Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (3 page)

Worse, the embargo intensified already widespread feelings of vulnerability in the United States. Rocked by losing a war in Vietnam, which President Johnson had called a “piss-ant country,” Americans now fretted as their economy took a battering from Third World nations rich in oil. Politicians, economists, educators, and business leaders scrambled to reduce demand for oil and gasoline, supporting among other measures a national speed limit of fifty-five miles per hour.
¹⁶
Hoping to save on heating costs, a number of colleges and universities shortened their winter terms. Still, the stagflation persisted.

A host of other economic numbers at the time were equally disturbing. Between March and December 1974, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell from 892 to 577, a loss of 37 percent.
¹⁷
As indicated by the growing appeal of foreign cars, some of America’s leading heavy industries, notably steel and automobile manufacturing, suffered from sharply declining sales and a record number of work stoppages. A Rust Belt was encircling industrial parts of the Midwest. Unemployment, which had averaged 4.7 percent in 1973, rose to 7.5 percent by 1975. Inflation, at 6.2 percent in 1969, doubled to 12.4 percent for 1974, the worst peacetime inflation in American history. The gross national product (GNP) actually fell by 2.3 percent per capita in both 1973 and 1974.
¹⁸

Facing discouraging numbers like these, George Shultz, a private citizen who had earlier served as secretary of labor, head of the Office of Management and Budget, and secretary of the treasury, exclaimed at a White House meeting in July 1974, “The country is in terrible shape, and I wish you guys in government would do something about it.”
¹⁹
His comment exposed an often profound ambivalence that Americans—then and later—harbored about the proper role of the state: Again and again, people damned the federal government as bloated and bumbling, but they rarely stopped demanding that it act to help them and to expand their rights and entitlements.

T
HESE DEVELOPMENTS, NOTABLY
W
ATERGATE
, divisions over race and gender, and economic distress, caused many Americans in 1974 to fear the passing of what they had imagined as the golden age of American history that had followed World War II. The cherished American Dream of upward social mobility, sustained for many people in those prosperous years by vigorous economic growth, seemed endangered. Americans who fell prey to fears such as these were a bit too quick to dwell on the troubles of the country, which remained immensely powerful in international affairs and which—the economic doldrums notwithstanding—was still by far the world’s most affluent society. America’s per capita GNP in 1974 remained considerably higher than that of its closest rivals, West Germany and Japan.
²⁰
The nation’s official poverty rate, at 11.6 percent of the population in 1974, was slightly below what it had been (12.6 percent) in 1970, and roughly half as high as it had been (22.2 percent) in 1960.
²¹
And, as the chief justice had exclaimed, the constitutional system had survived. With the soldiers home from Vietnam and the Watergate crisis resolved, Americans might well have looked forward to less tumultuous times and to celebrations of their nation’s bicentennial in 1976. Young men, moreover, no longer had to worry about the draft, which had been ended in 1973. This was a significant freedom—one of many that endured in the future.

Yet many disgruntled Americans in 1974, and later, practiced a form of selective amnesia, which blotted from their consciousness some of the blights that had afflicted the nation in the 1950s—among them constitutionally protected racial segregation, a Red Scare that launched angry assaults on civil liberties, blatant religious intolerance, and systematic discrimination against women. Many of the people who yearned nostalgically for a return of the supposedly halcyon 1950s, and for a resurgence of the unity and patriotism that had seemed to motivate what would later be called the “greatest generation” (of the World War II era), assumed that progress had always graced America’s historical development. Shaken by the problems of the 1970s, they appeared to believe that almost everything about the postwar years between 1945 and the assassination of President Kennedy had been better than the present.
²²

Nostalgic distortions aside, pessimists in 1974 were correct to remember that most years between 1945 and 1970 had featured vibrant economic growth. This had been especially true of the 1960s, when per capita GNP had risen by nearly 33 percent.
²³
Growth of this magnitude had enabled rising percentages of people to earn higher real wages and salaries and move upward into middle-class occupations and “lifestyles.” Young Americans in those years had seemed especially confident about the future. They had married early, produced a baby boom (of 75 million new arrivals between 1946 and 1964), bought houses in the suburbs, and acquired cars and many other consumer goods. They had sailed, or so it seemed, on a boundless sea of prosperity.
²⁴

In the process, these optimistic Americans had developed higher expectations—about the economy, government benefits, their marriages and friendships, their jobs, their health, and the futures of their children. Like Adam and Eve, they were restless in their new paradise, and they yearned for more. They expected to enjoy greater personal freedom, choice, and self-fulfillment. Having witnessed the powerful civil rights movement, they had seen dramatic expansions of freedom in their own lifetimes, and they developed ever more hopeful visions both about their rights and entitlements and (before taking a beating in Vietnam) about the capacity of the country to do good in the world.

Numerous groups—women, blacks, the aged, the handicapped—had already organized to seek greater support from government. Backed by public interest lawyers—whose numbers and influence increased in coming decades—these groups engaged in battles on behalf of an ever larger cluster of rights, thereby advancing the role of government and of the courts in American life. Though they won many of these struggles—entitlements expanded in these and later years—they remained impatient to improve their own situations in life as well as to advance a “rights revolution,” as it came to be called, that would benefit others. In America’s open, rights-conscious, and future-oriented culture, it was possible to believe that one step forward would lead straightaway to another.
²⁵

The contentious mood of the mid-1970s prompted a spate of jeremiads, many of which echoed throughout the next thirty years in a culture that was to abound—even in better times—in complaints about cultural conflict and prophecies of national decline. As Commager remarked just before Nixon’s resignation: “There is no consensus. There is less harmony in our society, to my mind, than at any time since, say, Reconstruction. Perhaps the ’60s and ’70s are a great divide—the divide of disillusionment.”
²⁶

Americans who shared Commager’s worries came to see the 1970s as the onset of a problematic new era, variously perceived as an “Age of Limits,” a “Time of Conflict,” or an “Era of Decline.” Conditioned to expect progress, they were impatient, and they resisted leaders who asked them to sacrifice. Suspicious of authority figures, they were quick to direct their wrath at Ford, congressional leaders, big businessmen, lawyers—anyone in a position of power. No leaders—no institutions—seemed immune in the 1970s from criticism, a great deal of which flowed from the media, whose leaders had become considerably more skeptical and confrontational as a result of the travails of Vietnam and Watergate, and which questioned if any authorities could be trusted. As Harvard University president Derek Bok put it, “There is a very obvious dearth of people who seem able to supply convincing answers, or even to point to directions toward solutions.”
²⁷

These were among the many developments that had worried Americans during the late 1960s, one of the most tempestuous times in modern United States history, and that still seemed to threaten national unity in 1974. Whether the country could surmount its problems and move ahead were questions that understandably chipped away at the confidence of many contemporary Americans.

T
HIS BOOK, PAYING SPECIAL ATTENTION
to concerns such as these, also explores a wider range of trends and controversies over the next quarter of a century and more, from 1974 until early 2001. It looks at major developments both at home and abroad, and at social and cultural as well as political and economic events. It has a good deal to say about the many flaws that continued to trouble American society after 1974, notably racial injustice. An especially worrisome trend was rising income inequality, which became sharp during this period. Many public schools, especially in poverty-stricken areas of inner cities, remained wretched.

But this is not primarily a tale of Limits, Decline, or Conflict, for after the doldrums of the mid- and late 1970s, a number of more positive developments, many of which were driven by successive generations of aspiring young people, helped to raise popular hopes. Many social and cultural conflicts, loudly contested by partisan political antagonists and given exaggerated play in the media, turned out to be neither so profound nor so implacable as they seemed.

By 2001, Americans lived in an economy that had expanded to promote considerably greater affluence, convenience, and comfort for most people, and in a physical environment that had become cleaner and safer. Toleration—of various religions, styles of life, and sexual practices—had widened substantially. Discrimination against minorities and women had weakened. Important rights and entitlements had expanded. Well before 2001, the Cold War was history, positioning the United States as a giant on the world stage.

Flourishing in an open, competitive, and pluralistic society, popular complaints about decline and conflict—and about government—continued to proliferate after 1974. “Culture wars” appeared to splinter the country, especially in the 1990s. But the quality of life in the United States, bolstered by the bounteous resources and receptivity to change that had always been hallmarks of American history, improved in manifold ways between 1974 and 2001. Most people of the affluent and enormously powerful United States, though often dissatisfied, had more blessings to cherish in early 2001 than they had had in 1974.

A
FTER WRITING A FINAL VERSION
of this book, I labored over drafts of an epilogue that attempted to explore the impact of September 11, 2001. The horrors of that terrible day provoked widespread fear and anger among Americans, banishing complacency about terrorism and inciting calls for revenge. The killings led the
New York Times
to editorialize that 9/11 was “one of those moments in which history splits, and we define the world as before and after.”
²⁸

As I write these words in 2005, it is obvious that this editorial was prescient: A great deal has changed since that world-shaking day, especially America’s foreign and military policies, which have become far more interventionist—and divisive—than most people could have imagined in early 2001. Efforts to combat domestic terrorism have raised widespread fears about threats to civil liberties and personal privacy. Federal deficits have exploded in size. Still, it is also clear that many key developments of American life, having taken root between 1974 and 2001, have continued to flourish. Not even a disaster such as 9/11 completely “splits” history.

Following many rewrites of the epilogue, I decided to drop it. I believe that a span of four years is too short to provide a very reliable historical perspective on the legacies of dramatic events such as those of 9/11/2001. So, while my book tries to help readers understand why America was so poorly prepared for the attacks of September 11, it has little to say about the years since then. I ask readers to put themselves back a bit in time and to receive this book as an interpretive history of the United States during a fascinating era that helped to shape many characteristics of our own.

1
The Troubled 1970s

In 1996, a popular comic strip, “The Buckets,” offered a characteristically unflattering picture of American culture in the 1970s. Successive frames of the strip, which normally poked fun at the haplessness of the Bucket family, depict Mr. Bucket’s recollections of the era: bell bottoms, disco, mood rings, “stupid hair,” and a drawing of Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Nixon is jowly, dark-browed, and menacing; Ford looks determined though a little empty-headed; Carter wears a huge, moronic, buck-toothed smile. Mr. Bucket then appears and muses, “I can think of only one thing worse than the ’70s.” In the last frame, he stares at two long-haired young people clad in styles reminiscent of those from the 1970s and explains what that “one thing” is: “Doing them again!”
¹

Mr. Bucket’s reflections capture a retrospective understanding of the 1970s: They were grim, tasteless years that are best put out of mind. A host of passions and fads that flourished in these years—heavy metal, punk rock, disco—bewildered and distressed traditionalists.
²
Major films of the decade, notably
Mean Streets, Taxi Driver
, and
Dog Day Afternoon,
offered dark visions that seemed to be appropriate portrayals of the era. Many of Bruce Springsteen’s songs, in four highly popular albums of the late 1970s, expressed an apparently widespread sense of pessimism among Americans who were struggling at the time to confront boredom and unsatisfying, low-paying work. In October 1975, Springsteen appeared on the covers of both
Time
and
Newsweek
.
³
In 1976, Tom Wolfe branded the 1970s as the “Me Decade,” in which Americans—avid consumers all—looked out only for themselves. Six years later, one of the earliest books to survey the period carried the revealing title
It Seemed Like Nothing Happened
.
⁴

A better history of the 1970s later emphasized that many seeds of change that had been planted during the stormy 1960s flourished in the 1970s. Rooting firmly, these strengthened in the years to come. But the history also concluded that much about the 1970s was “gaudy” and “depressing,” especially the nation’s “sometimes cheesy popular culture.” When the author asked his students to name the one person who best embodied the decade, they chose John Travolta, who starred in the disco-centered movie
Saturday Night Fever
(1977). By contrast, they identified JFK, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. as their models for the 1960s, and Ronald Reagan and Michael Milken as the men who are best remembered as symbols for the 1980s.
⁵

These students, like Mr. Bucket, overlooked important developments of the 1970s, including lasting technological advances and substantial gains in the rights and entitlements of various groups—notably of women, the aged, and the disabled—that delighted many contemporaries. A rights revolution, having transformed American politics in the 1960s, continued to march forward in the 1970s and thereafter. The students also tended to focus on especially visible manifestations of popular culture, which are matters of ephemeral, personal taste. In this sense, as in others, the 1970s should not be set apart. Rather, those years witnessed the strengthening of many trends that were already in the making—especially from the culturally pivotal 1960s—and that continued in later years.

The students might also have emphasized that many Americans at the time were becoming profoundly uneasy about divisive social developments. Some of these—the flaring of racial tensions, troubled public schools, alarm over crime and urban deterioration—accentuated the sense of national decline that had been evident during the pivotal year of 1974. The United States, many people thought, was teetering at the edge of an abyss. For these and other reasons, the mood of the late 1970s was in important ways the gloomiest in late twentieth-century American history.

I
N 1903, THE EMINENT BLACK SCHOLAR
W.E.B. DuBois had written that the “problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”
⁶
In the 1970s, he would no doubt have agreed that racial issues stubbornly remained the nation’s number one problem.

There are two dominant narratives about black-white relations in the United States during these and later years of the twentieth century. The first is optimistic because it looks at change over time, notably at the groundswell of progress lifted by the morally inspiring civil rights movement of the 1960s. This movement, the most powerful of the century, produced significant and lasting improvements in the lives of black people. Thanks to the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, America’s black people finally broke free from all but a few of the chains of the racial segregation that had constitutionally shackled and isolated them since the late nineteenth century. Inasmuch as these chains had fastened them in a systematic, humiliating, dehumanizing, and often violently enforced form of subjugation, this was a long overdue and lasting deliverance. Most blacks, nearly 22.6 million in number in 1970 (11.1 percent of the population of 203.3 million people), knew that they had far more rights in the 1970s, especially legal rights, than they had had in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Liberals hailed other developments in race relations of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Supreme Court rulings between 1968 and 1971 finally gave teeth to civil rights laws and to the
Brown v. Board of Education
decision of 1954, thereby bringing about increasing desegregation of southern schools.
⁷
The 1970s were something of a golden age for long-discouraged advocates of school desegregation in the South. Assured of equal legal rights—most of which received diligent protection by federal officials—blacks slowly moved ahead in other ways during the 1970s. Affirmative action plans, “set-asides” (which guaranteed percentages of contracts to minority-owned businesses), and pressure from the federal government’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to end discrimination in hiring—procedures and policies that had hardly been imagined in the mid-1960s—developed apace in those years.
⁸
Ever larger percentages of American blacks finished high school, entered colleges and universities, and found white-collar jobs. A black middle class, scarcely visible in the 1940s, rapidly enlarged after 1960.
⁹

Black Americans advanced in other ways during the 1970s. Improved access to health care, mainly from the expansion of Medicaid, along with better nutrition, led to declines in previously high levels of black infant mortality and to increases in longevity. Growing numbers of African Americans won political office, especially mayoralties in black-dominated cities. Blacks who were elected as mayors in 1973 alone included Tom Bradley in Los Angeles, Coleman Young in Detroit, and Maynard Jackson in Atlanta—the first African American since Reconstruction to win such a post in the urban South. In 1974, the citizens of the District of Columbia gained limited home rule and were permitted for the first time in more than a hundred years to vote for their mayor, whereupon they chose a black aspirant, Walter Washington. America’s first black Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall, swore Washington into office in 1975. Even the world of popular culture seemed to be opening up to African Americans: In 1975, CBS offered
The Jeffersons,
a sitcom featuring a black couple as well as an interracial couple who went so far as to kiss on screen. The show lasted ten years on television, earning many high ratings.
¹⁰

An astonishing cultural phenomenon of 1976–77 seemed to show how far blacks had come—and how far they might advance in the future. This was the excitement surrounding
Roots
, a book published in 1976 by the African American writer Alex Haley, who had earlier co-authored the best-selling
Autobiography of Malcolm X
(1965).
Roots
began by describing the world of a young African, Kunta Kinte, who was enslaved and shipped in chains to America in the 1700s. Haley, claiming to rely on oral accounts collected in Africa and on research in genealogical sources, identified Kinte as his own ancestor from seven generations back. With vivid characterizations of Kinte’s descendants over these generations,
Roots
rejected the notion that American slaves had been docile. As scholars were also doing at the time, it portrayed Haley’s ancestors as brave, resourceful human beings who had been proud of their African heritage and determined to shake off their shackles. Kunta Kinte had a leg amputated for daring to escape.

Roots
topped the non-fiction best-seller list for six months after publication and garnered sales of 1.5 million hardbacks within a year and a half. It won a National Book Award and a special Pulitzer Prize in 1977. In January of that year it was also featured as a seven-part, twelve-hour television miniseries. Approximately 130 million Americans—or more than half of the nation’s total population of 220 million—were estimated to have watched a part of the series. Some 100 million people tuned in for the final episode.

It is never easy to pinpoint why a commodity of popular culture—whether a book, a television show, or a movie—captures a large audience. In the case of
Roots
, it has been argued that its popularity reflected an earnest search by Americans, whites as well as blacks, for their own “roots,” as a way of better anchoring themselves amid the social and economic turbulence of the times. Interest in genealogy and local history boomed in the next few years.
¹¹
The stunning popularity of
Roots
may also indicate that millions of Americans were ready and willing by the mid-1970s to reconsider negative stereotypes of African Americans that had long flourished in textbooks, film, and television, and to react positively to Haley’s inspirational account. Like moths to a flame, they were drawn to his seductive history. So it was that
Roots
struck many observers as a milestone of African American progress. Vernon Jordan, a leading black activist, called
Roots
“the single most spectacular experience in race relations in America.”
¹²

The second narrative of race relations in the 1970s is more doleful. Though it concedes that some progress occurred, its standard of measurement looks at where a truly egalitarian nation ought to be, in the present and in the foreseeable future. Its more pessimistic conclusions reflect the gap that exists between the reality of black–white relations and of the higher expectations that liberals and many black people had developed in the 1960s. Since the 1960s, this narrative—in many ways the more compelling one—has been the one that liberals and the majority of African American leaders have repeated.
¹³

Advocates of this narrative concur that laws such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 destroyed most vestiges of legally mandated segregation and discrimination. These historic statutes went far toward guaranteeing a hallowed American value: equal opportunity under the law. But they point out that the laws did not greatly promote the still elusive, cardinal goal of African Americans: social and economic equality.

Statistics support this case, indicating that most of the gaps that had long separated blacks from whites shrank little if at all in the 1970s. Between 1970 and 1980, for instance, the median household income of African Americans did not rise (in inflation-adjusted dollars), whereas the median household income of whites slightly increased. Median black household income in 1980 stood at a little less than 60 percent of income for whites, a number that had hardly changed since 1965.
¹⁴
The net worth of black families—a measure not only of income but also of houses and other assets (many of them inherited)—was tiny compared to that of whites. The proportion of blacks in poverty in 1980, at around 33 percent, had decreased only slightly from 1970, when it had been 34 percent, thereby remaining—as it was to continue to do until it fell in the mid-1990s—at approximately three times the rate for whites.
¹⁵
Social conditions in many black areas of America’s crowded, crime-ridden central cities were grim.

As in earlier decades of the century, the rate of black infant mortality declined encouragingly during the 1970s, from 33 deaths per 1,000 live births in 1970 to 22 in 1980. But because the rate of decline for whites fell a little more rapidly (from 18 per 1,000 in 1970 to 11 in 1980), the relative picture was a little gloomier for blacks than it had been ten years earlier. The rates for blacks were responsible for one of the most depressing facts about life in the United States: The rate of American infant mortality remained high compared to other nations in the developed world. Black life expectancy at birth, at 68.1 years in 1980, compared poorly to the life expectancy of 74.4 for whites, a gap that had shrunk only a little from 1970—when it had been 64.1 for blacks and 71.7 for whites.
¹⁶

Statistics concerning educational background were among the few that seemed fairly promising for blacks. As late as 1970, only 31 percent of blacks over the age of twenty-five had completed four or more years of high school, and only 4 percent had completed four or more years of college. The percentages for whites at the time were 55 and 11, respectively. By 1980, 51 percent of black people aged twenty-five or more had finished four years of high school, and 8 percent had completed four or more years of college. White percentages had risen by then to 69 and 17. Many of these trends, featuring relative as well as absolute advances for blacks, were to continue later in the century, to the point that high school graduation rates of blacks approached those of whites by 2000. But it was very clear to blacks in the 1970s, and later, that they were making relative gains only because they had begun at such a dismally low level. Blacks did not exult over statistics such as these.
¹⁷