Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (2 page)

Prologue, 1974

On the evening of Thursday, August 8, 1974, a wan and tired President Richard Nixon gave a televised address to the American people. Facing impeachment and removal from office, he finally fell on his sword: “I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.”

Most Americans welcomed the president’s announcement, which ended two years of mounting public disillusion and anger about his attempted cover-up of a burglary in 1972 at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington.
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Some of them joined a jubilant crowd of 3,000 in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. One celebrator attached to the iron fence surrounding the White House a sign reading:
DING DONG, THE WITCH IS DEAD
. Others waved placards:
SEE DICK RUN; RUN, DICK, RUN
. Reflecting widespread opinion on Capitol Hill, Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts exclaimed, “The nightmare of Watergate is over, the Constitution is safe, and America can become whole again.”
²

Many other Americans, while glad to see Nixon go, remained embittered—or fatigued—by the duration of the crisis. State Representative Julian Bond of Georgia, a civil rights activist, observed, “The prisons of Georgia are full of people who stole $5 or $10, and this man tried to steal the Constitution of the United States.” A weary foe of the Nixon administration added, “This just doesn’t feel as good as I thought it would.”
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Onetime admirers of Nixon, too, solemnly accepted the resignation. Though a few die-hards insisted that he had been hounded from office, many seemed to agree with James J. Kilpatrick, a conservative commentator: “The lies, the lies, the lies! . . . What a pity, what a pity! Here was a President who got us out of Vietnam, ended the draft, restored a needed conservative balance to the Supreme Court, launched hopeful programs of new federalism, and by his bold overtures to Red China opened new avenues toward world peace. Now the good vanishes in the wreckage of the bad. The swearing-in of Gerald Ford can’t come one hour too soon.”
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That swearing-in took place in the East Room of the White House on the following day, August 9, 1974, when Ford reassured the nation, “Our long national nightmare is over.” At that time, most Americans seemed to share at least one sentiment: relief that the nation’s political institutions had managed to survive a constitutional crisis as grave as Watergate. After administering the oath of office to Ford, Chief Justice Warren Burger grabbed the hand of Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania and said, “Hugh, it worked. Thank God it worked.” Burger meant the constitutional system.
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The majority of Americans joined in support of their new president, who was widely praised as an open, straightforward man. George Reedy, former press secretary under Lyndon Johnson, spoke for many when he said, “Ford is one of the very few men in public life whose absolute honesty I do not question.”
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But Ford, having been thrust into office, had had little time to prepare an agenda or secure a staff. He lacked even the mandate of having been elected vice president—instead, he had been appointed to the office in 1973 after Spiro Agnew had resigned amid charges of tax evasion. Recognizing Ford’s disadvantages, prominent Americans urged citizens to support him. Historian Henry Steele Commager, recalling Abraham Lincoln’s famous words in 1865, wrote: “Now that Watergate and Mr. Nixon are behind us, President Ford has set himself to bind up the wounds that they inflicted. With malice toward none, with charity for all, we must cooperate in this honorable task.”
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T
HE UNITY OF MID-
A
UGUST
1974, however, proved to be short-lived. A host of obstacles blocked the road to reconciliation. The wounds that had opened as a result of America’s bloody fighting in Vietnam, which ended in January 1973, remained raw—and continued to hurt for decades thereafter. When Ford sought to heal these wounds in September by offering draft evaders some sort of leniency, many people tore into him. Ford, one man wrote, “has proposed that draft dodgers and deserters be allowed to work their way back into American society. I agree. May I suggest 20 years’ hard labor with time off for good behavior, and for the men responsible for their plight may I suggest burning in hell forever?”
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Tensions over issues of race and gender, sharp during the 1960s, also persisted at the time. Americans in 1974—and later—fought a host of “culture wars” over the legacies of that turbulent decade, one of the most divisive periods in modern American history. Earlier in the year, the black baseball star Henry “Hank” Aaron, beset by death threats as he approached Babe Ruth’s career home run record, felt obliged to hire an armed guard. In September, court-ordered busing to advance racial balance in Boston’s public schools ignited violent white resistance. Debate over gender issues, especially feminist activism, became equally clamorous. In 1972, Congress had sent the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the states for possible ratification, and in 1973, the Supreme Court, in
Roe v. Wade,
had invalidated most state laws criminalizing a woman’s access to abortion. The decision sparked super-heated debate in subsequent years.

These contentious developments indicated that many people of the United States, ever a restless, dynamic society, were prepared to challenge older ways. But the challenges encountered vigorous opposition. So did other legacies of the culturally subversive 1960s and early 1970s—long hair, beards, miniskirts, drug abuse, and sexual liberation—which suggested that many young people, especially people of the huge “boomer” generation, were rejecting hallowed American moral values. Escalating rates of violent crime evoked especially deep fears. Alarmed by these trends, religious conservatives and others were mobilizing their forces to march into politics.

International concerns also aroused large anxieties in 1974. In February, the Soviet Union had expelled its most famous dissident, the novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who later settled in the United States (where he deplored what he considered the grossness of American consumerism). His expulsion, inflaming other sources of friction between the USSR and the United States, threatened Nixon’s much-vaunted policy of “détente” with the Soviet Union and showed that the Cold War remained frigid indeed. A month later, in March, heavy fighting broke out between Kurds and Iraqi Arabs near the Iraqi-Turkish border. In May, India successfully tested an atomic bomb, becoming the world’s sixth nuclear power.
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Throughout the year Jews and Muslims continued to kill each other in Israel and Lebanon. Shortly before Ford became president, Turkish forces, combating a pro-Greece coup, seized northern parts of the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, which remained rigidly divided for the next 30 years and more.
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An especially difficult question concerning international relations, for Ford and others in the decades to come, focused on how to manage foreign policy in the aftermath of the war in Vietnam. Then and later, many Americans—most of them liberals—believed that the United States had been not only foolish but also morally wrong to engage in that prolonged and bloody conflict. Others, however, insisted that America could have prevailed if it had summoned the will to do so, and that it must never again back down in fights for freedom. Ford, like his successors in the White House, had to decide whether and under what circumstances the United States should risk military action to promote freedom and democracy abroad—as LBJ and Nixon had claimed to be doing in Vietnam.

Ford faced a particularly delicate domestic problem: What should he do about his predecessor? Should Nixon stand trial for the crimes he was alleged to have committed in covering up the Watergate break-in of 1972? Some Americans demanded that he be prosecuted: No one, not even a president, should be above the law. Others disagreed, believing that Nixon had already paid a high price and that prosecution would prolong the “national nightmare.” Braving predictable outrage, Ford sided with advocates of clemency. Barely a month after taking office—and before Nixon might have been indicted, tried, or convicted—he acted suddenly and decisively, giving Nixon a “full, free, and absolute pardon” for any crimes he might have committed.

A storm of criticism erupted around this “thunderbolt,” as some people called it. Ford’s press secretary resigned in protest. Democratic senator Mike Mansfield of Montana, the majority leader, observed, “All men are created equal,” and “that includes presidents and plumbers.” Many Americans, inclined to believe in conspiracies since the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., were convinced that Ford had earlier struck a deal with Nixon in order to be selected as Vice President Agnew’s successor in 1973: In the event that Nixon had to resign, Ford would pardon him. In any event, Ford’s public approval rating plummeted after the pardon. As measured by a Gallup poll, it had been 71 percent in late August. It fell sixteen points overnight and plunged further, to 50 percent by the end of September.
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N
OT EVERYONE, OF COURSE
, was absorbed by these front-page events. Most Americans did not pay sustained attention to politics. Instead, they were normally concerned with day-to-day developments closer to home, some of which advanced personal comforts. Among the consumer goods that appeared for the first time in 1974 were microwave ovens, fully programmable pocket calculators, and automatic icemakers in refrigerators. The first bar codes greeted shoppers in stores. Automated teller machines, introduced a few years earlier, were slowly increasing in number and rendering obsolete the constraints of “bankers’ hours.” Touch-tone phones, an innovation of the 1960s, were spreading rapidly and replacing dials.

There was more to please people in 1974. CAT scans for medical diagnoses were becoming widely available. Tobacco ads praised the blessings of “low tar” cigarettes that would supposedly be safer for the 45 million or so Americans—35 percent of the adult population—who still smoked.
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Consumers in the mid-1970s could choose from a wide range of automobiles, many of which—Toyotas, Datsuns, Audis, Volvos—were manufactured abroad. In 1975, there were 106.7 million passenger cars registered in the United States, in a car-crazy country that had 129.8 million licensed drivers among the 156.7 million people who were sixteen years of age or older.
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The very wealthy, of course, had nearly infinite choices. The cover of
Time
during the week following Nixon’s resignation featured the actor Jack Nicholson, who had recently starred in
Chinatown
and who was due in 1975 to appear in
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
His compensation for
Chinatown
was said to be $750,000, a huge sum for that time. Other luminaries of popular culture included Robert Redford and Paul Newman (both stars of
The Sting
in 1973), Barbra Streisand, and Clint Eastwood. They, too, reaped munificent rewards in a culture of celebrity that lavished near-worshipful attention on film stars, singers, and athletes. Muhammad Ali earned millions by taking the heavyweight title from George Foreman in Zaire in October 1974.
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The first issue of
People
magazine appeared earlier in the year, displaying on its cover the actress Mia Farrow (star of
The Great Gatsby
) nibbling on a string of pearls.
People
’s arrival as a hugely successful addition to American newsstands broadened the reach of tabloid-style journalism in the United States and ensured that millions of readers and consumers might know all—or almost all—about the beautiful, the rich, and the famous. Britain’s Princess Diana was to grace fifty
People
covers in later years.

The explosive power of America’s consumer culture, while liberating in many ways, was seductive and disorienting: The more people bought, the more they seemed to crave. Wants became needs. In the 1970s, as later in the century, the “lifestyles” of the rich and famous fostered a great deal of materialistic emulation. A miasma of cupidity, critics complained, was suffocating the culture and overwhelming traditional values that had made the nation strong.

Popular anxieties about the economy loomed especially large in 1974—larger, in fact, than Ford’s political difficulties, racial divisions, or controversy over abortion, vexing though those issues were. The economy had been ailing since 1969, afflicted by inflation as well as rising unemployment. Nixon, struggling to cure these maladies, had astounded Americans by proclaiming, “I am now a Keynesian in economics,” and by imposing controls on prices and wages. To increase the attractiveness of American exports, he had taken steps to devalue the dollar. Alas, after a brief upturn that helped him win reelection in 1972, the economy sickened again. Some contemporaries, badly affected by economic distress that worsened thereafter, referred to the next three years, between 1973 and 1975, as the Great Recession.

“Stagflation,” as it came to be called, mystified a great many economists, who had educated people to be prepared for the ills of inflation or unemployment at any given time but not to anticipate suffering from both at once. In the aftermath of American support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, an oil embargo, followed by price hikes ordered by OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries), had led to dramatic jumps in America’s energy prices. The cost of overseas oil rose from $1.77 per barrel in October 1973 to $10 by early 1974.
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The spike in oil prices further favored Japanese automobile manufacturers, who far outdid Detroit in producing fuel-efficient cars.