The Cahills voted for George McGovern in 1972.
They were fifty-five now, Stella closing in on fifty-six. Twenty-four of those years they’d spent together on Eddy Street, long enough to have buried Ed’s dad, raised their three kids, and sent them out to lives of their own. After eight years in New Jersey, Judy had recently moved to one of the western suburbs so that she could bring up her kids closer to home. Terry had taken his electrical engineering degree from Notre Dame—maxima cum laude, class of ’69—straight into a promising job with a major firm north of Chicago. And Kathy was at the start of her junior year in South Bend, a place she never would have gone had her mother and brother not cleared the way back in 1965. That had been their route into the solid center of the middle class: a step up from their parents’ world, though on the salary Ed brought home he and Stella could have moved up as well, into something bigger and better than an aging bungalow with boxes full of flags in the basement. But they couldn’t imagine why they’d want to.
That’s how they felt about politics too. They’d started voting Democratic when they were young, as almost everyone like them did. There they’d remained, supporting candidates they loved—like Dick Daley, who understood them better than any other politician was ever going to do—and candidates who didn’t get them at all, like George McGovern, because in the end voting for a party wasn’t a deal to be made every time an election rolled around. It was a commitment to be maintained, just like all the others that the Cahills had made.
Their neighbors didn’t agree. In 1968, 62 percent of whites nationwide had voted for either Nixon or Wallace. In 1972, Nixon alone took 70 percent. He reached that figure by cutting deeply into some of the Democrats’ core constituencies. Sixty-one percent of blue-collar voters went his way, 57 percent of union households, and 57 percent of Catholics, a transformation driven by widespread defection among a number of the Democrats’ old ethnic blocs. In the Cahills’ ward, those realignments combined to give Nixon 66 percent of the vote, six points above a national total so lopsided it won him forty-nine states: a stunning sweep for the emerging Republican majority Eisenhower had envisioned in 1952, sealed by Nixon’s four years of appeals to the nation’s silent center.
Five weeks later Nixon sent the bombers back over North Vietnam, though much of their impact was aimed at Saigon. Kissinger and the North Vietnamese had in fact reached a comprehensive settlement in mid-October. With its signing would come an immediate cease-fire to finally bring the fighting to an end. Beyond that, the entire agreement pivoted on South Vietnam. Officially the United States recognized the possibility of a unified Vietnam. In reality the South Vietnamese government would remain in place—the Americans wouldn’t agree to anything else—though its dynamics would change in fundamental ways. Within six months the United States would withdraw all of its troops from the South and dismantle its sprawl of bases; the North Vietnamese would keep its forces in the South; and the NLF would be given a formal role in shaping South Vietnam’s direction—in recognition, Kissinger insisted, of the realities on the ground.
But when he brought the agreement down to Saigon for approval in late October, South Vietnam’s president Nguyen Van Thieu rejected it as far too weak to protect his interests. He had a point. Once the settlement was signed and its provisions put in place, Thieu would be heading a country that looked a lot like the one Ngo Dinh Diem had led in the darkest days of his regime—holding power in Saigon while the Communists controlled the countryside, slicing into his authority bit by bit. And this time the Americans would not be willing to intervene.
Kissinger tried to salvage the deal by proposing changes to the North Vietnamese that he hoped would calm Thieu’s fears. For weeks the two sides probed around the agreement’s edges, searching for subtle shifts that might satisfy Saigon, but nothing worked. On December 13, Kissinger told the White House that the negotiations had deadlocked. The next day Nixon decided to bomb again, both to bludgeon Hanoi back to bargaining—just as Eisenhower had bludgeoned North Korea into a settlement in 1953—and to remind Thieu of the enormous damage the United States could inflict on the North should conditions require it.
The assault began on December 18, paused for Christmas Day, and then resumed until December 29, when the North Vietnamese agreed to go back into negotiations. In between, the military unleashed an orgy of violence. Every night the bombs came raining down—20,000 tons of them in all, mostly from B-52s—lacerating targets around Hanoi, the sites chosen so that the city’s civilian population would feel the explosions rattling through their homes, the timing set so that no one would be able to sleep, the collateral damage to Hanoi’s neighborhoods the cost of securing peace with a final blast of brutality.
The talks reopened in Paris on January 2, 1973. Seven days later—Nixon’s sixtieth birthday—Kissinger and the North Vietnamese reached a settlement that in its essentials matched the one they’d had in October. Over the next two weeks their staffs perfected its language, while the White House strong-armed Thieu into abandoning his objections. He capitulated on January 21, two days before a signing ceremony that Nixon had authorized Kissinger to hold whether or not Saigon approved.
On January 22 the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in Roe v. Wade. The justices had reheard oral arguments on October 11, 1972. In their subsequent conference they voted seven to two in support of Roe, up from the five-to-two-margin of the previous year. The chief justice assigned the opinion to Nixon’s second appointee, Harry Blackmun, precisely the sort of mainstream Republican who, according to the polls, was most likely to support abortion rights. He took about a month to finish a detailed draft based on the extensive reading he’d completed over the summer in anticipation of the case coming his way, though its general outline was never in doubt. His colleagues offered their critiques, in the Court’s tradition, which he incorporated into a revised opinion in time for Christmas. It took a couple more weeks for the two opposing justices to write their dissents and for the chief justice to settle on a concurrence. Only then was the Court ready to release its ruling.
Blackmun announced it from the bench with his colleagues arrayed alongside him, a practice the justices reserved for their most important decisions. His opinion opened by acknowledging “the deep and seemingly absolute convictions” that abortion inspired. But the Court was required, he said, to “resolve the issue by constitutional measurement free of emotion and predilection.” That’s what he tried to do in the fifty-one pages that followed. Its opening sections dealt with jurisdictional questions, its long middle piece with a detailed history of abortion law. On page thirty-six Blackmun finally reached the central issue. “The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy,” he said, but in its 1965 Griswold ruling the Court had recognized that such a right existed. With Roe, the justice had decided that it was “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.”1
Blackmun immediately narrowed that right to the first trimester of a woman’s pregnancy. After that date, he said, a state could regulate abortion to protect her health. And once the fetus reached viability, it could limit or even outlaw abortion to protect “the potentiality of human life,” a carefully constructed way of saying that the fetus had no rights of its own.2 The decision’s significance didn’t lie in its limits, though, but in its breadth. When Estelle Griswold set up her Connecticut clinic in 1961, a state still had the power to prohibit a couple from using any form of birth control. Twelve years later the United States Supreme Court was guaranteeing women access to the most controversial of procedures as a matter of right—and by so doing truncating the government’s ability to control its citizens’ sexuality to a degree that would have been unimaginable at the start of the 1960s. The revolution was far from complete—it would take the Court another thirty years and another Texas sodomy case to extend Griswold to gay and lesbian Americans—but with Harry Blackmun’s painstaking opinion it had moved dramatically forward.
All the major morning papers put the decision on their front pages, but it wasn’t the lead story. That belonged to Lyndon Johnson, who late on the afternoon of January 22 had suffered a massive heart attack. His Secret Service detail found him collapsed on his bedroom floor and tried to revive him with heart massage and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. It didn’t work. The doctors pronounced him dead at 4:33 p.m. Texas time, at the age of sixty-four. Twelve hours later Henry Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart met in Paris’ once elegant Hotel Majestic to initial the agreement that ended his bitch of a war.
Nixon formally announced the settlement that evening with the latest in his long line of television addresses. In a tight ten minutes on the air he offered North Vietnam “a peace of reconciliation” to follow the devastation the United States had inflicted, congratulated South Vietnam on securing the “precious right” of self-determination the agreement didn’t ensure, and thanked the American people for the sacrifices that they hadn’t wanted to make.3
The accounting would follow. The Defense Department set the cost of the war at $140 billion. That was purely a measure of military expenses, divorced from the war-induced inflation that would take another decade to break and the international financial transformations that would play a central part in the reconfiguration of the American economy. The Pentagon also counted the precise force its strategy had required: the seven million tons of bombs it dropped on Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos; the eleven million gallons of Agent Orange it spread across the Southeast Asian countryside; and the two million soldiers it passed through its grinding ground war. But there was no way to measure with any precision the damage that terrifying force had produced, just as there had been no way for Americans to measure the fighting’s progress, except through the body count. From the United States’ tentative steps toward escalation in the early 1960s to the imposition of its cease-fire shortly after Nixon’s nighttime address, the war had killed 2 million Vietnamese civilians, almost 1.5 million North and South Vietnamese troops, and 58,000 Americans, among them Lyndon Johnson.
Over the next few months the Watergate story broke open in a burst of revelations. Up the line they raced as Nixon had feared they could, from a first confession by one of the burglars to the White House lawyer he implicated, who knew exactly how the cover-up had been shaped inside the Oval Office. By mid-April 1973, the Democratically controlled Senate was preparing to open investigative hearings. The U.S. Attorney’s Office was moving toward new indictments, with the head of CREEP—Nixon’s former attorney general—at the top of its list. The Washington Post was regularly running damning stories sourced from somewhere inside the government. And Nixon was scrambling to build a firewall around himself by forcing his inner circle to accept sole responsibility for the crimes he’d pressed them to commit. On April 29 he brought Haldeman into his office one last time to tell him he had to resign, as a final act of loyalty to the president who was about to betray him. As they finished Nixon shook his hand, the first time he’d ever done such a thing.
Even as his administration was crumbling, one crucial piece of Nixon’s legacy was taking shape. In October 1972 the Supreme Court had heard oral arguments in Keyes v. School District No. 1, Denver, Colo., the NAACP’s long-sought test of whether the Charlotte decision applied to school districts outside the South. On June 21, 1973, the justices ruled by a vote of seven to one that Denver’s school board had, in fact, segregated its schools through many of the same manipulations Charlotte’s board had used. Denver therefore had to implement a court-directed process of integration as Charlotte had, with busing at its center. The ruling was tempered by technicalities, as the Court’s recent decisions almost always were. But the implications were enormous. If Denver’s schools met the Court’s standard for de jure discrimination, then almost every other urban system in the nation did as well. Already many of them were in litigation in the lower courts. So it wouldn’t be long before the buses started rolling in cities that Brown had never touched, from Boston to Los Angeles.
But what about Detroit? In June 1972, two months after George Wallace’s imposing victory in Michigan’s presidential primary, Judge Roth had finalized the comprehensive busing plan that would connect the city’s schools to the fifty-three surrounding suburban districts. It was the largest integration order ever issued, encompassing 780,000 children, 40 percent of whom were to be bused to new schools, the most distant 45 minutes away. Most of the affected districts and the State of Michigan immediately appealed to the Sixth Circuit Court, which upheld Roth’s ruling in June 1973. So the districts appealed again.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case, now formally titled Milliken v. Bradley, on February 28, 1974. The justices waited six months, until July 25, to issue their decision, which the chief justice read from the bench as Blackmun had read Roe the year before. Since its New Kent decision in 1968, the Court had moved relentlessly against segregated schools, first in the rural South, then in southern cities, and finally in cities across the nation. Now, in a five-to-four ruling anchored by Nixon’s four appointees, the justices announced that they had gone far enough. Detroit’s suburban schools had been segregated as a matter of course, the ruling read, and not by state action. So Judge Roth had no right to order their integration, much less to tie them to the racial transformation of the center city’s schools.
To so conclude, wrote Thurgood Marshall in a blistering dissent, was to ignore the tangle of state actions that had divided increasingly Black cities for the all-white suburbs that encircled them. Worse, by exempting those suburbs from the necessity of integration, the Court’s majority was giving white families the ability to flee the integration of city schools simply by moving across the suburban color line, as Judge Roth had warned they would in his initial ruling three years before. In the process, Marshall said, the Court would reverse the progress the nation had finally made in dismantling its ignoble tradition of separate and unequal schools, deny Black children the rights that were their due, and bring to an end the era that he himself had opened with his brilliant victory before the Court twenty years before.
Marshall had it exactly right. Nixon hadn’t appointed his four justices to roll back the legislative triumphs African Americans had won in the course of the 1960s, as Goldwater or Wallace would have done. The Court he shaped would never undermine the fundamentals of the Civil Rights Act, and it would be forty years before another set of justices eviscerated the Voting Rights Act. What Nixon wanted was a Court that would stop the civil rights movement’s drive to break through the racial barriers that surrounded his majority’s middling classes, where segregation wasn’t defined by a “Coloreds Only” sign hanging over a waiting-room door, or a mob out on the street, but by structures so deeply embedded even his justices could insist that they didn’t exist.
That’s what his appointees did. After their ruling in Milliken, school integration slowed, stalled, and then gave way to a gradual resegregation inside an enduring system of neighborhood segregation. Four decades on, the percentage of Black children in hyper-segregated schools was eight points above where it had been at the peak of integration, and the color line remained almost as starkly drawn across the nation’s major metropolitan areas as it had been when the NAACP’s lawyers put Virda Bradley’s case before the Court—or even as it had been when Martin Luther King Jr. dared to march into Marquette Park in the summer of 1966, hoping that by re-creating the moral witness that had brought down Jim Crow’s segregation of social space he could destroy Chicago’s as well.
Nixon was in California when the Milliken ruling came down, stumbling toward his final days in office. For over a year he’d been trying to hold off investigators’ demands that he turn over evidence he knew would implicate him in the Watergate cover-up. The harder he resisted the more they seemed to close in: by the start of 1974 he was under investigation by a special prosecutor appointed by the attorney general; the Senate’s select committee, which had staged a spectacular series of hearings over the summer of 1973; and the House Judiciary Committee, which had its staff working on the possibility of impeachment. The conflict reached a dangerous level in April 1974, when the special prosecutor subpoenaed the material. Nixon countered with claims of executive privilege, which the prosecutor then asked the Supreme Court to review. The justices unanimously rejected the president’s position on July 24, 1974, the day before their Milliken decision, on the grounds that the privileges of his office didn’t grant him the right to impede the pursuit of justice. Nixon resigned two weeks later.
Ed Cahill put up the flags again that year, though he’d started to think that the celebrations weren’t what they used to be. There wasn’t any reason for him to feel that way, beyond the ordinary changes that made the day seem different: kids growing up, neighbors moving away, the excitement fading with routine. But that was enough, even for Ed. So he’d run it for a few more Fourths, for his grandkids more than anyone else. Then he’d let it go as the creaking tradition it had become, the vestige of another age, when draping Eddy Street in the Stars and Stripes seemed just the right thing to do.