemicals in the canal and asked what they were. I was really alarmed by his answer. Some of the chemicals, he said, can affect the nervous system. Just a little bit, even the amount that’s in paint or gasoline, can kill brain cells. I still couldn’t believe it, but if it were true, I wanted to get Michael [my son] out of that 99^th Street School…

… I decided to go door-to-door with a petition. It seemed like a good idea to start near the school, to talk with the mothers nearest it. I had already heard that a lot of the residents near the school had been upset about the chemicals for the past couple of years. I thought they might help me. I had never done anything like this, however, and I was frightened. I was afraid a lot of doors would be slammed in my face, that people would think I was some crazy fanatic. But I decided to do it anyway… As I proceeded down 99^th Street, I developed a set speech. I would tell people what I wanted. But the speech wasn’t all that necessary. It seemed as though every home on 99^th Street had someone with an illness… As I continued door-to-door, I heard more. The more I head, the more frightened I became. This problem involved much more than the 99^th Street School. The entire community seemed to be sick! … I thought about Michael [who had epilepsy and low white blood cell count]… I didn’t understand how chemicals could get all the way over to 101^st Street from 99^th, but the more I thought about it, the more frightened I became- for my family and for the whole neighborhood…

The NY State Health Department held a public meeting in June 1978. It was the first one I attended. Dr. Nicholas Vianna and some of his staff explained that they were going to do environmental and health studies. They wanted to take samples- of blood, air, and soil, as well as from sump pumps. They wanted to find out if there really was a problem. They would study only the first ring of houses, though, the ones with backyards abutting Love Canal. Bob Matthews, Niagara Falls city engineer, was there to explain the city’s plan for remedial construction. They all sat in front of a big, green chalkboard on the stage in the auditorium of the 99^th Street School… There were about 75 people in that warm, humid auditorium. Everyone was hot, and we could smell the canal. The heat must have had something to do with the short tempers… Dr. Vianna advised people who lived near the canal to not any vegetables from their gardens. With that, [one] father became very upset. “Look- my kid can’t play in the yard because her feet get burned. My neighbor’s dog burns his nose in the yard. We can’t eat out of the garden. What’s going on here? What is this all about?” Dr. Vianna just kept saying, “I don’t know. We are investigating. It’s too early to tell.”

Then Bob Matthews discussed the remedial construction plan. He used the chalkboard to show us how a system of tile pipes would run the length of the canal on both sides. He said the canal was like a bathtub that was overflowing. He was talking to us as though we were children! He said it was like putting a fat woman in a bathtub, causing the water to overflow onto the floor. The tile system would collect the overflow. Then it would be pumped out and treated by filtering it through charcoal. After it had been cleaned by the charcoal, it would be pumped down to the sewers and everything would be all right. The overflow-filtering system would also draw the chemicals away from the backyards, which would be clean again… I asked him about the underground springs that feed into the canal. What would happen to them?... Someone else observed that the tile drains would be only 12 feet deep. “What if the chemicals are 40 feet deep? The canal is probably 40 feet deep.” Another person said there were many types of chemicals in there. How was the city engineer going to get them out? No one would, or could, give us straight answers. The audience was getting frustrated and angry. They wanted answers. I asked Dr. Vianna if the 99^th Street School was safe. He answered that the air readings on the school had come back clean. But there we were, sitting in the school auditorium, smelling chemicals!... I was learning that you can’t trust government to look out for your interests. If you insist to government officials strongly enough, they might do the right thing. The Niagara County Health Department and other government officials had known about the pollution problem at Love Canal for a long time but had ignored it. Maybe it was the state’s fiscal deficits or the blizzard of 1977. Whatever the reason, it was ignored, and the public’s health was thereby jeopardized.

http://www.thebulletin.org/files/TMIManganoSept_Oct2004p30to35.pdf

The accident began about 4 a.m. on Wednesday, March 28, 1979, when the plant experienced a failure in the secondary, non-nuclear section of the plant (one of two reactors on the site). Either a mechanical or electrical failure prevented the main feedwater pumps from sending water to the steam generators that remove heat from the reactor core. This caused the plant’s turbine-generator and then the reactor itself to automatically shut down. Immediately, the pressure in the primary system (the nuclear portion of the plant) began to increase. In order to control that pressure, the pilot-operated relief valve (a valve located at the top of the pressurizer) opened. The valve should have closed when the pressure fell to proper levels, but it became stuck open. Instruments in the control room, however, indicated to the plant staff that the valve was closed. As a result, the plant staff was unaware that cooling water was pouring out of the stuck-open valve.

As coolant flowed from the primary system through the valve, other instruments available to reactor operators provided inadequate information. There was no instrument that showed how much water covered the core. As a result, plant staff assumed that as long as the pressurizer water level was high, the core was properly covered with water. As alarms rang and warning lights flashed, the operators did not realize that the plant was experiencing a loss-of-coolant accident. They took a series of actions that made conditions worse. The water escaping through the stuck valve reduced primary system pressure so much that the reactor coolant pumps had to be turned off to prevent dangerous vibrations. To prevent the pressurizer from filling up completely, the staff reduced how much emergency cooling water was being pumped in to the primary system. These actions starved the reactor core of coolant, causing it to overheat.

Without the proper water flow, the nuclear fuel overheated to the point at which the zirconium cladding (the long metal tubes that hold the nuclear fuel pellets) ruptured and the fuel pellets began to melt. It was later found that about half of the core melted during the early stages of the accident. Although TMI-2 suffered a severe core meltdown, the most dangerous kind of nuclear power accident, consequences outside the plant were minimal. Unlike the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents, TMI-2’s containment building remained intact and held almost all of the accident’s radioactive material.

Federal and state authorities were initially concerned about the small releases of radioactive gases that were measured off-site by the late morning of March 28 and even more concerned about the potential threat that the reactor posed to the surrounding population. They did not know that the core had melted, but they immediately took steps to try to gain control of the reactor and ensure adequate cooling to the core. The NRC=s regional office in King of Prussia, Pa., was notified at 7:45 a.m. on March 28. By 8 a.m., NRC Headquarters in Washington, D.C., was alerted and the NRC Operations Center in Bethesda, Md., was activated. The regional office promptly dispatched the first team of inspectors to the site and other agencies, such as the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency, also mobilized their response teams. Helicopters hired by TMI’s owner, General Public Utilities Nuclear, and the Department of Energy were sampling radioactivity in the atmosphere above the plant by midday. A team from the Brookhaven National Laboratory was also sent to assist in radiation monitoring. At 9:15 a.m., the White House was notified and at 11 a.m., all non-essential personnel were ordered off the plant’s premises.

By the evening of March 28, the core appeared to be adequately cooled and the reactor appeared to be stable. But new concerns arose by the morning of Friday, March 30. A significant release of radiation from the plant=s auxiliary building, performed to relieve pressure on the primary system and avoid curtailing the flow of coolant to the core, caused a great deal of confusion and consternation. In an atmosphere of growing uncertainty about the condition of the plant, the governor of Pennsylvania, Richard L. Thornburgh, consulted with the NRC about evacuating the population near the plant. Eventually, he and NRC Chairman Joseph Hendrie agreed that it would be prudent for those members of society most vulnerable to radiation to evacuate the area. Thornburgh announced that he was advising pregnant women and pre-school-age children within a five-mile radius of the plant to leave the area.

Within a short time, chemical reactions in the melting fuel created a large hydrogen bubble in the dome of the pressure vessel, the container that holds the reactor core. NRC officials worried the hydrogen bubble might burn or even explode and rupture the pressure vessel. In that event, the core would fall into the containment building and perhaps cause a breach of containment. The hydrogen bubble was a source of intense scrutiny and great anxiety, both among government authorities and the population, throughout the day on Saturday, March 31. The crisis ended when experts determined on Sunday, April 1, that the bubble could not burn or explode because of the absence of oxygen in the pressure vessel. Further, by that time, the utility had succeeded in greatly reducing the size of the bubble.

Health Effects

The NRC conducted detailed studies of the accident’s radiological consequences, as did the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services), the Department of Energy, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Several independent groups also conducted studies. The approximately 2 million people around TMI-2 during the accident are estimated to have received an average radiation dose of only about 1 millirem above the usual background dose. To put this into context, exposure from a chest X-ray is about 6 millirem and the area’s natural radioactive background dose is about 100-125 millirem per year for the area. The accident’s maximum dose to a person at the site boundary would have been less than 100 millirem above background.

In the months following the accident, although questions were raised about possible adverse effects from radiation on human, animal, and plant life in the TMI area, none could be directly correlated to the accident. Thousands of environmental samples of air, water, milk, vegetation, soil, and foodstuffs were collected by various government agencies monitoring the area. Very low levels of radionuclides could be attributed to releases from the accident. However, comprehensive investigations and assessments by several well respected organizations, such as Columbia University and the University of Pittsburgh, have

concluded that in spite of serious damage to the reactor, the actual release had negligible effects on the physical health of individuals or the environment.

A combination of personnel error, design deficiencies, and component failures caused the Three Mile Island accident, which permanently changed both the nuclear industry and the NRC. Public fear and distrust increased, NRC’s regulations and oversight became broader and more robust, and management of the plants was scrutinized more carefully. Careful analysis of the accident’s events identified problems and led to permanent and sweeping changes in how NRC regulates its licensees – which, in turn, has reduced the risk to public health and safety.

Here are some of the major changes that have occurred since the accident:

• 
  Upgrading and strengthening of plant design and equipment requirements. This includes fire protection, piping systems, auxiliary feedwater systems, containment building isolation, reliability of individual components, and the ability of plants to shut down automatically;
  
• 
  Identifying the critical role of human performance in plant safety led to revamping operator training and staffing requirements, followed by improved instrumentation and controls for operating the plant, and est. of fitness-for-duty programs for plant workers to guard against substance abuse;
  
• 
  Enhancing emergency preparedness, including requirements for plants to immediately notify NRC of significant events and an NRC Operations Center staffed 24 hours a day. Drills and response plans are now tested by licensees several times a year, and state and local agencies participate in drills with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and NRC;
  
• 
  Integrating NRC observations, findings, and conclusions about licensee performance and management effectiveness into a periodic, public report;
  
• 
  Having senior NRC managers regularly analyze plant performance for those plants needing significant additional regulatory attention;
  
• 
  Expanding NRC’s resident inspector program – first authorized in 1977 – to have at least two inspectors live nearby and work exclusively at each plant in the U.S. to provide daily surveillance of licensee adherence to NRC regulations;
  
• 
  Expanding performance-oriented/ safety-oriented inspections, and the use of risk assessment to identify vulnerabilities of any plant to severe accidents;
  
• 
  Strengthening and reorganizing enforcement staff in a separate office within the NRC;
  
• 
  Establishing the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, the industry’s own “policing” group, and formation of what is now the Nuclear Energy Institute to provide a unified industry approach to generic nuclear regulatory issues, and interaction with NRC and other government agencies;
  
• 
  Installing additional equipment by licensees to mitigate accident conditions, and monitor radiation levels and plant status;
  
• 
  Enacting programs by licensees for early identification of important safety-related problems, and for collecting and assessing relevant data so operating experience can be shared and quickly acted upon; and
  
• 
  Expanding NRC’s international activities to share enhanced knowledge of nuclear safety with other countries in a number of important technical areas.
  

Today, the TMI-2 reactor is permanently shut down and all its fuel had been removed. The reactor coolant system is fully drained and the radioactive water decontaminated and evaporated. The accident’s radioactive waste was shipped off-site to an appropriate disposal area, and the reactor fuel and core debris was shipped to the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory. In 2001, FirstEnergy acquired TMI2 from GPU. FirstEnergy has contracted the monitoring of TMI-2 to Exelon, the current owner and operator of TMI-1. The companies plan to keep the TMI-2 facility in long-term, monitored storage until the operating license for the TMI-1 plant expires, at which time both plants will be decommissioned.

Below is a chronology of highlights of the TMI-2 cleanup from 1980 through 1993.

July 1980 Approximately 43,000 curies of krypton were vented from the reactor building.

July 1980 The first manned entry into the reactor building took place.

Nov 1980 An Advisory Panel for the Decontamination of TMI-2, comprised of citizens, scientists, and state/local officials, held its first meeting in

Harrisburg, Pa.

July 1984 The reactor vessel head (top) was removed

Oct 1985 Fuel removal began.

July 1986 The off-site shipment of reactor core debris began.

Aug 1988 GPU submitted a request for a proposal to amend the TMI-2 license to a “possession-only” license and to allow the facility to enter long-term

monitoring storage.

Jan 1990 Fuel removal was complete.

July 1990 GPU submitted its funding plan for placing $229 million in escrow for radiological decommissioning of the plant.

Jan 1991 The evaporation of accident-generated water began.

April 1991 NRC published a notice of opportunity for a hearing on GPU’s request for a license amendment.

Feb 1992 NRS issued a safety evaluation report and granted the license amendment.

Aug 1993 The processing of accident-generated water was completed involving 2.23 million gallons.

Sep 1993 NRS issued a possession-only license.

Sep 1993 The Advisory Panel for Decontamination of TMI-2 held its last meeting.

February 2013

We were seated at a table which had cakes and fruit on it, and the papal nuncio said a few words that I couldn’t understand. Then he wanted us to sing some Christmas carols, which I thought was totally ridiculous. Here we were at this table looking across the room into a television camera, and behind the camera along the back wall were about 40 or 50 militants standing there with their weapons. They were all staring at us like we were monkeys in a cage. Now how can 5 Americans feel at ease singing Christmas carols when they’re face to face with all those automatic weapons? That really blew my mind. I refused to sing. I just glowered at the militants. I wanted anyone who saw me on TV to know that I was angry. I wasn’t about to pretend that I was having a good time, and that I thought this was a nice little ceremony…

They let each of us deliver a short message to our families in front of the TV cameras. I said hello to my wife and told her that I was still alive. I also let her know that I had not received any mail. The whole time I was speaking, I kept glowering at the militants lined up along the back wall.

When the service was over, we were each given a present that was gift-wrapped and had our name on it. The Iranians filmed us receiving and opening these gifts. I remember there was a sweat suit and a couple of oranges in my box. Then when the TV cameras were turned off, we were taken back out to the hall, blindfolded, and our gifts were taken away from us. We weren’t allowed to keep them. They took that stuff and put it back on the pile with someone else’s name so that there would be gifts for the next group when they came in…

After the visit of the Algerian ambassador, we were all hoping that a release was imminent. I was sure that something was in the works, and even thought that a Christmas release was possible. But I definitely expected to be out of there by the end of the year. I was dead certain of that. But the days came and went with all of us sitting in Tehran. We were in 1981 and still in Iran. That just boggled my mind. We kept asking the guards, “Hey, what’s going on in the negotiations? What’s happening?”

We’d always get the same stock answer. “They’re working on it.” That’s all the guards would ever say. “They’re working on it.” We’d ask, “Well, when is something going to happen? When are we going home?” They’d say, “Maybe tomorrow. Do not worry. Maybe tomorrow.” Or, “Soon. Soon.” Those were their favorite expressions. Of course, they’d been saying the exact same things back when we were being kept at the embassy. So I started getting very depressed. I was afraid that maybe the negotiations had fallen through, because the days just kept rolling by…

Those first few weeks in January were particularly difficult, because we were living in such close quarters. There were 6 people living in this one room, and a little friction among us was inevitable. We had all been in Iran for over a year now, and our nerves were frayed. We were sick and tired of being hostages. We kept hoping and hoping that we’d be released, but we were still sitting there. Because of that, the degree of frustration was intense…

I remember there was a girls’ preschool right next door to us, and each day would begin with these 5 and 6 year old girls gathering on the playground to sing. “Marg bar Amrika! Marg bar Amrika! Marg bar Carter! Marg bar Carter!” Every morning we’d hear the teacher leading these little girls in song. It was so sad to know that an adult was standing out there on the playground and teaching those children to hate. I thought that was pathetic. But that was the way it was. Instead of saying the pledge of allegiance or singing the national anthem, those kids would sing “Death to America”…

We arrived in Frankfurt [after being released] at some ungodly hour in the morning and were loaded onto some little buses to be driven in convoy from Frankfurt to Wiesbaden. It was probably about 25 miles or so to the hospital, and all along that route the streets were lined with cheering people. That just amazed me. I think every American in Germany got out of bed that morning to come out and greet us. But it wasn’t just Americans. There were a lot of Germans out there, too. I was amazed that our return from Iran was such a big deal to people who didn’t even know us…

When we arrived in Wiesbaden, we received very warm greetings from the soldiers and patients at the hospital. A military band was playing as we walked in, and it was a very nice reception. Once again, there was a lot of hugging and kissing and shaking of hands. The band kept playing and a children’s choir was singing in the lobby. It was all very festive. Very joyous.

But the thing I remember the most was the huge number of letters that were waiting for us at the hospital. They had these letters stacked in boxes there in the hallway, and there were literally thousands and thousands of them. Big huge boxes full of mail. The whole time I was in Iran I received four letters. That was it. Ahmed kept telling me, “No one is writing to you. Your wife is not writing to you.” I knew that was [a lie], but in the prison I think there were times when all of us felt like we’d been left there and forgotten. But seeing all of that mail stacked up at the hospital was amazing. It gave me an idea of how much people cared. That was beautiful…

When President Carter came in, it was strictly us hostages in the room, and no one else… After hugging each of us, President Carter made a brief speech and discussed the financial terms of the deal that he had made to get us out. He also talked about the rescue mission… President Carter was a very emotional man, and in talking about the rescue attempt he broke down and cried a couple of times. At the time, I didn’t realize that 8 people had died in the rescue attempt… Some of the other hostages had learned some of the details while we were still in prison, but not me. I was still in the dark, and I wasn’t exactly sure what all the tears were about.

But somehow the 70s seem to be creeping out of the loser-decade category. Their claim to importance is in the realm of sweeping historical trends, rather than memorable events, though there were some of those too. In the US today a few basic propositions shape everything: the presidential electorate is conservative and Republican [as of 1991]. Geopolitics revolves around a commodity (oil) and a religion (Islam) more than around an ideology (Marxism-Leninism). The national economy is no longer one in which practically every class, region, and industry is upwardly mobile. American culture is essentially individualistic, rather than communitarian, which means that notions like deferred gratification, sacrifice, and sustained national efforts are a very tough sell. Anyone seeking to understand the roots of this situation has to go back to the 70s.

The underestimation of the 70s importance, especially during the early years of the decade, is easy to forgive because the character of the 70s was substantially shaped at first by spillover from the 60s. Such 60s events as the killings of student protesters at Kent State and Orangeburg, the original Earth Day, the invasion of Cambodia, and a large portion of the war in Vietnam took place in the 70s. Although 60s radicals (cultural and political) spent the early 70s loudly bemoaning the end of the revolution, what was in fact going on was the working of the phenomena of the 60s into the mainstream of American life. Thus the first Nixon administration, which was decried by liberals at the time for being nightmarishly right-wing, was actually more liberal than the Johnson administration in many ways- less hawkish in Vietnam, more free-spending on social programs. The reason wasn’t that Richard Nixon was a liberal but that the country as a whole had continued to move steadily to the left throughout the late 60s and early 70s; the political climate of institutions like the US Congress and the boards of directors of big corporations was probably more liberal in 1972 than in any year before or since, and the Democratic Party nominated its most liberal presidential candidate every. Nixon had to go along with the tide.

In New Orleans, my hometown, the hippie movement peaked in 1972 or 1973. Long hair, crash pads, head shops, psychedelic posters, underground newspapers, and other Summer of Love-inspired institutions had been unknown there during the real Summer of Love, which was in 1967. It took even longer, until the middle or late 70s, for those aspects of hippie life that have endured to catch on with the general public. All over the country the likelihood that an average citizen would wear longish hair, smoke marijuana, and openly live with [someone] before marriage was probably greater in 1980 than it was in 1970. The 60s’ preoccupation with self-discovery became a mass phenomenon only in the 70s, through home-brew psychological therapies like EST. In politics the impact of the black enfranchisement that took place in the 1960s barely began to be felt until the mid-to late 1970s. The tremendously influential feminist and gay-liberation movements were, at the dawn of the 1970s, barely under way in Manhattan, their headquarters, and certainly hadn’t begun their spread across the whole country. The 60s took a long time for America to digest; the process went on throughout the 70s and even into the 80s.

The epochal event of the 70s as an era in its own right was the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries’ oil embargo, which lasted for 6 months in the fall of 1973 and the spring of 1874. Everything that happened in the 60s was predicted on the assumption of economic prosperity and growth; concerns like personal fulfillment and social justice tend to emerge in the middle class only at times when people take it for granted that they’ll be able to make a living. For 30 years- ever since the effects of WWII on the economy had begun to kick in- the average American’s standard of living had been rising, to a remarkable extent. AS the economy grew, indices like home ownership, automobile ownership, and access to higher education got up to levels unknown anywhere else in the world, and the US could plausibly claim to have provided a better life materially for its working class than any society ever had. That ended with the OPEC embargo.

While it was going on, the embargo didn’t fully register in the national consciousness. The country was absorbed by a different story, the Watergate scandal, which was really another 60s spillover, the final series of battles in the long war between the antiwar liberals and the rough-playing anti-Communists. Richard Nixon, having engaged in dirty tricks against leftish politicians for his whole career, didn’t stop doing so as President; he only found new targets, like Daniel Ellsberg and [Democratic Party chairman], Lawrence O’Brien. This time, however, he lost the Establishment, which was now far more kindly disposed to Nixon’s enemies than it had been back in the 1950s. Therefore, the big-time press, the courts, and the Congress undertook the enthralling process of cranking up the deliberate, inexorable machinery of justice, and everybody was glued to the television for a year and a half. The embargo, on the other hand, was a non-video-friendly economic story and hence difficult to get hooked on. It pertained to two subcultures that were completely mysterious to most Americans- the oil industry and the Arab world- and it seemed at first to be merely an episode in the ongoing hostilities between Israel and its neighbors. But in retrospect it changed everything, much more than Watergate did.

By causing the price of oil to double, the embargo enriched- and therefore increased the wealth, power, and confidence of- oil-producing areas like Texas, while helping speed the decline of the automobile-producing upper Midwest; the rise of OPEC and the rise of the Sunbelt as a center of population and political influence went together. The embargo ushered in a long period of inflation, the reaction to which dominated the economics and politics of the rest of the decade. It demonstrated that America could now be “pushed around” by countries most of us had always thought of as minor powers.

Most important of all, the embargo now appears to have been the pivotal moment at which the mass upward economic mobility of American society ended, perhaps forever. Average weekly earnings, adjusted for inflation, peaked in 1973. Productivity- that is, economic output per man-hour- abruptly stopped growing. The nearly universal assumption in the post-WWII US was that children would do better than their parents. Upward mobility wasn’t just a characteristic of the national culture; it was the defining characteristic. As it slowly began to sink in that everybody wasn’t going to be moving forward together anymore, the country became more fragmented, more internally rivalrous, and less sure of its mythology.

Richard Nixon resigned as President in August 1974, and the country settled into what appeared to be a quiet, folksy drama of national recuperation. In the White House good old Gerald Ford was succeeded by rural, sincere Jimmy Carter, who was the only President elevated to the office by the voters during the 70s and so was the decade’s emblematic political figure. In hindsight, though, it’s impossible to miss a gathering conservative stridency in the politics of the late 70s. In 1976, Ronald Reagan, the retired governor of California, challenged Ford for the Republican presidential nomination. Reagan lost the opening primaries and seemed to be about to drop out of the race when, apparently to the surprise even of his own staff, he won the North Carolina primary in late March.

It is quite clear what caused the Reagan campaign to catch on: He had begun to attack Ford from the right on foreign policy matters. The night before the primary he bought a half-hour of statewide television time to press his case. Reagan’s main substantive criticism was of the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, but his two most crowd-pleasing points were his promise, if elected, to fire Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State and his lusty denunciation of the elaborately negotiated treaty to turn nominal control of the Panama Canal over to the Panamanians. Less than a year earlier Communist forces had finally captured the South Vietnamese capital city of Saigon, as the staff of the American Embassy escaped in a wild scramble into helicopters. The oil embargo had ended, but the price of gasoline had not retreated. The US appeared to have descended from the pinnacle of power and respect it had occupied at the close of WWII to a small, hounded position, and Reagan had hit on a symbolic way of expressing rage over that change. Most journalistic and academic opinion at the time was fairly cheerful about the course of American foreign policy- we were finally out of Vietnam, and we were getting over our silly Cold War phobia about dealing with China and the Soviet Union- but in the general public obviously the rage Reagan expressed was widely shared.

A couple of years later a conservative political cause even more out of the blue than opposition to the Panama Canal Treaty appeared: the tax revolt. Howard Jarvis, a 75-year-old retired businessman who had been attacking taxation in California pretty much continuously since 1962, got onto the state ballot in 1978 an initiative, Proposition 13, that would substantially cut property taxes. Despite bad press and the strong opposition of most politicians, it passed by a 2-1 margin. Proposition 13 was to some extent another aftershock of the OPEC embargo. Inflation causes the value of hard assets to rise. The only substantial hard asset owned by most Americans is their home. As the prices of houses soared in the mid-70s (causing people to dig deeper to buy housing, which sent the national savings rate plummeting and made real estate prices the great conversation started in the social life of the middle class), so did property taxes, since they are based on the values of the houses. Hence, resentment over taxation became an issue in waiting.

The influence of Proposition 13 has been so great that it is now difficult to recall that taxes weren’t a major concern in national politics before it. Conservative opposition to government focused on its activities, not on its revenue base, and this put conservatism at a disadvantage, because most government programs are popular. Even before Proposition 13, conservative economic writers like Jude Wanniski and Arthur Laffer were inventing supply-side economics, based on the idea that reducing taxes would bring prosperity. With Proposition 13 it was proved- as it has been proved over and over since- that tax cutting was one of the rare voguish policy ideas that run out to be huge political winners. In switching from arguing against programs to arguing against taxes, conservatism had found another key element of its ascension to power.

The tax revolt wouldn’t have worked if the middle class hadn’t been receptive to the notion that it was oppressed. This was remarkable in itself, since it had been assumed for decades that the American middle class was, in a world-historical sense, almost uniquely lucky. The emergence of a self-pitying strain in the middle class was in a sense yet another 60s spillover. At the dawn of the 60s, the idea that anybody in the US was oppressed might have seemed absurd. Then blacks, who really were oppressed, were able to make the country see the truth about their situation. But that opened Pandora’s Box. The eloquent language of group rights that the civil rights movement had invented proved to be quite adaptable, and eventually it was used by college students, feminists, Native Americans, Chicanos, urban blue-collar, “white ethnics,” and finally, suburban homeowners.

Meanwhile, the social programs started by Lyndon Johnson gave rise to another new, or long-quiescent, idea, which was that the government was wasting vast sums of money on harebrained schemes. In some ways the Great Society accomplished its goal of binding the country together, by making the federal government a nationwide provider of such favors as medical care and access to higher education; but in others it contributed to the 70s trend of each group’s looking to government to provide it with benefits and being unconcerned with the general mood. Especially after the economy turned sour, the middle class began to define its interests in terms of a rollback of government programs aimed at helping other groups.

As the country was becoming more fragmented, so was its essential social unit, the family. In 1965 only 14.9% of the population was single; by 1979 the figure had risen to 20%. The divorce rate went from 2.5 per thousand in 1965 to 5.3 per thousand in 1979. The percentage of births that were out of wedlock was 5.3 in 1960 and 16.3 in 1978. The likelihood that married women with young children would work doubled between the mid-60s and the late-70s. These changes took place for a variety of reasons- feminism, improved birth control, the legalization of abortion, the spread across the country of the 60s youth culture’s rejection of traditional mores- but what they added up to was that the nuclear family, consisting of a working husband and a nonworking wife, both in their first marriage, and their children, ceased to be the dominant type of American household during the 70s. Also, people became more likely to organize themselves into communities based on their family status, so that the unmarried often lived in singles apartment complexes and retirees in senior citizens’ developments. The overall effect was one of much greater personal freedom, which meant, as it always does, less social cohesion. Tom Wolfe’s moniker for the 70s, the Me Decade, caught on because it was probably true that the country had placed relatively more emphasis on individual happiness and relatively less on loyalty to family and nation.

Like a symphony, the 70s finally built up in a crescendo that pulled together all its main themes. This occurred during the second half of 1979. First OPEC engineered the “second oil shock” in which, by holding down production, it got the price for its crude oil (and the price of gasoline at American service stations) to rise by more than 50% during the first 6 months of that year. With the onset of the summer vacation season, the automotive equivalent of the Depression’s bank runs began. Everybody considered the possibility of not being able to get gas, panicked and went off to fill the tank; the result was hours-long lines at gas stations all across the country.

It was a small inconvenience compared with what people in the Communist world and Latin America live through all the time, but the psychological effect was enormous. The summer of 1979 was the only time I can remember when, at the level of ordinary life as opposed to public affairs, things seemed to be out of control. Inflation was well above 10% and rising, and suddenly what seemed like a quarter of every day was spent on getting gasoline or thinking about getting gasoline- a task that previously had been completely routine, as it is again now. Black markets sprang up; rumors flew about well-connected people who had secret sources. One day that summer, after an hour’s desperate and fruitless search, I ran out of gas on the Central Expressway in Dallas. I left my car sitting primly in the right lane and walked away in the 100-degree heat; the people driving by looked at me without surprise, no doubt thinking, “Poor bastard, it could have happened to me just as easily.”

In July President Carter scheduled a speech on the gas lines, then abruptly canceled it and repaired to Camp David to think deeply for 10 days, which seemed like a pale substitute for somehow setting things aright. Aides, cabinet secretaries, intellectuals were summoned to Carter’s aerie to discuss with him what was wrong with the country’s soul. On July 15 he made a television address to the nation, which has been enshrined in memory as the “malaise speech,” although it didn’t use that word (Carter did, however, talk about “a crisis of confidence… that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will”).

To reread the speech today is to be struck by its spectacular political ineptitude. Didn’t Carter realize that Presidents are not supposed to express doubts publicly or to lecture the American people about their shortcomings? Why couldn’t he have just temporarily imposed gas rationing, which would have ended the lines overnight, instead of outlining a vague and immediately forgotten 6-point program to promote energy conservation? His describing the country’s loss of confidence did not cause the country go gain confidence, needless to say. And it didn’t help matters that upon his return to Washington he demanded letters of resignation from all members of his cabinet and accepted five of them. Carter seemed to be anything but an FDR-like reassuring, ebullient presence; he communicated a sense of wild flailing about as he tried (unsuccessfully) to get the situation under control.

I remember being enormously impressed by Carter’s speech at the time because it was a painfully honest and much thought-over attempt to grapple with the main problem of the decade. The American economy had ceased being an expanding pie, and by unfortunate coincidence, this had happened just when an ethic of individual freedom as the highest good was spreading throughout the society, which meant people would respond to the changing economic conditions by looking out for themselves. Like most other members of the world-manipulating class whose leading figures had advised Carter at Camp David, I thought there was a mistake. What I didn’t realize, and Carter obviously didn’t either, was that there was a smarter way to play the situation politically. A President could maintain there was nothing wrong with America at all- that it hadn’t become less powerful in the world, hadn’t reached some kind of hard economic limit, and wasn’t in crisis- and, instead of trying to reverse the powerful tide of individualism, ride along with it. At the same time, he could act more forcefully than Carter, especially against inflation, so that he didn’t seem weak and ineffectual. All this is exactly what Carter’s successor, Ronald Reagan, did.

Actually, Carter himself set in motion the process by which inflation was conquered a few months later, when he gave the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve Board to Paul Volcker, a man willing to put the economy into a severe recession to bring back price stability. But in November fate delivered the coup de grace to Carter in the form of the taking hostage of the staff of the American Embassy in Teheran, as a protest against the US’s harboring of Iran’s former shah. As with the malaise speech, what is most difficult to convey today about the hostage crisis is why Carter made what now looks like a huge, obvious error: playing up the crisis so much that it became a national obsession for more than a year. The fundamental problem with hostage taking is that the one sure remedy- refusing to negotiate and thus allowing the hostages to be killed- is politically unacceptable in the democratic media society we live in, at least when the hostages are middle-class sympathetic figures, as they were in Iran.

There isn’t any good solution to this problem, but Carter’s two successors in the White House demonstrated that it is possible at least to negotiate for the release of hostages in a low-profile way that will cause the press to lose interest and prevent the course of the hostage negotiations from completely defining the Presidency. During the last year of the Carter administration, by contrast, the hostage story absolutely dominated the television news and several of the hostages and their families became temporary celebrities. In Carter’s defense, even among the many voices criticizing him for appearing weak and vacillating, there was none that I remember willing to say, “Just cut off negotiations and walk away.” It was a situation that everyone regarded as terrible but in which there was a strong national consensus supporting the course Carter had chosen.

So ended the 70s. There was still enough of the 60s spillover phenomenon going on so that Carter, who is now regarded (with some affection) as having been too much the good-hearted liberal to maintain a hold on the presidential electorate, could be challenged for renomination by Ted Kennedy on the grounds that he was too conservative. Inflation was raging on: the consumer price index rose by 14.4% between May 1979 and May 1980. We were being humiliated by fanatically bitter, pre-modern Muslims with whom we had expected to regard us with gratitude because we had helped ease out their dictator even though he was reliably pro-US. The Soviet empire appeared (probably for the last time ever) to be on the march, having invaded Afghanistan to Carter’s evident surprise and disillusionment. We had lost our most recent war. We couldn’t pull together as a people. The puissant, unified, prospering America of the late 1940s seemed to be just a fading memory.

I was a reporter for the Washington Post during the 1980 presidential campaign, and even on the Post’s national desk, that legendary nerve center of politics, the idea that the campaign might end with Reagan being elected President seemed fantastic, right up to the weekend before the election. At first [Ted] Kennedy looked like a real threat to Carter; remember that up to that point no Kennedy had ever lost a campaign. While the Carter people were disposing of Kennedy, they were rooting for Reagan to win the Republican nomination because he would be such an easy mark. He was too old, too unserious, and, most of all, too conservative. Look what had happened to Barry Goldwater (a sitting office-holder, at least) only 16 years earlier, and Reagan was so divisive that a moderate from his own party, John Anderson, was running for President as a third-party candidate. It was not at all clear how much the related issues of inflation and national helplessness were dominating the public’s mind. Kennedy, Carter, and Anderson were all, in their own way, selling national healing, that great post-60s obsession; Reagan, and only Reagan, was selling pure strength.

In a sense Reagan’s election represents the country’s rejection of the idea of a 60s-style solution to the great problems of the 70s-economic stagnation, social fragmentation, and the need for a new world order revolving around relations between the oil-producing Arab world and the West. The idea of a scaled-back America- husbanding its resources, living more modestly, renouncing its restless mobility, withdrawing from full engagement with the politics of every spot on the globe, focusing on issues of internal comity- evidently didn’t appeal. Reagan, and the country, had in effect found a satisfying pose to strike in response to the problems of the 70s, but that’s different from finding a solution.

Today some of the issues that dominated the 70s have faded away. Reagan and Volcker did beat inflation. The “crisis of confidence” now seems a long-ago memory. But it is striking how early we still seem to be in the process of working out the implications of the oil embargo. We have just fought and won [the Gulf War] against the twin evils of Middle East despotism and interruptions in the oil supply, which began to trouble us in the 70s. We still have not really even begun to figure out how to deal with the cessation of across-the-board income gains, and as a result our domestic politics are still dominated by squabbling over the proper distribution of government’s benefits and burdens. During the 70s themselves the new issues that were arising seemed nowhere near as important as those 60s legacies, minority rights and Vietnam and Watergate. But the runt of decades has wound up casting a much longer shadow than anyone imagined.

By 1980, various activists had taken the lead in establishing a conservative agenda for the nation, which included such diverse causes as lower taxes, improved morals, and reduced emphasis on affirmative action.

Ronald Reagan, a well-known movie and television actor, gained fame among Republicans as an effective political speaker in the 1964 Goldwater campaign. He went on to be elected the governor of California, the nation’s most populous state. In 1976 Reagan came close to taking the party’s nomination from President Ford. By this time, he was widely recognized as the most effective spokesperson for conservative positions. Handsome and vigorous in his late 60s, he proved a master of the media and was seen by millions as a likable and sensible champion of average Americans.

The Reagan administration advocated supply-side economics, arguing that tax cuts reduced government spending, would increase investment by the private sector, and lead to increased production, jobs, and prosperity. This approach contrasted with the Keynesian economics long favored by the Democrats, which relied on government spending to boost consumer income and demand. The supply-side theory reminded critics of the “trickle-down” economics of the 1920s, in which wealthy Americans prospered, and some of their increased profits and spending benefited the middle class and the poor.

Following up on the promise of “getting government off the backs of the people,” the Reagan administration reduced federal regulations on business and industry- a policy of deregulation begun under Carter. Restrictions were eased on savings and loan institutions, mergers and takeovers by large corporations, and environmental protection. To help the struggling American auto industry, regulations on emissions and auto safety were also reduced. Secretary of the Interior James Watt opened federal lands for increased coal and timber production and offshore waters for oil drilling.

Despite having once been the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Reagan took a tough stand against unions. He fired thousands of striking federal air traffic controllers for violating their contract and decertified their union (PATCO). Many businesses followed this action by hiring striker replacements in labor conflicts. These antiunion policies along with the loss of manufacturing jobs hastened the decline of union membership among nonfarm workers from over 30% in 1962 to only 12% in the late 1990s. In addition, the recession of 1982 and foreign competition had a dampening effect on workers’ wages.

In 1982, the nation suffered the worst recession since the 1930s. Banks failed an unemployment reached 11%. At the same time, however, the recession along with a fall in oil prices reduced the double-digit inflation rate of the late 1970s to less than 4%. As the policies of Reaganomics took hold, the economy rebounded and beginning in 1983 entered a long period of recovery. The recovery, however, only widened the income gap between rich and poor. While upper-income groups and “yuppies” (young urban professionals) enjoyed higher incomes and material benefits from a deregulated marketplace, the standard of living of the middle class remained stagnant or declined during the 1980s and early 1990s. In the late 1990s, the middle class gained back some of its losses.

Reagan followed through on his pledge to appoint conservative judges to the Supreme Court by nominating Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman on the Court, as well as Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy. Led by a new chief justice, William Rehnquist, the Supreme Court scaled back affirmative action in hiring and promotions and limited Roe v Wade by allowing states to impose certain restrictions on abortion, such as requiring minors to notify their parents beforehand.

The return of prosperity, even if not fully shared by all Americans, restored public confidence in the Reagan administration. At their convention in 1984, Republicans nominated their popular president by acclamation. Among Democrats, Jesse Jackson became the first African American politician to make a strong run for the presidency by seeking the support of all minority groups, under the banner of the rainbow coalition. The Democratic majority, however, nominated Walter Mondale, Carter’s vice president, to be their presidential candidate and Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York to be the first woman to run for vice president. Reagan easily defeated the liberal Mondale, taking every state except Mondale’s home state of Minnesota. Two-thirds of white males voted for Reagan. Analysis of voting returns indicated that only two groups still favored the Democrats: African Americans and those earning less than $12,500 a year.

By the mid-80s, Reagan’s tax cuts combined with large increases in military spending were creating federal deficits of over $200 billion a year. Over the course of Reagan’s two terms as president, the national debt tripled from about $900 billion to almost $2.7 trillion. The tax cuts, designed to stimulate investments, seemed only to increase consumption, especially of foreign-made luxury and consumer items. As a result, the US trade deficit reached a staggering $150 billion a year. The cumulative trade imbalance of $1 trillion during the 1980s contributed to a dramatic increase in the foreign ownership of US real estate and industry. In 1985, for the first time since the World War I era, the United States became a debtor nation. In an effort to keep the federal deficit under control, Congress in 1985 passed the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Balanced Budget Act, which provided for across-the-board spending cuts. Court rulings and later congressional changes kept this legislation from achieving its full purpose, but Congress was still able to reduce the deficit by $66 billion from 1986 to 1988.

President Reagan’s two terms reduced restrictions on a free-market economy and left more money in the hands of investors and higher income Americans, Reagan’s policies also succeeded in containing the growth of the New Deal-Great Society welfare state. Another legacy of the Reagan years were the huge federal deficits, which were to change the context of future political debates. With yearly deficits running between $200-$300 billion, it no longer seemed reasonable for either Democrats or Republicans to propose new social programs, such as universal health coverage. Instead of asking what new government programs might be needed, Reaganomics changed the debate to issues of what government programs to cut and by how much.

Increased spending for defense and aid to anticommunist forces in Latin America were the hallmarks of Reagan’s approach to the Cold War during his first term.

Reagan’s foreign policy suffered a series of setbacks in the Middle East. In 1982, Israel (with US approval) invaded southern Lebanon to stop PLO terrorists from raiding Israel. Soon the United States became involved in helping to evacuate the PLO to a safe haven and in providing peacekeeping forces to Lebanon in an effort to contain that country’s bitter civil war. In April 1983, an Arab suicide squad bombed the US Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. A few months later, another Arab terrorist drove a bomb-filled truck into the US Marines barracks, killing 241 servicemen. In 1984, Reagan pulled US forces out of Lebanon, with little to show for the effort and loss of lives. Secretary of State George Schultz pushed for a peaceful settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by setting up a homeland for the PLO in the West Bank territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 war. Under American pressure, PLO leader Yasser Arafat agreed in 1988 to recognize Israel’s right to exist.

The Cold War intensified in the early 1980s as a result of both Reagan’s arms buildup and the Soviet deployment of a larger number of missiles against NATO countries. In 1985, however, a dynamic reformer, Mikhail Gorbachev, became the new Soviet leader. Gorbachev attempted to change Soviet domestic politics by introducing two major reforms: (1) glasnost, or openness, to end political repression and move toward greater political freedom for Soviet citizens, and (2) perestroika, or restructuring of the Soviet economy by introducing some free-market practices. To achieve his reforms, Gorbachev had to end the costly arms race and deal with a deteriorating Soviet economy. In 1987, after two earlier attempts, Gorbachev and Reagan agreed to remove and destroy all intermediate-range missiles (the INF agreement). In 1988, Gorbachev further reduced Cold War tensions by starting the pullout of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. He also cooperated with the United States in putting diplomatic pressure on Iran and Iraq to end their war. By the end of Reagan’s second term, relations between the two superpowers had so improved that the end of the Cold War seemed at hand.

Viewed presidentially, the 80s were one part Jimmy Carter, eight parts Ronald Regan and one part George Bush. The decade seems destined to be known, however, as the era of the “Regan Revolution.” Just how revolutionary a time it was depends upon where you set your gaze, but the range of subpossibilities extends from “more than you might think,” to “a lot less than you’ve been told.” At its self-proclaimed core, the revolution was a clear underachiever. For an epoch supposedly characterized by is backlash against government spending, government intrusion, and government presence in national life, there was far less action than fanfare. Not a single public housing project was privatized. The sagebrush rebellion didn’t pry any western lands out of Uncle Sam’s grasp [Reagan had proposed that 80 million acres of public wilderness be opened to developers by the end of the century]. Zooming farm subsidies and protections cost a total of $200 billion during the 1980s, by far the highest figure in our history. Enterprise zones, school prayers, and “the anti-communist resistance” in Nicaragua were so real to White House staffs as to have earned their own function keys on the speechwriting computers. But to average Americans they remained just slogans. Not a single tuition or social-service voucher was ever handed to a poor person over the head of a bureaucrat. And not only is there still a Department of Education, it spent one-and-a-half times as much in 1989 as it did ten years earlier.

In fiscal year 1980 the federal budget totaled 22.1 % of US GNP. By 1989, the figure had dropped all the way to 22.2%. No axe job! Not even any whittling! No decrease at all! (for ancient history buffs, the figure was 16% in 1950). That’s the revenge of the Neanderthal conservatives? Even on the narrower front of federal taxes, where it is constantly claimed that the Reagan administration made cuts of “irresponsible” proportions, the changes were distinctly mouse-like. Over the decade, the proportion of national output channeled into the federal till went from 19.4% to 19.3% (compared with 14.8% in 1950). And if state and local taxes are taken into consideration, one can only conclude that during the 1980s the American people took a little more government onto their backs.

Mathematicians in the audience will detect a mismatch between the taxes-in and spending-out figures cited above. That discrepancy is called “the deficit,” a definite growth sector and the favorite subject of the policy class during most of the last decade. The federal deficit stood at $74 billion in 1980, peaked at $221 billion in 1986, and weighed in at $115 billion by decade’s end. So much for fiscal prudence and other pinched Republican concepts. Accumulated and metamorphosed over the years like so much sea-bottom silt, federal deficits eventually became federal debt, an increasingly plentiful quantity in America during the 1980s. On New Year’s Eve 1979 the national debt stood at $836 billion. Ten Auld Lang Syne’s later it hit $2.3 trillion. These figures inspired rare harmonic caterwauls from both the right and the left.

Recent US binging, however, appears only routine when viewed against the behavior of other big-spending national governments. The US deficit [in late 1989] amounted to a little over 3% of GNP. The Japanese- they of the mystical discipline, the sober frugality- were running up tabs half again as large, as of 1987. The Canadians, Austrians, and Spanish were also overspending their allowances by a larger portion than the US, and the Italians, Irish, and Belgians, heaven help them, actually had double-digit deficit/GNP ratios. If we sharpen our focus on US budget figures even further and look down the supposed heart of the Reagan hit list- social welfare spending- we still see little evidence of any adherence to an anti-bloat diet. Federal spending on Social Security, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, health, housing, education, and anti-poverty measures totaled 4.9% of GNP in 1960, 7.8% in 1970, 11.3% in 1980, and 11.3% in 1987. Much ballyhooed overhauls of the Social Security and welfare systems, replete with “blue-ribbon” commissions, presidential task forces, and “shadow committee” proposals resulted in the end in 2 distinct “POOFS!” that could be heard hundreds of miles from the nation’s capital. Both reform efforts ultimately carried far more fingerprints of steady-as-she-goes Democratic Senator Patrick Moynihan than of the would-be-earthquake inducers in the Reagan administration.

The Reagan presidency was not without its effect on the budget, however, Raising spending is a lot easier than reducing it, naturally, and in the area of national defense a notable expansion was accomplished. From its 1980 level of just under $200 billion, defense spending was increased to slightly more than $300 billion in the late 1980s (both figures in 1989 dollars). Here too, though, ephemerality was the byword. Defense outlays, which had represented 9.5% of GNP in 1960, 8.3% in 1970, and 5% in 1980, bobbed up to a peak of 6.5% of GNP in 1986 before dribbling back under 6% again by the decade’s end.

People who understand physics claim that entropy is the law of the universe, but in Washington DC, inertia dominates. Truth is, the alleged “political realignment” of the 1980s produced relatively minor alterations of policy, and it resulted in almost no lasting change of casts. Following the relatively short-lived dominance of Republicans in the Senate (1981-1987), the iron rule of the incumbents (which in Congress means Democrats) reasserted itself. In… elections, incumbents in the House of Representatives have been victorious in literally 99% of their races (early in this century it was common for half of all Congressional incumbents to be replaced in an election year. As recently as the 1940s about 1/5 got dumped). Competition has effectively disappeared from national representative politics.

The two lasting political effects of Reaganism are disparate: Party identification has taken a so-far enduring swing toward the GOP, with self-described Republicans even becoming a majority among some young voting cohorts. Among 18 to 29 year olds, for instance, 52% inclined to Republicanism in the first quarter of 1989, versus 33% in 1980 (while young voters tend to be comparatively liberal on issues like race and gender, they took a more conservative line on economics, crime, and foreign policy). And the Supreme Court, with 5 reasonably solid right-leaning justices, has been transformed from a clearly liberal institution of more than 20 years’ standing to what most observers describe as a “moderately conservative” one (the same is true for the federal judiciary generally). Again, however, the transmogrifying jump was distinctly un-quantum like. But the federal fisc and Washington are not the nation. In the myriad private universities of America, movement during the last 10 years was much more rapid. Indeed, change ranging between gradual and dizzying was virtually the rule.

For one thing, the place of technical innovation- which accelerates largely without regard to dithering beyond the laboratory- continues to defy most people’s expectations. Scientific advances initiated in the 1980s include the first higher-temperature superconductivity, the first anomalous indications that nuclear fusion may be possible at sub-stellar temperatures, creation of the first genetically altered animals, and the first field tests of genetically engineered plants. It must be remembered that personal computers and workstations- of which there were nearly 60 million in operation [in late 1989]- were only invented in the 1980s. Likewise cellular phones (a couple million in motion), laser printers (more than 3 million), any number of new drugs, and a host of other daily-life-changing products. Undoubtedly, though their significance is often hard to grasp at the moment of breakthrough, the advances now sweeping electronics, biotechnology, chemistry, and other hard sciences will eventually cause our era to be thought of as an epochal one in human civilization.

The results of these quiet marches can be seen in fundamental indicators like life expectancy. Average life expectation for a child born in the United States was 70.8 years in 1970, 73.7 in 1980m and 75 in 1987. With each passing year during the 1980s, average life spans increased 67 days (to lay a prominent Reagan-attack to rest, infant mortality rates also continued to improve steadily during this period, falling from 12.6 deaths per 1,000 births to 9.9 in the first 8 years of the decade). To put improvements of this magnitude in perspective, consider that when my still-living grandmother was born in 1900, US life expectancy at birth was 47.3 years (10 years below the current level of India). The nearly 28-year improvement in longevity in her lifetime is more than occurred during the previous 10,000 years of human history. It takes serious exertion to achieve progress like that, and the United States has spared no expense. In 1980, health expenditures represented 9.2% of our Gross Domestic Product. By 1986, they had jumped up to 11.1% and are still climbing. We spent $1,926 on health for every man, woman, and child in the country in 1986- far more than, for instance, the $831 invested by the Japanese, or the $1,031 per capita expended in West Germany.

We also poured a lot of money into our education system during the 1980s. Spending per elementary and secondary school student zoomed up 26% from 1980 to 1988, and the average salary of public-school teachers rose 23% (both figures in constant dollars). Our high-school drop-out rate edged down a couple of percentage points- among African-Americans it was down about a third from 1980 to 1987. And college attendance continued to increase to an all-time high of 55% of all high-school graduates in 1986. It’s not clear, however, that all the extra effort improved the quality of education. During the 1980s, employment in school administrative bureaucracies grew two-and-a-half times as fast as employment of instructors. Barely half of all school employees today are full-time teachers. And judging by test results, not all those teachers are teaching that well. The national average combined Scholastic Aptitude Test score bottomed out at 890 (out of 1600) in 1980. When the figure rebounded to 906 by the mid-80s, backs were thumped everywhere. Our best assessment of nationwide educational competence stood at 903 as the decade ended, compared to an average score of 958 in 1968.

To return for a moment to the subject of life and limb, there is one very troubling 1980s retrogression that must be noted. Life expectance for African Americans as actually fallen since 1984, an unprecedented occurrence. Given the health-care spending surge and all the countervailing technological factors regularly pushing life spans up, only a serious breakdown in the social arena could drag the figure lower. Unfortunately, such a breakdown exists today, in the form of drug abuse and homicide epidemics which are tragically sweeping African-American communities across the nation. Jesse Jackson [an African-American activist] has taken to saying that dope is doing more damage to African-Americans than KKK ropes every did, and on this critical statistical axis he is literally correct.

But the crime and drug waves which so damaged underclass communities during the 1980s went against society-wide trends. US overall crime victimization crested in about 1979, and fell 14% for violent crime, 23% for personal thefts, and 28% for household thefts in the 9 years following. The national trendlines on drug use by high school students peaked at about the same time. The fraction of high school seniors reporting use of an illicit substance within the previous 12 months declined 29% from the class of 79 to the class of 88. Tougher law enforcement during the 1980s may have had something to do with these shifts. There were 29,000 criminal defendants convicted in US District Courts in 1980 (about the same number as in 1970). By 1988 the number had jumped to 43,000. Likewise, the number of federal and state convicts behind bars increased from 316,000 in 1980 to 674,000 eight-and-a-half years later.

If gradual progress was ironically accompanied by a public sense of worsening crisis in the areas of crime and drugs, in another area almost the opposite phenomenon took place. The 1980s were the decade when the family arrived as a political issue. The public saw infant strollers clogging neighborhoods full of baby boomers and concluded that the return to traditional family values the president was calling for had actually taken place. Not so. The divorce rate did finally level off in the early 1980s, but that is mostly because the marriage rate had fallen so low. And divorce has stabilized at a level more than double the pre-1970s norm (current rates, extrapolated into the future, suggest that half of today’s marriages will [and did] eventually break up).

As for the birthrate, it has not risen from the low, less-than-population-replacement level it hit in the mid-1970s. All those strollers you are seeing are just a consequence of the aging of the baby boomers. An entire, large generation has hit the swollen-belly stage, but per couple they are having relatively few offspring (an average of 1.8 per woman, which doesn’t even fill the places of mom and dad). Since the mid-80s, for the first time in our history, the number of childless households in the US has exceeded the number containing children. And traditionalism is hardly on a roll. During the first 7 years of the 1980s, right in the midst of a supposedly calm and conservatizing era, the number of births out of wedlock soared 40%. The astonishing result is that by the end of the decade one-quarter of all children born in America arrived without benefit of married parents. Literally a majority of them will depend upon welfare payments instead of a contributing father. The combined result of 1980s divorce and illegitimacy patterns is that 27% of all children in this country now live apart from one or both of their parents (in Japan, 96% of all children live in 2-parent families. Could “broken homes” with known negative effects on “human capital” be part of our competitiveness problem?). An even more frightening fact is this: At some point in their childhood, at least 60% of all American youngsters born in the 1980s will spend time in a single-parent home.

If family salvation and shrunken government were Reaganisms that just didn’t happen, a few other battle cries translated more successfully into reality. While critics worried that greed and self-interest would overwhelm the voluntarism and individual accountability called for by the president, Americans remained very generous during the 1980s. Private giving for philanthropic purposes increased from $49 billion to $104 billion in the first 8 years of the decade. More than 4/5 of that was comprised of individual donations. Corporate giving also jumped, by 66% in 7 years. Mutual aid and fraternal cooperation are alive and well in the US, as further indicated by the jump in national non-profit associations, from 14,726 in 1980 to 21,911 in 1989.

The Reaganites always insisted that the best aid program in the world was economic growth, and of that there was a surprisingly large measure during the 1980s. As this is being written in the waning weeks of 1989 the US is entering its 85^th straight month of economic growth, the 2^nd longest expansion since record-keeping began in 1854, and one that economist Herbert Stein characterizes as “the longest and strongest noninflationary expansion in our history.” In addition to confounding economists of varying hues, this long expansion did nice things to the pocketbooks of American citizens. Median family income, in constant 1988 dollars, stood at $29,919 in 1980. The decade-opening recession pushed it down to $28,708 by 1982. Then over the next 6 years it zipped up to $32,191. Income per capita, in many ways a purer indicator because it is not distorted by changes in family configuration over time, grew even more strongly: up a total of 17% from 1980 to 1988, or an annual rate of 2% since the expansion began. 2% annual growth sounds unexceptional, until you realize that it would double your standard of living in 35 years. For most of human history, an increase in life quality of that magnitude would have taken many generations. Today it is the legacy of a single presidential term.

Growth like that also has a way of eating up surplus labor. Early in the decade the air was full of talk of long-term “structural” unemployment. By late 1989 unemployment was just a bit over 5% and a record 63% of all Americans 16 and over were in harness. The raw aggregates too are quite impressive: as of 1979, 100 million Americans were earning a paycheck. In 1989 it was up to 119 million. There has been a whole lot of shaking going on in the world of job creation. Perhaps the best indicator of the progress made on this front is the fact that unemployment stories almost never show up on news programs anymore. Which is not to say we don’t have a serious employment problem in this country. We do. As one Vermont state labor official puts it, “You’ve heard of the discouraged worker effect; what we’re seeing is the discouraged employer effect.”

New England, with 13 million residents, had a late-1980s unemployment rate of 3.1%. In the Maryland/DC/Virginia region (home to 11 million), the figure was 3.5%. In many areas, grave labor shortages exist… The minimum wage has become a fiction in many places (pizza deliverers for the Domino’s chain are now paid between $8 and $12 man hour in the nation’s capital), and the employers throughout the land are finding it hard to fill positions with qualified workers.

Evidence of the rising prosperity of American private lives in the later 1980s could be seen in everything from skyrocketing housing demand (median sales prices of existing homes up 25% from 1985 to 1989) to record movie house admissions ($4.5 billion in 1988 versus $2.7 billion in 1980) to all-time highs in the fraction of American meals eaten out at restaurants (38 cents of every food dollar in 1987, up from 32 cents in 1980). 40% of Americans now attend an art event in the course of a year, 49% partake of live sports, 48% visit amusement parks (we now spend the same amount attending cultural events as we do on athletic events. 20 years ago it was only half as much). The number of painters, authors and dancers has increased more than 80% over the last decade. The number of US opera companies rose from 986 to 1,224 in just the first 7 years of the 1980s.

Book purchases are up, national park visits and trips abroad have soared, cable TV hook-ups are climbing, wine sales have jumped, big-ticket athletic shoes are huge sellers. Nearly 1 out of every 5 houses now standing in the US was built since 1980. Numbers of motor vehicles and numbers of phones have risen toward saturation (more than 1 of each for every adult in the country) and video cameras, microwave ovens, personal computers, food processors and other gadgets have come out of nowhere since 1980 to take their places right next to the toaster and other “necessities.” Expanded choices and new services confront even the reluctant consumer. Anyone spinning the FM radio dial in 1989 encountered a great many more stations than he or she did in 1980 (1,000 more nationwide, up 30%). New regional and specialty magazines fill every niche from Organic Farmer to PC World. Just about any item that a person desires can now be purchased from catalogs which slip conveniently throughout mail slots every day.

One example of the increasingly riotous variety that bubbled through American life in the 1980s: The number of different fresh fruits and vegetables stocked by the average supermarket tripled in 10 years. Vising Soviet legislator Boris Yelstin went home raving that the Americans HAVE 30,000 ITEMS IN THEIR GROCERY STORES! The fact that before returning he converted all his lecture fees into hypodermic needles- one of thousands of vital low-tech commodities that Mother Russia has found it impossible to produce in adequate supply- indicates how grotesquely fantastical these material riches must seem to people in countries of low economic creativity.

Perhaps out of frustration, many talented residents of those less creative nations decided to vote with their feet during the 1980s. Nearly 6 million legal immigrants came to our shores during the decade, a little less than half from Asia, somewhat under 40% from Latin America and the Caribbean, and most of the rest from Europe. The number of people of Hispanic origin in the US rose from 15 million in 1980 to 20 million in 1989, and the ranks of Asian-Americans grew from 4 million to about twice that. Measures to draw immigrants from various continents in somewhat fairer relation to the existing make-up of the US population were wending their way through Congress as the 80s drew to a close.

One of the biggest statistical “dud” stories of the 1980s concerned our supposed invasion by illegal aliens. After years of hearing alarmist guessers make alarming guesses, the Census Bureau in 1986 finally undertook an official calculation of the extent of illegal immigration to the US. Their best estimate: about 200,000 per year (this was prior to passage of the Simpson-Rodino bill in 1986, which tightened things up; presumably there are fewer these days). The Census Bureau also attempted to quantify out-migration from one country (most of it by foreign-born Americans return to the country of their birth) and came up with a figure of around 160,000 annually. When the Immigration and Naturalization Service conducted its amnesty program for illegals in the later 1980s, just 1.8 million individuals applied for permanent legal status, confirming that the “undocumented” population in this country is much smaller than the 5 to 20 million figure sometimes bandied about. A factual survey like this necessarily concentrates on subjects that can be measured and expressed statistically. But many of the most important shifts of the 1980s fell in softer categories, loosely organizable under the topic “cultural attitudes.” In the long run, the new cultural thinking that coincided with the Reagan era (I do not wish to make a case here concerning cause and effect) may be more significant to the life of the nation than anything that happened in, say, the governmental or financial realms.

There was, for instance, a pronounced religious revival, with most of the action taking place within evangelical and theologically conservative churches. Even though the total percentage of Americans who attend church services weekly is about the same today as it was in 1939- 40%- the number of persons reporting they watch religious television rose from 42% in 1980 to 49% in 1989. A network of thousands of religious book stores has spread across the country. 2,500 retail stores were members of the Christian Booksellers Association in 1980, versus 3,000 in 1989. If sales figures from such shops were included by the tabulators, religious books by authors like James Dobson, Charles Swindoll, Frank Peretti, Jeannette Olsen, Robert Schuller, and Rabbi Harold Kushner would have appeared prominently on US best-seller lists during the 1980s (with around 30 million books sold among them).

In other concerns of American culture there has been a pronounced turn toward traditionalism. Our buildings, for instance, are once again being built with columns, ornaments, and gold leaf. On our stages, screens, political podiums, and playing fields, hairy-chested masculinity has roared back as an American ideal. In the music industry, classical recordings began to sell like rock recordings for the first time during the 1980s. Luciano Pavarotti’s “Oh, Silent Night” went Platinum (1 million or more sales), the Mozart soundtrack for Amadeus hit Gold (500,000 or more sales), and other pressings like “Horowitz in Moscow,” RCA’s “Pachelbel Canon,” and Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” on Deutsche Gramophone are all approaching bullion status. Many of the most influential new pop artists were dubbed “New Traditionalists” because of their affinities for both older musical styles (acoustic instruments have made a big comeback, for example) and older lyrical themes. Love of family and flag, expressions of faith, and praise for independence and hard work were among the favorite songwriting topics of the 1980s.

Conservatism played well in the nation’s bookstores as well. Allan Bloom sold around 850,000 copies of The Closing of the American Mind, a book which may best be described as a declamation against the 20^th century. The two most influential public-policy books of the decade were a defense of supply-side economics by George Gilder and an attack on the Great Society by Charles Murray (the former Wealth and Poverty, sold 114,000 copies in hardbound alone; the latter, Losing Ground, 56,000 copies). After 52 weeks on the fiction best-seller lists, The Bonfires of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe’s conservative critique of urban collapse, continues to sell briskly. Even writers of a usually leftish inclination started behaving uncharacteristically. In 1986, at a Poets, Essayists, and Novelists (PEN) conference in New York, none other than Norman Mailer surprised his audience with a defense of Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Schultz. On television and in film, too, new values- or at least a new wistfulness for old values- became apparent. Among the movies that American audiences consumed most hungrily during the 1980s were ones like “Chariots of Fire,” “Top Gun,” “Hoosiers,” and “Trading Places”- films that treated religion sympathetically, that frankly admired military values, that celebrated small-town virtue, that were anti-communist, that were pro-entrepreneurial and anti-bureaucratic. Among the most popular television fare was “The Bill Cosby Show,” with its full embrace of the traditional bourgeois family values (top rated for 4 of its five 5 seasons to date), and the attacks on liberalism in criminal justice on “Hill Street Blues” (winner of 25 Emmy awards).

The currents and crosscurrents of the 1980s had their cumulative effect in subtle but significant ways. Toward the end of the decade an extremely average American woman named Anita Fomar, one of many conservative Democrats whom Ronald Reagan had induced to become a Republican, was quoted in an unimportant little newspaper piece praising the president for bringing a “return to morality… wearing jeans where jeans should be worn, not all the time.” That is about as good a summary of the most important presidency since WWII as we are likely to get. Ronald Reagan- himself more a cultural icon, an embodied idea, than an actual movie force- was important mostly because he presented an altered picture to American in the 1980s.

[Decades} have now passed since the Berlin Wall was breached, the first material sign of the Soviet empire’s decline and fall. As the annals of current history continue to be written, a great geopolitical riddle remains: Did the Reagan Administration somehow trigger the collapse of the Evil Empire? Shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union, Strobe Talbott, on the talk show Inside Washington, said: “The difference from the Kremlin standpoint… between a conservative Republican Administration and a liberal Democratic Administration was not that great. The Soviet Union collapsed, the Cold War ended almost overwhelmingly because of internal contradictions or pressures… And even if Jimmy Carter had been reelected and been followed by Walter Mondale, something like what we have now seen probably would have happened.” But a number of former Soviet officials don’t see it that way. “American policy in the 1980s was a catalyst for the collapse of the Soviet Union,” is the blunt assessment of former KGB General Oleg Kalugin. He adds, “Reagan and his views disturbed the Soviet government so much they bordered on hysteria. There were cables about an imminent crisis. He was seen as a very serious threat.”

Yevgeny Novikov, who served on the senior staff of the Communist Party Central Committee, recalls, “There was a widespread concern and actual fear of Reagan on the Central Committee. He was the last thing they wanted to see in Washington.” Former Foreign Minister Aleksandr Bessmertnykh has said publicly that programs such as the Strategic Defense Initiative was far more active than had previously been believed. A paper trail of top-secret presidential directives indicates that in early 1982, Reagan and a few key advisors began mapping out a strategic offensive designed to attack the fundamental weaknesses of the Soviet system.

Two canons of Reagan thinking drove the strategy. The first was the President’s well-known anti-Communism, expressed in moral terms of good and evil. He did not believe that Communist regimes were “just another form of government,” as George Kennan had once put it, but a monstrous aberration. When the words “evil empire” rolled from his lips, Reagan meant it. But the other important ingredient in his thinking (often overlooked) was his belief in the profound weakness of the USSR. Some of his public pronouncements seem rather prophetic in retrospect. “The years ahead will be great ones for our country, for the cause of freedom and the spread of civilization,” he told students at Notre Dame in May 1981. “The West will not contain Communism, it will transcend Communism. We will not bother to denounce it, we’ll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.” In June 1982 he told the British Parliament: “In an ironic sense, Karl Marx was right. We are witnessing today a great revolutionary crisis- a crisis where the demands of the economic order are colliding directly with those of the free, non-Marxist West, but in the home of Marxism-Leninism, the Soviet Union.” He said that Marxism-Leninism would be left on the “ash heap of history,” and predicted that Eastern Europe and the USSR itself would experience “repeated explosions against repression.”

Reagan’s view was not even within shouting distance of conventional wisdom. Distinguished Sovietologist Seweryn Bialer of Columbia University opined in Foreign Affairs (1982): “The Soviet Union is not now nor will it be during the next decade in the throes of a true systemic crisis, for it boasts enormous unused reserves of political and social stability…” Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson declared in his textbook Economics (1981): “It is a vulgar mistake to think that most people in Eastern Europe are miserable.” Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. declared after a 1982 visit to Moscow: “Those in the US who think the Soviet Union is on the verge of collapse” are “only kidding themselves.” Wishful thinkers,” he wrote, “always see other societies as more fragile than they are. Each superpower has economic troubles; neither is on the ropes.” In 1981 Strobe Talbott wrote: “Though some second-echelon hardliners in the Reagan Administration… espouse the early Fifties goal of rolling back Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, the US simply does not have the military or political power to do that.”

The direction of Reagan’s Soviet strategy is most evident in National Security Decision Directive 75, signed by the President in early 1983. (An NSDD is a written order from the President directing his senior advisors on major foreign-policy matters.) The document was a break with the policy of containment, which had guided every previous postwar Administration. NSDD-75 declared instead a policy of rolling back Soviet power. NSDD-75 changed the terms of the superpower relationship. According to Professor Richard Pipes of Harvard, who drafted early versions of the document while at the National Security Council (NSC): “It was the first document which said what mattered was not only Soviet behavior but the nature of the Soviet system. NSDD-75 said our goal was no longer to coexist with the Soviet Union but to change the Soviet system. At its root was the belief that we had it in our power to alter the Soviet system.”

The Reagan strategy of attacking Soviet vulnerability first emerged in early 1982, shortly after the hammer of martial law descended on Poland. Pipes recalls: “The President was absolutely livid. He said, ‘Something must be done. We need to hit them hard.’” In January 1982, he spoke with his closest advisors, in a meeting where much of the National Security Council was not included. “NSC meetings were not considered leak-proof; he didn’t want to risk anything,” recalls Pipes. Also present were George Bush, Alexander Haig, Caspar Weinberger, Bill Clark, Ed Meese, and Bill Casey. There was a general consensus that the US had to send a strong message to Warsaw and Moscow. Economic sanctions were universally supported. But then someone raised the stakes: What about covertly funding Solidarity to ensure that the only above-ground anti-Communist organization in the Soviet bloc would survive the cold winter of martial law?

The specter of a risky covert operation haunted the room. After a few moments, Haig cut through the silence, calling the notion “crazy.” Bush agreed, arguing that if the operation were discovered, it would only inflame Moscow. Pipes, Weinberger, Casey, and Clark, however, voiced enthusiastic support for such an operation. But the President “didn’t need any encouragement,” according to Pipes. He immediately ordered Bill Casey to draw up a plan. Over the next several months Casey arranged for the CIA to provide advanced communication equipment and material assistance to the tune of approximately $8 million per year.

Next, the President asked Clark, his new National Security Advisor, to draw up a document redefining American goals in Eastern Europe. The directive that emerged was radical: the stated goal of US policy would be to “neutralize efforts of the USSR” to maintain its hold on Eastern Europe. Reagan signed the directive in the spring of 1982. “In NSDD-32,” recalls Bill Clark, “Ronald Reagan made clear that the United States was not resigned to the status quo of Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. We attempted to forge a multi-pronged strategy to weaken Soviet influence and strengthen indigenous forces for freedom in the region. Poland offered a unique opportunity relative to other states like Bulgaria, Rumania, and Czechoslovakia. This is not to say that we did not pursue activities-both overt and covert- in these other countries to loosen Moscow’s grip.” The activities included covert support for underground movements attempting to throw off Communist rule, and intensifying psychological operations (PSYOP), particularly broadcasts by Voice of America and Radio Free Europe.

In tandem with the geopolitical counteroffensive in Eastern Europe, the Administration fired the first volleys of what would become a secret economic war against the Kremlin. Using Poland as a justification, the Administration in 1982 imposed sanctions on Moscow, intended to cut off most of the technologies needed for a massive new natural-gas pipeline from Siberia, and for an energy program on the Sakhalin Islands being co-developed with Japan. The sanctions went to the heart of Soviet income: energy exports, which accounted for 80 percent of Soviet hard-currency earnings. US sanctions, which Western Europe resisted, did not stop construction of the pipeline, but delayed it two years, and cut it back in size. The Kremlin was out $15 to $20 billion.

Meanwhile, the Administration realized that if international oil prices could be brought down, the US economy, the world’s largest importer of crude, would be the beneficiary, while the Kremlin, as a large exporter, could only be hurt. The easiest means of bring down prices was by raising world production, and the key to that was Saudi Arabia, the “swing producer” for the OPEC cartel. The Saudis had historically changed their production rates to ensure stable and high oil prices; they could just as easily change them to cause prices to drop. To make the Saudis hospitable to Western interests, the Reagan Administration provided unprecedented security commitments to the Saudi royal family. There were of course arms sales (the AWACS deal in 1981 and the 1984 sale of Stinger missiles) in which the President used extraordinary powers to sidestep Congress. But the US commitment went even deeper. Bill Casey’s CIA helped modernize Saudi internal security to help protect the regime from its domestic opponents. And the US flexed its military muscle by establishing in 1983 a US Central Command (US-CENTCOM) for the Persian Gulf region, boasting an ability to mobilize 300,000 US troops. In 1985 the US began construction on “Peace Shield,” a high-tech system manned by US personnel to coordinate the defense of Saudi Arabia in case of attack. In addition, President Reagan himself expressed publicly (in 1981) and privately to King Fahd (in early 1985) his guarantee that so long as he was Commander-in-Chief, the royal family would not meet the same fate as the Shah of Iran. Saudi Arabia, surrounded by multiple threats- South Yemen, Syria, the raging Iran-Iraq war- was clearly pleased, and the Administration hoped that this would lead to a change in Saudi oil-pricing policies. However, senior Administration officials insist that there was never any quid pro quo presented to the Saudis.

In the late summer of 1985, senior Saudi officials alerted the Administration that prices would soon drop. The Saudi decision to alert Washington to its production plans stands in stark contrast with the swings in Saudi polity that took America by surprise during the 1970s. As production rose, prices plunged from $30 a barrel in November 1985 to $12 a barrel five months later. And it cost the Kremlin dearly. “The drop in oil prices was devastating, just devastating,” says Yevgeny Novikov. “Tens of billions were wiped away.” A secret May 1986 CIA report noted that for every dollar-per-barrel drop in the price of oil, the Kremlin would lose a half-billion to a billion dollars per year. The report concluded that the price drop “will substantially reduce the Soviets’ ability to import Western equipment, agricultural goods, and industrial materials… [This]… comes at a time when Gorbachev probably is counting on increased inputs from the West to assist his program of economic revitalizations.”

Dozens of large projects were brought to an end for lack of funds. By July 1986 it took almost five times as much Soviet oil to purchase a given piece of West German machinery as it had taken a year earlier. Arms exports (the number-two Soviet export behind energy) also plunged, because most sales were to Middle Eastern countries no longer flush with petrodollars. As the Soviets faced this catastrophic drop in their income, they also faced the prospect of spending more of their dwindling resources on an arms race. US defense procurement budgets roles by 25% in each of the early Reagan years. By the mid-1980s, US military expenditures were exceeding those of the Soviet Union for the first time since the late 1960s.

More than anything else, the defense build-up- from SDI to conventional weapons, was predicated on high technology, a profound Soviet weakness. Computers and other advanced technologies were threatening to make old weapon systems obsolete- much as the tank had done to horse cavalry. As Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov put it: “The rapid development of science and technology in recent years creates real preconditions for the emergence… of even more destructive and previously unknown types of weapons based on new physical principles. Work on these new types of weapons is already in progress… most importantly in the United States. Their development is a reality of the very near future, and it would be a serious mistake not to take account of this right now.” Gorbachev himself shared this view, noting: “The competition that has grown more active under the impact of scientific and technological progress is affecting those who have dropped behind ever more mercilessly.”

Documents reveal that the effect of the Reagan defense build-up on the Soviet economy was quite deliberate. A top-secret five-year planning directive for the Department of Defense, signed by Caspar Weinberger in early 1982, mentions the build-up could serve as a form of “economic and technical war” against Moscow. The Pentagon would push for “investment in weapon systems that render the accumulative Soviet equipment obsolete.” SDI was part of this strategy. Yes, the President wanted a strategic defense system. But according to one NSDD from 1983, a measure of success for the program was the economic costs it would impose on Moscow. And it worked. By 1984, General Secretary Knstantin Chernenko declared that “the complex international situation has forced us to divert a great deal of resources to strengthening the security of our country.” In 1985 General Secretary Gorbachev pushed for an 8% per year jump in defense spending. “The US wants to exhaust the Soviet Union economically through a race in the most up-to-date and expensive weapons,” he ominously warned.

By 1985, with a covert line of support running to Poland, a massive US defense build-up, and the Kremlin facing a myriad of economic problems, the Reagan Administration dramatically expanded its commitment to rolling back Soviet power in Afghanistan. The program to aid the mujahedin began under Carter. When he first authorized covert support for the resistance in 1980, a top-secret finding declared that the US goal was to “harass” Soviet forces. By 1985, the Reagan Administration was far more ambitions. The President asked National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane to redefine and sharpen US objectives in the region. The result was NSDD-166, signed by the President in March. The directive had several key elements, including a commitment to supply the resistance with more advanced weapons and better intelligence pulled from spy satellites. But most importantly, the long annex to NSDD-166 made the clear-cut goal in Afghanistan absolute victory. And an important ingredient in accomplishing that goal was a secret initiative to take the war into the Soviet Union itself.

Back in 1983, Bill Casey and Bill Clark had sat in the Oval Office mulling over the situation in Afghanistan. As Clark recalls, “The President and Bill Casey were determined that Moscow pay an ever greater price for its brutal campaign in Afghanistan.” Bill Casey suggested a bold move: What about widening the war to include military operations on Soviet soil? The President liked the idea. Casey, as Director of Central Intelligence, took the proposal to the Pakistanis in 1984, during one of his periodic secret trips to Islamabad. Fred Ikle, the undersecretary of defense at the time, recalls that Casey “simply told Zia [the Pakistani president] and Yaqub Khan [the foreign minister], ‘This is something that should be done,’” Zia embraced the proposal and told Casey to raise it with General Abdul Akhtar and Brigadier Mohammad Yousaf of Pakistani Intelligence (ISI), who were managing the war along the Afghan frontier.

In their regular meetings, Casey, Akhtar, and Yousaf covered a number of issues related to running a war. But this time, after dealing with the usual matters, Casey stood up and went to the wall map. The Soviet Union is vulnerable to ethnic tensions, he told his hosts. Soviet Central Asia is the soft underbelly of the Soviet Union. We should smuggle literature to stir up dissent. Then we should ship arms, to encourage local uprisings. Casey was the first one to have openly pointed out this vulnerability. Yousaf recalls, “I can vividly remember that he used the phrase ‘soft underbelly.’”

Taking the Administration’s suggestion, the ISI began a program to subvert and launch strikes into Soviet Central Asia. In 1985, the resistance began by spreading subversive literature provided by the CIA. By early 1986, strikes were launched from Afghanistan’s Jozjan and Badakshan provinces. The CIA outfitted these units with Chinese rocket launchers and special explosives, as well as rubber zodiac boats to cross the Amu River by night. Chinese 107mm rocket launchers with ranges of almost ten miles would be deployed at night along the south bank of the Amu River and fire a rain of explosives onto Soviet soil. Teams of specially trained mujahedin would make their way across the river to hit border posts, lay mines, and knock down power lines. An airfield north of the Soviet town of Pyandch was repeatedly hit by commandos. Once the mujahedin were on Soviet territory, locals would occasionally meet them and join in on the operations. Only months after the attacks began, the Soviet Politburo held the meeting in which it was decided to withdraw Soviet forces.

The Soviet edifice was brought down by a tempest whose causes we will never completely understand. But what is beginning to come into focus is the extent to which the Reagan Administration contributed to the decline of the world’s last great empire. Assume for a moment that the Administration’s initiatives had not been taken- that Solidarity was strangled in its crib for lack of external support; that the mujahedin were given only enough weapons to lose more slowly; that the Kremlin was able to reap badly needed funds from world energy markets, and was relieved of its military burdens. Events in history are rarely inevitable; they are created by human beings. Absent the aggressive policies of the Reagan Administration, a weakened USSR might still be lumbering on the world stage.

I started this Save Our Jobs Committee. I’m puttin’ in full time, 6 days a week, sometimes more. We started in with this surplus food. We’d pass it out once or twice a month to workers and their families. We five out 5 pounds of cheese and some butter. We get some rice and honey and make them a bag and these steelworkers come around and pick it up for their families. 500 bags run out, just like that…

A lot of the families are on welfare. What they do is pick up a little [money] here, a little there, enough for medicine. They can’t put down they got it, it’s illegal. A lot of guys meet their family in the park on Sunday because if they live with their family, they cut ‘em off welfare. A TV woman’s comin’ from New England next week. She wants to do a story on Wisconsin Steel workers and their plight. She’d like to talk to somebody who knows somebody who committed suicide…To make news, you gotta have somebody jump off the bridge and commit suicide. Otherwise they don’t see you. Today, if a plant goes down with 20,000, that’s not news anymore.

I’m invited to a conference to discuss abandoned homes. They’re not abandoned; they’re evicted! We’ve been fighting like the devil for people to try to save homes. They put these people out. They throw their bags out, lock, stock, and bond. They board their homes up and run around hollering: Abandoned! Who the hell abandoned them? They was put out, man!

Something’s bound to happen. They talk about the soup lines in the 30s. What they’re not talking about is the marches. The old soldiers. People were marching all over the country in the thousands, in the millions. They said what happened to people, but didn’t say what people were doing. Roosevelt didn’t just do what he did out of the goodness of his heart. This world was in turmoil. It could have been a revolution then. If Reagan thinks he’s gonna roll the country back to the old days, he better think again. I see the spirit among the people. What has got to be developed is the leadership.

I been doing this thing for 7 years. We’ve been able to carry marches to Springfield, marches to City Hall, marches to Washington. Three, four years ago, we marched to Springfield all the way from City Hall. On the highway, all the trucks blow their horns, wave at us. Peoples in town, they’d know we was coming through. An old, old senior citizen would meet us down the way and give us cool water to drink. We had about 20,000 people in Springfield. We started out with 20. It’s there, I tell ya! It’s just gotta be organized, you know what I mean?

… There’s no way the people is gonna be taken back to where they were before. You can’t do it. The president can do it for a while, but I do believe the pot is going to really boil… Let’s see the beginning of the end of this business where if you’re born boor, you gotta die in the slums. All these kids [around here today] can do is sell hubcaps and tires to the junkman. And steal. The answer to crime is full employment. We got start figuring a way to get it. It’s no mystery.


“An Upper-Class Working Girl”- Morning in America by Sugar Rautbord

Many Americans applauded President Reagan’s positive outlook and optimism about the nation’s future, epitomized in his “Morning in America” campaign ads. Among these was Sugar Rautbord, an affluent Chicago socialite.
I think of myself as an upper-class working girl. The handle the press has given me is “socialite.” A rather peculiar word, I think, ‘cause I don’t know what it means. A socialite in today’s worlds is a well-dressed fund-raiser. I can’t imagine the kind of women that sat lying on their backs, looking at the ceiling, eating bonbons and rummaging through jewelry catalogues. Socialite women meet socialite men and mate and breed socialite children so that we can fund small opera companies and ballet troupes because there is no government subsidy. And charities, of course..

What the president and Mrs. Reagan have done is extraordinary at a time in our history when there was a depressed mood in this country. They came and made it positive. How can you put a value on that? After we had one through the morass and self-hatred and all that of Vietnam, it is psychologically important that we have, A, a couple who adore each other; B, are supportive of each other; and C, a man who is a great communicator and can make things happen. If we have all these negative feelings, I don’t think we can function well as an individual or as a family or as a nation. Didn’t it make you feel better? That the nation itself was having a better feeling about itself?

It’s not what he does; it’s what he is. He’s a survivor. He’s a man who with one fell swoop can stop a speeding bullet. He’s a superman. With one fell swoop- he almost looked like the original Superman- he could spread his cape and stop a strike. The fact that a man in his 70s could take a bullet in his lung and show no bitterness is as important as passing 28 pieces of legislation. It just does something for everyone.


“Polish People Have Never Known Freedom”- A Solidarity Worker Immigrates to America By Jozef Patyma

During the 1980s, democratic forces fought against communist rule in Eastern Europe. One of the early leaders in this movement was the Polish independent union Solidarity. Although Solidarity went underground with the martial-law crackdown of 1981, it eventually triumphed when communism fell in the late 1980s. Jozef Patyna was a Solidarity leader in Poland. After being jailed there, he decided to immigrate with his family to the United States in 1983. Here he comments on his life in both countries.
We arrived in Rhode Island from West Germany on December 21, 1983. It was a very cold Wednesday night, ten o’clock. We were four people, including my wife, Krystyna, our teenage daughter, Magdalena, and our 11 year old son, Przemyslaw [Shem]… I tried to tell our sponsors, “We only want three things: show us the school for our children. Help me look for a job. And find us a decent apartment.” I said, “When I have a job and am earning money, I will pay you back for everything. I don’t want to be on welfare or receiving financial aid.”

The sponsoring agency found us the apartment and nothing more. After the New Year holiday, my wife and the kids and I walked to the school by ourselves. It was the middle of winter, and the sidewalks were covered in snow. We only knew how to say “Good morning,” “Goodbye,” and “Thank you.” But the principal and teachers were very kind to us. They couldn’t understand Polish, but they knew what our children needed. My daughter went to high school and my son was in middle school.

Krystyna and I were anxious to find work. After a month, a Polish man told us about a local factory. We walked to the office and filled out applications. Soon the factory called my wife to work. The next day they called me. We are still working there, making safety belts for cars, parachutes, and other uses…

Like many of my neighbors [in Poland], I worked in a coal mine that became part of the Solidarity Union about 1980. The Solidarity movement was the first time that Polish people felt a sense of self-determination and hope since the Germans and Soviets agreed to invade and divide Poland between them in 1939… Polish people born after the war have never known freedom. Still, the idea of freedom and democracy is what the people have an instinctive need for. People listen to Western radio. They read underground newspapers and books, which are very popular. When people buy a book and finish reading it, they exchange it with a friend...

Solidarity was recognized by the Polish government as an official union in September 1980. It was the first independent union ever in a communist country. The government was unsure of what was in the minds of Polish citizens during the August strikes. So government officials said, “Okay, we’ll sign this paper, the Solidarity Charter. Now, everybody go back to work. No more problems.” But their plan didn’t succeed…

In mid-November 1981, the Solidarity leadership met in Warsaw for talks with the government about problems like food shortages and rising prices. After 10 days, we decided that it was useless to campaign for free elections. Change could only come through a truly democratic process. And the February 1982 national elections were just a few minutes away… At the end of November, the Soviet general in charge of the Warsaw Pact forces visited the Polish government. Following the Soviet visit, Jaruzelski [Poland’s prime minister] made a speech threatening “a state of war.” We worried that Russian tanks would charge in… On Saturday afternoon, December 12, the governor of Gdansk sent a letter to Solidarity. He gave us information about a new headquarters for the union. Everyone was happy… We didn’t know our “new location” would be the police jail… In March I was hospitalized because of a problem with my heart. I was pretty ill. The authorities terminated by jail sentence in July 1982, but I remained in the hospital until August….

I wanted to stay in Poland, but I was afraid for my family. The police broke down my friend’s door and beat everyone… wife, kids. They asked no questions. They just beat the family up, then walked out... I decided to leave the country toward the end of 1983. I came to that decision after traveling around the country for a few months and talking with friends who were living in the same circumstances as I. Though Lech Walesa [the leader of Solidarity] was still influential, other friends and I knew that our time in Poland was over. We had so many police problems that we were no longer effective. And we risked endangering people by meeting with them, especially underground Solidarity members. So we decided to look after our children’s futures…

Driving around Providence, you will see a lot of people with stickers on their car fenders… I only have a “Solidarnosc” sticker… We bought the Solidarity sticker here. If people put such a sign in their window in Poland, they would be in a lot of trouble. You can be jailed for two years for such a sign. It’s kind of ironic that, after working so hard for a union in Poland, the factory where we work here doesn’t have a union. It’s an entirely different situation here…

I am loyal to both the United States and Poland. I don’t see any problem with my double loyalty, because freedom in the United States affects freedom in Poland. And the situation in Poland affects freedom in Western Europe and the United States… Krystyna and I have decided that we will spend the rest of our lives in this country. This is our second homeland.


“Stop This Madness”- Joining the Nuclear Freeze Movement by Jean Gump

The 1980s saw increased tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, leading to an intensified arms race. With that came a massive upsurge in the protests against nuclear weapons. One of the most popular proposals was that the number of nuclear weapons be frozen at their current levels. Jean Gump, a Chicago grandmother, participated in the nuclear freeze movement by defacing a nuclear missile silo on Good Friday in 1986. She was sentences to 8 years in a federal penitentiary.
We commemorated the crucifixion of Christ by entering a missile silo near Holden, Missouri. We hung a banner on the outside of the chainlink fence that read: Swords into Plowshares, An Act of Healing. Isaiah 2, from Scriptures: We will pound our swords into plowshares and we will study war no more. It’s a Minuteman II silo, a first-strike weapon. There are 150 of these missiles. If one of these missiles were to leave the ground, it would decimate an area of 72 miles. And all the children and others. We wanted to make this weapon inoperable. We succeeded. We carried three hammers, a wire clipper, three baby bottles with our blood, papers with an indictment against the United States and against the Christian church for its complicity. Ken Ripito, who is 23, and Ken Moreland, who is 25, went with me. The other two went to another silo about 5 miles away.

It is going to be the citizens that will have to eliminate these weapons. They were built by human hands. People are frightened of then, yet view then as our Gods of Metal. It is a chain-link fence with barbed wire on top. We have become so accustomed to these monstrosities that there are no guards. It is nondescript. If you were passing it on the road, you would see this fence. The silo itself is maybe a foot or two out of the earth. It looks like a great concrete patio. It’s very innocuous.

To get through the fence, we used a wire clipper. We had practiced in the park the day before. Once we were in, I proceeded to use the blood and I made a cross on top of the silo. Underneath, I wrote the words, in black spray paint: Disarm and Live. We sat down and waited in prayer. We thanked God, first of all, that we were alive. We expected a helicopter to come over and kill us terrorists. We thanked God for our successful dismantling, more or less, of this weapon. We assumed the responsibility for our actions, and we waited to be apprehended.

About 40 minutes later, the soldiers arrived in an armored vehicle. There was a machine-gun turret at the top. The commander used a megaphone and said, “Will all the personnel on top of the silo please leave the premises with your hands raised?” So all of us personnel left the silo… They took things out of my pocket and put them on the ground. One of the items was a handkerchief. I said, “It’s getting a little chilly; I think I’m getting a cold and a runny nose. I will have to get my handkerchief and I’m going to blow my nose.” I did that and put the handkerchief in my pocket. The soldier said, “You have to leave your handkerchief over here.” I said, “All right. But if my nose should run again, I’ll go over and I will blow my nose.” At this point, the poor solider looked sort of crestfallen. He was about the age of my youngest child…

My children knew nothing about this. Mother’s doing her thing, is what they always say. As I leave the house, they often say, “Don’t get arrested, Ma.” I’d been arrested five other times for civil disobedience. I felt peace marching was fine, but what we needed was a freeze group. After campaigning in Morton Grove, we had a referendum. 5,000 voted for the freeze, 2,000 against…

My one daughter graduates from the University of California. I will not be there. My other daughter is getting married. I will not be there. I want more than anything in the world to be there. These are my children and I love them. But if they’re going to have a world, we have to stop this madness. I think they understand that as much as I want to be with them and with my loving husband [I can’t]…

I supposed my neighbors out here think I’m kind of a kook. I’m pretty ordinary. When I’m not doing these things, I’m a good cook and I have swell parties… When I started dating my husband, right after WWII, my aunt said, “Jean is going to marry a Hun.” I thought, What the hell is a Hun? My husband’s of German descent. We had just gotten through a war and we had to gate Germans. They were bad people. We certainly had to hate the Japanese. They were bad people. Through these years, I found out there’s a lot of people that I have to hate.

We have to hate the Iranians, ‘cause we have to go over there and kill em. I had to hate the Vietnamese people. I had to hate the commies. Everybody has to hate the commies. There is no end to my nation’s enemies. But I don’t think they’re my enemies. I think, God help me, these are people…

• 
  In 1980 a new house cost $68,714 and by 1989 it was $120,000
  
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  In 1980 the average income per year was $19,170 and by 1989 it was $27,210
  
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  In 1980 a gallon of gas was $1.19 and by 1989 it was 97 cents
  
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  In 1980 the average cost of a new car was $7,210 and by 1989 it was $15,400
  
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  Nike Air Force Basketball Shoes- $54.90
  
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  Amigo 500 with Color Monitor- $849
  
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  Hands Free Car Phone- $788
  
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  Milk- 85cents per ½ gallon
  
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  Cheer Laundry Detergent- $1.59
  

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  The collapse of traditional communism and the end of the Cold War. The fall of the Berlin Wall lead to German reunification and the breakup of USSR.
  
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  The rise of conservatism in politics and culture.
  
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  Argentina invaded/occupied the Falkland Islands in 1982 but was later defeated by the United Kingdom.
  
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  China continued to grow/liberalize but suffered unrest; student protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and authorities used force to quell the protests.
  
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  Famine in Ethiopia was shown to the world on TV screens 1984-1985 and the pain and suffering caused the western world to find new ways to help including the Live Aid concert and many of the most popular stars contributed their time and performance for free in cities throughout the world.
  
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  Many South American countries returned to democracy after a period of dictatorships.
  

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  BASEBALL- players go on strike again in 1981 and lose many fans for the strike as well as scandals of drug and alcohol abuse by the players.
  
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  BASKETBALL- new stars emerge like Larry Bird, “Magic” Johnson, and Michael Jordan, drawing fans back.
  
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  SOCCER-24 teams competed for the World Cup in 1982; soccer “hooliganism” and the heysel stadium disaster give English Soccer a bad name.
  
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  FOOTBALL- The Miami Hurricanes won the national college championships; The RAIDERS/49ers dominated the NFL; the most famous quarterback was Joe Montana.
  
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  HOCKEY- The NY ISLANDERS dominated the first half; OILERS dominated the second half, led by “The Great One” Wayne Gretzky and Mark Messier.
  

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  The 80s started the “computer age,” following the creation of Microsoft and Apple at the end of the 70s. The technology and the speed of innovation in both hardware and software, combined with a reduction in price provided much growth in industry. The birth of the IBM PC signaled the start of personal computers first in offices and them in homes. Following Microsoft’s MS-DOS on PCs came the first versions of Windows.
  
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  A new technology was evolving starting as “bulletin boards” later becoming what is known as the Internet and the beginnings of the World Wide Web.
  
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  The 80s signaled the age of the video game in arcades, game machines and PC’s. The most popular games were Space Invaders and Pac Man.
  
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  Cellular mobile phones were introduced but were big and heavy and often unreliable for signal strength.
  
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  The Post-It note was introduced from a glue accidently invented in 1968 by 3M’s Spencer Silver.
  
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  The world began to take more notice of the impact on the planet and more research was done on the effects of global warming through population growth, land clearing of rain forests for agriculture and logging, increased use of fossil fuels for power.
  

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  John Lennon was shot outside his NY apartment.
  
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  MTV (Music Television) was launched
  
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  Floppy shirts, padded shoulders, big hair, leg warmers, and white stiletto shoes were popular fashions
  
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  The Simpsons were first aired as a short cartoon segment on the Tracey Ullman Show in 1987
  
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  Michael Jackson released his second solo album Thriller
  
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  Popular movie stars included Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Harrison Ford, Michael J. Fox, Eddie Murphy, Tom Cruise, Dudley Moore, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
  
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  Popular music included Chicago, Lionel Richie, Queen, The Police, David Bowie, Whitney Houston, Cindi Lauper, Culture Club, Bruce Springsteen, U2, Michael Jackson.
  

The 80s had a very distinct personality to its pop culture phenomena. It was in the 80s that we saw the first mass explosion of hysteria for new toys, with the 1983 winter shortage of Cabbage Patch Dolls. Trivial Pursuit, a response to a few decades of mass information and the development of world-wide pop culture, also appeared in 1983. The electronic toy age also kicked into gear with the introduction of hundreds of new toys that could talk, move about and imitate favorite cartoon characters such as the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, the Transformers, and He-Man. Soon, Nintendo kicked off the home video game console era after a failed start by Atari.

The 80s were an important decade in the television industry. Not only were great strides made in the way of “pushing the envelope” with shows like Married… With Children, but other programs displayed family-friendly issues and themes. The Cosby Show began in the mid-80s and it enjoyed several years as the #1 TV program. The 80s also saw the creation of a number of cable networks. The Weather Channel- based in Atlanta, Georgia- premiered in 1982 as a cable network that covered the weather 24 hours a day. The Cable News Network, better known as CNN, was also created as TV’s first 24 hour news network. Fox Network was created in the 80s as a challenge to the only 3 major networks at the time- NBC, CBS, and ABC. Music Television, MTV, was also a major breakthrough network in the 1980s. Other popular shows during the 1980s included:

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  Married with Children (88-97) • Who’s the Boss (84-92)
  
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  Baywatch (89-99) • Columbo (68-03)
  
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  Full House (87-95) •The A Team (83-87)
  
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  Hill Street Blues (81-98) • Moonlighting (85-89)
  
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  Highway to Heaven (84-89) • The Cosby Show (84-92)
  
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  Knight Rider (82-86) • Murder She Wrote (84-96)
  
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  Dukes of Hazard (79-85) • Cheers (82-93)
  
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  Hunter (84-91) • Mr. Belvedere (85-90)
  
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  Fame (82-87) •Night Court (84-92)
  
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  Cagney & Lacey (82-88) •Growing Pains (85-92)
  
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  Dallas (78-91) •The Golden Girls (85-92)
  
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  Matlock (86-92) • Miami Vice (84-90)
  
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  MacGyver (85-92) • Family Ties (82-89)
  
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  Designing Women (86-93) • The Simpsons (87-now)
  
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  Kate & Allie (84-89) • LA Law (86-94)
  
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  Magnum PI (80-88) • Simon & Simon (81-88)
  
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  Scarecrow & Mrs. King (83-87) • Thirtysomthing (87-91)
  
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  Unsolved Mysteries (87-92) • Different Strokes (78-86)
  
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  Head of the Class (86-91) • 21 Jumpstreet (87-91)
  
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  ALF (86-90) • A Different World (87-93)
  
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  Full House (87-95) • Night Court (84-92)
  
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  My Two Dads (87-90) • Punky Brewster (84-88)