Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore

Restless Giant

The Oxford History of the United States

David M. Kennedy,
General Editor

ROBERT MIDDLEKAUFF
THE GLORIOUS CAUSE
The American Revolution, 1763–1789

JAMES M. MCPHERSON
BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM
The Civil War Era

DAVID M. KENNEDY
FREEDOM FROM FEAR
The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945

JAMES T. PATTERSON
GRAND EXPECTATIONS
The United States, 1945–1974

JAMES T. PATTERSON
RESTLESS GIANT
The United States from Watergate to
Bush v. Gore

RESTLESS GIANT

The United States from Watergate to
Bush v. Gore

JAMES T. PATTERSON

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Copyright © 2005 by James T. Patterson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Patterson, James T.
Restless giant : the United States from Watergate to
Bush v. Gore
/ James T. Patterson.
p. cm. —(The Oxford history of the United States ; v. 11)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-512216-9
ISBN-10: 0-19-512216-X
1. United States—History—1969– I. Title. II. Series.
E839.P38 2005 973.92—dc22 2005016711

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

To Cynthia, with love

Acknowledgments

Many people offered helpful comments on earlier drafts of this book and in so doing enabled me to bring forth the final version. Among these are former and current graduate students at Brown University, where I taught United States history from 1972 until 2002. They include Richard Canedo, Robert Fleegler, and Daniel Williams. John Snyder, a long-ago undergraduate research assistant, had an important role in shaping my prologue. I also thank present and former history faculty colleagues at Brown who criticized various draft chapters: Philip Benedict, Howard Chudacoff, Carl Kaestle, Luther Spoehr, John Thomas, and Gordon Wood. Cherrie Guerzon of the history department offered expert assistance in editing and distributing a series of drafts. Other scholars whose advice improved substantial parts of drafts include William Berman, John Morton Blum, Gareth Davies, Michael Heale, Morton Keller, David Patterson, Tom Roberts, Daniel Rodgers, John Skrentny, Alan Wolfe, and Joshua Zeitz.

Tony Badger, Brian Balogh, Gareth Davies, Townsend Ludington, John Thompson, and Stephen Tuck invited me to present overviews of my book to informed audiences. My children, Stephen Patterson and Marnie Cochran, encouraged me to rethink some of my ideas. Susan Ferber of Oxford University Press commented constructively on some of my chapters. Others at the press who provided vital help in the production process include Joellyn Ausanka, India Cooper (who copyedited the manuscript), and Furaha Norton.

I am especially grateful to the following, all of whom carefully evaluated one or another draft of the entire manuscript: Steven Gillon, Michael Klarman, and Bruce Schulman. Andrew Huebner commented thoughtfully and at length on an entire early draft. Trevor O’Driscoll, a former Brown student, joined me in going over every line of a near-final draft. His perceptive eye caught many errors of fact and interpretation. The extensive comments of David Kennedy, general editor of the Oxford History of the United States series, and of Peter Ginna, my editor at Oxford University Press, were invaluable.

My wife, Cynthia, was a constant source of encouragement and advice. Without her intelligent and patient help I would have needed far more time to write this book.

Providence, R.I.
May 2005

James Patterson

Contents

Editor’s Introduction

Prologue, 1974

1. The Troubled 1970s

2. Sex, Families, Stagflation

3. The Political World of the Mid-1970s

4. Carter, Reagan, and the Rise of the Right

5. “Morning Again in America,”

6. America and the World in the 1980s

7. Bush 41

8. “Culture Wars” and “Decline” in the 1990s

9. Immigration, Multiculturalism, Race

10. Political Wars of the Early Clinton Years

11. Prosperity, Partisanship, Terrorism

12. Impeachment and Electoral Crisis, 1998–2000

Bibliographical Essay

Index

Illustrations appear following pages
144
and
304

Editor’s Introduction

Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974,
James Patterson’s earlier volume in
The Oxford History of the United States,
opened with a masterful evocation of the exuberant American mood in the post–World War II years—a time aptly characterized by the novelist Philip Roth as “the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history . . . the clock of history reset and a whole people’s aims limited no longer by the past” (
American Pastoral
, 40–41).
Grand Expectations
went on to chronicle the remorseless tempering of that extravagant mood in the cauldron of postwar history, as events like the hardening Cold War, the escalating nuclear arms race, the scourge of McCarthyism, the bloody American humiliation in Vietnam, the struggles to secure full citizenship for African Americans and women, the abortive war on poverty, and the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. provided painful reminders that reality would not easily yield to the aspirations of history’s most hopeful dreamers, even at the height of their national power and self-confidence.
Grand Expectations
concluded with the trauma of the Watergate scandal, which Patterson used to write a mordant epitaph for the inflated expectations of the post–World War II generation.

Restless Giant
begins where
Grand Expectations
left off, in the sour atmosphere of disenchantment left in the wake of President Richard Nixon’s disgrace and resignation. But if
Grand Expectations
told a story about chastised innocence, about a people reluctantly forced to disenthrall themselves from easy assumptions about the malleability of their world,
Restless Giant
tells a tale of national resilience and even regeneration—until another enormous trauma, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, once again threatened to transform the tenor and the very terms of American life.

Patterson, the only author to contribute two volumes to
The Oxford History of the United States
, begins his account of the post-Watergate era by imaginatively recapturing the odd blend of political disillusionment and pop-culture daffiness that gave the 1970s their distinctive flavor. Challenges abounded in that decade—from the oil shocks administered by the newly assertive Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the “tax revolt” that spread from California in 1978 and helped to propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency, the agony of the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, divisive Supreme Court decisions concerning abortion and affirmative action, the continuing sexual revolution, often wrenching redefinitions of women’s role and the nature of the family, the emerging AIDS epidemic, and the stubborn persistence of “stagflation”—a devil’s brew of faltering economic productivity and galloping price increases. All of these Patterson recounts with his customary crispness and color, enlivening his story with deft portraits of figures like Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and a cast of supporting characters that includes Ayatollah Khomeini, Mikhail Gorbachev, O. J. Simpson, Bill Gates, and Steven Spielberg.

Patterson ranges broadly across the landscape of American life in the twentieth century’s closing decades, weaving a rich narrative tapestry out of the incidents and anecdotes that he relates so artfully, including the advent of personal computers, the first Gulf War, the triumphs and foibles of televangelists, and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. But larger patterns emerge as well. Patterson explains with admirable clarity the gathering economic recovery of the 1980s that culminated in the “dot-com” boom (or bubble) of the following decade; the halting efforts to redefine American foreign policy as the Cold War wound down and eventually ended with the astonishing implosion of the Soviet Union itself; the pervasive effects of the “information revolution”; the mixed implications of the commitment of successive administrations to free trade and the ongoing process of “globalization,” as embodied in institutions like NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) and the WTO (World Trade Organization); the impact of some 30 million immigrants on the nation’s economy, politics, and culture; the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s; and the vigorous growth of evangelical religion and its contribution to the powerful resurgence of political conservatism by the century’s end.

Recounting the history of those several developments suggests that the last quarter of the twentieth century was a time of unusual stress for the American people—but, as Patterson emphasizes, a time of notable achievements as well. Despite all their travails, he concludes, “Most people of the affluent and enormously powerful United States, though restless, had more blessings to cherish in early 2001 than they had had in 1974.”

It is often said that the history we know least well is the history of our own time, particularly the decades immediately surrounding our own birth. All readers will learn from this book, but James Patterson has done a special service to readers born during and after the Vietnam era. Here they will find a cogent and compelling account of how history has shaped the world they inherited—and the world they now inhabit. James Patterson has superbly delivered on the promise of the
Oxford History of the United States—
a series dedicated to bringing the very best of rigorous and imaginative historical scholarship to the widest possible audience.

David M. Kennedy

Restless Giant