Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (91 page)

54
. Mann,
Rise of the Vulcans
, 382–91.

55
.
New York Times,
Sept. 11, 1975.

56
. Greene,
The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
, 77–81; Reichley,
Conservatives in an Age of Change
, 358–71.

57
. Greene,
The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
, 119.

58
. Some thirty years later there were still 1,875 American MIAs from the Vietnam War, along with some 78,000 from World War II, 8,100 from Korea, and 3 from the Gulf War of 1991.
New York Times
, Nov. 19, 2003.

59
. Greene,
The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
, 137.

60
. Reported later in
Time
, April 24, 2000, 52–53.

61
. Alan Wolfe,
One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and Each Other
(New York, 1998), 170.

62
. As reported by David Brooks,
New York Times
, Feb. 17, 2004.

63
. King and Karabell,
The Generation of Trust
, 21–24.

64
. Tom Engelhardt,
The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation
(New York, 1995); Michael Sherry,
In the Shadow of War: The United States Since the 1930s
(New Haven, 1995), 336–40.

65
.
New York Times
, April 30, 1975; Laura Kalman, “Gerald R. Ford,” in James McPherson, ed.,
“To the Best of My Ability”: The American Presidents
(New York, 2000), 274–81; Greene,
The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
, 141.

66
. George Lipsitz, “Dilemmas of Beset Nationhood: Patriotism, the Family, and Economic Change in the 1970s and 1980s,” in John Bodnar, ed.,
Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism
(Princeton, 1996), 251–72. Useful accounts of the
Mayaguez
incident include Greene,
The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
, 143–50; and Sherry,
In the Shadow of War
, 337–38.

67
. See Raymond Garthoff,
Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan
(Washington, 1985), 409–37.

68
. Mann,
Rise of the Vulcans
, 56–78.

69
. Reichley,
Conservatives in an Age of Change
, 347–48.

70
. Gaddis Smith,
Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years
(New York, 1986), 234–37; H. W. Brands,
The Devil We Knew: Americans and the Cold War
(New York, 1993), 161–63, 217. Joseph Nye,
Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power
(New York, 1990), 79–87, 107–12, argues that America and its allies maintained a strategic edge in nuclear weapons in the 1970s.

71
. It was estimated that some 2,700 Chileans died in the bloody coup that overthrew Allende, and that some 30,000 people disappeared or died in the “dirty war” that the Argentinian military junta launched between 1976 and the late 1980s.
New York Times
, Dec. 28, 2003.

72
. Reagan as governor of California had signed a liberal abortion bill in 1967.

73
. Smith,
Morality, Reason, and Power
, 109–15.

74
. Greene,
The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
, 157–88.

75
. William Leuchtenburg, “Jimmy Carter and the Post-New Deal Presidency,” in Gary Fink and Hugh Davis Graham, eds.,
The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post-New Deal Era
(Lawrence, Kans., 1998), 7–28; Burton Kaufman,
The Presidency of James Earl Carter, Jr.
(Lawrence, Kans., 1993), 16.

76
. Democrats had sniped at the GOP slogan in 1964, “In your guts you know he’s nuts.”

77
. Garry Wills,
Under God: Religion and American Politics
(New York, 1990), 119; Daniel Williams, “From the Pews to the Polls: The Political Mobilization of Southern Conservative Protestants” (PhD diss., Brown University, 2005), chap. 3.

78
. Greenstein,
The Presidential Difference
, 127–29.

79
. Eugene McCarthy, running as the candidate of the Independent Party, won most of the rest of the votes.

80
. Carter received 40,831,000 votes, and Ford, 39,148,000. McCarthy received 757,000. See note 3 and the start of this chapter for other statistics concerning the election.

81
. Greene,
The Presidency of Gerald R. Ford
, 193.

1
. James Fallows, “The Passionless Presidency: The Trouble with Jimmy Carter’s Administration,”
Atlantic Monthly
243 (May 1979), 33–48.

2
. Fred Greenstein,
The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton
(New York, 2000), 127–32; Lewis Gould,
The Modern American Presidency
(Lawrence, Kans., 2003), 179–80.

3
. Fallows, “The Passionless Presidency II,”
Atlantic Monthly
243 (June 1979), 75–81.

4
. Bruce Schulman, “Slouching Toward the Supply Side: Jimmy Carter and the New American Political Economy,” in Gary Fink and Hugh Davis Graham, eds.,
The Carter Presidency: Policy Choices in the Post–New Deal Era
(Lawrence, Kans., 1998), 51–71.

5
. William Leuchtenburg, “Jimmy Carter and the Post–New Deal Presidency,” in Fink and Graham, eds.,
The Carter Presidency
, 7–28; Tom Wolfe, “Entr’actes and Canapes,” in Wolfe,
In Our Time
(New York, 1980), 22.

6
. Greenstein,
The Presidential Difference
, 135–37.

7
. Carter’s personal papers at the Carter presidential library in Atlanta, which I have perused, amply reveal the president’s great attention to detail.

8
. A point made by the historian Robert Dallek, in Leuchtenburg, “Jimmy Carter,” 10.

9
. William Stueck, “Placing Jimmy Carter’s Foreign Policy,” in Fink and Graham,
The Carter Presidency
, 244–66. Quote on 249-50.

10
. Burton Kaufman,
The Presidency of James Earl Carter, Jr.
(Lawrence, Kans., 1993), 210.

11
. Gould,
The Modern American Presidency
, 182.

12
. Marc Reisner,
Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water
(New York, 1993), 314; Jeffrey Stine, “Environmental Policy During the Carter Presidency,” in Fink and Graham,
The Carter Presidency
, 179–201.

13
. Culminating in the
Bakke
decision by the Supreme Court in 1978. See
chapter 1
.

14
. Terry Anderson,
In Pursuit of Fairness: A History of Affirmative Action
(New York, 2004), 147, 155–57.

15
. House Committee on Ways and Means, “Overview of Entitlement Programs,”
1992 Green Book
, 102d Congress, 2d Session (Washington, 1992), 1013–19, 1613–39.

16
. Hugh Davis Graham, “Civil Rights Policy in the Carter Presidency,” in Fink and Graham,
The Carter Presidency
, 202–23.

17
. James Patterson, “Jimmy Carter and Welfare Reform,” ibid., 117–36.

18
. Kaufman,
The Presidency of James Earl Carter, Jr.
, 134.

19
. Ibid., 114.

20
. Susan Hartman, “Feminism, Public Policy, and the Carter Administration,” in Fink and Graham, eds.,
The Carter Presidency
, 224–43.

21
. And led to a loss in jobs, many of them unionized. Nelson Lichtenstein,
State of the Union: A Century of American Labor
(Princeton, 2002), 236, estimated that union representation in these industries declined by one-third.

22
. Leuchtenburg, “Jimmy Carter,” 16.

23
. Robert Gottlieb,
Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement
(Washington, 1993), 292–96.

24
. Estimate by Robert Putnam,
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community
(New York, 2000), 115–16. Many of these people were active mainly or only to the extent of paying dues. For sources concerning environmentalism, see also Hal Rothman,
The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States Since 1945
(Orlando, 1998); Ted Steinberg,
Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History
(New York, 2002); Barbara Freese,
Coal: A Human History
(Cambridge, Mass., 2003), 167–72; and Stine, “Environmental Policy During the Carter Presidency.”

25
. Gregg Easterbrook, “America the O.K.,”
New Republic
, Jan. 4/11, 1999, 25. See also Easterbrook,
A Moment on the Earth: The Coming Age of Environmental Optimism
(New York, 1995).

26
. Rothman,
The Greening of a Nation
, 148–55.

27
. Ibid., 144–47. Starting in 1981, use of nuclear power slowly increased in the United States, from around 3 percent of total energy use in 1981 to nearly 8 percent by 2000.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 563. But nuclear power remained less important in the United States than in many other industrialized nations.

28
. Stine, “Environmental Policy,” 188–91.

29
.
New York Times
, March 18, July 28, 2004.

30
. Steinberg,
Down to Earth
, 261; Gottlieb,
Forcing the Spring
, 308–10. After 1995, money for Superfund, at a steady-state $450 million per year, came solely from the federal budget. In early 2004, Superfund had more than 1,200 sites on its list of places to be cleaned up.
New York Times
, March 9, Dec. 5, 2004.

31
. Gaddis Smith,
Morality, Reason, and Power: American Diplomacy in the Carter Years
(New York, 1986), 56–58; John Barrow, “An Age of Limits: Jimmy Carter and the Quest for a National Energy Policy,” in Fink and Graham,
The Carter Presidency
, 158–78.

32
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 422, 563.

33
.
New York Times
, Oct. 25, 2004.

34
. Barrow, “An Age of Limits,” 160.

35
. Jimmy Carter,
Keeping Faith: Memoirs of a President, Jimmy Carter
(New York, 1982), 20.