Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (90 page)

92
. Robert Goldberg,
Enemies Within: The Cult of Conspiracy in Modern America
(New Haven, 2001), 253–60. In 1982, a review by the National Academy of Sciences of the evidence cited by the House committee concerning Kennedy’s assassination concluded that static or other noise, not gunshots, accounted for the sounds on the tape.
New York Times,
Aug. 3, 2004.

93
. Collins,
More
, 133–34.

94
. Ibid., 162.

95
. Arthur Herman,
The Idea of Decline in Western History
(New York, 1997), 441–46. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith, musing on popular notions of decline, liked to tell people that every editor he knew wanted books to be titled “The Crisis of American Democracy.”

96
. Bell,
The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism
(New York, 1976). The argument that virtually all human beings—not just Americans—are often caught on a “hedonic treadmill,” is a key to the thesis of Richard Easterlin,
Growth Triumphant: The Twenty-first Century in Historical Perspective
(Ann Arbor, 1996), 52–53, 131–44.

1
.
Time
, Nov. 15, 1976, 20.

2
. Ibid.

3
. Turnouts of eligible voters had hovered around 60 percent between 1952 and 1968, before dropping to 55 percent in 1972. The low, in 1948, had been 51 percent.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 236, 254. Declining percentages such as these, however, did not mean that Americans were becoming more apathetic. See note 105,
chapter 4
, for a less gloomy explanation of American electoral turnouts since 1972.

4
. In June 1975, a shootout at the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota resulted in the deaths of one Indian and two federal agents. An AIM member, Leonard Peltier, was convicted in 1977 of the murders and sentenced to two life terms in prison. Believing that Peltier had been unjustly accused and sentenced, advocates helped to make him a human rights celebrity. As of mid-2005, however, Peltier remained behind bars.

5
. Hearst was sentenced in 1976 to seven years in prison for her part in the bank robbery. She served twenty-one months, going free after President Carter commuted her sentence in January 1979. In one of the last acts of his administration, President Bill Clinton pardoned her in January 2001.

6
. Most articulate scholars and writers on the left, including socialists, rejected violent approaches in the 1970s and thereafter, but these intellectuals and non-violent advocates of far-reaching social programs had no significant impact on politics or policy.

7
. Steven Gillon,
Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever and How It Changed America
(New York, 2004); Peter Keating, “Wake-up Call,”
AARP: The Magazine
, Sept./Oct. 2004, 55ff. For culture wars, see
chapter 8
.

8
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 245. Both chambers had small numbers of third-party members.

9
. Democrats also controlled the Senate most of the time in these years.

10
. Laura Kalman,
The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism
(New Haven, 1996), 77.

11
. See
chapter 8
.

12
. For the rise of the Religious Right, see
chapter 4
.

13
. Benjamin Ginsberg and Martin Shefter,
Politics by Other Means: Politicians, Prosecutors, and the Press from Watergate to Whitewater
(New York, 2002).

14
. At times, friendships across party lines in Congress—as between Democratic House Speaker Thomas “Tip” O’Neill of Massachusetts and Republican minority leader Robert Michel of Illinois in the early 1980s—moderated this incivility. Most of the time, however, partisan warfare was sharp and unforgiving on Capitol Hill.

15
. Hugh Davis Graham, “Legacies of the 1960s: The American ‘Rights Revolution’ in an Era of Divided Governance,”
Journal of Policy History
10, no. 3 (1998), 267–88.

16
. Most of Cleveland’s vetoes were of private pension bills. FDR served a little more than three terms, Truman slightly less than two.

17
. James Fallows,
Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy
(New York, 1996), 246; E. J. Dionne,
Why Americans Hate Politics
(New York, 1991).

18
. John Judis and Ruy Teixeira,
The Emerging Democratic Majority
(New York, 2002), 32.

19
. John Kenneth White,
The New Politics of Old Values
(Hanover, N.H., 1989), 96–99.

20
. For trends in American political patterns during these years, see Sidney Milkis,
The President and the Parties: The Transformation of the American Party System Since the New Deal
(New York, 1999); Lisa McGerr,
Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right
(Princeton, 2001); Steven Schier,
By Invitation Only: The Rise of Exclusive Politics in the United States
(Pittsburgh, 2000); Byron Shafer,
The Two Majorities and the Puzzle of Modern American Politics
(Lawrence, Kans., 2003); Ginsberg and Shefter,
Politics by Other Means
; Dionne,
Why Americans Hate Politics
; and Shep Melnick, “Governing More but Enjoying It Less,” in Morton Keller and Melnick, eds.,
Taking Stock: American Government in the Twentieth Century
(New York, 1999), 280–306.

21
. For much that follows about this law, see Steven Gillon,
“That’s Not What We Meant to Do”: Reform and Its Unintended Consequences in Twentieth-Century America
(New York, 2000), 200–234.

22
.
Buckley v. Valeo
, 424 U.S. 1 (1976).

23
. Reminiscences of Nik Edes, an aide to Democratic senator Harrison Williams of Delaware, cited in Richard Scotch,
From Good Will to Civil Rights: Transforming Federal Disability Policy
(Philadelphia, 1984), 48.

24
. David Price, “House Democrats Under Republican Rule: Reflections on the Limits of Bipartisanship,”
Miller Center Report
(University of Virginia) 20 (Spring/Summer 2004), 21–28.

25
. For political reforms in the 1970s, see Julian Zelizer,
On Capitol Hill: The Struggle to Reform Congress and Its Consequences
(Cambridge, Eng., 2004), 157–76.

26
. Gillon,
“That’s Not What We Meant to Do,”
38–40.

27
. Theda Skocpol,
Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life
(Norman, Okla., 2003), 201.

28
. Jack Walker,
Mobilizing Interest Groups in America: Patrons, Professionals, and Social Movements
(Ann Arbor, 1991), 23–27, 72.

29
. Skocpol,
Diminished Democracy
, 127–74, 199–228.

30
. Jeffrey Berry,
The Interest Group Society
(New York, 1997), 220.

31
. In 2002, Congress passed the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, also known (after the names of its sponsors) as the McCain-Feingold Act. Among other things, this law placed a ban (after the election of 2002) on unlimited soft-money contributions to national political parties. A bitterly divided Supreme Court upheld by a five-to-four vote most of this law’s provisions in December 2003.
New York Times
, Dec. 11, 2003. As many skeptics had predicted in 2002, party fund-raisers in the 2004 election managed to find large loopholes in the clauses limiting soft-money contributions. By mid-October 2004, the major parties had already raised more than $1 billion, a record amount that they used mainly for ads and get-out-the-vote efforts. Ibid., Dec. 3, 2004.

32
. Kevin Phillips,
Arrogant Capital: Washington, Wall Street, and the Frustration of American Politics
(Boston, 1994), 32; Gillon,
Boomer Nation
, 190.

33
. Bruce Schulman,
The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics
(New York, 2001), 84–87. In 2005, AARP claimed a membership of more than 35 million.

34
. Hugh Heclo, “Issue Networks and the Executive Establishment,” in Anthony King, ed.,
The New American Political System
(Washington, 1978), 87–124.

35
. David King and Zachary Karabell,
The Generation of Trust: Public Confidence in the U.S. Military Since Vietnam
(Washington, 2003), 2.

36
. Ginsberg and Shefter,
Politics by Other Means
, 13–169. The media, while eager to poke into the personal behavior of candidates, were less aggressive when it came to examining large issues, such as sensitive decisions concerning war and peace.

37
. Haynes Johnson,
Divided We Fall: Gambling with History in the Nineties
(New York, 1994), 324.

38
. Skocpol,
Diminished Democracy
, 280–88.

39
. Gillon,
“That’s Not What We Meant to Do,”
212.

40
. David Farber, “The Torch Had Fallen,” in Beth Bailey and David Farber, eds.,
America in the Seventies
(Lawrence, Kans., 2004), 11–13.

41
. John Greene,
The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
(Lawrence, Kans., 1995), 1–3.

42
. Ibid., 1–6, 113–15.

43
. Reeves, “Jerry Ford and His Flying Circus: A Presidential Diary,”
New York
, Nov. 25, 1974, 42–46; Greene,
The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
, 62.

44
. Fred Greenstein,
The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton
(New York, 2000), 113–16.

45
. President Jimmy Carter was to hold fifty press conferences in four years, and Ronald Reagan thirty-two in eight years.

46
.
A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford
(New York, 1979), 87.

47
.
Time
, Nov. 15, 1976, 20.

48
.
Newsweek
, Oct. 14, 1974, 37.

49
. Greene,
The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
, 42–52.

50
. Greenstein,
The Presidential Difference
, 235. Ford’s average popularity was only 47 percent.

51
. Lewis Gould,
The Modern American Presidency
(Lawrence, Kans., 2003), 135; A. James Reichley,
Conservatives in an Age of Change: The Nixon and Ford Administrations
(Washington, 1981), 274–75; James Mann,
Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet
(New York, 2004), 9–20.

52
. The theme of Mann,
Rise of the Vulcans
.

53
. David Halberstam,
War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton, and the Generals
(New York, 2001), 66–68; Reichley,
Conservatives in an Age of Change
, 305–15; Mann,
Rise of the Vulcans
, 10–12, 59–61, 64–65.