“When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.”
—Richard Nixon
Richard M. Nixon (1913–1994) was the thirty-seventh president of the United States and the first to resign from office. The scandal that drove him from the White House, Watergate, overshadowed the rest of Nixon’s career. Before Watergate ended his presidency, Nixon was a highly successful figure who won the popular vote in the 1972 election by the widest margin in American history.
Born in California in a small Quaker community, Nixon was a bright and ambitious student who graduated third in his class at Duke Law School. He returned to California in 1946 and beat an incumbent Democrat in a race for the House of Representatives, an upset victory that impressed national Republicans. GOP presidential candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) picked Nixon as his running mate in 1952, catapulting the thirty-nine-year-old representative to national prominence. They won both that election and the next, in 1956.
Nixon ran for president in 1960 to succeed Eisenhower but lost the race to Democrat John F. Kennedy (1917–1963). When he ran again in 1968, the Democrats were badly divided over foreign policy, and Nixon won the election on a platform promising an American troop withdrawal from Vietnam.
Domestically, Nixon made modest reforms to the welfare state programs started by President Lyndon Johnson (1908–1973) and created a few of his own, including the Environmental Protection Agency, a new office to safeguard the environment. In foreign affairs, he made a famous trip to China in 1972, restoring American diplomatic relations with the communist nation.
Nixon sought a second term in the 1972 election. The Democratic candidate, George McGovern (1922–), won only one state, Massachusetts, in one of the worst showings in American history, giving Nixon a landslide victory. But after details of Nixon’s involvement in the Watergate scandal began to emerge in 1973 and 1974, Congress began to consider impeachment. Sensing the inevitable, Nixon resigned August 9, 1974. His vice president, Gerald Ford (1913–2006), was sworn in as president.
1. The faculty at Nixon's alma mater, Duke Law School, voted against giving him an honorary degree.
2. In 1968, Nixon’s daughter Julie (1948–) married David Eisenhower (1948–), grandson of Dwight D. Eisenhower.
3. Nixon’s resignation had a disastrous impact on his Republican Party, which lost forty-nine seats in the House of Representatives in the 1974 congressional elections.
When Iranian militants invaded the United States embassy in Tehran in 1979, taking fifty-two American diplomats hostage, the incident sparked an international crisis that severely damaged the administration of President Jimmy Carter (1924–) and marked the first prominent clash between the United States and the Islamic world. After 444 days of captivity, the hostages were finally released unharmed on January 20, 1981, the day Carter left office. However, American relations with Iran have remained frosty ever since.
The roots of the Iranian hostage crisis stretch back to 1953, when American and British spies organized a coup against a popular Iranian prime minister. In his place, they installed the shah, a hereditary monarch whose regime became increasingly repressive over the next two decades. In the middle of the Cold War, the United States continued to support the anticommunist shah, enraging Iranians who chafed at his authoritarian rule.
In the late 1970s, Islamic fundamentalists led by a radical cleric, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (c. 1900–1989), began agitating against the shah, who fled from Iran and eventually was admitted into the United States for medical treatment in October 1979. Angry that the United States had admitted the shah instead of sending him back to Iran for trial and certain execution, followers of the ayatollah burst into the American embassy in November 1979 and seized the hostages.
The Carter administration was divided over how to respond. The United States first imposed economic sanctions and cut diplomatic ties. Then in April 1980, the president ordered a military raid to rescue the hostages, but it failed. The shah died in July 1980, but the Iranian captors held on to the hostages in further protest of US policies. Carter’s inability to win the release of the hostages would cost him the 1980 election, which he lost to Ronald Reagan (1911–2004). The Iranians finally released the hostages in January 1981, minutes after Reagan took the oath of office.
However, the relationship between the United States and Iran remained hostile. The Reagan administration supported Iraq, ruled by Saddam Hussein (1937–2006), in the bloody Iran-Iraq war between 1980 and 1988, and it sought to counter growing Iranian influence in the Islamic world.
1. In recognition of their hardships, each hostage was given a free lifetime pass to major league baseball games when they returned to the United States.
2. Despite promises to take a tough line against the ayatollah, the Reagan administration later illegally sold weapons to Iran in order to finance its own secret operations in Latin America, an action that became known as the Iran-contra affair.
3. Many Americans tied yellow ribbons around the trunks of trees in a gesture of support for the hostages, beginning a tradition that would be resurrected during the Gulf War (1991) and in other times of crisis.
A renowned civil rights lawyer, Thurgood Marshall (1908–1993) was the first African-American appointed to the United States Supreme Court. President Lyndon Johnson (1908–1973) made the appointment in 1967. Over the next twenty-four years, Marshall was a stalwart supporter of affirmative action and racial equality and an opponent of the death penalty.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, Marshall opened his first law office in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s, when he filed successful challenges to Maryland’s segregation statutes. He soon joined the legal staff of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and launched a series of court challenges to segregation in colleges and universities across the South. This effort culminated in 1954 with Marshall’s most famous victory, the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision outlawing segregation in public schools.
President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) named Marshall to a federal appeals court seat in 1961, over the objection of Southern senators who vehemently objected to his past civil-rights work. After Marshall’s elevation to the Supreme Court, he often sided with other liberal justices remaining from the Warren Court era. In his first ten years on the bench, Marshall was in the majority on decisions decriminalizing abortion and allowing the private possession of pornography.
However, as the court moved to the right in the 1970s, Marshall frequently found himself on the losing end of controversial decisions. Marshall strongly supported affirmative action, and he criticized a 1978 Supreme Court decision that curtailed racial quotas meant to reserve spaces in college classes for African-Americans. Marshall also fought against the death penalty, which was reintroduced in the United States in 1976 over his objections. In failing health, the legal hero of the civil-rights movement resigned from the Court in 1991 and died two years later.
1. The name Thurgood came from Marshall’s grandfather, who had made up the name Throughgood when he joined the Union Army in the Civil War (1861–1865).
2. Marshall dissented in 25 of his last 112 Supreme Court cases.
3. Baltimore’s international airport was renamed in Marshall’s honor in 2005.
In the heyday of the military-industrial complex during the Cold War of the late twentieth century, a secretive office at the Pentagon called the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was in charge of developing cutting-edge technology for use by the military. Flush with defense funds, ARPA funded an array of futuristic research, including a project that began in 1962 to link computers to one another across the country. The result, seven years later, was a primitive network called ARPAnet, the ancestor of the modern Internet. ARPAnet officially shut down in 1990, but the Internet that continues today is built on many of the technologies first developed for the defense agency.
In the 1960s, relatively few high-powered computers existed, and they were scattered among college campuses. Military planners hoped to use the ARPAnet system to link these distant computers together to make research faster and easier. ARPAnet went operational in 1969, and the first e-mail was sent across the network in 1971 by Ray Tomlinson (1941–), an American computer programmer. For its first twenty years, the Internet would remain primarily a text-based network.
The Internet’s roots as a military project reflected the vast sums lavished on defense during the Cold War. Whatever else the faults of the military-industrial complex may have been, money spent by the Pentagon on research often resulted in useful new civilian technology. The Internet, which separated from the defense network in the 1980s, is perhaps the best example of an unexpected benefit arising from Cold War–era defense spending.
Throughout the 1980s, the network continued to develop but its use was still mostly limited to computer nerds. Then in 1991, a British computer programmer, Tim Berners-Lee (1955–), developed hypertext markup language (HTML), which made the network much more user-friendly by linking words in one computer file to those in another, enabled the use of graphics, and for the first time made the net widely accessible to the public. The hypertext portion of the Internet became known as the World Wide Web, which in turn provided the impetus for the Internet revolution of the 1990s. Now accessible on computers in virtually every corner of the globe, the Web has hugely increased business productivity and speeded up global communications.
1. Tomlinson first used the @ symbol for e-mail in 1971.
2. The “ownership” of the Internet remains subject to a contentious and confusing debate; at present, the US Department of Commerce retains some control over it and the issue of so-called top-level domain names like “.com” and “.net.”
3. The first Internet connection in 1969 was between computers at Stanford University and the University of California at Los Angeles.
The sunny oceanside village of Provincetown, Massachusetts—where the Pilgrims first set foot in the New World in 1620—later attracted pilgrims of a different sort as one of the first towns in the United States to openly welcome gays and lesbians. The picturesque town at the tip of Cape Cod has been at the vanguard of the gay rights movement since the 1970s and is now considered one of the vacation capitals of gay Americans.
English settlers first colonized the area in the early eighteenth century, attracted by the rich fisheries that gave the cape its name. After the American Revolution, many Portuguese immigrated to Provincetown and other coastal New England towns, where they gradually came to dominate the fishing industry.
In the twentieth century, however, the fishing industry fell into decline, and the town was reborn as a center for the arts. Many playwrights, including Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) and Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), were involved in the village’s burgeoning artistic scene.
The town’s association with the gay rights movement began in the early twentieth century, at a time when gays and lesbians faced rampant harassment and ostracism in most American cities. Provincetown welcomed gay tourists, many of whom bought property in the town. Today, the city is overwhelmingly gay during the summer tourist season, when the movement’s symbolic rainbow flag flutters above many homes and shops.
In 2004, Massachusetts made national headlines by becoming the first state to permit gay marriage. Hundreds of gay weddings have been held in “P-Town,” which to many observers symbolizes the growing acceptance of equal rights for gays and lesbians in the United States.
1. The area of Provincetown facing the Atlantic Ocean is closed to development as part of the Cape Cod National Seashore.
2. Provincetown is at the eastern end of US Route 6, a transcontinental road that stretches 3,652 miles to Long Beach, California.
3. Mostly a summer resort, the town has only about 4,000 permanent residents, compared to 50,000 during the summer.
The publication in 1976 of Roots: The Saga of an American Family, by journalist Alex Haley (1921–1992), was a major literary phenomenon and it is one of the most commercially successful books ever written by an African-American author. An autobiographical story of Haley’s quest to trace his family’s origins in Africa, the book sold five million copies in its first three years in print and was made into an enormously popular TV miniseries.
Haley was born in New York and spent most of his childhood in Tennessee. He served for twenty years in the United States Coast Guard, spanning World War II (1939–1945) and the Korean War (1950–1953), and took a job at Playboy magazine in 1959 after leaving the military. In 1965, he published The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which he had begun several years earlier based on interviews for Playboy with the black nationalist leader. The book has sold more than six million copies to date, and it made Haley a household name.
His next project, Roots, took Haley more than ten years to research and involved trips to three continents in search of clues about his ancestry. Starting with only a few scraps of oral history passed down from his family, Haley was eventually able to trace his lineage back to a small village in the West African nation of Gambia, where one of his ancestors had been kidnapped and sold into slavery. Haley based the book closely on his own family but fictionalized certain elements; the book won a Pulitzer Prize and topped national bestseller lists for weeks. In a time before VCRs and TiVo, millions of people in 1977 stayed home night after night for a week to tune in to the Roots saga on network TV.
The runaway success of Roots reflected the growing desire among African-Americans in exploring their genealogical background and writing about their past, seeking to reclaim the history of black Americans. Although Haley would be criticized for certain elements of the story, the book proved deeply moving and inspirational to millions of readers. Haley died of a heart attack before he could complete a planned second novel about slavery.
1. The Coast Guard created a new military position especially for Haley—chief journalist—which he held for the last seven years of his military career.
2. The author Harold Courlander (1908–1996) sued Haley in 1978, alleging that Haley had lifted some passages of Roots verbatim from Courlander’s novel The African. The case was settled out of court after six weeks.
3. The last episode of the Roots miniseries, which aired on ABC in 1977, is the third-highest-rated TV program ever, behind the series finales of M*A*S*H and Dallas, respectively.
Michael Jackson (1958–), nicknamed the King of Pop, is the most popular recording artist on the planet. His 1982 hit album, Thriller, is the best-selling record of all time.
Born in Gary, Indiana, Jackson was a major star by age five as the lead singer of the Jackson 5, a boy band consisting of Michael and four of his brothers: Jackie (1951–), Tito (1953–), Jermaine (1954–), and Marlon (1957–). The band scored big hits on the Motown recording label with songs such as the 1970 chart toppers “ABC” and “I’ll Be There.”
Widely regarded as the most talented of the five, Michael Jackson began his solo career in the early 1970s, while still a teenager. Off the Wall, his breakthrough 1979 album produced by Quincy Jones (1933–), became a mammoth global hit on the strength of its title track and the tune “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough.”
Thriller, however, was a global entertainment sensation utterly without precedent. Hit singles from the album include “Billie Jean,” “Beat It,” and the title track, “Thriller.” The album featured duets with other major stars, including former Beatle Paul McCartney (1942–)and distinguished hair-metal guitarist Eddie Van Halen (1955–). Music videos of the album’s hit singles were played repeatedly on MTV and helped define that emerging genre.
The success of Thriller made Jackson the most popular musician of the 1980s and earned him an invitation to the White House to meet President Ronald Reagan (1911–2004). In 1985, at the peak of his fame, he cowrote with Lionel Richie (1949–) the charity single “We Are the World” to raise funds for famine relief in Africa. Jackson went on to release two more hit albums, Bad (1987) and Dangerous (1991).
And then Jackson started getting weird. Rumors emerged that he slept in a special, pressure-controlled chamber to prevent aging. His skin color and facial structure changed inexplicably. He bought an old amusement park in California that he turned into his own private hideaway called Neverland Ranch, and he began inviting prepubescent children to the ranch for sleepovers.
In 2005, with his musical career in decline, Jackson was tried on child molestation charges stemming from his Neverland slumber parties. His trial resulted in acquittal. Jackson temporarily moved to the island kingdom of Bahrain in the Persian Gulf to escape publicity but later returned to the United States.
1. Michael Jackson was married to Lisa Marie Presley (1968–) from 1994 to 1996 and then to Debbie Rowe (1958–) from 1996 to 1999. He reportedly fathered two children with Rowe and a third with a woman of undisclosed identity.
2. Jackson bought the rights to half the catalog of the Beatles in 1985.