Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (12 page)

Whether these Jeremiahs were accurate is hard to say. Many foreign observers, including Pope John Paul II, who in 1979 lambasted what he regarded as America’s callousness toward its poor people, emphatically seconded them. Wolfe and Lasch, moreover, belonged to a long American line of critics, beginning with the Puritans, who had railed against materialism and shallow self-absorption. They offered large generalizations that might equally have been deployed (and later were) to characterize other decades. Still, they received a wide hearing in the late 1970s. Wolfe, a colorful journalist and speaker who had earned a doctoral degree in American studies from Yale, was hailed as a smart social critic. Lasch, to his surprise, found that his book became a best-seller. In 1979, President Carter invited him to the White House. Granted only a short visit with the president, Lasch was not sure if Carter, who prided himself on his ability as a speed-reader, had seriously perused his book. But Carter soon echoed the professor, telling the nation that a vast “emptiness” had gripped Americans, who were slaves to the “worship of self-indulgence and consumption.”

A second lament that swelled in the late 1970s—and later—was similar: that Americans were losing the sense of civic-mindedness, or “community,” that had made the nation strong. Pessimists of this persuasion, who also inherited a long American tradition, identified a number of trends to make their case. One, they said, was the rise of narrow group-consciousness, notably as expressed by “selfish interests” that were demanding larger rights and entitlements: A rights revolution, though benefiting the nation in some ways, was also fragmenting America.
⁸⁵
Community-conscious critics highlighted many manifestations of decline: a falling-off in voting and political participation; the growing power of mega-retailers, which were driving mom-and-pop stores out of business; the rising commercialization of public space, notably via the expansion of vast, privately owned malls; the spread of “niche” advertising—such as appeals to the “Pepsi Generation”—and of political campaign tactics catering to specific constituencies, thereby further segmenting the nation; and, more generally, the insatiable appetite that Americans seemed to be developing for private, personal pleasure and for the consumption of goods.

Critics such as these had still other grievances with social changes in the 1970s: the sprouting of gated or demographically homogeneous housing developments, such as Sun City, Florida, which by the early 1970s had 8,500 residents, virtually all of them middle-class people over the age of sixty; the decline of newspaper circulation (only 51 percent of adults read the papers by 1990, down from 73 percent in 1970); and the collapse of highly regarded newspapers such as the
New York Herald Tribune
and the
Chicago Daily News
, both in 1978. A
bête noire
of many critics was television, which had become the most popular source of news and of entertainment. Americans on the average watched for four hours a day in 1975. Critics of TV were certain that it coarsened taste, isolated people, and damaged community activity. Television, they sniped, was truly a medium: because it was neither rare nor well done.
⁸⁶

A third lament that gained force in the late 1970s targeted what many worried contemporaries considered the spread of disrespect for authority. “Punk rock” groups such as Britain’s Sex Pistols, which attracted many American young people in the mid-1970s, struck critics as contemptuous of all civilized values. Public opinion polls revealed that ever increasing percentages of Americans distrusted public officials. Cool and often cynical television shows that flourished in the late 1970s, such as
60 Minutes
and
Saturday Night Live,
were said to encourage such attitudes. So were popular books, such as Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s
All the President’s Men
(1974), a best-seller that highlighted the lying of politicians during the Watergate scandal. A film version of the book did well at the box office in 1976.

Politicians were by no means the only group of people whose prestige dimmed in the 1970s. Once-powerful hierarchies—the army, the Catholic Church—were struggling to cope with internal dissension, much of which had broken out as a result of the social and cultural turmoil of the 1960s, and more specifically as a result of the Vietnam War and the Second Vatican Council (“Vatican II”), which between 1962 and 1965 had introduced a series of progressive reforms that divided Catholics throughout the world. Universities, while far more peaceful than they had been at the peak of anti-war demonstrations in the late 1960s and early 1970s, continued to face challenges from students, many of whom no longer bowed as readily as they had in the past to the dicta of deans. Corporate leaders and lawyers, frequently stereotyped as cold and avaricious, were if anything more widely targeted than they had been in earlier years. Public opinion polls revealed that the percentage of Americans who believed that “most people can be trusted” dropped from 55 in 1960 to 45 in 1975—and to 38 by 1985.
⁸⁷

Even physicians, a prestigious group that had been idolized in earlier TV shows like
Marcus Welby, M.D.
and
Dr. Kildare,
lost some of their luster. By the mid-1970s, it was obvious that a governmentally initiated “war on cancer” initiated in the late 1960s had been wildly oversold. Feminists and others insisted that the (male) “establishment” treatment for breast cancer, radical mastectomy, was often unnecessary. Many of these antiauthoritarian dissidents bemoaned a troubling contradiction that then and later seemed to be afflicting American medicine: Highly touted (and real) advances in costly medical technology coexisted with apparent declines in the quality of personal care from physicians.

Paralleling doubts about authority figures was a widespread sense that the government had engaged in conspiracies and cover-ups. One of these supposed cover-ups, that authorities had suppressed evidence of aliens landing in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, was of long standing—and of no demonstrable veracity. Another, the belief that a conspiracy of people, perhaps involving the Mafia, perhaps involving the CIA, had been involved in killing President Kennedy, had a large following. Roughly 50 percent of Americans had always doubted the Warren Commission Report of 1964, which had named Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone gunman. Though doubters such as these never produced convincing evidence to support the ideas that lurked in the dark and feverish corners of their imaginations, they nonetheless engaged the attention of millions of people. By the early 1980s, 80 percent of Americans appeared to credit various conspiratorial theories surrounding the assassination of the president.
⁸⁸

Some conspiracies of the era were real. Americans had only to recall the dissembling of Lyndon Johnson and his advisers about the Gulf of Tonkin incident off Vietnam in 1964, or the cover-up by Nixon of events surrounding the Watergate break-in. In 1974, the
New York Times
reported that covert CIA activity between 1970 and 1973 had helped to overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende of Chile, a Marxist who died during the coup on September 11, 1973. General Augusto Pinochet, who ousted him, established a brutal dictatorship lasting sixteen years. In June 1975, a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller disclosed that officials working for the CIA and the FBI had engaged in illegal wiretapping, opened people’s mail, and assembled files on 300,000 citizens. A few months later, a Senate select committee headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho reported that the CIA, sometimes working with organized crime, had plotted to kill world leaders such as Fidel Castro of Cuba, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, and Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. The CIA, Church had said earlier, was a “rogue elephant,” but his committee’s subsequent report left open the possibility that agency officials working to kill Castro were doing the bidding of higher-ups, that is, of President Kennedy, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, and others.
⁸⁹

The sensational activities of the Church Committee led to the establishment for the first time of formal congressional oversight of American intelligence affairs: permanent select committees on intelligence in both houses. They also moved President Ford to act. In February 1976, he issued an order that expanded executive control over intelligence operations and that declared, “No employee of the U.S. government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.”
⁹⁰
A month later his attorney general, Edward Levi, slapped sharp restrictions on the FBI’s authority to conduct investigations of domestic political groups, such as left- or right-wing extremists. Actions such as these indicated that Congress, the bit in its teeth, was charging ahead to challenge the power of the presidency. Much later, after terrorists succeeded in killing thousands of Americans on September 11, 2001, these restrictions, which remained in force, were said to have had a role in preventing the FBI from moving proactively against potentially violent extremists in the United States.
⁹¹

Other rumors of plots persisted. In 1978–79 a select House committee, relying on a police recording, concluded that more than one assassin—one of them probably shooting from a grassy knoll near the motorcade route—had fired at Kennedy in 1963.
⁹²
A conspiracy, the committee added, had also been behind the slaying of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. With claims of conspiracy emanating from so many official sources, who needed to fall back on paranoid suspicions?

Many critics in the mid-1970s raised a fourth lament: that the nation had to pare back its ambitions. This cry for restraint, rooted in the belief that Americans must shake off their lust for consumption, was perhaps the most widespread lament of all at the time. As California governor Jerry Brown put it, the United States had to realize that it had entered an “Age of Limits.” The British author E. E. Schumacher’s
Small Is Beautiful
(1973), a best seller on both sides of the Atlantic in the mid-1970s, called for a “maximum of well-being with the minimum of consumption.” In 1977, Schumacher enjoyed a triumphal tour of the United States, during which Brown, Ralph Nader, and many others lionized him. President Carter invited him to the White House.
⁹³
When oil prices ballooned in 1979, denunciations of America’s gluttonous appetite for material things—and consequent dependence on other countries—became stronger than ever. The nation, critics exclaimed, must consume less and conserve more. It must recognize and accept limits to its growth in the future. In 1980, Vice President Walter Mondale urged progressives to “adjust the liberal values of social justice and compassion to a new age of limited resources.”
⁹⁴

T
HERE WAS SURELY NO DOUBTING
that Americans (like other people) cherished material things. Later events, however, were to demonstrate that most American people continued to embrace ideals and visions that went well beyond dollars and cents. The United States in the late 1970s, moreover, had by no means entered a permanent “Age of Limits.” Instead, between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, the nation was caught in shorter-term economic stagnation. It also continued to struggle against an array of social problems, most of which, like race, were long-standing. And it wrestled, then and later, with cultural and generational conflicts that had sharpened in the 1960s, and with the divisive legacy of the Vietnam War. All these developments advanced a sense in the late 1970s that conflict was destroying the unity that was supposed to have blessed the World War II era. Cultural pessimists—hardly new in American or Western history—received lavish coverage from media that had become more critical and confrontational following American escalation in Vietnam and Watergate.
⁹⁵

Instead of prophesying a future of economic stagnation or decline, cultural pessimists might have attended more closely to other powerful forces of the 1970s. In these years, as throughout most of United States history, abundant resources and a hard-working, resilient, and innovative population combined to advance real economic growth over time. Though rising inequality accompanied this progress, most people, blacks included, fared a little better absolutely. The years of the late 1970s were hardly a great Age of Decline.

Yet nostalgia about the post–World War II golden age—particularly about family life—helped to induce many people in the late 1970s to feel a sense of loss. Moreover, most American adults, having lived through the economically vibrant years that preceded the 1970s, had developed ever larger expectations about life—expectations that the sociologist Daniel Bell in 1976 aptly linked to a “revolution of rising entitlements.” In part for these reasons, and in part because of the economic trials and cultural controversies of the age, many people concluded in the late 1970s that the nation was in deep trouble. Even Americans who were doing a little better at the time often talked as if they were doing worse. As if caught on a treadmill, they were anxious about the present and wary about the future.
⁹⁶

3
The Political World of the Mid-1970s

Shortly before the 1976 election, which pitted President Ford against James Earl “Jimmy” Carter Jr., of Georgia, a middle-aged businessman bragged that he did not intend to vote. “I’m a three-time loser,” he explained. “In 1964 I voted for the peace candidate—Johnson—and got war. In ’68 I voted for the law-and-order candidate—Nixon—and got crime. In ’72 I voted for Nixon again, and we got Watergate. I’m not going to vote this time.”
¹

This was a characteristically sour opinion of American politics in 1976. Another citizen growled, “I’m not apathetic about non-voting, I’m emphatic about it.”
²
Others heeded the advice of Mae West, who had quipped, “If you have to choose between two evils, pick the one you haven’t tried.” Many people who did go to the polls grumbled that they were casting a “clothes-pin vote”—holding their noses while voting for one poor candidate or the other. The turnout in 1976, 54.8 percent of eligible voters, was the lowest since 1948. Carter squeaked into office with 50.1 percent of the ballots, to 48 percent for Ford. He won the electoral college by 297 to 240, the narrowest margin since 1916.
³

T
HE POLITICAL WORLD
inhabited by Ford and Carter reflected larger trends that had developed since the 1960s and that were to persist long after 1980. One of these was the virtual disappearance of the radical Left as an organized political force. In 1970, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which in the late 1960s had been the largest left-of-center student group in American history, had imploded. After Nixon pulled American troops out of Vietnam and ended the military draft, only a few very small radical groups remained in the news. One, the far-left Weather Underground, took credit for some twenty bombings between 1970 and 1975. Another group, the American Indian Movement (AIM), agitated militantly for Indian self-governance and a return to tribal ways. In 1973, some 200 AIM adherents seized the Sioux village of Wounded Knee in South Dakota, forcing a seventy-one-day standoff with federal agents. The Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), which included idealistic anti-war young people among its founders, evolved into a California gang of killers, robbers, and self-styled revolutionaries who captured nationwide headlines in early 1974 when it kidnapped nineteen-year-old newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. Its slogan was “Death to the fascist insect that preys upon the people.” Hearst, after having been held in a closet for two months, joined her captors and dubbed herself Tania, the name of the girlfriend of former Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara. Toting a carbine, she was photographed helping her former captors carry out an armed robbery of a San Francisco bank.

The confrontation at Wounded Knee, however, ended in a stalemate that did not improve the plight of American Indians, many of whom continued to confront extraordinarily high rates of poverty and disease on their reservations. AIM splintered badly in later years.
⁴
All the members of the small delusional “army” that kidnapped Hearst could have fit into a Humvee with room left over for hostages. Six heavily armed members of the gang, including its leader, died in a fire and televised shootout with Los Angeles police in 1975. Others, including Hearst, were captured, convicted, and jailed.
⁵
The pipe dreams of the SLA, like those of the Weathermen, exposed the dying gasps in the mid-1970s of ’60s-style radical activism in the United States.
⁶

Liberals, a far more potent political force, also faced worrisome trends in the 1970s and thereafter. Persistent demographic and economic forces, notably the movement since World War II of millions of people into the middle classes and the suburbs, helped to drive these trends. As Americans headed upward and outward, they loosened their ties to the Democratic electoral coalition of blue-collar groups and urban political machines that had helped to elect FDR and Harry Truman in the 1930s and 1940s, and JFK and LBJ in the 1960s. Labor unions, which had been powerful allies of the Democratic Party, lost strength. For these reasons, class-related issues, which had been strong in American politics in the 1930s and 1940s, had lost some of their salience by the 1970s.

Compared to some nations of Western Europe, where social-democratic, labor-based political parties continued to command varying levels of popular support, the United States was a nation of relatively conservative people who valued individualism and were ambivalent about a wide-reaching central state. In the 1970s and later, the fervor and political strength of Americans who opposed gun control, abortion, and the teaching of Darwinian theories of evolution stunned and outraged a great many observers in Western Europe. Many of these observers equated the death penalty, which their societies had abolished, with barbarism, and regarded governmentally guaranteed health insurance coverage—also widespread on the Continent—as a sine qua non of advanced civilization.

Changes in racial allegiances especially threatened to hurt the Democrats. When LBJ championed civil rights in the 1960s, southern white voters, until then reliably Democratic, left the party in droves and began to vote Republican. Very high percentages of African Americans, who had already abandoned the GOP in the 1930s and 1940s, backed Democratic candidates after 1964. Though blacks helped elect liberal Democrats in northern cities, the surge to the right of white voters, especially male voters, in the South was a boon to the Republican Party. Democrats remained competitive in many parts of the South—especially in state and local elections—but the rise of the GOP in Dixie was inexorable over time. As much as any single force, racial concerns transformed the partisan preferences of Americans in the 1970s and thereafter, making the core of the Republican Party more conservative and the Democrats more liberal than they had been.

Ever larger numbers of people in the Plains and Mountain states, meanwhile, came to perceive liberals in the Democratic Party as champions of eastern, urban interests that catered to blacks, welfare recipients, and labor unions. Though these westerners benefited greatly from federal largesse—dams, irrigation projects, defense contracts, and the like—they increasingly embraced conservative criticisms of big government. They blasted environmentalists, “elitists,” and “faraway bureaucrats” who owned vast tracts of their land and regulated their lives. Like white southerners, they were more conservative concerning a number of hot-button issues of late twentieth-century politics—such as gun control, the death sentence, and abortion. Feelings such as these, like the racial divisions that were transforming politics in the South, shifted the core of the Democratic Party’s base more strongly to urban areas in the northeastern, mid-Atlantic, and midwestern regions. They revealed that passionate regional loyalties, which had been expected to decline as TV and other mass communications tied the nation more closely together, more than held their own as the years passed.

Developments such as these by no means destroyed either the Democratic Party or American liberalism. It was already clear that the tumultuous cultural warfare of the 1960s had left a political mark on many young people who had come of age during those years. Millions of baby boomers, having grown up amid the excitement of the civil rights and women’s rights movements, had developed—and maintained—liberal views on a range of social and cultural issues, such as abortion, affirmative action, and federal governmental responsibility for health and welfare. In part because of the spread of higher education, they were more tolerant than their elders had been of the religions of other people. Affected by the sexual revolution, they were more broad-minded than Americans in the past had been about the private behavior of their friends and neighbors. The beliefs and behavior of Americans such as these portended a central trend of late twentieth-century life in the United States: Liberals, benefiting from the support of younger generations, were to prevail in many hotly contested cultural struggles in the future.
⁷

Liberals enjoyed special political blessings in the mid-1970s. Watergate temporarily shattered the Republican Party. Already in solid command of Congress, Democrats gained fifty-two members in the House and four in the Senate in 1974, thereby commanding huge margins of 291 to 144 and 60 to 37.
⁸
The election gave the Democrats control of thirty-six governorships and thirty-seven state legislatures. Though this surge abated a little after 1976, liberal Democrats remained especially strong in the House. Thanks in part to gerrymandered or heavily one-party districts (which enabled most incumbents to enjoy near lifelong tenure), Democrats controlled the House without interruption from 1955 to 1995.
⁹

In the 1970s, liberal Democrats in the North, having backed civil rights, civil liberties, entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, and other federal government social policies, solidified their strength among intellectuals, graduate students, teachers, artists, musicians, actors, and writers. A great many professionals and professors, including increasingly large majorities of those who taught at prestigious colleges and universities, joined them. While these liberal elites were relatively insignificant numerically, many were articulate and politically active, and they received considerable attention in the media. A clear omen was visible in 1972, when thirty-four of thirty-eight Harvard Law School professors voted for Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern, an ardent liberal, and thirty gave him campaign contributions.
¹⁰
Fighting back, conservatives were to fight a host of “culture wars” against liberal academics and other “elitists” on the left.
¹¹

Still, Republicans fared all right in presidential elections. Starting in 1968, when Nixon triumphed, they won five of eight presidential races through 1996, losing only to Carter in 1976 and to Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Moreover, the GOP became more conservative after 1974, because the party gained a great deal of strength in the South, because religious conservatives entered politics as never before, and because centrist elements in the GOP, led by Nixon, had been discredited by Watergate.
¹²
Assailing liberals, Republican candidates and officeholders moved toward the right at the same time that Democrats, shorn of many conservative southerners, were turning toward the left.

Beginning in 1968, when Nixon crafted a “Southern Strategy” to lure white southern voters to the GOP, Republicans focused less on the bread-and-butter economic issues that had helped Democrats since the 1930s to muster working-class support. Instead, they emphasized social and cultural concerns—abortion, busing, affirmative action, school prayer, “law and order”—so as to attract white people, notably Catholics and blue-collar workers. By 1980, as Republicans began to shed a country-club image that had hurt them with many voters, it was clear that the political power of clear-cut, class-based divisions was abating, and that Democrats could no longer take the loyalty of white blue-collar workers for granted.

Changes such as these propelled two widely deplored trends that appeared to advance over the next three decades. Both trends, convincing millions of Americans that politics was a nasty business, threatened grass-roots political activism and may have depressed turnout at the polls. One was the growing ferocity of partisan rhetoric, which seemed on occasion to threaten elementary civility between Democrats and Republicans. Encouraged by a more strident media culture, many candidates and officeholders plunged into a political culture of clamorous sound-bite communications and became increasingly uncompromising, ultimately descending into what one later study called a politics of “R.I.P.”—“Revelation, Investigation, Prosecution.”
¹³
Partisan polarization seemed at times to overwhelm the conduct of congressional business.
¹⁴

The second trend was the phenomenon of “divided government” pitting Congresses that prior to 1995 were normally Democratic against Republican presidents.
¹⁵
Liberals on the Hill, moreover, became more assertive in their post-Watergate quest to enact reforms and to diminish the “imperial presidency,” as critics called it in the 1970s. Retaliating against the zeal of Democrats, Ford vetoed sixty-six bills during his seventeen months in office, a number previously exceeded only during the administrations of Grover Cleveland, Franklin Roosevelt, and Harry Truman.
¹⁶
Divided government, then and later, intensified a popular sense that politicians could get nothing done. Sometimes, in fact, they were too divided to act, thereby shunting resolution of issues to non-elected officials in the bureaucracy and to the courts.

Though partisan warfare was often intense after 1970, it coexisted most of the time with a general decline in identification by voters with the major parties—or with electoral “de-alignment,” as it was often called. Citizens were often turned off by the partisan vilification, as they saw it, practiced by their elected representatives.
¹⁷
In part for this reason, the percentage of voters who considered themselves “independents” rose from 23 or so in 1952 to 40 or so at the end of the century.
¹⁸
Increasing percentages of voters, as if eager to prevent either major party from taking charge of government, resorted to splitting their tickets.
¹⁹
Losing partisan voters, party leaders in the years ahead struggled to build dependable majority coalitions. As of the early 2000s, however, neither party had succeeded in clearly effecting such a realignment of politics in the United States.