A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (150 page)

Instead of moving in the direction of their flocks, mainstream churches sought to be inclusive, leading them to reinterpret church practices in a number of areas. Most of the mainstream churches, for example, started to ordain women by the 1970s. These female ministers in liberal Protestant churches “tended to side with radical feminists on the most volatile issues of the day,” especially abortion.
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Scarcely had the ink dried on the key sexual reproduction case of the century,
Roe v. Wade
(1973), than the Methodists, Presbyterians, American Baptists, United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, and Episcopal Church all adopted proabortion positions.
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In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court, hearing a pair of cases (generally referred to by the first case’s name,
Roe v. Wade
), concluded that Texas antiabortion laws violated a constitutional “right to privacy.”
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Of course, no such phrase can be found in the Constitution. That, however, did not stop the Court from establishing—with no law’s ever being passed and no constitutional amendment’s ever being ratified—the premise that a woman had a constitutional right to an abortion during the first trimester of pregnancy. Later, sympathetic doctors would expand the context of health risk to the mother so broadly as to permit abortions almost on demand. Instantly the feminist movement leaped into action, portraying unborn babies as first, fetuses, then as “blobs of tissue.” A battle with prolife forces led to an odd media acceptance of each side’s own terminology of itself: the labels that the media used were “prochoice” (not “proabortion”) and “prolife” not “antichoice.” What was not so odd was the stunning explosion of abortions in the United States, which totaled at least 35 million over the first twenty-five years after
Roe.
Claims that without safe and legal abortions, women would die in abortion mills seemed to pale beside the stack of fetal bodies that resulted from the change in abortion laws.

For those who had championed the Pill as liberating women from the natural results of sex—babies—this proved nettlesome. More than 82 percent of the women who chose abortion in 1990 were unmarried. Had not the Pill protected them? Had it not liberated them to have sex without consequences? The bitter fact was that with the restraints of the church removed, the Pill and feminism had only exposed women to higher risks of pregnancy and, thus, “eligibility” for an abortion. It also exempted men almost totally from their role as fathers, leaving them the easy escape of pointing out to the female that abortion was an alternative to having an illegitimate child.

Fatherhood, and the role of men, was already under assault by feminist groups. By the 1970s, fathers had become a central target for the media, especially entertainment. Fathers were increasingly portrayed as buffoons, even as evil, on prime-time television. Comedies, according to one study of thirty years of network television, presented blue-collar or middle-class fathers as foolish, although less so than the portrayals of upper-class fathers.
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Feminists had unwittingly given men a remarkable gift, pushing as they had for no-fault divorce. Divorce laws began changing at the state level in the early 1970s, at which time a full court hearing and proof of cause was no longer required. Instead, if both parties agreed that they had irreconcilable differences, they simply obtained an inexpensive no-fault divorce. This proved a boon for men because it turned the social world into an “arena of sexual competition [making] men and women view each other as prey and their own sex as competitors to a degree that corrodes civility.”
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Divorce rates skyrocketed, with more than 1.1 million divorces occurring in 1979, and the number of children under the age of eighteen who lived in one-parent families rising during the decade of the 1970s from 11 percent to 19 percent. Although it took about twenty years for sociologists to study the phenomena, scholars almost universally agreed by the 1990s that children of one-parent families suffered from more pathologies, more criminal behavior, worse grades, and lower self-esteem than kids from traditional families.
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A husband, able to easily escape from matrimony because it no longer proved fulfilling (or more likely, he desired a younger woman), now only had to show that he could not get along with his current wife—not that she had done anything wrong or been unfaithful. In turn, the process called the “one-to-a-customer” rule by George Gilder in his controversial
Men and Marriage
was instantly killed.
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In its place, wealthy older men could almost always attract younger women, but older women (
regardless
of their personal wealth) usually could not attract men their age, who instead snapped up younger “hard bodies” (as these physically fit women were called). Whereas in previous eras these younger women would have married middle-or lower-class men of roughly their own age and started families, they now became prey for the middle-aged wealthy men with “Jennifer Fever.” The new Jennifer herself only lasted temporarily until she, too, was discarded.
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Pools of available middle-aged women, often with money, and younger men may have seemed to sociologists to be a logical match, but in fact the two groups were biologically and culturally incompatible. Instead, young men with looks and vitality battled against older males with money and status for the affections of an increasingly smaller group of twenty-to thirty-year-old females, while an army of middle-aged female divorcées struggled to raise children from one or more marriages.

Feminism’s sexual freedom thus placed older women into a no-win competition with the young, and in either group, the losers of the game had limited options. The process slowly created an entirely new class of females who lacked male financial support and who had to turn to the state as a surrogate husband, producing one of the most misunderstood political phenomena of the late twentieth century, the so-called gender gap. In reality, as most political analysts admit, this was a marriage gap. Married women voted Republican in about the same numbers as men did; it was only the single mothers, as casualties of the sexual free-fire zone the feminists had dropped them into, who saw government as a savior instead of a threat.

Meanwhile thanks to the women’s movement, a new option opened to women in the 1970s that had not existed to the same degree in earlier decades: a career. Women applied to law and medical schools, moved into the universities, and even gradually made inroads into engineering and the hard sciences.

Inflation had actually smoothed the way for women to enter professional fields. As families struggled and a second income was needed, men usually preferred their wives to have the highest paying job possible. Personnel directors and company presidents—usually men—could not help but appreciate the fact that many of their own wives had started to interview for jobs too. Over time, this realization helped override any macho chauvinism they may have possessed.

The working female brought a new set of economic realities. First, large numbers of women entering the workforce tended to distort the statistics. There is no question that more overall activity occurred in the economy as women now spent more on housekeepers, gas, fast food, and child care. But there were also hidden economic indicators of social pathology: suicides were up, as was drug use, alcoholism, clinical depression, and, of course, divorce. What went almost unnoticed was that productivity—the key measure of all wealth growth—
fell steadily
throughout the 1970s, despite a tidal wave of women entering the job markets.

As more people moved into the workforce, there were increased family pressures for child care. Once touted as the salvation of the working family, child care has been shown to be undesirable at best and extremely damaging at worst.
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Moreover, with both parents coming home around six in the evening, families tended to eat out more, send out laundry more often, and pay for yard or other domestic work as well as additional taxes, all of which chewed up most of the extra cash brought in by the wife’s job. Although by 1978 the median family income had risen to $17,640, up from $9,867 in 1970, that increase had occurred by having two adults, rather than one, in the workplace. Children increasingly were viewed as impediments to a more prosperous lifestyle and, accordingly, the number of live births fell sharply from what it had been in 1960.

All of these indicators told Americans what they already had known for years: the great prosperity of the 1950s had slowed, if not stopped altogether. Social upheaval, which was excused in the 1960s as an expression of legitimate grievances, took on a darker tone as illegitimacy yielded gangs of young boys in the inner cities, and in suburban homes both parents worked forty hours a week to stay afloat. It would provide the Democratic challenger to the presidency with a powerful issue in November 1976, even if no other reasons to oust Ford existed. But events abroad would prove disastrous for Gerald Ford.

Foreign Policy Adrift

Domestic issues may have absorbed Americans’ attention more after Vietnam, but foreign threats had hardly diminished. Making matters worse, Ford was weak in dealing with foreign leaders. Soviet dictators, always probing for soft spots, found one at Vladivostok in 1974, when Ford met with Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev. A hard-line communist, Brezhnev nevertheless was vulnerable. He had suffered a series of strokes that had left him a semi-invalid, attended constantly by a KGB nurse who “fed him a daily stream of pills without consulting his doctors.”
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His entourage was followed everywhere by a resuscitation vehicle. When it came to bargaining with the “main adversary,” as he viewed the United States, Brezhnev differed little from Stalin. He was searching for a strategic advantage that could offset several new U.S. military technologies.
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Of most concern to the Soviets was the antiballistic missile (ABM) system allowed under SALT I. If deployed across the nation, even at low levels of effectiveness, antimissile missiles could effectively combat nuclear warheads aimed at the United States. The ABM system represented a tremendous bargaining chip against the Soviets, since their heavy land-based missiles represented their only guaranteed threat against the United States whereas American deterrent forces were evenly divided within the triad of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), long-range bombers, and ICBMs. Another concern for the USSR was the new MIRV capability of U.S. missiles. MIRV, or multiple independent reentry vehicles, meant that a single American ICBM could hit multiple targets. Its “bus” vehicle carrying up to ten MIRVs could deliver nuclear payloads to as many as ten different locations within a broad target area. Therefore, any advantage the Soviets had in sheer numbers of missiles was offset by the ability to convert existing U.S. ICBMs to MIRVs.

Political will, however, proved more important than advanced technology. As long as Nixon remained in office, he could with some degree of certainty keep together a pro-Pentagon coalition of Republicans and hawk Democrats (such as Richard Russell of Georgia and Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington). Ford, in contrast, was out of his element. He and his advisers failed to distinguish between warheads and launchers. The Russians enthusiastically agreed to a new SALT treaty (SALT II) that placed limits on launchers, leaving the United States at a permanent disadvantage, which could only be counterbalanced by introducing newer and more survivable submarines, bombers, and ICBM systems. To obtain a treaty that had so clearly put the United States at a disadvantage, Ford and Congress had assured the Joint Chiefs of Staff—without whose approval the treaty would never have passed—that programs such as the B-1 bomber, MX missile, ABM system, and Trident submarine would continue to be funded. Like the support of Vietnam, all these promises rested solely on the will and character of the president and Congress who stood behind them.

“I’ll Never Lie to You”

Had Gerald Ford not had social decay and economic disruption to deal with, he still would have been hard pressed to defeat Georgia Governor James Earl “Jimmy” Carter in 1976. Carter was one of a line of presidential candidates to “run against Washington.” Born in Plains, Georgia—the first president born in a hospital—Carter was raised in a religious household. He was a professed born-again Christian and a practicing Baptist. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy, entering the submarine service under the “father of the nuclear navy,” Admiral Hyman Rickover. After his service ended, Carter ran his family’s substantial peanut farm and seed enterprise, making him the first president since Truman to have any significant experience in private business. He entered Georgia politics, winning the governorship in 1970, which gave him all the qualifications—except for foreign policy experience—to hold the highest office. He had improved the efficiency of his state government bureaucracy and ran it on budget, a point that allowed him to criticize Washington’s deficit spending. A southerner and a Southern Baptist, Carter appealed to both white conservatives and the religious faithful who perceived that morality was slipping from public service. His military service suggested that he would not abandon the military, and his commitment to racial justice showed that he would not abandon blacks.

Carter also benefited from the self-destruction of the last Kennedy rival. Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, the youngest and last of Joe Kennedy’s boys (and easily the least talented politically), had cultivated hopes of attaining the presidency that his brother Robert, in the eyes of many, had been denied by an assassin’s bullet. Certainly the Democratic Party would have enthusiastically welcomed a Kennedy heading a ticket. But in July 1969, Kennedy drove his Oldsmobile off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island, drowning his passenger, staffer Mary Jo Kopechne. The implications of cavorting with his young campaign worker were damaging, and probably contributed to Kennedy’s decision to leave the scene of the accident. He did not even report the incident to police and made no effort to save the trapped woman as she drowned. The Kennedy spin machine immediately flew into high gear, containing the press coverage, inquest, and grand jury probe. Still, few scholars looking at the evidence have concluded anything other than the fact that Ted Kennedy was culpable in the death of Kopechne.
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After lying low in 1972, Kennedy took the nation’s political pulse in 1976, and found that tremendous resentment accompanied the unanswered questions about the incident. He quietly ceded the field to the Georgia governor.