Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (176 page)

5.
Blum,
Years of Discord
, 421–27. Hunt had recruited the three Cuban exiles for the job.

6.
Time
, Aug. 19, 1974, p. 27.

7.
"Nixon's Endgame,"
Newsweek
, Aug. 8, 1994, pp. 50–51.

8.
The reason given to stop the FBI was that its investigation would compromise CIA operations necessary to national security. This was not the case, but both the CIA and Gray, a compliant Nixon loyalist eager for confirmation, went along with it. Gray later cooperated with Nixon's plans to the extent of destroying relevant documents. He was not confirmed as head of the FBI.

9.
Carl Bernstein and Robert Woodward,
All the President's Men
(New York, 1974); Kutler,
Wars of Watergate
, 458–59.

10.
"Two Decades After a Political Burglary, the Questions Still Linger," New
York Times
, June 15, 1992.

11.
James Baughman,
The Republic of Mass Culture: Journalism, Filmmaking, and Broadcasting in America Since
1941 (Baltimore, 1992), 177–78; Kutler,
Wars of Watergate
, viii, 615. In the long run, official lies about Watergate, like lies about the war in Vietnam, helped to make the media more suspicious and confrontational about public leaders. But that is mainly a later story. See
chapter 20
for the media and Vietnam.

12.
Ambrose,
Nixon: Ruin
, 81–136; Kutler,
Wars of Watergate
, 290–320.

13.
Ambrose,
Nixon: Ruin
, 179–228.

14.
Ambrose,
Nixon: Ruin
, 229–62; Kutler,
Wars of Watergate
, 383–414.

15.
Some observers have wondered if the House of Representatives would have proceeded with impeachment proceedings in 1974 if Agnew had remained as Vice-President. Many representatives would have preferred Nixon, with all his faults, to Agnew.

16.
Blum,
Years of Discord
, 451–65; Ambrose,
Nixon: Ruin
, 263–88.

17.
This and the following paragraphs are drawn from Ambrose,
Nixon: Ruin
, 289–445, and Kutler,
Wars of Watergate
, 443–550.

18.
Blum,
Years of Discord
, 464.

19.
U.S
. v.
Nixon
, 418 U.S. 683 (1974). The decision, however, did for the first time give claims for executive privilege a constitutional standing, thereby enabling later Presidents (notably Reagan in the
Iran-contra
affair) to hide behind it.

20.
Neuchterlein, "Watergate." It is hard to imagine any administration (or any institution) benefiting from public access to tapes of frank and uncensored private conversations. That is why people have private conversations.

21.
Theories about this range widely. Some argue that he did not dare, others that he thought some of the tapes might exonerate him, others that he was either stupid or stubborn.

22.
These included Mitchell, Kleindienst, Colson, Dean, Haldeman, Ehrlichman, Magruder, Hunt, and Liddy. All but Kleindienst, who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for refusing to testify fully and accurately before a Senate committee investigating the ITT case, served time. Kleindienst received a $100 fine and a suspended one-month jail sentence.

23.
Time
, Aug. 19, 1974, p. 9.

24.
Jonathan Rieder,
Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism
(Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 160.

25.
Congress later approved this amendment, in December 1974. It did nothing for the Jews and harmed what remained of detente.

26.
Kutler,
Wars of Watergate
, 603–7.

27.
Hoff,
Nixon Reconsidered
, 25–27; Kutler,
Wars of Watergate
, 133–37; Louis Fisher,
Presidential Spending Power
(Princeton, 1975), 175–201.

28.
Ambrose,
Nixon: Ruin
, 297–99, 596–97.

29.
Raymond Garthoff,
Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan
(Washington, 1985), 409–37; John Gaddis,
Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy
(New York, 1982), 310–15; Kutler,
Wars of Watergate
, 607.

30.
Kutler,
Wars of Watergate
, 710–11.

31.
Hoff,
Nixon Reconsidered
, 329–38; Kutler,
Wars of Watergate
, 574–603.

32.
Rieder,
Canarsie
, 250.

33.
Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison,
The Deindustrialization of America
(New York, 1982); Landon Jones,
Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation
(New York, 1980), 255.

34.
Daniel Yankelovich,
New Rules: Searching for Self-Fulfillment in a World Turned Upside Down
(New York, 1981), 181–84.

35.
Jones,
Great Expectations
, 158–60. Cutbacks in defense spending in 1973–74 also hurt some regions.

36.
Peter Carroll,
It Seemed Like Nothing Happened: The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970s
(New York, 1982), 129–30.

37.
Garthoff,
Detente and Confrontation
, 360–85, 404–7. Kissinger called the alert in the early morning hours of October 25, five days after the turmoil engendered by Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre" of October 20. Efforts by the UN and others brought about a cease-fire and averted a confrontation of world powers.

38.
Blum,
Years of Discord
, 457.

39.
David Calleo,
The Imperious Economy
(New York, 1983), 112–13.

40.
Yankelovich,
New Rules
, 164–65. Carroll,
It Seemed
, 117–18, argues that the embargo caused "the most revolutionary shift of world power in the twentieth century." For a sweeping study of oil in world politics, see Daniel Yergin,
The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power
(New York, 1991).

41.
Frank Levy,
Dollars and Dreams: The Changing American Income Distribution
(New York, 1987), 62–65.

42.
Carroll,
It Seemed
, 118. For energy policy after World War II, see Richard Vietor,
Energy Policy in America Since
1945: A
Study of Business-Government Relations
(New York, 1984).

43.
Arlene Skolnick,
Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty
(New York, 1991), 134–37. Lasch popularized this phrase, introduced by him in the
New York Review of Books
in 1976, in a much-discussed book,
The Culture Of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations
(New York, 1979).

44.
See footnote 35,
chapter 23
. America's social welfare state, however, continued to be less comprehensive and less generous than that of most other industrialized nations; means-tested, non-indexed programs such as AFDC fared relatively worse than they had before 1974; and social insurance continued to be financed by regressive payroll taxes. These reached 15.3 percent for Social Security and Medicare by the mid-1990s.

45.
David Farber,
The Age of Great Dreams: America in the 1960s
(New York, 1994), 264–65.

46.
Mary Frances Berry,
Why the ERA Failed: Politics, Women's Rights, and the Amending Process
(New York, 1986).

47.
By the 1980s it became especially clear that the sexual revolution, among other things, had helped to promote extraordinarily high rates of illegitimacy (which in turn greatly increased the numbers of children in poverty). Sexual "liberation" also helped to sustain the rise of AIDS after 1980—but that is another story.

48.
Nicholas Lemann, "How the Seventies Changed America,"
American Heritage
, July/August 1991, pp. 39–49; Yankelovich,
New Rules
, 24–25. In fact, a degree of upward mobility remained, but perceptions—conditioned by high expectations in earlier years—were often otherwise.

49.
As noted, Vietnam had much to do with the rise of these economic difficulties—and with the suspicion and divisiveness of the culture. Economic problems were deeply interrelated with others.

50.
Economic inequality, as measured by shares of national income possessed by various slices of the income pyramid, declined slightly between 1945 and 1974 and appeared to rise considerably thereafter, especially in the late 1970s and 1980s. By 1990 the wealthiest 20 percent of families in the United States had 44.3 percent of aggregate income, and the poorest 20 percent had 4.6 percent—compared to percentages in 1950 of 42.7 and 4.5, in 1960 of 41.3 and 4.8, in 1970 of 40.9 and 5.4, and in 1980 of 41.6 and 5.1. Sheldon Danziger, "The Historical Record: Trends in Family Income, Inequality, and Poverty," in Danziger, Gary Sandefur, and Daniel Weinberg, eds.,
Confronting Poverty: Prescriptions for Change
(Cambridge, Mass., 1994), 18–50.

Table of Contents

Editor's Introduction

Prologue: August 1945

1. Veterans, Ethnics, Blacks, Women

2. Unions, Liberals, and the State: Stalemate

3. Booms

4. Grand Expectations About the World

5. Hardening of the Cold War, 1945–1948

6. Domestic Politics: Truman's First Term

7. Red Scares Abroad and at Home

8. Korea

9. Ike

10. World Affairs, 1953–1956

11. The Biggest Boom Yet

12. Mass Consumer Culture

13. Race

14. A Center Holds, More or Less, 1957–1960

15. The Polarized Sixties: An Overview

16. The New Frontier at Home

17. JFK and the World

18. Lyndon Johnson and American Liberalism

19. A Great Society and the Rise of Rights-Consciousness

20. Escalation in Vietnam

21. Rights, Polarization, and Backlash, 1966–1967

22. The Most Turbulent Year: 1968

23. Rancor and Richard Nixon

24. Nixon, Vietnam, and the World, 1969–1974

25. End of an Era? Expectations amid Watergate and Recession

Bibliographical Essay

Index

Illustrations