Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (86 page)

Welch, Jack,
361

Welfare,
49
–50,
170
,
249

   Carter’s policies of,
111

   Clinton and,
341
,
371
,
376
,
402
,
404
,
404
n
42

   government and,
79
,
402

   social,
86

West Bank,
196
,
336

West, economy and,
58
–59

West Germany,
63

Western Europe,
78

“The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the Frontier, 1820–1920, ”
262

Weyrich, Paul,
132

White, Ryan,
181

Whitewater River,
342
–43,
388
,
393
,
397

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,
280

Wilder, L. Douglas,
247

Will, George,
214

Wills, Gary,
147
,
177

Wilson, August,
171

Wilson, James,
364

Winfrey, Oprah,
302

Winslet, Kate,
284

Wolfe, Alan,
268
,
290

Wolfe, Tom,
14
,
47
,
48
,
50
,
69
,
110
,
142
,
186

Wolfowitz, Paul,
228
,
228
n
25,
233

Women: affirmative action and,
24

   careers of,
271
–72

   discrimination against,
9
,
11
,
55
,
271

   elections and,
244
,
244
n
62

   full citizenship for,
xi

   rights of,
67
,
114
,
178

   sexual revolution and,
47

   support for,
10
,
14
,
24

   in workforce,
271
–72.
See also
Female employment

Women’s Tennis Association,
53

Wonder, Stevie,
58

Woods, Tiger,
302

Woodward, Bob,
71

Woolsey, James,
341

Workforce: in 1990s,
349
–50,
350
nn
8
–9

   immigration and,
296
,
299

   women in,
271
–72

World Bank,
61
,
100
,
360
,
362

World Trade Center,
336
,
381

World Trade Organization.
See
WTO

World War II: “greatest generation” of,
9
,
9
n
22

   years after,
xi
,
8
,
74

Wounded Knee,
77

Wozniak, Stephen,
59

Wright, James,
156

Wright, Susan Webber,
397

WTO (World Trade Organization),
xii
,
362

Wyman, Jane,
147

Yakovlev, Aleksandr,
214

Yeats, William Butler,
254

Yeltsin, Boris,
195
,
228
,
229
.
See also
Soviet Union

Yemen,
232
,
380

Yom Kippur War,
7
,
97

Young, Coleman

Yugoslavia,
225
–26

1
. By the time of Nixon’s resignation, the House Judiciary Committee had voted to impeach him on three counts: obstruction of justice; abuse of executive authority (involving among other things his illegal use of electronic surveillance and misuse of the CIA, FBI, and IRS); and violation of the Constitution stemming in part from his refusal to honor the committee’s subpoenas. Recordings of conversations in the Oval Office of the White House had provided incriminating evidence, including a “smoking gun”—a tape of June 23, 1972, showing that Nixon had ordered the CIA to stop the FBI from investigating the break-in.

2
.
New York Times
, Aug. 11, 1974;
Time
, Aug. 19, 1974, 9.

3
.
Time
, Aug. 19, 1974, 9.

4
.
National Review
, Aug. 30, 1974, 965.

5
.
Time
, Aug. 19, 1974, 9. Luck—Nixon had kept the tapes—also helped the “system.”

6
. Ibid., Aug. 12, 1974, 9.

7
. Ibid., Aug. 19, 1974, 88.

8
. Ibid., Sept. 9, 1974, 9.

9
. The other five were the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, France, and China. India did not test again until May 1998; in response, its bitter enemy, Pakistan, tested for the first time.

10
.
New York Times
, July 20, 1974.

11
.
Time
, Sept. 16, 1974, 13; Fred Greenstein,
The Presidential Difference: Leadership Style from FDR to Clinton
(New York, 2000), 113–18.

12
. Though cigarette consumption had declined slowly since the surgeon general of the United States had warned in 1964 against the perils of smoking, roughly 40 percent of adult men and 30 percent of adult women still smoked in 1974. They averaged thirty cigarettes per day. The percentage of adults who smoked in 2000 had declined to 23.3 (24.4 percent of men and 21.2 percent of women).
Statistical Abstract of the U.S., 2002
, 124. Henceforth cited as
Stat. Abst.

13
.
Stat. Abst., 1977
, 4–5, 636, 638. In all, there were 132.9 million motor vehicles (including trucks, cabs, and buses) registered in the United States in 1975. The number of motor vehicles registered in 1960 had been only 73.9 million, of which 61.7 million were passenger cars.

14
. Ali had been stripped of his title in 1967 after refusing to be drafted during the Vietnam War. His victory in 1974 helped make him
Sports Illustrated
’s Sportsman of the Year. Zaire became the Democratic Republic of Congo in 1998.

15
. James Reichley,
Conservatives in an Age of Change
(Washington, 1981), 361–62.

16
. The national speed limit, initiated in 1974 as a temporary measure, lasted until repealed in 1995. It was credited with a major role in conserving energy and with producing a 16 percent decline in traffic fatalities, from 54,052 in 1973 to 45,196 in 1974.
New York Times
, Nov. 24, 2003.

17
. Between December 1972 and December 1974, the stock market lost almost half its value.

18
.
Stat. Abst., 1977
, 431.

19
. Robert Collins,
More: The Politics of Growth in Postwar America
(New York, 2000), 153–55; Robert Samuelson, “The Age of Inflation,”
New Republic
, May 13, 2002, 32–41.

20
. Edward Luttwak, a pessimist, nonetheless later concluded that America’s per capita GNP in 1974 (taking into account real purchasing power) was $4,022, as opposed to an equivalent in dollars of $3,380 in West Germany and $2,765 in Japan. Luttwak,
The Endangered American Dream: How to Stop the United States from Becoming a Third World Country and How to Win the Geo-Economic Struggle for Industrial Supremacy
(New York, 1993), 119–22.

21
.
Stat. Abst, 1977
, 453. Disposable per capita income, in 1975 dollars, averaged $5,470 in 1975—approximately 8 percent higher in real dollars than in 1970.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 422. Legislation approved by Congress in 1972—which went into effect in 1974—indexed Social Security payments for inflation and established the Supplemental Security Income program (SSI), which for the first time placed a federal floor under payments for the indigent blind, disabled, and elderly. SSI, too, was indexed. Poverty among the elderly, before then very high, plummeted thereafter.

22
. The popularity of Tom Brokaw’s book
The Greatest Generation
(New York, 1998) and of an HBO miniseries,
Band of Brothers
(2001), later indicated the persistence of nostalgia about the “World War II generation.”

23
.
Stat. Abst., 2002
, 422.

24
. Steven Gillon,
Boomer Nation: The Largest and Richest Generation Ever, and How It Changed America
(New York, 2004), 1–16.

25
. Key sources for the rise of a rights revolution—a major theme of this book—are Samuel Walker,
The Rights Revolution: Rights and Community in Modern America
(New York, 1998); Laura Kalman,
The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism
(New Haven, 1996); and Lawrence Friedman,
American Law in the Twentieth Century
(New Haven, 2002).

26
.
Time
, July 15, 1974, 22–23.

27
. Ibid., 21. I am greatly indebted to John Snyder, a research assistant, for an early draft of this prologue.

28
.
New York Times
, Sept. 12, 2001.