Don’t Know Much About History

Camelot. The Age of Aquarius. “All You Need Is Love.” Hippies and Haight-Ashbury. “Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair.” “Tune In. Turn On. Drop Out.” Free love. Men on the moon. Woodstock.

It has come down as “the sixties,” a romantic fantasy set to a three-chord rock beat. But the era viewed so nostalgically as the days of peace, love, and rock and roll didn’t start out with much peace and love. Unless you focus on the fact that Enovid, the first birth control pill, was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960.

The flip side of the sixties was a much darker tune. Riots and long, hot summers. Assassinations. Rock-star obituaries etched in acid. A war that only a “military-industrial complex” could love. Sympathy for the Devil. Altamont Speedway.

The “bright shining moment” of the JFK years—the media-created myth of Camelot manufactured in the wake of Kennedy’s death—began with the same Cold War paranoia that set the tone of the previous decade. The “liberal” Kennedy campaigned in 1960 as a hard-line anti-Communist, and used a fabricated “missile gap” between the United States and the Soviet Union as a campaign issue against Republican candidate Richard Nixon. What we call the sixties ended with the death throes of an unpopular, costly war in a quagmire called Vietnam.

But it was an extraordinary era in which all the accepted orthodoxies of government, church, and society were called into question. And, unlike the glum, alienated mood of the fifties, the new voices questioning authority had a lighter side. Joseph Heller (1923–99) was one of the first to capture the new mood of mordant humor in his first novel, Catch-22 (1961), which was a forecast of the antimilitary mood that would form to oppose the war in Vietnam. But the new generation of poets was more likely to use an amplified guitar than a typewriter to voice its discontent. In the folk music of Peter, Paul, and Mary and Bob Dylan, and later in the rock-and-roll revolution, “counterculture” was blasting out of millions of radios and TVs. Of course, the record business found it a very profitable counterculture. And it spilled into the mainstream as entertainers like the Smothers Brothers brought irreverence to prime time—which promptly showed them the door.

The seventies got under way with the downfall of a corrupt White House in a sinkhole called Watergate. Vietnam and Watergate seemed to signal a change in the American political landscape. The years that followed were characterized by a feeling of aimlessness. Under Gerald Ford (1913–2006), who replaced the disgraced Nixon, and Jimmy Carter (b. 1924), America suffered the indignity of seeing its massive power in a seeming decline. But this slide was not the result of a superpower confrontation with the archvillain Soviets. Instead, a series of smaller shocks undid the foundation: the forming of OPEC by major oil producing countries to place a stranglehold on the world’s oil supplies; the acts of international terrorists, who struck with seeming impunity at the United States and other Western powers, culminating in the overthrow of the once mighty shah of Iran; and the imprisonment of American hostages in the American embassy in Teheran.

More than anything else, it was that apparent decline, reflected in America’s economic doldrums, that brought forth a president who represented, to the majority of Americans, the cowboy in the white hat who they always believed would ride into town. After the doubt and turmoil produced by the seventies, Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) seemed to embody that old-fashioned American can-do spirit. For many critics, the question was who was going to do what, and to whom? A throwback to Teddy Roosevelt and his “big stick,” Reagan also saw the White House as a bully pulpit. His sermons called back the “good old days”—which, of course, only appeared so good in hindsight.

Though it is still too soon to assess properly the long-term impact of his presidency, Ronald Reagan has already begun to be judged by history. To those who admire him, he was the man who restored American prestige and economic stability, and forced the Soviet Union into structural changes through a massive buildup of American defenses. To critics, he was the president who dozed through eight years in office while subordinates ran the show. In some cases, those underlings proved to be corrupt or simply cynical. In perhaps the most dangerous instance, a lieutenant colonel working in the White House was allowed to make his own foreign policy.

How did Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow spoil his 1960 campaign for president?

“If you give me a week, I might think of one.” That’s what President Eisenhower told a reporter who asked what major decisions Vice President Richard Nixon (1913–94) had participated in during their eight years together. Although Ike later said he was being facetious, he never really answered the question, and the remark left Nixon with egg on his face and the Democrats giddy.

That was in August 1960, as Nixon and John F. Kennedy (1917–63) ran neck and neck in the polls. How many wavering Nixon votes did Ike’s little joke torpedo? It would have taken only a shift of about a hundred thousand votes out of the record 68,832,818 cast to change the result and the course of contemporary events.

Most campaign historians cite Ike’s cutting comment as a jab that drew blood, but that was not the knockout punch in this contest. Posterity points instead to the face-off between the contenders—the first televised debates in presidential campaign history—as the flurry of verbal and visual punches from which Nixon never recovered. In particular, the first of these four meetings is singled out as the blow that sent the vice president to the canvas. More than 70 million people watched the first of these face-to-face meetings. Or maybe “face-to–five o’clock shadow” is more accurate.

Recovering from an infection that had hospitalized him for two weeks, Nixon was underweight and haggard-looking for the debate. Makeup artists attempted to conceal his perpetual five o’clock shadow with something called Lazy Shave that only made him look more pasty faced and sinister. Jack Kennedy, on the other hand, was the picture of youth and athletic vigor. While radio listeners thought there was no clear winner in the debates, television viewers were magnetized by Kennedy. If FDR was the master of radio, Kennedy was the first “telegenic” candidate, custom-tailored for the instant image making of the television age.

Broadcast on September 26 from Chicago, the first debate focused on domestic affairs, an advantage for Kennedy because Nixon was acknowledged to be more experienced in international matters. It was Nixon, after all, who had stood face-to-face with Nikita Khrushchev in Moscow, angrily wagging a finger at the Soviet leader during their “kitchen debate” in 1959. But in the first TV debate, Kennedy had Nixon on the defensive by listing the shortcomings of the Eisenhower administration. With deft command of facts and figures, Kennedy impressed an audience that was skeptical because of his youth and inexperience. He stressed his campaign theme that the Republicans had America in “retreat,” and he promised to get the country moving again.

The audience for the three subsequent debates fell off to around 50 million viewers. The impressions made by the first debate seemed to be most lasting. Kennedy got a boost in the polls and seemed to be pulling out in front, but the decision was still too close to call. Invisible through most of the contest, Eisenhower did some last-minute campaigning for Nixon, but it may have been too small an effort, too late.

Two events in October also had some impact. First, Nixon’s running mate, Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, promised that there would be a Negro in the Nixon cabinet. Nixon had to disavow that pledge, and whatever white votes he won cost him any chance at black support. A second Kennedy boost among black voters came when Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested prior to the final debate. Kennedy called King’s wife, Coretta, to express his concern, and Robert Kennedy helped secure King’s release on bail. Nixon decided to stay out of the case. King’s father, who had previously stated he wouldn’t vote for a Catholic, announced a shift to Kennedy. “I’ve got a suitcase of votes,” said Martin Luther King Sr., “and I’m going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.” He did just that. When Kennedy heard of the senior King’s earlier anti-Catholic remarks, he won points by humorously defusing the situation, commenting, “Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father. Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?”

Kennedy certainly had a father. Joseph Kennedy Sr., FDR’s first chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission and later his ambassador to Great Britain, where his anti-Semitic and isolationist views won him no points, stayed in the background in the campaign. Bankrolling and string pulling, Joseph Kennedy had orchestrated his son’s career from the outset with his extensive network of friends in the media, the mob, and the Catholic church. A few examples: Writer John Hersey’s “Survival,” the now deflated account of Kennedy’s wartime heroics aboard PT-109, overlooked the fact that Kennedy and his crew were sleeping in a combat zone when a Japanese destroyer rammed them. Joe Kennedy made sure his son was decorated by a high-ranking Navy official. When JFK ran for the House, Joe arranged for the Hersey article to appear in Reader’s Digest and then made sure every voter in Kennedy’s district got a copy. Publication of JFK’s first book, Why England Slept, was arranged by Kennedy pal journalist Arthur Krock, who then reviewed the book in the New York Times. Kennedy’s second book, the best-selling and Pulitzer Prize–winning Profiles in Courage, was the output of a committee of scholars and Kennedy speechwriter Theodore Sorensen.

Other friends of Joe Kennedy, like Henry Luce and William Randolph Hearst, had added to building the Kennedy image. Through Frank Sinatra, another Joe Kennedy crony, funds of dubious origin were funneled into the Kennedy war chest. Also through Sinatra, JFK met a young woman named Judith Campbell, who would soon become a regular sexual partner. What Kennedy didn’t know at the time was that Judith Campbell was also bedding Mafia chieftain Sam Giancana and a mob hit man named John Roselli. In a few months, they would all converge as Giancana and Roselli were given a “contract” to pull off the CIA-planned assassination of Fidel Castro.

The debate, his father’s war chest, his appeal to women (the public appeal, not the private one, which remained a well-protected secret), the newly important black vote, and vice presidential candidate Lyndon B. Johnson’s role in delivering Texas and the rest of the South all played a part in what was the closest presidential election in modern history (until the Bush-Gore race of 2000). Nixon actually won more states than Kennedy, but it was a Pyrrhic victory. Kennedy had sewn up the biggest electoral vote states. The margin of difference in the popular vote was less than two-thirds of a percentage point.

But, as the saying goes, “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades.” Despite some Republican protests of voting fraud in Illinois, Nixon went back to California, where he lost the race for governor to Pat Brown in 1962. After that, as if he were finally leaving the national stage, he would famously tell reporters, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”

America got its youngest president, his beautiful young wife, its youngest attorney general in Jack’s brother Robert F. Kennedy (1925–68), and a new royal family whose regal intrigues were masked by sun-flooded pictures of family games of touch football.

AMERICAN VOICES

From JOHN F. KENNEDY’S inaugural address (January 20, 1961):

Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage—and unwilling to witness the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world. . . .

Now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”—a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease and war itself.

. . . And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.

What happened at the Bay of Pigs?

In March 1961, during his first hundred days in office, Kennedy announced a program that perfectly symbolized his inaugural appeal to “ask what you can do for your country.” The Peace Corps would dispatch the energy of American youth and know-how to assist developing nations. Directed by another family courtier, Sargent Shriver, husband of John’s sister Eunice, the Peace Corps was the new generation’s answer to Communism, promoting democracy with education, technology, and idealism instead of the fifties rhetoric of containment. Linked with the Alliance for Progress, a sort of Marshall Plan aimed at Latin America, the Peace Corps was the visible symbol of the vigor that Kennedy wanted to breathe into a stale American system.

What the Peace Corps idealism masked was a continuing policy of obsessive anti-Communism that would lead to one of the great disasters in American foreign policy. This failure would bring America to its most dangerous moment since the war in Korea and, in the view of many historians, help create the mind-set that sucked America into the Vietnamese quicksand. It took its unlikely but historically fitting name from an obscure spot on the Cuban coast, Bahía de Cochinos. The Bay of Pigs.

If the operation had not been so costly and its failed results so dangerously important to future American policy, the Bay of Pigs fiasco might seem comical, a fictional creation of some satirist trying to create an implausible CIA invasion scenario.

The plan behind the Bay of Pigs sounded simple when put to the new president by Allen Dulles (1893–1961), the legendary CIA director and a holdover from the Eisenhower era, when his brother, John Foster Dulles (1888–1959), had been the influential secretary of state. It was Allen Dulles’s CIA operatives who dreamed up the Cuban operation involving a force of highly trained and well-equipped anti-Castro Cuban exiles called La Brigada during the waning days of the Eisenhower administration, part of a larger CIA venture called the Cuba Project aimed at overthrowing and if necessary assassinating Fidel Castro. As James Srodes writes in Dulles, his admiring biography of the CIA director, “Some of the schemes the CIA discussed with President Eisenhower (and later with President Kennedy) bordered on the lunatic. There were suggestions that Castro could be sprayed with hallucinogens, or his cigars laced with botulism, or his shoes dusted with thallium powder in the hope that his beard would fall out.”

Supported by CIA-planted insurgents in Cuba who would blow up bridges and knock out radio stations, the brigade would land on the beaches of Cuba and set off a popular revolt against Fidel Castro, eliminating the man who had become the greatest thorn in the paw of the American lion. The most secret aspect of the plan, as a Senate investigation revealed much later, was the CIA plot to assassinate Castro using Mafia hit men Sam Giancana and John Roselli, who were also sleeping with Judith Campbell, the president’s steady partner. The Mafia had its own reasons for wanting to rid Cuba of Castro. (Giancana and Roselli were both murdered mob style in 1975 and 1976, respectively. Giancana was assassinated before he could testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee; Roselli testified, but his decomposing body was later found floating in an oil drum off Florida.)

For most of the century, since Teddy Roosevelt and company had turned Cuba into an American fiefdom in the Caribbean after the Spanish-American War, the island’s economy was in nearly total American control. Almost all the sugar, mining, cattle, and oil wealth of Cuba was in American hands. The Spanish-American War had also given the United States a huge naval base at Guantanamo. But American gangsters had a rich share, too. While American businessmen controlled the Cuban economy, the casinos and hotels of Havana, a hot spot in the Caribbean, were controlled by the Mafia from New Orleans and Las Vegas.

All that had come to an end in 1958, when Fidel Castro and Che Guevara marched out of the hills with a tiny army and sent dictator Fulgencio Batista into exile. At first, Castro got good press notices in the United States and made a goodwill visit to Washington, professing that he was no Communist. But that didn’t last long.

Cuban Communism became a campaign issue in 1960 as Nixon and Kennedy tried to outdo each other on the Castro issue. As they campaigned, the plans for La Brigada’s invasion were being hatched by the CIA, a plan that had the enthusiastic encouragement of Vice President Richard Nixon and the nominal approval of Eisenhower. When Kennedy arrived in office, the plans only awaited the presidential okay. Briefed by Dulles himself before his inauguration, Kennedy agreed that preparations should continue. After his inauguration, momentum took over.

The CIA planners cockily pointed to their successful 1954 Guatemala coup that had installed a pro-American regime there as proof of their abilities. Before that, in 1953, the CIA had overseen a coup in Iran that installed the shah of Iran, an immediate success with much longer-term disastrous effects. But Cuba, as they were sadly going to learn, was not Guatemala. From the Cuban plan’s outset, the agency men in charge of the invasion (including a fanatical CIA operative named E. Howard Hunt, who also wrote third-rate spy novels and would later be involved in the Watergate debacle) bungled and blustered. Almost every step of the plan was misguided. The CIA overestimated themselves, underestimated Castro and the popular support he enjoyed, relied on sketchy or nonexistent information, made erroneous assumptions, and misrepresented the plot to the White House.

The secret invasion proved to be one of the worst-kept secrets in America. A number of journalists had uncovered most of the plan, and several editors, including those at the New York Times, were persuaded by the White House to withhold the information. When the curtain finally came down, it was on a tragedy.

On April 17, 1961, some 1,400 Cubans, poorly trained, under-
equipped, and uninformed of their destination, were set down on the beach at the Bay of Pigs. Aerial photos of the beaches were misinterpreted by CIA experts, and Cuban claims that there were dangerous coral reefs that would prevent boats from landing were ignored by invasion planners, who put American technology above the Cubans’ firsthand knowledge. CIA information showing the target beaches to be unpopulated was years out of date. The bay happened to be Fidel’s favorite fishing spot, and Castro had begun building a resort there, including a seaside cabin for himself.

The invasion actually began two days earlier with an air strike against Cuban airfields, meant to destroy Castro’s airpower. It failed to do that, and instead put Castro on the alert. It also prompted a crackdown on many suspected anti-Castro Cubans who might have been part of the anticipated popular uprising on which the agency was counting. Assuming the success of the air strike without bothering to confirm it, the agency didn’t know Castro had a number of planes still operable, including two jet trainers capable of destroying the lumbering old bombers the CIA had provided to the invaders. But these planes wouldn’t have counted for much if the air “umbrella” that the CIA had promised to La Brigada had materialized. President Kennedy’s decision to keep all American personnel out of the invasion squashed that, and Castro’s fliers had a field day strafing and bombing the invasion “fleet.” The CIA-leased “navy” that was to deliver the invasion force and its supplies turned out to be five leaky, listing ships, two of which were quickly sunk by Castro’s small air force, with most of the invasion’s supplies aboard.

Cuban air superiority was responsible for only part of the devastation. Castro was able to pour thousands of troops into the area. Even though many of them were untried cadets or untrained militia, they were highly motivated, well-equipped troops supported by tanks and heavy artillery. While the invasion force fought bravely, exacting heavy casualties on Castro’s troops, they lacked ammunition and, most important, the air support promised by the CIA. Eventually they were pinned down on the beaches, while American Navy fliers, the numbers on their planes obscured, could only sit and wonder why they had to watch their Cuban allies being cut to pieces. U.S. ships, their identifying numbers also pointlessly obscured, lay near the invasion beach, also handcuffed. Frustrated naval commanders bitterly resented their orders not to fire. In Washington, Kennedy feared that any direct U.S. combat involvement might send the Russians into West Berlin, precipitating World War III.

The sad toll was 114 Cuban invaders and many more defenders killed in the fighting; 1,189 others from La Brigada were captured and held prisoner until they were ransomed from Cuba by Robert Kennedy for food and medical supplies. Four American fliers, members of the Alabama Air National Guard in CIA employ, also died in the invasion, but the American government never acknowledged their existence or their connection to the operation.

What was the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Those were the immediate losses. The long-term damage was more costly. American prestige and the goodwill Kennedy had fostered around the world dissipated overnight. Adlai Stevenson, the former presidential contender serving as the U.S. representative to the United Nations, was shamed by having to lie to the General Assembly about the operation because he was misled by the White House. In Moscow, Kennedy was perceived as a weakling. Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971) immediately saw the Bay of Pigs defeat as the opening to start arming Cuba more heavily, precipitating the missile crisis of October 1962.

When American spy flights produced evidence of Soviet missile sites in Cuba, America and the Soviet Union were brought to the brink of war. For thirteen tense days (recently dramatized in a film of that title that conveys much of the drama of the situation, if not all the facts), the United States and the Soviet Union stood toe to toe as Kennedy, forced to prove himself after the Bay of Pigs, demanded that the missile sites be dismantled and removed from Cuba. To back up his ultimatum, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade to “quarantine” Cuba, and readied a full-scale American invasion of the island. With Soviet ships steaming toward the island, Soviet premier Khrushchev warned that his country would not accept the quarantine. People around the world nervously awaited a confrontation. Through back channels a secret deal was struck that the Soviets would dismantle the missiles in exchange for a promise not to invade Cuba. On Sunday, October 28, Radio Moscow announced that the arms would be crated and returned to Moscow. Nuclear disaster was averted, temporarily.

The damage done to U.S. credibility by the Bay of Pigs fiasco had seemingly been undone. But the lesson of the foolishness of committing American military support to anti-Communism hadn’t really sunk in. Kennedy was still willing to make an anti-Communist stand in the world. The next scene would be as distant from America as Cuba was close, a small corner of Asia called Vietnam.

(Recently released documents also reveal that during the Missile Crisis and his entire presidency, JFK suffered from more ailments, was in much greater pain, and was taking many more medications than the press, public, or family members and close aides knew. Although his back problem was well known, Kennedy also suffered from Addison’s disease, a life-threatening lack of adrenal function, along with digestive problems and other ailments. Taking as many as eight medications a day, Kennedy used painkillers such as codeine, Demerol, and methadone; anti-anxiety agents such as librium; Ritalin and other stimulants; sleeping pills; and hormones to keep him alive. For all his intense suffering, there is no suggestion that these ailments or the medications ever incapacitated President Kennedy. On the other hand, it seems unlikely that any presidential candidate who revealed this array of medical problems could be elected.)

AMERICAN VOICES

RACHEL CARSON (1907–64), from Silent Spring (1962):

Over increasingly large areas of the United States, spring now comes unheralded by the return of the birds, and the early mornings are strangely silent where once they were filled with the beauty of bird song.

As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life.

In Silent Spring, biologist-writer Rachel Louise Carson warned of the dangers of the indiscriminate and persistent use of pesticides such as DDT. The book helped launch the United States environmental protection movement.

What was The Feminine Mystique?

Every so often a book comes along that really rattles America’s cage. Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1850. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in 1906. In the 1940s and 1950s, John Hersey’s Hiroshima and the Kinsey studies, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. Silent Spring in 1962. All these books delivered karate chops to the American perception of reality.

In 1963, it was a book that introduced America to what the author called “the problem without a name.” Betty Friedan (1921–2006), a summa cum laude Smith graduate and freelance writer who was living out the fifties suburban dream of house, husband, and family, dubbed this malady “the feminine mystique.”

The book reached millions of readers. Suddenly, in garden clubs, coffee klatches, and college sorority houses, talk turned away from man catching, mascara, and muffin recipes. Women were instead discussing the fact that society’s institutions—government, mass media and advertising, medicine and psychiatry, education and organized religion—were systematically barring them from becoming anything more than housewives and mothers.

Friedan’s book helped jump-start a stalled women’s rights movement. Lacking a motivating central cause and aggressive leadership since passage of the Nineteenth Amendment after World War I (see p. 334), organized feminism in the United States was practically nonexistent. In spite of forces that brought millions of women into the workforce—like the wartime factory jobs that made Rosie the Riveter an American heroine—women were expected to return to the kitchens after the menfolk came home from defending democracy. Although individuals like Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, Margaret Sanger, and Frances Perkins—the first woman cabinet officer and a key player in FDR’s New Deal—were proven achievers, most women were expected to docilely accept the task of managing house and family, or to hold a proper “woman’s job” like teaching, secretarial work, or, for the poorer classes, factory labor. In all these jobs, women were invisible. Once married, of course, the “ideal woman” stopped working. The idea of career as fulfillment was dismissed as nonsense, and that minority of pioneer “career women” was viewed practically as a class of social deviants. Overnight, Friedan made women question those assumptions.

The Feminine Mystique had its shortcomings. It was essentially about a white, middle-class phenomenon. It failed to explore the problems of working-class, poor, and minority women, whose worries ran far deeper than personal discontent. It also ignored the fact that a substantial portion of American women were satisfied in the role that Friedan had indicted.

But the book was like shock treatment. It galvanized American women into action at the same moment that an increasingly aggressive civil rights movement was moving to the forefront of American consciousness. And it came just as the government was taking its first awkward steps toward addressing the issue of inequality of the sexes. In one of his first acts, President Kennedy had formed a Commission on the Status of Women, chaired by the extraordinary Eleanor Roosevelt, then in her seventies. In 1964, a more substantial boost came when women actually received federal protection from discrimination because the legislative tactics of one crusty conservative congressman backfired.

Howard W. Smith of Virginia, an eighty-one-year-old vestige of the Old South, was looking for ways to shoot down the 1964 Civil Rights Act with “killer amendments.” To the laughter of his House colleagues, Smith added “sex” to the list of “race, color, religion or national origin,” the categories that the bill had been designed to protect. Assuming that nobody would vote to protect equality of the sexes, Smith was twice struck by lightning. The bill not only passed, but now protected women as well as blacks. Women were soon bringing appeals to the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, even though its director complained that the bill was “conceived out of wedlock” and wasn’t meant to prevent sex discrimination. That complaint came too late. Women filed more discrimination complaints with the EEOC than did any other single group. It was the foot in the door, and a new generation of activist women was ready to push the door harder.

In 1966, some 300 charter members formed the National Organization for Women (NOW) with Friedan as its first president. In the years ahead, NOW spearheaded a movement that would splinter and change as younger women grew more angry and defiant, radicalized by the same forces that were altering the civil rights and antiwar movements. But it is safe to say that no movement so fundamentally altered America’s social makeup as the feminist movement of the past three decades. The workplace. Marriage and family life. The way we have babies—or choose not to have them. Few corners of American life were left untouched by the basic shifts in attitude that feminism created.

Of course, the process is far from complete. The federal government, from the White House to Congress and the judiciary, is still largely male, middle-aged, white, and wealthy. The upper crust of American corporate management remains male-dominated. A considerable gap in salaries still exists between men and women. And it is still presumed impossible or at least unlikely for a woman to be elected president in this country, even though forceful leaders like Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, and Corazón Aquino of the Philippines have shown they are capable of acting as effectively, and even as ruthlessly, as any man.

Forty years after Friedan gave a name to the problem, the greatest irony may be the new yearning created for a generation of younger women brought up to put careers first and families second. In a strange twist on the question plaguing Friedan’s generation, several researchers have written books that examine the deep dissatisfaction that many successful women in their thirties and forties feel as the new century begins. Both unmarried, childless women and career-bound mothers are looking at their designer business suits, corporate perks, and power offices with a new sense of unfulfilled promise. It is now their turn to wonder about that silent question, “Is this all?”

AMERICAN VOICES

From MARTIN LUTHER KING’S “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C. (August 1963):

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-
owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

King’s most memorable speech was the culmination of the massive march on Washington, D.C., that drew a quarter of a million blacks and whites to the capital. In his biography of King, Bearing the Cross, author David J. Garrow calls the speech the “clarion call that conveyed the moral power of the movement’s cause to the millions who had watched the live national network coverage. Now, more than ever before . . . white America was confronted with the undeniable justice of blacks’ demands.” The march was followed by passage of the Civil Rights Act, signed into law by Lyndon Johnson in June 1964, and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Dr. King in October 1964.

AMERICAN VOICES

MALCOLM X, following the March on Washington:

Not long ago, the black man in America was fed a dose of another form of the weakening, lulling, and deluding effects of so-called “integration.”

It was that “Farce on Washington,” I call it. . . .

Yes, I was there. I observed that circus. Who ever heard of angry revolutionists all harmonizing “We Shall Overcome . . . Someday . . .” while tripping and swaying along arm-in-arm with the very people they were supposed to be angrily revolting against? Who ever heard of angry revolutionists swinging their bare feet together with their oppressor in lily-pad park pools, with gospels and guitars and “I Have A Dream” speeches?

If Martin Luther King Jr. gave J. Edgar Hoover bad dreams, Malcolm X (1925–65) was his worst nightmare. Born Malcolm Little, in Omaha, Nebraska, Malcolm had escaped a fire set by white men when he was four years old. His father was a follower of Marcus Garvey, a black separatist leader who worked to establish close political and economic ties to Africa. In 1931, Malcolm’s father was found dead after being run over by a streetcar. Malcolm believed white racists were responsible for his father’s death. When Malcolm was twelve years old, his mother was committed to a mental hospital, and he spent the rest of his childhood in foster homes.

In 1941, Malcolm moved to Boston and fell into street crime. He was arrested for burglary and sent to prison in 1946. While in prison, he joined the Nation of Islam, commonly called the Black Muslims, and took the name Malcolm X, renouncing his “slave name.” He quickly rose as a charismatic and forceful spokesman for the movement and became the Nation of Islam’s most effective minister. But in 1964, Malcolm X broke with the Nation of Islam. Soon afterward, he made a pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca and underwent a radical change. In the form of Islam he discovered in Mecca, Malcolm X had a new vision of racial harmony, as he made clear in a letter to his followers that appeared in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (written with Alex Haley). “You may be shocked by these words coming from me,” he wrote. “But on the pilgrimage, what I have seen, and experienced, has forced me to re-arrange much of my thought-patterns previously held, and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions.”

Adopting the Muslim name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, he returned to the United States to form the Organization for Afro-American Unity, and was clearly tilting toward a more conciliatory racial message. On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was fatally shot while giving a speech in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted of the crime. But, as with other assassinations during that era, the truth behind Malcolm’s death remained buried in suspicious circumstances.

Who was right? The Warren Commission or Oliver Stone?

Americans probe this question as if we are searching for a missing tooth. We keep running our tongue over the empty space.

This question has inspired a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists and literally thousands of books. In the view of an American majority, none of them has yet to answer the question to full and verifiable satisfaction. Some innate paranoia in the American makeup finds it far more appealing to believe that Kennedy’s death was the result of some intricately constructed byzantine conspiracy. The list of possible suspects reads like an old-fashioned Chinese restaurant menu. Just choose one from Column A and one from Column B. The choices include a smorgasbord of unsavory characters with the motive and ability to kill Kennedy: teamsters and gangsters; Cubans, both pro- and anti-Castro; white supremacists; CIA renegades; KGB moles; and, of course, lone assassins. Then Oliver Stone’s movie JFK (1991) created an entire new generation of doubters, who also grew up with The X-Files, a show that elevated antigovernment conspiracy paranoia to televised art. A younger generation, completely distrustful of the “official explanation,” began to cite Stone’s film as source material in their term papers.

The conspiracy theories linger because many of the basic facts of the assassination remain shrouded in controversy and mythology. What is true is that JFK went to Texas in the fall of 1963 to shore up southern political support for his upcoming 1964 reelection bid. The Texas trip began well in San Antonio and Houston, where the president and the first lady were met by enthusiastic crowds. Everyone agreed that Dallas would be the tough town politically, and several advisers told Kennedy not to go. A few months before, the good folks of Dallas had spat on Adlai Stevenson, JFK’s UN ambassador. But even in Dallas on November 22, things went better than expected, and crowds cheered the passing motorcade. In the fateful limousine, Texas governor John Connally’s wife leaned over and told the president, “Well, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.”

Then the car made its turn in front of the Texas School Book Depository, and three shots rang out. Kennedy and Governor Connally were hit. The limousine carrying them sped off to the hospital. The president died, and Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–73) took the oath of office aboard Air Force One as a shocked and bloodied Jackie Kennedy looked on. Within hours, following the murder of a Dallas policeman, Lee Harvey Oswald was in custody and under interrogation. But two days later, as Oswald was being moved to a safer jail, Jack Ruby, owner of a Dallas strip joint, jumped from the crowd of policemen and shot Oswald dead in full view of a disbelieving national television audience.

This is where controversy takes over. A grieving, stunned nation couldn’t cope with these events. Rumors and speculation began to fly as the country learned of the strange life of Lee Harvey Oswald—that he was an ex-marine who had defected to Russia and come back with a Russian wife; that he was a Marxist and a Castro admirer; that he had recently been to the Cuban embassy in Mexico City.

Responding to these rumors, which were growing to include the suggestion that Lyndon Johnson himself was part of the conspiracy, LBJ decided to appoint a commission to investigate the assassination and to determine whether any conspiracy existed. After his first week in office, Johnson asked Chief Justice Earl Warren to head the investigation. Warren reluctantly accepted the job when Johnson said that he feared nuclear war might result if the Cubans or Soviets proved to be behind the assassination.

The commission was appointed on November 29, 1963. Besides Chief Justice Earl Warren, the other members were Senator Richard B. Russell, Democrat of Georgia; Senator John S. Cooper, Republican of Kentucky; Representative T. Hale Boggs, Democrat of Louisiana; Representative Gerald R. Ford, Republican of Michigan; Allen W. Dulles, former director of the CIA; and John J. McCloy, former adviser to President Kennedy. During ten months, the commission took testimony from 552 witnesses.

The Warren Report was a summary of events related to the assassination issued in September 1964. It concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, shot Kennedy from a window on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository building. The report also said that Jack Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald on November 24, 1963. The report found no evidence of a conspiracy involving Oswald and Ruby. It criticized the U.S. Secret Service and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and it asked for better measures in the future to protect the president.

But almost immediately after the Warren Report was issued, other investigations criticized the report’s findings. In the decades since the Warren Commission tried to calm a very skittish nation, those findings are still viewed skeptically by a majority of the American public. The commission’s detective work left much to be desired, and in later years, major new revelations followed. During the late 1970s, a special committee of the U.S. House of Representatives reexamined the evidence. It concluded that Kennedy “was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.” In particular, shocking facts were produced by the investigations into the activities of the CIA and the FBI during the 1970s. Among other startling discoveries, these investigations by a presidential commission and Congress uncovered the CIA’s plans for assassinating Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders; that Kennedy’s mistress Judith Campbell was also involved with the two gangsters hired by the CIA to kill Castro; and that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had ordered a cover-up of bureau failures in the Oswald investigation in an effort to protect the bureau’s integrity and public image.

Were there only three shots fired by someone in the Texas School Book Depository? Was Oswald the gunman who fired them? Or were other shots fired from the grassy knoll overlooking the route of the motorcade? Was Jack Ruby, who was both connected to the Dallas underworld and a friend of Dallas policemen, simply acting, as he said, to spare Mrs. Kennedy the pain of returning to Dallas to testify at a murder trial? Who were the two “Latins” that a New Orleans prostitute said she encountered on their way to Dallas a few days before the murder? Did “hundreds of witnesses” to the incident and investigation die suspiciously, as several conspiracy theorists claim?

More than 2,000 books have been written about the case since JFK’s death, from attorney Mark Lane’s Rush to Judgment and Edward Jay Epstein’s Inquest to David Lifton’s Best Evidence and David Scheim’s Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy. All have relied on serious flaws in the Warren investigation as well as material the Warren Commission never saw to support a variety of possible conspiracies. All have been greeted by a public feeding frenzy.

Far less sensational is Final Disclosure, a 1989 book that refutes all these theories, written by David W. Belin, the counsel to the Warren Commission and executive director of the Rockefeller Commission investigating abuses by the CIA. Obviously Belin, as a key staff member of the Warren Commission, had a personal interest to protect. But his book is well reasoned and amply supported by evidence. Examining the Warren Commission’s total evidence, the subsequent CIA and FBI revelations, and the analysis of a controversial audio tape that supposedly proved the existence of a fourth shot and a second gunman, Belin deflated the most serious charges brought by the conspiracists, often by showing they have made highly selective use of evidence and testimony.

Far more exhaustive and comprehensive, and more controversial, than Belin’s book is Case Closed by Gerald Posner. Using new technological resources and sophisticated computer studies, Posner reached an unambiguous and rather unassailable conclusion: Lee Harvey Oswald indeed acted alone, as did Jack Ruby. Writes Posner, “There is more than enough evidence available on the record to draw conclusions about what happened in the JFK assassination. But apparently most Americans, despite the strength of the evidence, do not want to accept the notion that random acts of violence can change the course of history and that Lee Harvey Oswald could affect our lives in a way over which we have no control. It is unsettling to think that a sociopathic twenty-four-year-old loser in life, armed with a $12 rifle and consumed by his own warped motivation, ended Camelot. But for readers willing to approach this subject with an open mind, it is the only rational judgment.”

Even so, that missing-tooth feeling remains for many Americans. While the arguments are convincing that Oswald and then Ruby acted alone, it seems that few people were willing to accept that conclusion. Their skepticism was one more indication of the deep-seated mistrust and lack of faith Americans had come to have in their government and political leadership.

Must Read: Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK by Gerald Posner.

AMERICAN VOICES

From LYNDON JOHNSON’S
“Great Society” speech (May 1964):

The Great Society rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.

The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.

It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what it adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.

In this speech, delivered during his election campaign against Republican Barry Goldwater, Johnson laid out the foundation for the ambitious domestic social program he carried out after his landslide victory over the conservative senator from Arizona. Johnson proposed attacking racial injustice through economic and educational reforms and government programs aimed at ending the cycle of poverty. The legislative record he then compiled was impressive, although social historians argue over its ultimate effectiveness. The Office of Economic Opportunity was created. Kennedy’s proposed civil rights bill was passed, followed by a Voting Rights Act and the establishments of Project Head Start, the Job Corps, and Medicaid and Medicare. But while Johnson was carrying out the most ambitious social revolution since FDR’s New Deal, he was also leading the country deeper and deeper into Vietnam. And that futile and disastrous path, more than any of his domestic initiatives, would mark Johnson’s place in history.

Did Mississippi Burning really happen?

If Hollywood gets its way, the civil rights movement was saved when Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe rolled into town like two gunslinging Western marshals. In this revisionist cinematic version of history, two FBI men bring truth and vigilante justice to the nasty Ku Klux Klan while a bunch of bewildered Negroes meekly stand by, shuffling and avoiding trouble.

The 1989 film Mississippi Burning was an emotional roller coaster. It was difficult to watch without being moved, breaking into a sweat, and finally cheering when the forces of good terrorized the redneck Klansmen into telling where the bodies of three murdered civil rights workers were buried. The movie gave audiences the feeling of seeing history unfold. But in the grand tradition of American filmmaking, this version of events had as much to do with reality as did D. W. Griffith’s racist “classic,” Birth of a Nation.

The movie opens with the backroads murder of three young civil rights activists in the summer of 1964. That much is true. Working to register black voters, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, two whites from the North, and James Chaney, a black southerner, disappeared after leaving police custody in Philadelphia, Mississippi. In the film, two FBI agents arrive to investigate, but get nowhere as local rednecks stonewall the FBI and blacks are too fearful to act. The murderers are not exposed until Agent Anderson (Gene Hackman), a former southern sheriff who has joined the FBI, begins a campaign of illegal tactics to terrorize the locals into revealing where the bodies are buried and who is responsible.

It is a brilliantly made, plainly manipulative film that hits all the right emotional notes: white liberal guilt over the treatment of blacks; disgust at the white-trash racism of the locals; excitement at Hackman’s Rambo-style tactics; and, finally, vindication in the murderers’ convictions.

The problem is that besides the murders, few of the events depicted happened that way. Pressed by Attorney General Robert Kennedy, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover sent a large contingent of agents to Mississippi, but they learned nothing. The case was broken only when Klan informers were offered a $30,000 bribe and the bodies of the three men were found in a nearby dam site. Twenty-one men were named in the indictment, including the local police chief and his deputy. But local courts later dismissed the confessions of the two Klansmen as hearsay. The Justice Department persisted by bringing conspiracy charges against eighteen of the men. Tried before a judge who had once compared blacks to chimpanzees, seven of the accused were nonetheless convicted and sentenced to jail terms ranging from three to ten years.

Although J. Edgar Hoover put on a good public show of anti-Klan FBI work, it masked his real obsession at the time. To the director, protecting civil rights workers was a waste of his bureau’s time. Although the film depicts a black agent, the only blacks employed by the bureau during Hoover’s tenure as head were his chauffeurs. The FBI was far more interested in trying to prove that Martin Luther King was a Communist and that the civil rights movement was an organized Communist front. Part of this effort was the high-level attempt to eavesdrop on King’s private life, an effort that did prove that the civil rights leader had his share of white female admirers willing to contribute more than just money to the cause. Hoover’s hatred of King boiled over at one point when he called King “the most notorious liar” in the country. Another part of this effort involved sending King a threatening note suggesting he commit suicide.

What was the Tonkin Resolution?

When is a war not a war? When the president decides it isn’t, and Congress goes along.

America was already more than ten years into its Vietnam commitment when Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy’s best and brightest holdovers decided to find a new version of Pearl Harbor. An incident was needed to pull American firepower into the war with at least a glimmer of legitimacy. It came in August 1964 with a brief encounter in the Gulf of Tonkin, the waters off the coast of North Vietnam.

In the civil war that was raging between North and South since the French withdrawal from Indochina and the partition of Vietnam in 1954, the United States had committed money, material, advice, and, by the end of 1963, some 15,000 military advisers in support of the anti-Communist Saigon government. The American CIA was also in the thick of things, having helped foster the coup that toppled Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963 and then acting surprised when Diem was executed by the army officers who overthrew him.

Among the other “advice” the United States provided to its South Vietnamese allies was to teach them commando tactics. In 1964, CIA-trained guerrillas from the South began to attack the North in covert acts of sabotage. Code named Plan 34-A, these commando raids failed to undermine North Vietnam’s military strength, so the mode of attack was shifted to hit-and-run operations by small torpedo boats. To support these assaults, the U.S. Navy posted warships in the Gulf of Tonkin, loaded with electronic eavesdropping equipment enabling them to monitor North Vietnamese military operations and provide intelligence to the South Vietnamese commandos.

Coming as it did in the midst of LBJ’s 1964 campaign against hawkish Republican Barry Goldwater, President Johnson felt the incident called for a tough response. Johnson had the Navy send the Maddox and a second destroyer, the Turner Joy, back into the Gulf of Tonkin. A radar man on the Turner Joy saw some blips, and that boat opened fire. On the Maddox, there were also reports of incoming torpedoes, and the Maddox began to fire. There was never any confirmation that either ship had actually been attacked. Later, the radar blips would be attributed to weather conditions and jittery nerves among the crew.

According to Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam: A History, “Even Johnson privately expressed doubts only a few days after the second attack supposedly took place, confiding to an aide, ‘Hell, those dumb stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish.’”

But that didn’t stop Lyndon Johnson. Without waiting for a review of the situation, he ordered an air strike against North Vietnam in “retaliation” for the “attacks” on the U.S. ships. American jets flew more than sixty sorties against targets in North Vietnam. One bitter result of these air raids was the capture of downed pilot Everett Alvarez Jr., the first American POW of the Vietnam War. He would remain in Hanoi prisons for eight years.

President Johnson followed up the air strike by calling for passage of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. This proposal gave the president the authority to “take all necessary measures” to repel attacks against U.S. forces and to “prevent further aggression.” The resolution not only gave Johnson the powers he needed to increase American commitment to Vietnam, but allowed him to blunt Goldwater’s accusations that Johnson was “timid before Communism.” The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed the House unanimously after only forty minutes of debate. In the Senate, there were only two voices in opposition. What Congress did not know was that the resolution had been drafted several months before the Tonkin incident took place.

Congress, which alone possesses the constitutional authority to declare war, had handed that power over to a man who was not a bit reluctant to use it. One of the senators who voted against the Tonkin Resolution, Oregon’s Wayne Morse, later said, “I believe that history will record that we have made a great mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution.” After the vote, Walt Rostow, an adviser to Lyndon Johnson, remarked, “We don’t know what happened, but it had the desired result.”

MILESTONES IN THE VIETNAM WAR

While American involvement in Vietnam and much of Southeast Asia came after the Second World War, the roots of Western involvement in the region date to the nineteenth-century colonial era when France took control of parts of the Vietnamese Empire in 1862. During World War II, Japan fought the French in Indochina. It was during that time that Ho Chi Minh (born 1890 in central Vietnam) emerged to create the Vietminh to battle both France and Japan. In 1918, Ho had left Vietnam for the West, and had tried to influence President Wilson to allow Vietnam self-determination at the Versailles peace talks after World War I. When that failed, he joined the French Communist Party and went to Moscow, returning in secret to Vietnam in 1941. In 1945, the Japanese seized control of Indochina, allowing the emperor to declare his independence from France.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, Ho declared the country independent as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, encompassing the whole country. He dissolved the Communist Party to form a coalition government with other nationalists, and in 1946, France recognized the DRV as a free state within the French Union. But later that year, the French and Vietnamese would begin to fight the French-Indochina War.

1950

While U.S. troops fight in Korea, President Truman grants military aid to France for its war against Communist rebels in Indochina. The United States will ultimately pay the lion’s share—75 to 80 percent—of France’s military costs in the war against the Ho Chi Minh–led Vietminh rebels.

1954

Although the use of an atomic bomb is actively considered, President Eisenhower decides against providing direct military support to the French in their stand at their base at Dienbienphu. Eisenhower instead favors continued aid for France in Indochina, and tells the press in April that Southeast Asia may otherwise fall to Communism. Says Eisenhower, if you “have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.”

May The French stronghold at Dienbienphu is overrun by Vietnamese forces under General Giap. The French withdraw from Indochina, and Vietnam is partitioned at a conference in Geneva, creating the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North and the Republic of South Vietnam with its capital at Saigon. A political settlement to the country’s division is left to a future election that will never take place. The United States continues its direct involvement in Vietnam by sending $100 million in aid to the anti-Communist Saigon government led by Prime Minister Ngo Dinh Diem.

1955

Direct aid and military training are provided to the Saigon government. Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos receive more than $200 million in U.S. aid this year.

October The Republic of Vietnam is proclaimed by Prime Minister Diem following a rigged election organized by the United States. Diem had rejected a unification election with the North.

1959

July 8 Two American soldiers, Major Dale Buis and Master Sergeant Chester Ovnard, are killed by Vietcong at Bienhoa. They are the first Americans to die in Vietnam during this era. By year’s end, there are some 760 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam.

1960

At the request of the Diem government, the number of the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group is increased to 685.

November A military coup against Diem is foiled. The U.S. government advises Diem to implement radical reforms to eliminate corruption.

December In the North, the Hanoi government announces a plan calling for reunification and overthrow of the Diem government. The National Liberation Front of South Vietnam is formed, and its guerrillas will be known as the Vietcong.

1961

After touring Vietnam, President Kennedy’s advisers, Walt Rostow and General Maxwell Taylor, recommend sending 8,000 U.S. combat troops there. Instead, President Kennedy chooses to send more equipment and advisers. By year’s end, there are 3,205 U.S. military personnel in Vietnam.

1962

February 6 The American Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) is formed, based in Saigon.

May President Kennedy sends 5,000 marines and fifty jets to Thailand to counter Communist expansion in Laos. The number of American advisers is increased to nearly 12,000.

1963

January The Army of the Republic of South Vietnam suffers a major defeat against a much smaller Vietcong force at the Battle of Ap Bac. The performance of the Vietnamese troops and commanders, under American guidance, is disastrous.

May–August Antigovernment demonstrations by Buddhist monks provoke violent reprisals. In protest, numerous monks commit suicide by setting themselves afire.

November General Duong Van Minh and other South Vietnamese officers stage a coup and overthrow the Diem government with U.S. knowledge and CIA assistance. Diem and his brother are murdered. Three weeks later, President Kennedy is assassinated.

December By the end of the year, President Johnson has increased the number of American advisers to 16,300, and the United States has sent $500 million to South Vietnam in this year alone. The CIA begins training South Vietnamese guerrillas as part of an ambitious covert sabotage operation against the North, under American direction.

1964

January Lieutenant General William Westmoreland (1914–2005) is appointed deputy commander of Military Assistance Command Vietnam.

January 30 General Nguyen Khanh seizes power in Saigon; General Minh is retained as a figurehead chief of state.

June Westmoreland is promoted to commander of MACV.

August 2 While conducting electronic surveillance ten miles off North Vietnam, in the Gulf of Tonkin, the American destroyer Maddox is pursued by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats. As the patrol boats close in, the Maddox opens fire and the patrol boats respond with torpedoes, which miss. The destroyer calls for air support from the nearby carrier Ticonderoga, and three United States fighter planes attack the boats. The Maddox sinks one patrol boat, cripples the other two, and withdraws. Two days later, the Maddox and a second destroyer, the Turner Joy, are ordered back to Tonkin to “reassert freedom of international waters.”

August 4 President Johnson reports to congressional leaders that a second attack has been made on the Maddox, although this attack was never confirmed and was later shown not to have taken place.

August 5 U.S. planes bomb North Vietnam in retaliation for the “attacks” on the U.S. ships. The American bombing mission is called “limited in scale,” but more than sixty sorties are flown, destroying oil depots and patrol boats. Two American planes are shot down and Everett Alvarez is captured, the first American prisoner of war in Vietnam. He is held for more than eight years.

August 7 By a unanimous vote in the House, and with only two dissenting votes in the Senate, Congress passes the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, giving President Johnson powers to “take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression.” Johnson later says the resolution was “like grandma’s nightshirt—it covered everything.”

August 26 President Johnson is nominated at the Democratic National Convention and chooses Hubert Humphrey as his running mate. Pledging before the election to “seek no wider war,” Johnson defeats Republican candidate Barry Goldwater in a landslide, with a plurality of 15.5 million votes.

September UN Secretary General U Thant proposes mediating talks with North Vietnam to avert a war. Withholding some information from Johnson, American officials reject these negotiations.

October 30 In a Vietcong attack on the U.S. airbase at Bien Hoa, six B-57 bombers are destroyed and five Americans are killed.

December 31 The number of American military advisers rises to 23,300.

1965

February 7 Following a Vietcong attack on a U.S. base at Pleiku in which eight Americans are killed, President Johnson orders air raids against North Vietnam and the beginning of a new round of escalation in the war, in what is named Operation Flaming Dart. Communist guerrillas then attack another American base, and Flaming Dart II is ordered in retaliation.

February 19 A series of competing coups result in Nguyen Cao Ky, an air force general, taking control of South Vietnam.

March 2 The United States begins Operation Rolling Thunder, the sustained bombing of North Vietnam. It will continue until October 31, 1968.

March 8 Two battalions of American marines land and are assigned to protect the airbase at Danang. They are the first American combat troops in Vietnam.

April 7 President Johnson calls for talks with Hanoi to end the war. The plan is rejected by Hanoi, which says any settlement must be based on its Vietcong program.

April 15 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) sponsors a large antiwar rally in Washington.

June 11 Fellow generals choose Nguyen Cao Ky, a flamboyant young officer, as prime minister of a South Vietnamese military regime.

November 14–17 In the first major conventional clash of the war, U.S. forces defeat North Vietnamese units in the Ia Drang Valley.

December 25 President Johnson suspends bombing in an attempt to get the North to negotiate. By year’s end, American troop strength is nearly 200,000, combat losses total 636 Americans killed, and at home, draft quotas have been doubled.

AMERICAN VOICES

PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON, to his secretary of defense, Robert S. McNamara (June 1965), quoted in Reaching for Glory: Lyndon Johnson’s Secret White House Tapes, 1964–1965:

It’s going to be difficult for us to very long prosecute effectively a war that far away from home with the divisions we have here—and particularly the potential divisions. I’m very depressed about it. Because I see no program from either Defense or State that gives me much hope of doing anything, except just praying and gasping to hold on during monsoon and hope they’ll quit. I don’t believe they’re ever going to quit. And I don’t see . . . that we have any . . . plan for a victory—militarily or diplomatically.

1966

January 31 The bombing of the North is resumed after failure of the “peace offensive” that was designed to promote negotiations.

March 10 In Hue and Danang, Buddhist monks demonstrate against the Saigon regime. Both cities are taken over by government troops.

June 29 American planes bomb oil depots near Haiphong and Hanoi, in response to North Vietnamese infiltration into the South to aid the Vietcong.

September 23 The U.S. military command in Vietnam announces that it is using chemical defoliants, Agent Orange among them, to destroy Communist cover.

October 25 A conference between Johnson and heads of six allied nations involved in Vietnam (Australia, the Philippines, Thailand, New Zealand, South Korea, and South Vietnam) issues a peace plan calling for the end of North Vietnamese aggression. By year’s end, American troop strength in Vietnam is nearly 400,000.

1967

January 5 American casualties in Vietnam for 1966 are announced: 5,008 killed and 30,093 wounded. (Totals since 1961 are 6,664 killed, 37,738 wounded.)

January 8 Thirty thousand combined American and South Vietnamese troops begin Operation Cedar Falls, an offensive against enemy positions in the Iron Triangle, an area twenty-five miles northwest of Saigon. (Among the U.S. battalion commanders in this operation is General Alexander Haig.)

January 28 The North Vietnamese announce that U.S. bombing must stop before there can be peace talks.

July 7 The Joint Economic Committee of Congress reports that the war effort created “havoc” in the U.S. economy during 1966.

August Testifying before Congress, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara says bombing of North Vietnam is ineffective.

September Major Communist offensives begin. General West-
moreland fortifies Khe Sanh.

October 21 Two days of antiwar protests take place in Washington, and are the subject of Norman Mailer’s book Armies of the Night.

December 8 The wave of antiwar protests becomes more organized and active. In New York, 585 protesters are arrested, including Dr. Benjamin Spock and poet Allen Ginsberg. Spock and four other protesters issue a pamphlet, A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority, later published as a book and used as the basis for Spock’s prosecution by the government. In the following days of antidraft protests, arrests are made in New Haven, Connecticut; Cincinnati; Madison, Wisconsin; and Manchester, New Hampshire. At year’s end, U.S. troop strength stands at nearly half a million.

1968

January 21 The Battle of Khe Sanh. A strategic hamlet that General Westmoreland had heavily fortified and stockpiled with ammunition as a future staging point for attacks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the Communist supply route from the North, Khe Sanh becomes the scene of one of the war’s most controversial sieges. When Vietcong and North Vietnamese regulars begin the siege of American forces at Khe Sanh, it is seen by many Americans, including Westmoreland, President Johnson, and the media as a repeat of the 1954 attack on the French stronghold at Dienbienphu. Westmoreland and Johnson are committed to preventing such a disaster, and Johnson tells one of his senior aides, “I don’t want any damn Dinbinphoo.”

A military catastrophe such as the French suffered is averted as Khe Sanh is heavily reinforced and supported by massive B-52 bombings. But at home, Americans watch the siege unfold like a nightly TV serial. Fought in the midst of the Tet Offensive (see below), the battle for Khe Sanh seems to be one more example of the resolve of the Vietnamese, who ultimately lost some 10,000 to 15,000 men at Khe Sanh against 205 Americans killed. The siege lasts until April. Ironically, the base at Khe Sanh will be abandoned one year later, when a planned strike at the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos is canceled.

January 23 The intelligence vessel USS Pueblo is captured by North Korea.

January 31 The Tet Offensive. Although a brief truce is set to celebrate the Vietnamese lunar New Year holiday, the Vietcong launch a major offensive throughout South Vietnam, and the American embassy in Saigon is attacked. Hanoi had hoped for a general uprising in the South, which does not happen.

Although most of the attacks are eventually repulsed, Tet is seen in the United States as a defeat and a symbol of the Vietcong’s ability to strike at will anywhere in the country. It also damages the optimistic views of the war’s progress that General Westmoreland and other American military leaders have been bringing back to Congress and the American people.

February 25 After twenty-six days of fighting since the Tet Offensive began, the city of Hue is recaptured by American and South Vietnamese forces. Mass graves reveal that an enormous atrocity was committed by the retreating Vietcong and North Vietnamese, who killed thousands of civilians suspected of supporting the Saigon government.

February 29 Defense Secretary Robert McNamara resigns after concluding that the United States cannot win the war. He is replaced by Clark Clifford.

March 12 Senator Eugene McCarthy, an outspoken opponent of the war, nearly defeats President Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic primary, a stunning setback for Johnson as the incumbent president.

March 16 Following McCarthy’s near upset of Johnson, Senator Robert F. Kennedy announces that he will campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination.

This is also the date of the massacre of villagers at My Lai (see p. 491).

March 31 In an extraordinary television address, President Johnson announces a partial bombing halt, offers peace talks, and then stuns the nation by saying he will not run again.

April 4 Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee.

April 23 At New York’s Columbia University, members of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) seize five buildings in protest of Columbia’s involvement in war-related research.

May 10 Peace talks begin in Paris between the United States and North Vietnam.

June 6 Following his victory in the California primary, Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated by Sirhan B. Sirhan.

June 14 Dr. Benjamin Spock is convicted of conspiracy to aid draft evasion. (The conviction is later overturned.)

August 26 The Democratic National Convention opens in Chicago. In the midst of antiwar protests and violent police response, the Democrats nominate Hubert Humphrey.

October 31 President Johnson orders an end to bombing of the North, in an attempt to break the stalemate at Paris. Progress at Paris will presumably help the chances of the Democratic ticket of Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie.

November 6 In one of the closest presidential elections, the Republican ticket of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew defeats Democrat Hubert Humphrey, with third-party candidate George Wallace drawing more than 9 million votes. At year’s end, American troop strength is at 540,000.

1969

January 25 Paris peace talks are expanded to include the South Vietnamese and Vietcong.

March 18 President Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger order the secret bombing of Communist bases in Cambodia.

May 14 President Nixon calls for the simultaneous withdrawal of American and North Vietnamese forces from the South.

June 8 Nixon announces the withdrawal of 25,000 American troops, the first step in a plan called Vietnamization, the aim of which is to turn the war over to the South Vietnamese.

September 2 Ho Chi Minh, leader of the North since the 1950s, dies in Hanoi at the age of seventy-nine.

September 25 Congressional opposition to the war grows as ten bills designed to remove all American troops from Vietnam are submitted.

October 15 The first of many large, nationwide protests against the war, the so-called Moratorium is designed to expand the peace movement off the campuses and into the cities, drawing broader popular support. Led by Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 250,000 protesters march on Washington.

November 3 Attempting to defuse protest, Nixon makes his “silent majority” speech, claiming that most of the nation supports his efforts to end the war.

November 15 A second Moratorium march on Washington takes place.

November 16 A 1968 massacre of civilians at the Vietnamese hamlet of My Lai is revealed. U.S. Army Lieutenant William L. Calley is tried and convicted for his role in the massacre. The atrocity further discredits the war and adds momentum to the peace movement in America.

December 1 The first draft lottery of the Vietnam era is instituted in an effort to reduce criticism of the draft as unfair. It signals the end of student draft deferments. By the end of the year, American troop strength has been reduced to 475,200.

1970

February 18 Following a long, theatrical trial highlighted by the courtroom antics of defendants Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and others, the Chicago Seven are acquitted on charges of conspiring to incite a riot. They are convicted on lesser charges of conspiracy, which are later overturned.

February 20 National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger begins secret Paris negotiations with North Vietnamese envoy Le Duc Tho.

April 20 Nixon promises to withdraw another 150,000 men from Vietnam by year’s end. The withdrawals are decreasing American casualties.

April 30 Nixon announces that U.S. troops have attacked Communist sanctuaries in Cambodia, following the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk by U.S.-aided Lon Nol.

May 4 As part of the widening campus protests against the war and the decision to send troops to Cambodia, a demonstration is held at Kent State University in Ohio. When national guardsmen open fire on the demonstrators, four students are killed. Ten days later, two more students are killed, at predominantly black Jackson State College in Mississippi.

October 7 Nixon proposes a “standstill cease-fire,” and reissues a proposal for mutual withdrawal the next day.

November 23 A raid into North Vietnam, in an attempt to rescue American POWs, comes up empty-handed. Heavy bombing of the North continues.

At year’s end, U.S. troop strength has been reduced to 334,600.

1971

January–February The South Vietnamese, with American support, begin attacks on Vietcong supply lines in Laos. The operation is easily defeated by Communist troops.

March 29 An army court-martial finds William Calley guilty of premeditated murder at the village of My Lai. After three days in the stockade, Calley is released to “house arrest” by President Nixon.

June 13 The New York Times begins publication of the Pentagon Papers, the top-secret history of American involvement in Vietnam, which has been turned over by Pentagon employee Daniel Ellsberg to Times reporter Neil Sheehan. Nixon tries to stop publication of the documents, which reveal much of the duplicity within the government surrounding Vietnam. But on June 30, the Supreme Court rules that the Times and the Washington Post may resume publication. On Nixon’s orders to investigate Ellsberg, a group is set up known as the “plumbers,” whose purpose is to try to stop “leaks.” The “plumbers” soon expand their activities to a campaign aimed at a Nixon “enemies list.” Also on their agenda is a break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C.

November 12 President Nixon announces the withdrawal of 45,000 more men, leaving an American force of 156,800 in Vietnam.

1972

January 13 President Nixon announces withdrawal of an additional 70,000 troops.

January 25 President Nixon reveals that Henry Kissinger has been in secret negotiations with the North Vietnamese, and makes public an eight-point peace proposal calling for a cease-fire and release of all U.S. POWs, in exchange for U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam.

February 21 Nixon and Kissinger arrive in China to meet with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier.

March 30 The North Vietnamese launch a massive offensive across the Demilitarized Zone into the South. In five weeks, Hanoi’s troops have penetrated deep into the South.

April 15 President Nixon orders resumption of bombing in the North, suspended three years earlier.

May 1 The city of Quang Tri is captured by the North.

May 8 President Nixon announces the mining of Haiphong Harbor and stepped-up bombing raids against the North.

June 17 Five men are arrested at the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Office Building. They work for the Committee to Reelect the President. Subsequently, two former intelligence operatives, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, are arrested for their involvement in the break-in, and the ensuing cover-up by the White House begins to unravel as “Watergate.”

October 8 Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho achieve a breakthrough in their Paris negotiations. Henry Kissinger returns to the United States to say that peace is “within reach.” The announcement is made two weeks before the presidential election, in which Nixon is opposed by the Democratic senator from South Dakota, George McGovern, an outspoken opponent of the war.

November 7 Nixon is reelected in a landslide victory. Following the election, Kissinger’s talks with Le Duc Tho break down.

December 18 The United States resumes bombing raids over North Vietnam, which continue for eleven days. Communists agree to resume talks when bombing stops.

By year’s end, American troop strength has been reduced to 24,000.

1973

January Kissinger resumes talks with the North. A cease-fire agreement is signed and formally announced on January 27. Defense Secretary Melvin Laird announces the end of the draft as the army shifts to an all-volunteer force. During the Vietnam War, 2.2 million American men have been drafted.

March 29 The last American ground troops leave Vietnam.

April 1 All American POWs held in Hanoi are released.

April 30 President Nixon’s aides H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and John Dean resign amid charges that the White House has obstructed justice in the Watergate investigation. On June 25, Dean accuses Nixon of authorizing a cover-up, and another White House aide reveals the existence of a secret taping system that has recorded conversations in the Oval Office.

July 16 The Senate begins an investigation of the secret air war against Cambodia.

August 14 The U.S. officially halts bombing of Cambodia.

August 22 Henry Kissinger becomes secretary of state.

October 10 Vice President Spiro Agnew resigns after pleading “no contest” to charges of tax evasion. House minority leader Gerald Ford is nominated by Nixon to replace Agnew under the Twenty-fifth Amendment, which allows the president to fill a vacancy in the vice presidency.

October 23 Kissinger and North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho are awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, which Le Duc Tho rejects because fighting continues in Vietnam.

November 7 Over the president’s veto, Congress passes the War Powers Act, which restricts the president’s power to commit troops to foreign countries without congressional approval.

1974

January South Vietnam’s President Thieu announces that war has begun again. Communists proceed to build up troops and supplies in the South.

July 30 The House Judiciary Committee votes to recommend impeachment of President Nixon on three counts of “high crimes and misdemeanors.”

August 9 Nixon resigns and is replaced by Gerald Ford.

September 8 Ford pardons Nixon for all crimes he “committed or may have committed.”

1975

In an offensive that lasts six months, combined Vietcong and North Vietnamese forces overrun South Vietnam and Cambodia.

April 13 The United States evacuates its personnel from Cambodia.

April 17 Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia (renamed Kampuchea), falls to the Communist Khmer Rouge.

April 23 President Ford calls the war “finished.”

April 25 High-ranking South Vietnamese officials evacuate Saigon.

April 29 The last Americans are evacuated from Saigon, on the same day that the last two American soldiers are killed in Vietnam. On the following day, Communist forces take Saigon.

1977

January 21 President Jimmy Carter unconditionally pardons most of the 10,000 men who evaded the draft during the war.

1982

November 11 The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is unveiled in Washington, D.C. It commemorates the 58,000 American lives lost in Vietnam between 1959 and 1975.

Must Read: The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam; Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow; Our Vietnam: The War, 1954–1975 by A. J. Langguth.

What happened in Watts?

In the tumultuous decade after Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat (see Chapter 7), the civil rights movement coalesced behind the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., achieved some gains through the courts and legislation, and moved the question of racial equality to the front burner of American life. For most of those ten years, blacks seemed willing to accept King’s nonviolent vision of overcoming the hurdles of racism and segregation. But sometimes the front burner gets very hot. Before long, the pot was boiling over.

By 1965 the rhetoric and the actions of the civil rights movement changed because the country had changed. The war in Vietnam was moving into full swing. The year 1963 brought the assassination of President Kennedy, and Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers (1925–63) was gunned down in front of his home in Jackson. The nonviolent integration movement was being met by violence and death. A Birmingham church was bombed, with four little girls killed. Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney (see p. 464) were murdered in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. In February 1965, it was Malcolm X who went down. A month later, after thousands of marchers led by Martin Luther King, with U.S. Army protection, walked from Selma to Montgomery, a white civil rights worker named Viola Liuzzo was murdered. In the car with the Klansmen who shot her was an FBI informer.

Once solidly anchored by King’s Southern Christian Leadership Council and the NAACP, with their emphasis on peaceful, court-ordered remedies, the movement was coming under fire. The violence in the air was producing a new generation of activists who lacked King’s patience. Men like Floyd McKissick of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) were no longer willing to march to Dr. King’s moderate tune. They preferred the martial drumbeat of Malcolm X’s aggressive rhetoric. Built on frustration and anger, this basic split in tactics splintered the movement. By the summer of 1965, only days after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, strengthening protection of black voter registration, the anger no longer just simmered. It boiled over. The scene was a section of Los Angeles called Watts.

This was not the Los Angeles of Hollywood, Malibu, and Bel Air. Watts was a rundown district of shabby houses built near the highway approaching Los Angeles International Airport. Ninety-eight percent black, Watts was stewing in a California heat wave. In the stewpot were all the ingredients of black anger. Poverty. Overcrowding. High unemployment. Crime everywhere. Drugs widely available. The nearly all-white police force was seen as an occupation army.

On August 11, a policeman pulled over a young black man to check him for drunken driving. A common occurrence for blacks, it happened much less frequently to white drivers. When the young man was arrested, a crowd gathered, at first joking and taunting, then growing more restive. Rumors of police brutality started to waft through the summer heat. The crowd grew larger and angrier. Soon the lone policeman called for reinforcements, and when the police arrived, they were met by hurled stones, bottles, and chunks of concrete. Within a few hours, the crowds had grown to a mob, and the frustration was no longer simmering in the August heat. It had exploded.

Watts was sealed off, and for a while all was quiet. But the next day the anger returned. By nightfall the small, roving bands had grown to a mob of thousands, hostile, angry, and beyond control. The rocks and bottles were replaced by Molotov cocktails as the riot erupted into a full-blown street rebellion. Black storeowners posted signs that read, “We Own This One.” The signs didn’t always help. Among the most popular looted items were weapons, and when police and firefighters responded to the violence and fires, they were met with a hail of bullets and gasoline bombs. All of the pent-up rage and helplessness boiled over in white-hot fury. Reason lost out. When Dick Gregory, the well-known standup comic and activist, tried to calm the crowds, he was shot in the leg. Mob frenzy had taken over. Watts was in flames.

The battle—for that was what it had become—raged on for days as thousands of national guardsmen poured in to restore order. There was open fighting in the streets as guardsmen set up machine-gun emplacements. Vietnam had seemingly come to L.A. By the sixth day of rioting, Watts was rubble and ashes. One European journalist even commented, “It looks like Germany during the last months of World War II.”

The toll from six days of mayhem was thirty-four killed, including rioters and guardsmen; more than 1,000 injured; 4,000 arrested; and total property damage of more than $35 million.

But the aftermath of Watts was more than just a body count, police blotters, and insurance estimates. Something fundamental had occurred. There had been race riots before in America. In Detroit, during World War II, as many people had died as were killed in Watts. There had been smaller riots in other northern cities in previous years. But Watts seemed to signal a sea change in the civil rights movement. When Martin Luther King toured the neighborhood, he was heckled. Saddened by the death and destruction, he admonished a local man, who responded, “We won because we made the whole world pay attention to us.” The time of King’s “soul power” was passing. The new call was for “black power.”

The Watts summer of 1965 was only the first in a string of long, hot summers that left the cities of the North and Midwest smoldering with racial unrest. In the summer of 1966, several cities saw rioting. But the worst came in 1967, particularly when Newark and Detroit were engulfed in more rebellions. The death toll due to urban violence that year rose to more than eighty.

In the wake of these rebellions, presidential commissions were appointed, studies made, and findings released. They all agreed that the problem was economic at its roots. As Martin Luther King had put it, “I worked to get these people the right to eat hamburgers, and now I’ve got to do something to help them get the money to buy them.” One of these studies, conducted by the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, warned forebodingly that America was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”

That was on February 29, 1968. About a month later, Martin Luther King was killed in Memphis. His death set off another wave of riots that left cities smoldering. James Earl Ray, who confessed to the killing, was imprisoned. But nagging doubts, just as with the death of JFK, remain about the guilt of Ray—who died in 1998—and the existence of a wider conspiracy.

AMERICAN VOICES

RALPH NADER, from Unsafe at Any Speed (1965):

For more than half a century, the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.

Few politicians of the twentieth century have changed life in America as fundamentally as this lawyer born in Winsted, Connecticut, the son of Lebanese immigrants. Ralph Nader graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School and was working for the Department of Labor to crusade for “consumer protection”—the defense of the rights of consumers to safe products and ethical behavior from companies. His landmark book, Unsafe at Any Speed, argued that the U.S. automobile industry emphasized profits and style over safety. The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966, which established safety standards for new cars, resulted largely from his work.

In later years, his studies resulted in stricter controls of the meat and poultry industries, coal mines, and natural gas pipelines. He publicized what he felt were the dangers of pesticides, food additives, radiation from color TV sets, and excessive use of X-rays. In 1971, Nader founded Public Citizen, Inc., which specialized in energy problems, health care, tax reform, and other consumer issues. Nader and his staff conducted a major study of Congress in 1972, and their findings were published in Who Runs Congress? In 1982, another Nader group published a study of the Reagan administration called Reagan’s Ruling Class: Portraits of the President’s Top One Hundred Officials. Nader was a coauthor of The Big Boys: Power and Position in American Business (1986), which looked at the structure and control of corporate business in the United States. Nader won another battle in 1989, when General Motors announced it would make air bags standard equipment on many 1990 models. Nader had promoted the use of the safety feature for more than ten years.

The same year that Unsafe at Any Speed was published witnessed another landmark event. Congress established a national Clearinghouse for Smoking and Health and ordered every cigarette package to come with a new label: “Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health.” It was the beginning of a long anticigarette campaign that would fundamentally transform American society as few other social movements ever have. Before the surgeon general’s 1964 report that linked cigarette smoking to lung cancer, cigarettes were part of the American way of life. By the end of the century, antismoking legislation had converted smokers into near pariahs, changing eating patterns in restaurants and work routines as smokers were forced to grab a smoke during breaks while standing outside their office buildings.

Who was Miranda?

For anyone who grew up on a TV diet of Joe Friday and Dragnet, Streets of San Francisco, NYPD Blue, and a hundred other cop shows, “Read him his rights” is a familiar bit of requisite dialogue. That is, for any cop shows that came after 1966. To America’s lawmen, that was the year that the world started to come unglued.

Ernesto Miranda was hardly the kind of guy who might be expected to change legal history. But he did, in his own savage way. A high school dropout with a criminal record dating from his teen years, Miranda abducted a teenage girl at a Phoenix moviehouse candy counter in 1963 and drove her into the desert, where he raped her. Having a criminal record, Miranda was soon picked up, and was identified by the victim in a police lineup. After making a written confession in which he stated that he had been informed of his rights, Miranda was convicted and sentenced to prison for forty to fifty-five years. But at the trial, Miranda’s court-appointed attorney argued that his client had not been told of his right to legal counsel.

The American Civil Liberties Union took the case of Miranda v. Arizona all the way to the Supreme Court, where it was heard by the Warren Court in 1966. The issue was the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination. On June 13, 1966, the Court announced a five-to-four ruling in favor of Miranda that said a criminal suspect must be told of his right to silence, that his remarks may be used against him, and that he had a right to counsel during interrogation, even if he could not afford one.

Depending on your point of view, it was either a great milestone for civil liberties and the protection of the rights of both the innocent and the criminal, or the beginning of the end of civilization.

And the notorious Miranda? On the basis of new evidence, he was convicted again on the same charges of kidnapping and rape, and imprisoned. He was eventually paroled, and ten years after the Court inscribed his name in legal history, Ernesto Miranda died of a knife wound suffered during a bar fight.

AMERICAN VOICES

MUHAMMAD ALI, heavyweight boxing champion:

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

That’s why they call me Muhammad Ali.

Few athletes reflect, or actually change, history as Muhammad Ali did. Born Cassius Marcellus Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, Muhammad Ali (b. 1942) became a professional boxer after winning the light heavyweight gold medal at the 1960 Summer Olympics. In 1964, he won the world heavyweight championship by knocking out Sonny Liston in an upset. And there the controversy began, and it would soon extend far beyond the boxing ring, or even sports.

Profoundly influenced by Malcolm X, Cassius Clay joined the Black Muslims, or Nation of Islam, in 1967 and changed his name to Muhammad Ali, rejecting his birth name as a “slave name.” (In fact, American slave holders had typically given their slaves the names of Roman nobility.) He said he even threw his Olympic gold medal into the Ohio River.

During the next few years, Ali became one of the most colorful and controversial boxing champions of all time, said to be the world’s most recognizable man. Widely admired for his extraordinary grace, speed, and boxing skills, he was equally disdained for his boastfulness as he made up poems that mocked his opponents or predicted, in verse, the round in which he would score a knockout.

But if he was disliked for these attitudes before 1967, his name change and adoption of the Muslim faith further alienated much of white America, which in the 1960s still wanted its athletes to be seen—on the playing fields—but not heard. Especially if they were considered “loudmouthed and uppity,” as Ali was widely viewed. But in an era when “Black is beautiful” became a new motto for young blacks and soul singer James Brown was beginning the chant of “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud,” Muhammad Ali was the living embodiment of both phrases. As other black leaders, like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, fell, Muhammad Ali was lionized by a younger generation that was no longer content with the status quo.

The stakes changed later in 1967, when Ali offered a different rhyme:

Keep asking me no matter how long—

On the war in Vietnam I sing this song—

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.

Saying that “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger,” Ali refused induction into the United States Army, basing his decision on religious principles. He was convicted on charges of refusing induction and sentenced to prison, but appealed the decision and stayed out of jail. However, most boxing groups stripped Ali of his title and, after his conviction, Ali could not box for three and a half years. While out of the ring, Ali remained on the world stage, and his views on the war and a racist America profoundly influenced a younger generation that was rejecting both the war and racism. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, American sprinters hung their heads and raised their fists in a clenched-fist “black power” salute during the medal ceremony. It was an audacious display that cost the sprinters their medals and indicated how divided the country had become.

In 1971, the Supreme Court of the United States reversed Ali’s conviction and he began a remarkable comeback and second career with a series of legendary fights against Joe Frazier. He regained the heavyweight championship by knocking out George Foreman, the defending champion, in Africa in 1974. Early in 1978, Ali lost the title to Leon Spinks in one of the greatest upsets in boxing history, but regained the title for a fourth time when he defeated Spinks in a rematch. In 1979, Ali gave up his title and announced his retirement. But in 1980, he came out of retirement and fought Larry Holmes for the World Boxing Council version of the title. Holmes defeated Ali by a technical knockout.

A few years later, Ali was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, which many doctors attributed to the many severe blows he had absorbed in his remarkable career.

What happened at My Lai?

On March 16, 1968, in a small Vietnamese village, “something dark and bloody” took place. With those words, a lone veteran of the war forced the U.S. Army to reluctantly examine a secret that was no secret. America was forced to look at itself in a manner once reserved for enemies who had committed war crimes. With those words, America found out about the massacre of civilians by U.S. soldiers at My Lai.

The GIs of Charlie Company called it Pinkville. That was how it was colored on their maps of Vietnam’s Quang Ngai province, because the village was suspected of being a stronghold for the Vietcong. Under the command of Lieutenant William L. Calley, Charlie Company of the Americal Division’s Eleventh Infantry had nebulous orders from its company commander, Captain Ernest Medina, to “clean the village out.” In the previous three months, Charlie Company had taken about 100 casualties without even seeing action. Sniper fire and booby traps were to blame. Frustrated and angry at the hand they had been dealt in a war in which there were no uniforms to separate “good gooks” from “bad gooks,” the men of Charlie Company were primed to wreak havoc on a phantom enemy they had never been able to confront in an open battle.

Dropped into the village by helicopter, the men of Charlie Company found only the old men, women, and children of My Lai. There were no Vietcong, and no signs of any. There were no stashed weapons, no rice caches, nothing to suggest that My Lai was a staging base for guerrilla attacks. But under Lieutenant Calley’s direct orders, the villagers were forced into the center of the hamlet, where Calley issued the order to shoot them. The defenseless villagers were mowed down by automatic weapons fire. Then the villagers’ huts were grenaded, some of them while still occupied. Finally, small groups of survivors—some of them women and girls who had been raped by the Americans—were rounded up and herded into a drainage ditch, where they, too, were mercilessly machine-gunned. A few of the soldiers of Charlie Company refused to follow the order; one of them later called it “point-blank murder.”

AMERICAN VOICES

VARNADO SIMPSON, a member of Lt. Calley’s unit, describing My Lai on March 16, 1968 (quoted in Four Hours in My Lai by Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim):

That day in My Lai, I was personally responsible for killing about twenty-five people. Personally. Men, women. From shooting them, to cutting their throats, scalping them, to cutting off their hands and cutting out their tongues. I did it. I just went. My mind just went. And I wasn’t the only one that did it. A lot of other people did it. I just killed. . . . I didn’t know I had it in me.

During the massacre, Hugh C. Thompson, a twenty-five-year-old helicopter pilot, saw the bodies in the ditch and went down to investigate. Placing his helicopter between the GIs and a band of children, the pilot ordered his crew to shoot any American who tried to stop him. He managed to rescue a handful of children. But that was one of the day’s few heroic deeds. Another witness to the massacre was an army photographer who was ordered to turn over his official camera, but kept a second, secret, camera. With it, he had recorded the mayhem in which more than 560 Vietnamese, mostly women and children, were slaughtered. Those pictures, when they later surfaced, revealed the extent of the carnage at My Lai. But not right away. Although many in the chain of command knew something “dark and bloody” had happened that day, there was no investigation. The mission was reported as a success back at headquarters.

But Ronald Ridenhour, a veteran of Charlie Company who had not been at My Lai, began to hear the rumors from buddies. Piecing together what had happened, he detailed the events in a letter he sent to President Nixon, to key members of Congress, and to officials in the State Department and Pentagon. The dirty little secret of My Lai was out. Then reporter Seymour Hersh also got wind of the story and broke it to an incredulous America in November 1968. Within a few weeks, the army opened an investigation, but it remained secret. More than a year had passed since the day My Lai became a killing ground. It would be another two years before anyone was tried in the case.

In the immediate aftermath of the investigation, several officers still on active duty were court-martialed for dereliction of duty for covering up the massacre, a word the Pentagon never used. At worst, they were reduced in rank or censured. Four officers—Calley, Medina, Captain Eugene Kotouc, and Lieutenant Thomas Willingham—were court-martialed. Medina was acquitted, but later confessed that he had lied under oath to Army investigators. The other two officers were also acquitted. Only Lieutenant Calley was found guilty of premeditated murder of twenty-two villagers at My Lai, on March 29, 1971. Two days later, he was sentenced to life imprisonment. But President Nixon then reduced his sentence to house arrest in response to an outpouring of public support for Calley, who was seen as a scapegoat. Calley was later paroled. A documentary about My Lai that was broadcast in 1989 showed Calley, a prosperous businessman, getting into an expensive foreign car and driving off. He refused to comment on the incident.

To the war’s supporters on the right, the atrocity at My Lai was an aberration and Calley a victim of a “leftist” antiwar movement. To the war’s opponents, Calley and My Lai epitomized the war’s immorality and injustice. In a sense, My Lai was the outcome of forcing young Americans into an unwinnable war. It has now been well documented that this was not the only crime against civilians in Vietnam. It was not uncommon to see GIs use their Zippo lighters to torch an entire village. As one officer said early in the war, after torching a hamlet, “We had to destroy this village to save it.” That Alice in Wonderland logic perfectly embodied the impossibility of the American position.

Even though the United States would drop 7 million tons of bombs—twice the total dropped on Europe and Asia during all of World War II—on an area about the size of Massachusetts, along with Agent Orange and other chemical defoliants, the United States was losing the war. The political and military leadership of this country failed to understand the Vietnamese character, traditions, culture, and history. That failure doomed America to its costly and tragic defeat in Vietnam. As A. J. Langguth wrote in his excellent history of the war, Our Vietnam, “North Vietnam’s leaders had deserved to win. South Vietnam’s leaders had deserved to lose. And America’s leaders, for thirty years, had failed the people of the North, the people of the South, and the people of the United States.”

AMERICAN VOICES

Astronaut NEIL ARMSTRONG (b. 1930) on July 20, 1969, as he became the first man to walk on the Moon:

That was one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.

Armstrong’s words, and the images of him stepping onto the lunar surface, were seen and heard by the entire world. The moment was the culmination of the obsessive push for putting a man on the Moon, a challenge that began with the humiliation of Sputnik (see Chapter 7). Armstrong and fellow Moon walker Buzz Aldrin planted an American flag on the lunar surface and left a plaque that read, “Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon July, 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.”

How did a successful break-in in Pennsylvania change the FBI?

On the night of March 8, 1971, burglars broke into the offices of the FBI in Media, Pennsylvania, and stole more than a thousand documents. Within two weeks of the break-in, copies of the stolen material were being sent to members of Congress and the media by the enterprising and crusading burglars, who were never caught. One of the documents that appeared in the Washington Post used the word COINTELPRO. An NBC newsman who was an attorney made a Freedom of Information Act request for all COINTELPRO documents. After a series of legal maneuvers by the FBI, one of J. Edgar Hoover’s secrets was out: COINTELPRO, which stood for Counter Intelligence Program, was a twenty-year-old FBI campaign of illegal and improper activities aimed at harassing political targets. Begun under J. Edgar Hoover in 1956 to target the Communist Party in America for investigation and disruption, already then dwindling, the program continued for the next two decades. Eventually, domestic targets such as the Socialist Workers Party, the Black Panthers, and the Ku Klux Klan were victims of the FBI’s illicit and almost laughably foolish smear campaigns and illegal wiretaps. In the early days of the program, Ronald Kessler writes in The Bureau, “Agents questioned party officials at their places of employment to intimidate their employers, . . . planted evidence so that local police would arrest party members, and left what appeared to be FBI informant reports on the cars of party officials so that the party would drop them as suspected snitches. . . . The bureau informed the parents of one woman that she was living with a Communist out of wedlock. . . . The tactics were no different than those used by the KGB in Russia.”

These might seem like innocent pranks, amateurish at times—
almost amusing, if they weren’t so potentially and actually dangerous, as events would prove.

By the early 1970s, COINTELPRO had widened its focus to include the antiwar movement and elements of the civil rights movement. When some antiwar groups turned to violence, most notably the Weathermen—or Weather Underground—Hoover turned COINTELPRO loose on them. During a wiretap of a Black Panther group, the FBI learned that actress Jean Seberg was pregnant. An international star of such movies as the French classic Breathless and Lilith, Seberg had become an outspoken opponent of both the war and American racism, and financially supported the Panthers. According to FBI documents, J. Edgar Hoover ordered, “Jean Seberg . . . should be neutralized.” In 1970, the FBI leaked the rumor that Seberg was carrying the child of a member of the Black Panthers to an accommodating media. She had apparently had affairs with some members of the group, but none of them was the father of her child. But her pregnancy became the focus of international attention, and the paternity of the unborn child was “smeared” in papers and magazines, including Newsweek and the Los Angeles Times. The child was born prematurely in 1970 and died two days later. The body was then displayed in an open coffin to prove that she was white. (Seberg and her estranged husband, Romain Gary, a French writer, sued Newsweek in France and the magazine was forced to pay damages for invasion of privacy.) Seberg became increasingly despondent over the years, turning to pills and alcohol, and finally committed suicide in 1979.

The Seberg rumors had been manufactured by COINTELPRO. When the COINTELPRO program was revealed in 1971, Hoover ordered it shut down. For years the most powerful man in Washington because of the secret files he maintained on almost every politician and celebrity in America, Hoover survived the calls for his resignation, serving as director of the FBI until his death in 1972. But America was going to soon learn that COINTELPRO wasn’t the only instance of the FBI being put to political use.

Why did Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger try to stop the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers?

In the summer of 1971, President Richard Nixon learned that what you don’t know can hurt you.

In June 1971, the New York Times ran a headline that hardly seemed sensational: “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement.” What the headline did not say was that the study also traced thirty years of deceit and ineptitude on the part of the United States government.

In page after numbingly detailed page, the Times reprinted thousands of documents, cables, position papers, and memos, all referring to the American effort in Vietnam. Officially titled The History of the U.S. Decision Making Process in Vietnam, the material quickly became known as the Pentagon Papers. Richard Nixon was not aware of its existence. But it would shake his administration and the military establishment in America to their toes.

Ordered by Robert McNamara, one of Kennedy’s “best and brightest” prior to his resignation as defense secretary in 1968, this massive compilation had involved the work of large teams of scholars and analysts. The avalanche of paper ran to some 2 million words. Among the men who had helped put it together was Daniel Ellsberg, a Rand Corporation analyst and onetime hawk who, like McNamara himself, became disillusioned by the war. Working at MIT after his resignation from Rand, which was involved in collecting and analyzing the papers, Ellsberg decided to go public with the information. He turned a copy over to Times reporter Neil Sheehan.

When the story broke, the country soon learned how it had been duped. Going back to the Truman administration, the Pentagon Papers revealed a history of deceptions, policy disagreements within several White House administrations, and outright lies. Among the most damaging revelations were cables from the American embassy in Saigon, dating from the weeks before Prime Minister Diem was ousted with CIA encouragement and then executed. There was the discovery that the Tonkin Resolution had been drafted months before the incident occurred from which it took its name. And there were memos showing Lyndon Johnson committing infantry to Vietnam at the same time he was telling the country that he had no long-range plans for a strategy in Vietnam.

The papers did not cover the Nixon years, and White House reaction was at first muted, even gleeful at the prospect of the embarrassment it would create for the Democrats. But Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger (b. 1923), soon realized that if something this highly classified could be leaked, so could other secrets. Both men were already troubled by leaks within the administration. How could they carry on the business of national security if documents this sensitive could be photocopied and handed out to the nation’s newspapers like press releases? There was a second concern. The revelations in the Pentagon Papers had fueled the antiwar sentiment that was growing louder and angrier and moving off the campuses and into the halls of Congress.

The administration first tried to bully the Times into halting publication. Attorney General John Mitchell threatened the paper with espionage charges. These were ignored. Nixon then tried the courts and received a temporary injunction blocking further publication. But the brushfire started by the Times was growing into a forest fire. The Washington Post and the Boston Globe were also running the documents. A federal court ordered the Post to halt publication, and the question went to the Supreme Court. On June 30, the Court ruled six to three in favor of the newspapers on First Amendment grounds.

Kissinger and Nixon went nuclear. Said Nixon, “I want to know who is behind this. . . . I want it done, whatever the costs.”

When Ellsberg was revealed as the culprit, a new White House unit was formed to investigate him. Their job was to stop leaks, so they were jokingly called the “plumbers.” White House assistant Egil Krogh, Nixon special counsel Charles Colson, and others in the White House turned to former CIA man E. Howard Hunt and ex-FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy to bring their special clandestine talents to the operation. One of their first jobs was to conduct a break-in at the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist. As a burglary, it was only marginally more successful than the next break-in planned by the group, at an office complex called Watergate.

Apart from setting into motion some of the events that would mutate into the Watergate affair, the publication of the Pentagon Papers had other important repercussions. From the government’s standpoint, American security credibility had been crippled, severely damaging intelligence operations around the world, for better or worse. On the other side, the antiwar movement gained new strength and respectability, increasing the pressure on Nixon to end the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. And the Supreme Court’s action in protecting the newspapers from prior restraint established and strengthened First Amendment principles.

But the Pentagon Papers case also reinforced a “bunker mentality” that already existed within the White House “palace guard.” There was an us-against-them defensiveness emanating from the Oval Office. Publication of the Pentagon Papers made the Nixon White House far more aggressive in its defense of “national security,” an idea that was expanded to include the protection and reelection of Richard Nixon by any means and at any cost.

Why did “Jane Roe” sue Wade?

“To be or not to be.” For Shakespeare and the Supreme Court, that was and is the question. There is no other issue more emotionally, politically, or legally divisive in modern America than the future of abortion rights.

Many Americans thought the question was settled on January 22, 1973. That was the day the Supreme Court decided, by a seven-to-two margin, that it was unconstitutional for states to prohibit voluntary abortions before the third month of pregnancy; the decision also limited prohibitions that states might set during the second three months.

The decision grew out of a Texas case involving a woman who, out of desire to protect her privacy, was called Jane Roe in court papers. “Roe” was Norma McCorvey, a single woman living in Texas who became pregnant. She desired an abortion, but was unable to obtain one legally in her home state of Texas, and so she gave birth to a child she put up for adoption. Nonetheless, she brought suit against Dallas County District Attorney Henry Wade in an attempt to overturn the restrictive Texas abortion codes. The case ultimately reached the Supreme Court, which made the decision in the case known as Roe v. Wade.

For sixteen years the Roe precedent influenced a series of rulings that liberalized abortion in America. To many Americans, the right to an abortion was a basic matter of private choice, a decision for the woman to make. But to millions of Americans, Roe was simply government-sanctioned murder.

The mostly conservative foes of legal abortion—who call their movement “pro-life”—gained strength in the 1980s, coalescing behind Ronald Reagan and contributing to his election. And it will ultimately be Reagan’s legacy through his appointments to the Supreme Court who determine the future of Roe v. Wade. In the summer of 1989, the Supreme Court decided five to four, in the case of Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, to give states expanded authority to limit abortion rights. The Court also announced that it would hear a series of cases that would give it the opportunity to completely overturn the Roe decision. (In 1998, McCorvey announced a conversion to Christianity and a complete break with the pro-choice movement. Henry Wade, the Dallas prosecutor she had sued and who also prosecuted Jack Ruby, the man who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, died in 2001.)

AMERICAN VOICES

From JUSTICE HARRY A. BLACKMUN’S majority decision in Roe v. Wade (January 22, 1973):

The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. In a line of decisions, however . . . the Court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the Constitution. . . . They also make it clear that the right has some extension to activities relating to marriage; procreation; contraception; family relationships; and child rearing and education.

The right of privacy . . . is broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy. . . . We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man’s knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.

How did a botched burglary become a crisis called Watergate and bring down a powerful president?

Break-ins and buggings. Plumbers and perjury. Secret tapes, smoking guns, and slush funds.

We know now that Watergate wasn’t what Nixon press secretary Ron Ziegler called it, “a third-rate burglary.” This nationally televised soap opera of corruption, conspiracy, and criminality only began to unravel with a botched break-in at the Watergate office complex. That ludicrous larceny was only a tiny strand in the web of domestic spying, criminal acts, illegal campaign funds, enemies lists, and obstruction of justice that emerged from the darkness as “Watergate.” But it ended up with Richard Nixon resigning from the presidency in disgrace and only a few steps ahead of the long arm of the law.

After the Civil War and Vietnam, few episodes in American history have generated as many written words as the Watergate affair. Just about everybody who participated in this extraordinary chapter ended up writing a book about his view of the events. They were joined by the dozens of historians, journalists, and other writers who turned out books. The notoriety of Watergate gave convicted felon E. Howard Hunt a renewed lease on a life as a writer of inferior spy novels, a pursuit in which he was joined by John Ehrlichman and even Spiro Agnew, another of the rats who went down with the sinking ship that was Richard Nixon’s second administration. Even the rabidly right-wing former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy was able to parlay his macho, fanatical, “hand over a lighted candle” image into a lucrative career including playing guest roles on the eighties television series Miami Vice, founding a “survivalist” camp to teach commando techniques to weekend warriors, and going on a lecture tour that pitted Liddy in the role of mad-dog conservative against sixties relic Timothy Leary, the onetime high priest of psychedelic drugs.

This ludicrous aftermath has been combined with some of the comical aspects of the bungled break-in and Howard Hunt’s notoriously bad CIA-provided disguises to soften the image of Watergate’s implications. It seems almost opéra bouffe, a lighthearted satire. But that perspective overlooks the seriousness of the crimes committed in the name of national security and Richard Nixon’s reelection—two objectives that a large number of high-placed fanatics equated with each other.

AMERICAN VOICES

RICHARD NIXON, from the Oval Office tapes:

I don’t give a shit what happens, I want you to stonewall it, let them plead the Fifth Amendment, cover up or anything else, if it’ll save the plan.

A WATERGATE CHRONOLOGY

1972

June 17 At the Watergate Office Building in Washington, D.C., five men are arrested during a pathetically bungled break-in at the offices of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). The men are all carrying cash and documents that show them to be employed by the Committee to Re-elect the President (later given the acronym CREEP), and the purpose of the burglary is to plant listening devices in the phones of Democratic leaders and obtain political documents regarding the Democrats’ campaign strategy. The men arrested include a former FBI agent and four anti-Castro Cubans who have been told that they are looking for material linking Castro to the Democratic Party. Two former White House aides working for CREEP, G. Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hunt, are also arrested. Hunt, it will be learned, was one of the CIA agents responsible for planning the Bay of Pigs invasion and some of the Cubans arrested also took part in the invasion. The seven men are indicted on September 15. Even though their relationship to the election committee is established, none of the seven men connects the committee or the White House to the break-in.

November 7 After an October Gallup poll shows that less than half of the American people have even heard of the break-in, President Nixon defeats his Democratic challenger Senator George McGovern in a landslide, capturing 60.8 percent of the popular vote and 520 of the 537 electoral votes. McGovern carries only Massachusetts and Washington, D.C.

December 8 The wife of E. Howard Hunt dies in a plane crash in Chicago. She is carrying $10,000 in $100 bills. The money is “hush money” she was ferrying to someone in Chicago.

1973

February 7 Amid swirling rumors of widespread wrongdoing, corrupt financing, and political dirty tricks committed by the Nixon reelection committee, the Senate establishes a Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities, chaired by North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin (1896–1985).

March 23 Former CIA agent James W. McCord, one of the seven men convicted in the attempted burglary, admits in a letter to Judge John Sirica that he and other defendants have been under pressure to remain silent about the case. McCord reveals that others were involved in the break-in, and he eventually names John Mitchell, the former attorney general who had become chairman of the Committee to Re-elect the President, as the “overall boss.”

April 20 L. Patrick Gray, acting director of the FBI, resigns after admitting he destroyed evidence connected to Watergate, on the advice of Nixon aides in the White House.

April 30 Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, domestic affairs assistant John Ehrlichman, and presidential counsel John Dean III all resign. In a televised speech announcing the shake-up, President Nixon denies any knowledge of a cover-up of White House involvement in the Watergate break-in.

May 11 Charges against Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony J. Russo are dropped for their theft and release of the Pentagon Papers. The judge makes this decision following the revelation that Watergate conspirators E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy had burglarized the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in an attempt to steal Ellsberg’s medical records.

June 25 Testifying before Ervin’s Senate committee, John Dean accuses President Nixon of involvement in the Watergate cover-up and says the president authorized payment of “hush money” to the seven men arrested in the break-in.

July 16 In testimony that rocks the nation, White House aide Alexander Butterfield tells the Ervin committee that President Nixon secretly recorded all Oval Office conversations. This startling revelation provides the committee with the means to substantiate testimony implicating the president in the cover-up of the Watergate burglary. It also sets off a constitutional crisis over the president’s right to keep the tapes secret under the umbrella of “executive privilege.”

October 10 In an unrelated development that further damages White House credibility, Vice President Spiro Agnew, the chief voice of “law and order” in the Nixon White House, resigns after pleading nolo contendere (no contest) to tax evasion charges dating from his days as governor of Maryland. Two days later, President Nixon nominates House Minority Leader Gerald Ford to succeed Agnew under the provisions of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, allowing the president to fill a vacancy in the vice presidency.

October 20 The Saturday Night Massacre. President Nixon orders Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox, who has refused to accept the president’s compromise offer to release a “synopsis” of the tapes. Richardson and his assistant, William D. Ruckelshaus, refuse to follow this order and both resign. Solicitor General Robert Bork, third in the Justice Department chain of command, fires Cox. (The Democrats’ revenge will come when Ronald Reagan nominates Bork to the Supreme Court in 1988. Bork’s nomination will open an acrimonious debate over his legal views, and he will be rejected by the Senate.) The resignations and the firing of Cox raise a storm of protest in Congress, and the House actively begins to consider impeachment of the president.

October 23 The House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Peter Rodino, announces an investigation into impeachment charges against the president. Leon Jaworski is appointed special prosecutor in the Watergate investigation after Archibald Cox’s firing.

October 30 After Nixon reluctantly agrees to turn over the Oval Office tapes, investigators learn that two tapes are missing.

November 21 Investigators learn that one of the tapes contains a mysterious eighteen-and-a-half-minute gap. The White House claims that Rosemary Woods, Nixon’s secretary, accidentally erased part of the tape while transcribing it, a feat that, owing to the way the recording apparatus was set up, would have required the skills of a contortionist. (In January 1974, analysis of the tape will show that the erasure was deliberate.)

November 9 Six of the Watergate defendants are sentenced for their roles in the break-in. E. Howard Hunt receives a sentence of two and a half to eight years and a $10,000 fine. The others are given lesser sentences. G. Gordon Liddy is sentenced to twenty years, in part because of his refusal to cooperate with investigators.

November 13 Representatives of two oil companies plead guilty to making illegal contributions to the Nixon campaign. The next day, Commerce Secretary Maurice Stans, who was the Nixon campaign treasurer, admits that such contributions were expected from major corporations. Two days later, three more companies—Goodyear, Braniff Airlines, and American Airlines—report similar donations.

November 30 Egil Krogh Jr., who headed the White House “plumbers” unit, pleads guilty to charges stemming from the break-in at the offices of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist.

December 6 Gerald Ford is sworn in as vice president. Besides having been a member of the Warren Commission investigating the death of President Kennedy, Ford is best known for what Lyndon Johnson once said about him: “Shucks, I don’t think he can chew gum and walk at the same time. . . . He’s a nice fellow, but he spent too much time playing football without a helmet.”

1974

January 4 Claiming “executive privilege,” President Nixon refuses to surrender 500 tapes and documents subpoenaed by the Senate Watergate Committee.

March 1 Seven former White House staff members, including Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and former attorney general John Mitchell, are indicted for conspiring to obstruct the investigation of the Watergate break-in.

April 3 Following months of investigation by a separate congressional committee, President Nixon agrees to pay more than $400,000 in back taxes. Using suspect deductions, the president had paid taxes equivalent to those levied on a salary of $15,000, despite the president’s $200,000 salary and other income.

April 29 In another nationally televised address, President Nixon offers a 1,200-page edited transcript of the tapes subpoenaed by the House Judiciary Committee and Special Prosecutor Jaworski. Both Jaworski and the committee reject the transcripts.

May 16 Richard Kleindienst, John Mitchell’s successor as attorney general, pleads guilty to a misdemeanor charge of failing to testify accurately before a Senate committee. Kleindienst is the first attorney general ever convicted of a crime.

July 24 The Supreme Court rules unanimously that Nixon must turn over the tapes requested by the special prosecutor. Eight hours later, the White House announces it will comply with the order.

July 27 The House Judiciary Committee approves two articles of impeachment against Nixon, charging him with obstructing justice and accusing him of repeatedly violating his oath of office. Three days later the committee will recommend a third charge of unconstitutional defiance of committee subpoenas.

August 5 In another televised address, Nixon releases transcripts of a conversation with chief of staff H. R. Haldeman. The transcript shows that, six days after the break-in, Nixon ordered a halt to the FBI investigation of the affair. Nixon concedes that he failed to include this information in earlier statements, what he calls “a serious omission.” This is the “smoking gun” that everybody has been looking for. Following the speech, Nixon’s remaining congressional support disappears.

August 8 President Nixon announces his resignation, effective noon the following day. The decision comes in the wake of his revelation three days earlier, after which key Republican congressmen told him he would probably be impeached and convicted.

August 9 President Nixon formally resigns and leaves for California. Vice President Gerald Ford is sworn in as president.

August 21 President Ford nominates Nelson Rockefeller, the wealthy governor of New York and a three-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, as his choice for vice president.

September 8 President Ford grants Richard Nixon a “full, free and absolute pardon . . . for all offenses against the United States which he . . . has committed or may have committed or taken part in while President.”

1975

January 1 Four of the former White House staffers charged with obstruction are found guilty. They are H. R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, John Mitchell, and White House attorney Robert Mardian. A fifth, Nixon assistant Kenneth Parkinson, is acquitted. The Watergate charges against Charles Colson are dropped after he pleads guilty to crimes connected with the Ellsberg-psychiatrist break-in. A seventh defendant, Gordon Strachan, is tried separately.

1976

In the presidential election, Jimmy Carter narrowly defeats President Ford. Besides the economic problems facing the country, Carter’s victory is widely attributed to the post-Watergate atmosphere of cynicism and a very specific rejection of Ford for his pardon of Nixon in September 1974.

The final accounting of the Watergate affair produced an impressive list of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” as the Constitution labels impeachable offenses. Some of them seem laughably innocuous in retrospect. But others were offenses against the law, against individual citizens, and against the Constitution itself. The Watergate “rap sheet” breaks down into five general categories, as follows:

1. BREAKING AND ENTERING

In the wake of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, Daniel Ellsberg became the prime target of the “plumbers.” One of the group’s first missions was to break into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist and steal Ellsberg’s confidential medical records. Although they got in, they were unable to find any incriminating or embarrassing material about Ellsberg.

Some of the same team members later planned the break-in at the Democratic National Committee offices to install listening devices. This job was ordered by White House officials and with the knowledge of some of the president’s closest advisers.

2. ILLEGAL CONTRIBUTIONS

A secret slush fund, controlled by Attorney General John Mitchell, was set up to finance a campaign of “dirty tricks” against key Democratic Party figures. Some of this money was used to pay the Watergate burglars for the job and later to keep them silent.

The slush fund was built out of illegal campaign contributions solicited by Nixon officials from some of the country’s largest corporations, who thought they were buying “access” to the president. Other contributions were made to derail criminal investigations or antitrust activities going on in the Justice Department.

3. DIRTY TRICKS

Like the “plumbers,” the dirty tricks team was set up in the White House for the purpose of damaging and embarrassing key Democrats. In fact, the Democrats didn’t need any help—they were doing just fine by themselves. The activities ranged from ordering pizzas delivered to Democratic campaign offices to forging letters that were used to discredit and embarrass Democratic leaders like Senators Edmund Muskie and Henry Jackson.

Using material he culled from the Pentagon Papers, E. Howard Hunt forged cables that implied that President John Kennedy ordered the toppling and assassination of Vietnam’s prime minister Diem in 1963. Hunt then tried unsuccessfully to plant these cables with major news magazines.

An “enemies list” was created, an extensive collection of opposition politicians, entertainers, newsmen, and other prominent public figures deemed disloyal by the White House. The list was used to target the people that the White House wanted to “screw” through the use of selected federal agencies. The list included Jane Fonda, Bill Cosby, and CBS newsman Daniel Schorr.

4. COVER-UP/OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE

White House officials, from the president down to lower-echelon staffers, ordered the payment of hush money from the campaign slush fund to the Watergate conspirators. These men also orchestrated the cover-up of White House involvement in the conspiracy.

President Nixon secretly pledged clemency to the Watergate burglars in return for their silence.

L. Patrick Gray, acting head of the FBI and in line for appointment to the permanent job of director, turned over FBI files on Watergate to White House staffers.

Nixon ordered ranking CIA officers to dissuade the FBI from investigating Watergate.

Incriminating evidence in E. Howard Hunt’s White House safe was removed and destroyed.

Two of the White House tapes subpoenaed by the special prosecutor were discovered to be missing. Another tape contained a crucial eighteen-minute gap, the result of a deliberate erasure.

5. MISCELLANEOUS OFFENSES AND REVELATIONS

Nixon had used more than $10 million in government funds for improvements on his private homes in Florida and California, ostensibly in the name of “security.” (The House did not include this charge as an impeachable offense. It was deemed a personal offense rather than an act against the state.)

Nixon had taken illegal tax deductions on some papers donated to a presidential library.

The illegal secret war against Cambodia was revealed.

What was the real payback for these abuses? President Nixon resigned in disgrace. But he was quickly pardoned, guaranteeing that his pension checks would keep coming. Within a short time, Nixon was “rehabilitated” by his party and the press, gradually easing his way back into a new role as “elder statesman” and foreign policy expert. Nixon died in 1994 and was eulogized by Democratic president Bill Clinton, whose wife, Hillary, had once been an assistant on the House Judiciary Committee and was involved in researching impeachment history for the Committee. (She and her husband would, of course, learn much more about impeachment, along with the rest of the country, in 1998, when Clinton became the second president in American history to be impeached. See Chapter 9.)

Liddy and Hunt both went to prison. Liddy wrote a book called Will, which was turned into a television miniseries. He later became a nationally syndicated radio talk show host, appealing to an extremely conservative audience. Hunt continued to write spy novels. John Mitchell was jailed and disbarred. His book was rejected by its publisher. Mitchell died in 1988.

Haldeman and Ehrlichman, the two aides closest to Nixon, also served brief jail terms. Both wrote successful books. John Dean served four months, but wrote Blind Ambition, his memoir of the Watergate affair, a best-seller also turned into a television miniseries.

Many of the other minor characters in Watergate served brief prison terms. A spate of legislation addressing the issues of ethics in government, campaign financing, and presidential powers all followed in Watergate’s wake. The ensuing years brought more investigations that further revealed the extent of the abuses committed by the FBI and the CIA in the name of national security. More laws were passed.

Watergate and those revelations cost the Republicans the White House in 1976, when Gerald Ford, the man who pardoned Nixon, was defeated by Jimmy Carter, who ran as an “outsider” pledged to rid Washington of its corruption. New campaign financing laws went into effect, in an attempt to limit the impact of illegal campaign funds. It was assumed that such abuses were now in check and that nobody in the White House could manage such an illegal undertaking again.

How did OPEC cripple America during the 1970s?

The international hot spots during the fifties and sixties were Cold War battles waged in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. But in the late sixties and early seventies, the scene shifted. The Middle East emerged as the world’s most significant flash point, a political and military battlefield in which superpower rivalries took a backseat to an enmity as old as the Bible. As Arabs and Jews struggled over the existence of Israel and the future of the Palestinian Arabs, the United States got caught between a rock and a hard place.

Almost from the moment Israel was born in 1948 out of their war of independence, Israel occupied a singular, untouchable position in American foreign policy. This unique status was based on a tight web of philosophical, religious, social, political, and strategic conditions. After the horrors of the Holocaust, Americans endorsed a homeland for the Jews. Culturally, Americans felt a kinship with Israelis and viewed with admiration the remarkable agricultural, industrial, and economic island they had created in the desert. The Israeli determination to build a nation seemed to mirror the pioneer spirit Americans romantically viewed as their own. The Israelis—many of them transplanted Europeans, along with American Jews—sounded, looked, and acted like Americans.

The Arabs, on the other hand, rode camels, wore funny robes, and carried around mats for praying at odd hours of the day. The typical American view of Arabs as rather backward was seemingly confirmed in a series of brief wars in which Israel easily defeated larger combined Arab armies, expanding its territories with each conquest. While the idea of Israel was widely accepted, the displacement of Palestinians was disregarded.

On the simplistic American scale of good versus bad, Israel was democratic and pro-Western. Strategically, Israel was a reliable client state in the midst of unstable Arab lands. For years, while these Arab states had remained in the control of Western oil companies, the American position was comfortable.

But as time passed, that position was transformed from one of unequivocal alliance with Israel to a more slippery footing, greased by oil diplomacy. Beginning in the 1960s, the Arabs increasingly took control of their valuable resource, and the balance of power began to shift. The seesaw tilting toward the Israelis got its most violent bounce after the October 1973 Yom Kippur War. Again the Israeli army prevailed, but its cloak of invincibility had been torn. While Israel beat back the combined offensive of several Arab states, Egyptian armies crossed the Suez and retook territory in the Sinai held by Israel since the Six-Day War of 1967.

But that was only a small part of the shifting sands of Middle East power politics. In an effort to compel the Israelis to return the lands captured in 1967, the Arab nations cut off oil shipments to the United States, Japan, and Western Europe in a boycott that precipitated the first great “energy crisis” of the 1970s. This boycott was made possible by the enormous reserves of petroleum controlled by the Middle Eastern countries, especially the Saudis, who were members of a group called OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). Formed in 1960 by the world’s principal oil exporters, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, Iraq, and Venezuela, OPEC lacked economic clout until the 1973 Arab boycott demonstrated its power in a world guzzling oil and dependent on other petroleum-related products. (Besides the obvious gasoline and home heating oil, hundreds of other products, such as plastics, fertilizers, paint, and ink, are petroleum based.)

In the United States, the boycott caused mayhem. A series of energy-saving measures were instituted, from Sunday closings of gas stations to a rationing system based on license plate numbers (plates having even numbers could buy gas one day; odd-numbered plates could buy it the next). Speed limits were lowered; environmental standards were relaxed; a new generation of gasoline mileage targets were set for automakers. American car companies, which had ignored the market for inexpensive, fuel-efficient cars pioneered by the Europeans and Japanese, soon found their once imperturbable empire crumbling around their expensive, gas-guzzling showboats. Overnight, a generation unaccustomed to the kind of sacrifices made during the Depression and World War II reacted angrily to the idea that a bunch of Arabs could shackle that great American freedom—owning and driving a car. As gas lines lengthened, frustration boiled over into fistfights and even gas-pump homicides. A bit of the American fabric was unraveling.

After the Arab boycott was lifted in March 1974, the future was altered. Having tasted power through the boycott, the OPEC members realized the control they actually possessed. Preboycott oil prices of about $3 per barrel rose to nearly $12 in 1974. The end of the boycott did not bring a return to the old pricing system. Oil prices stayed high, controlled by Arabs who could make the oil flow in a gush or just a trickle. The non-Arab OPEC members, such as Venezuela and Nigeria, were quite content to allow the prices to go as high as the Arabs wanted. American oil companies eagerly seized on the perception and reality of higher costs to force their prices up as well, bringing new profits to the oil companies at the expense of the American economy.

The following years of oil shortages and altered economic realities produced by the OPEC domination created the highest rates of unemployment since the Depression and historically high inflation—a combination of low growth and rising prices termed “stagflation”—striking a severe blow to American prestige and confidence. Once built on a bedrock of cheap labor and cheap oil, the American economy no longer enjoyed either.

An inflationary cycle of double-digit dimensions had been set in motion, and it would take Americans through a dizzying decade that seemed beyond the control of the country’s leadership. The crisis, begun in Nixon’s final days, became Gerald Ford’s problem. His inability to “WIN”—“Whip Inflation Now” was his administration’s inept, empty economic rallying cry—played a large part, along with post-Watergate disillusionment, in the 1976 election of former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter.

While America agonizingly transformed itself into a more efficient energy user and adjusted to new economic realities, it also began the search for alternative sources of energy. Congress, under Carter, funded development of wind, solar, and synthetic fuels. The American nuclear industry got a new boost as well. But there were still shocks to come. In 1978, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (1919–80), the shah of Iran, a military dictator established in 1954 through a CIA-backed coup, was overthrown by a fundamentalist Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1900–89). Iran cut off oil exports, setting off another mild oil shortage. A year later, America’s energy future was darkened when there was a major accident in the core of a nuclear reactor at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, which severely curtailed the planned development of nuclear power in this country. To make matters worse, that year OPEC announced another drastic price increase.

But it was the situation in Iran that would move to the foreground of American life, overshadowing Carter’s historic achievement in negotiating a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1978. On November 4, 1979, some 500 Iranians stormed the American embassy in Teheran, capturing ninety American diplomats and beginning a hostage crisis that effectively ended Jimmy Carter’s hopes for governing effectively and being reelected. Carter’s inability to free the hostages, including a disastrous, abortive rescue mission that ended with eight Americans dead in the Iranian desert, seemed to symbolize American powerlessness.

In 1980, America turned to a man it thought represented old-style American ideals and strength. Ronald Reagan (1911–2004), former movie star and governor of California, soundly defeated Carter in 1980 by promising to restore American prestige, power, and economic health. At the moment of Reagan’s inauguration, as a last insult to Jimmy Carter and an omen of the good fortune Reagan would enjoy, the hostages were freed by Iran.

AMERICAN VOICES

From JIMMY CARTER’S “Crisis of Confidence” speech (July 15, 1979):

All the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America. So I want to speak with you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy. . . .

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways. It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

What was “voodoo economics”?

If there is one thing America does not want from its presidents, it’s a sermon. America wants pep talks. America wants the coach to tell the country that it only has to fear “fear itself.” America likes the trumpet sounding a summons. Americans want to be told they’re the best. When America thumbed its nose at Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech, he belatedly learned that lesson. But Ronald Reagan knew it instinctively. He also understood a basic American political precept: This country, since the pre-Revolutionary days of James Otis back in Boston (see p. 64), doesn’t like taxes.

When Ronald Reagan campaigned in 1980, he promised to cut taxes, reduce government deficits, reduce inflation, and rebuild America’s defenses. One of his Republican primary opponents said it could only be done “with mirrors.” Another Republican called Reagan’s ideas “voodoo economics.” He was George Bush, later to become Reagan’s loyal vice president and then president himself. Bush got a laugh with that line in 1980.

But Ronald Reagan got the last laugh when he was resoundingly elected, bringing to power a new conservative coalition pledged to reverse what it saw as the damage done by decades of liberal Democratic control of American economic and social policy. The Reagan coalition featured the “neo-conservatives,” political theorists who put a new face on old-line anti-Communism; the so-called Moral Majority, the religious right wing led by Reverend Jerry Falwell, whose solutions to America’s problems included returning prayer to public schools, outlawing abortion, and reducing government’s role in social policy; conservative southerners, who responded to Reagan’s call for a strengthened American defense and lower taxes; and, perhaps most importantly but least visibly, a blue-collar majority who saw their paychecks disappearing in taxes and an endless inflationary spiral.

The theoretical underpinning of Reagan’s plans was called “supply side economics.” The basic premise was that if taxes were cut, people would produce more goods and spend more money, creating more jobs and broader prosperity, which would lead to higher government revenues. Coupled with deep cuts in “wasteful” government spending, these revenues would provide a balanced budget. Reagan supporters even pointed to the fact that Democratic hero John Kennedy had had a similar idea in 1963, when he promoted a tax cut by saying, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”

There certainly was nothing new about this idea. President Carter had proposed tax cuts, smaller government, and tight credit to keep down inflation. Earlier in American history, another Republican administration had used a similar strategy. Herbert Hoover had tried the same things during the Depression; back then the name for supply side economics was “trickle down economics.”

With strong popular support and the congressional backing of a bloc of southern Democrats known as “boll weevils,” Reagan’s economic package sailed through Congress in 1981. But there was certainly no immediate relief, and the American economy was soon in the midst of a full-blown and devastating recession.

Unemployment was high, inflation continued, bankruptcies and business failures skyrocketed, and family farms went on the auction block. Committed to purging inflation from the world economic system, the Federal Reserve Board, led under Carter and Reagan by Paul Volcker, had adopted a policy of high interest rates to put the brakes on the economy. Without easy credit, houses go unbuilt, cars unsold, and businesses and factories contract or fold.

Oil had been at the root of the inflationary pressure, and it was only the eventual tumble in oil prices that relieved that pressure. Brought on by the international recession, the oil shortage became an oil glut. Buffeted by new competition from non-OPEC oil producers like Mexico, Norway, and Great Britain, OPEC’s chokehold on the Western economies began to loosen. Suddenly awash in their unsold oil, the OPEC members saw their clout crippled as they struggled to maintain artificially high prices through production quotas that were routinely broken by OPEC’s members.

The beneficiary of this reversal was none other than Ronald Reagan. The slide in oil prices signaled the beginning of the recovery. With oil prices falling, the heart of the inflationary dragon was cut out, and Ronald Reagan looked like St. George. Other pro-business Reagan policies, such as deregulating industry and ignoring the antitrust laws, fueled the recovery. Employment started to grow, and inflation, which had been running at 12 percent, dropped to less than 5 percent. The tax cuts passed in 1981, to be phased in over three years, fueled a resurgence in the financial markets and would reap a bonanza for the nation’s wealthiest, but the poor and the middle class would feel few of its rewards.

The shift in tax policy was accompanied by a new reality in government spending. A succession of Reagan budgets slashed domestic spending in those areas that most affected the poor—the legacy of LBJ’s Great Society. Welfare, housing, job training, drug treatment, and mass transportation all fell under the rubric of wasteful government spending. Yet in spite of these cuts and the passage of the tax changes meant to stimulate government revenues, the federal deficits ballooned. Apart from the reductions made by the tax cuts, the chief culprit in the deficits was the expansion of the defense budget. Although pledged publicly to cutting the budget, Reagan was merely overseeing a massive transfer of funds from the domestic sector to the Pentagon. For years, conservatives had complained that liberal social programs had tried to solve problems by “throwing money at them.” Now, under President Reagan, the conservatives were going to solve the “weakness” of America’s defenses by doing the same thing.

AMERICAN VOICES

THOMAS K. JONES, Reagan administration defense official in an interview with Los Angeles Times reporter Robert Scheer:

Dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top. It’s the dirt that does it. . . . Everybody’s going to make it if there are enough shovels to go around.

According to Robert Scheer’s 1982 book, With Enough Shovels, T. K. Jones was the man responsible for administering a multimillion-dollar civil defense program, the centerpiece of which seemed to be making sure that America had plenty of doors, dirt, and shovels with which to build fallout shelters. This was his plan for saving American lives and putting the country back on its feet within a few years of an all-out nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

What happened to the space shuttle Challenger?

The Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bombs that those shovels would guard against had been the greatest scientific achievement of the century. The space program that put an American on the moon was certainly a close second. The Apollo program represented the pinnacle of human achievement and the greatest moment for NASA.

Its lowest point was unquestionably the tragic event that took place on the cold morning of January 28, 1986. The tenth launch of the space shuttle Challenger was scheduled as the twenty-fifth space shuttle mission. Francis R. (Dick) Scobee was the mission commander. The five other regular crew members were Gregory B. Jarvis, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith A. Resnik, and Michael J. Smith. But this mission was different; the crew included Christa McAuliffe, a high school teacher from Concord, New Hampshire, mother of two and winner of a contest to become the first “citizen passenger” in space. The choice of McAuliffe was part of NASA’s usually unerring sense of perfect pitch for public relations. If only its understanding of the weather, engineering, and physics had been so flawless.

The space shuttle program, which once again had captured flagging American enthusiasm for space exploration, had become rather humdrum in public opinion. Sending shuttles up had become as predictable as airline flights. But like the commercial airlines, NASA could fall behind schedule. By 1986, it was way behind schedule, and way over budget. Congressional budget hawks were looking for targets and NASA and the space program, a bloated bureaucracy, had become a sitting duck. Ronald Reagan’s budget director, David Stockman, had argued for an end to all manned NASA missions. Reagan resisted, believing that the public imagination was still captivated by the space program.

As had become annoyingly routine with shuttle flights, this Challenger mission had been set back by several launch delays. Despite warnings from representatives of the shuttle’s builders, NASA officials overruled the concerns of engineers and ordered a liftoff at 11:38 A.M. with the Florida temperature at thirty-six degrees. Seventy-three seconds into flight, with the nation watching its first “mom and apple pie” shuttle astronaut, the Challenger disintegrated into a ball of fire at an altitude of 46,000 feet (14,020 meters). Among the stunned audience watching the launch had been McAuliffe’s parents and sister. Television cameras grippingly caught their faces going from excitement to bewilderment to disbelief in a matter of seconds as it became apparent that something had gone terribly wrong. Around the country, millions of schoolchildren had also tuned in to see a teacher being sent into space.

The concept of “civilian astronauts” had emerged as the shuttle program progressed from its early experimental days. The shuttle’s first orbital mission began on April 12, 1981. That day, the shuttle Columbia was launched, with astronauts John W. Young and Robert L. Crippen at the controls. The fifty-four-hour mission went perfectly. Seven months later, the vehicle made a second orbital flight, proving that a spacecraft could be reused.

The first four shuttle flights each carried only two pilots, but the crew size was soon expanded to four, and later to seven or eight. Besides the two pilots, shuttle crews grew to include “mission specialists,” experts in the scientific research to be performed, and “payload specialists,” a term that was supposed to mean experts in the operation of the shuttle but which grew increasingly ambiguous. Soon it was applied to include a variety of passengers like a U.S. senator and a Saudi prince whose presence on board was more ceremonial than scientific. They were among the first non-astronauts, a group NASA eventually hoped would include journalists and artists. New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe was the first true “citizen passenger,” who would deliver classroom lessons from space in a carefully calculated measure of NASA’s public relations blitz.

In the wake of the disaster, President Reagan appointed a special commission to determine the cause of the accident. Its fourteen members were led by former secretary of state William P. Rogers, who made it clear from the outset that NASA would emerge unscathed at least publicly, and included Apollo hero Neil Armstrong and America’s first woman in space, Sally Ride. In June 1986, the commission reported that the accident was caused by a failure of an O-ring in the shuttle’s right solid rocket booster.

An O-ring? Think of the rubber ring that seals the top of a Mason jar of preserves. More sophisticated versions of these rubber rings sealed the joint between the two lower segments of the booster. The dramatic high point of the hearings came when committee member Richard P. Feynman, a veteran of the Manhattan Project and one of the country’s most prominent physicists, dipped a piece of O-ring into a glass of ice water and used a vise clamp that came from from a local hardware store to show that the cold rubber was brittle. Design flaws in the joint and unusually cold weather during launch caused these O-rings to fail, a possibility that was apparent in test reports from one of the shuttle’s contractors.

The commission had hit upon the physical cause of the disaster but the ultimate cause was the decision to hurry a launch to justify the shuttle program, which was falling further and further behind schedule and costing more than it was ever predicted to cost. The fact that NASA wanted to keep Christa McAuliffe’s classroom lesson plan intact also played a role in the decision to launch, as did President Reagan’s schedule. He was supposed to deliver the State of the Union Address that same night and planned to refer to the shuttle and McAuliffe. Although no direct evidence of political involvement in the launch decision was produced during the commission’s hearings, many critics of NASA believed that the space agency was responding to White House pressure to stick to the schedule.

Why was Ronald Reagan called the “Teflon president”?

Ronald Reagan had a neat trick. When reporters yelled questions at him from a roped-off distance, he would cup his ear and apologize that he couldn’t hear. In fact, he had some hearing troubles. But when it came to many issues, he had perfect political pitch. Whether winning a crowd with a quip, relating an anecdote to win points in a speech, or leading the nation in mourning, as he did after the space shuttle disaster, Reagan was finely tuned in to an admiring public that genuinely liked him, as even his most begrudging critics acknowledged. But through his eight years in the White House and in the period since President Reagan left office, many views of the Reagan presidency have served up a different perspective. They depicted a detached, disinterested executive who asked no questions, ignored details, and allowed subordinates to run amok. Even the revelation that the first lady consulted an astrologer, Joan Quigley, whose advice was taken seriously, seemed to slide off Reagan’s back. As Bob Woodward later wrote, “the secret practice of making scheduling decisions based on astrology was irritating and irrational. [White House Chief of Staff Donald] Regan believed it was the most closely guarded domestic secret in the Reagan White House.” Almost every memoir by former administration figures—most notably those by David Stockman and Donald Regan—as well as a number of books about Reagan’s administration by journalists, such as Hedrick Smith’s The Power Game and The Acting President by Bob Schieffer and Gary Paul Gates, present a picture of Reagan as ill informed and disengaged, with a poor memory and little interest in details.

Yet, through most of it, Ronald Reagan held on to extraordinary public approval ratings, if national polls are to be trusted. Reagan’s uncanny ability to keep the controversies and problems of his eight years in office from sticking to him prompted the gently derisive nickname of “Teflon president.” Part of that “Teflon” image was simply a matter of Reagan’s extraordinary good luck. The fact that the American embassy hostages held in Teheran were freed at the moment Reagan took office, and through no effort of his own, seemed to give the Reagan years the first blush of serendipity. This image got another boost when Reagan survived an assassination attempt on March 30, 1981, and the country reveled in press reports of how he joked with the emergency room staff. It was only after George Bush’s election that Reagan’s onetime White House physician stated that the Twenty-fifth Amendment should have been invoked to transfer presidential powers temporarily to Vice President Bush while Reagan was under general anesthesia and recovering from emergency surgery. (Bush did become the first “acting president” under the Twenty-fifth Amendment in 1985 while Reagan had cancer surgery.)

But he emerged from the shooting unbowed, sitting taller in the saddle than ever in the American estimation. The surge in his approval polls after the shooting helped him ramrod through Congress the tax cuts and Pentagon spending plans he called for. After a generation of failed and disgraced presidents, Washington observers were marveling at Reagan’s considerable power. This gloss of invincibility and his personal affability carried Reagan through scandals at the highest levels of his administration, all of which he was able to shrug off with a chuckle, a wave, and a bemused shrug. Even the public embarrassment of his wife feeding him lines to shout to reporters didn’t dent the armor. The revelations of gross corruption by a large number of administration officials—the so-called sleaze factor that bubbled beneath the surface for his eight years—continued after Reagan’s departure. In the summer of 1989, a new scandal broke through in revelations of abuses in the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), led by a cabinet secretary, Samuel Pierce, whom Reagan once failed to recognize at a Rose Garden party.

Even major policy disasters seemed to roll off his back. When a terrorist bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut killed 239 marines assigned to an indefensible position with no real justification for their presence other than to assert American interests in the area, Reagan assumed “responsibility” without any damage to his image and popularity. An American air raid on the home of Libyan strongman Muammar Khaddafy left only two American pilots and some civilians dead, including one of the Libyan leader’s children. Yet Reagan’s popularity soared after what amounted to an attempted assassination.

But Reagan’s armor got its most severe test with the series of events that came to be called Iran-Contra. Although the full story of these events may never be learned, President Reagan personally escaped that controversy unscathed, even if it did serve to cripple his administration’s final days.

The “facts” in Iran-Contra are still shrouded in some mystery, obfuscated by denials and silence from some of the key participants, including Director of Central Intelligence William Casey, who died before the extent of his involvement was fully known to the press and the public. The situation went back to a problem that had bedeviled Jimmy Carter right up to Ronald Reagan’s inauguration—American hostages held in the Middle East. Unlike the Carter hostage dilemma, in which American diplomatic personnel were held by a surrogate arm of the Iranian government and whose whereabouts were known, the hostage situation facing Reagan involved a number of separate hostages held in the chaotic anarchy of civil war–ridden Lebanon by mysterious parties, assumed to be linked to Iranian leadership. In addition, one of these hostages, William Buckley, was the CIA head of station in Beirut, a fact likely known to his kidnappers. Reagan was personally tormented by the plight of the hostages and their families, but publicly stuck to his guns that there would be no yielding to terrorist demands. Such a trade-off, it was stated, would only encourage further hostage taking.

In the summer of 1985, Reagan’s national security adviser, Robert McFarlane, was approached by a group of Israelis with a plan for winning release of the hostages. That plan involved a rather dubious Iranian arms merchant who proposed that Teheran would use its influence to free the hostages in return for a few hundred U.S. antitank missiles, which Iran needed to carry on its long war of attrition with neighboring Iraq. To McFarlane, the deal presented an opportunity not only to free the hostages but to establish contact with so-called moderates within the Iranian government. After returning from surgery to remove a malignancy, President Reagan met with key staffers to discuss the arms-for-hostages deal. Secretary of State George Shultz and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger both voiced strong opposition. (The two later said George Bush was present; Bush claimed he was not present at any meeting at which Shultz and Weinberger objected to the deal and always professed he was “out of the loop” on Iran-Contra.) No decision was voiced at the meeting, and Shultz and Weinberger left thinking the idea was dead.

But in McFarlane’s account, Reagan called him with a go-ahead. Reagan would say he had no recollection of such a call. No formal record of this major decision was ever made. The first shipment of arms went through, and one hostage was released. The Iranian arms dealer withheld the news that CIA man Buckley, the man McFarlane wanted out most, was already dead, tortured before being executed. A second arms shipment, now being handled by one of McFarlane’s Security Council deputies, Marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, went awry, and no hostages were released.

While Let’s Make a Deal went on with Iran, the Reagan administration was in the thick of another foreign policy struggle—the ongoing support of a rebel army known as the Contras, committed to overthrowing the Marxist Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. The Democratic-
controlled Congress had taken the upper hand in its power struggle with the White House over Contra aid by passing an amendment that cut off all U.S. funds for the rebel army. But inside the White House, plans were hatched to make an end run around Congress by soliciting foreign money for the Contras, and that was done, with large amounts of private cash donations coming from wealthy conservative Republicans and, later, the Saudis. With money in the till, the problem became one of its disbursement. Even though Reagan was advised that sending such funds might be considered an impeachable offense, the plan went ahead, and that job was turned over to the same man who was in charge of the Iranian situation—Oliver North.

The man Reagan was later to call “a national hero” even as he fired him was seen by some White House staff as a power-grabbing zealot, delusional and willing to lie about his contacts and closeness with the president to advance his cause. A battle veteran of Vietnam and a fire-breathing anti-Communist, North had been involved in planning the military strike on the Caribbean island of Grenada to overthrow a Marxist government there on the pretext of rescuing American medical students.

To help him run his secret war in Nicaragua, North recruited a number of characters with past connections to the CIA and the American military, chief among them former Air Force general Richard Secord. At about this time, someone—nobody wants to take credit—came up with the idea of using profits being made from the sale of arms to Iran to fund the Contras. Hence the title Iran-Contra. CIA chief Casey was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea and became North’s chief White House patron, soon expanding the idea into what was called a permanent “off-the-shelf” covert enterprise that would circumvent congressional oversight of CIA secret operations.

One of the many ironies in this muddle was that the story was broken by an obscure Middle Eastern magazine, which revealed that McFarlane and North had been to Teheran, where McFarlane had tried to deliver a Bible and a birthday cake to the Ayatollah Khomeini as a goodwill gesture. Within days of this revelation, the strings began to unravel in the White House, and a seemingly befuddled Ronald Reagan issued a stream of conflicting statements and press conferences that were contradicted as soon as he made them. On November 13, 1986, Reagan had given a national address in which he said that the United States had sent Iran “a small amount of defensive weapons” and “We did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages.” Both assertions were completely false.

The immediate outcome of the story was the formation of a presidential commission composed of Senator John Tower, a conservative Republican (later to be rejected by the Senate as George Bush’s defense secretary, owing to reports of his drinking and womanizing); former senator Edmund Muskie, Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state; and retired General Brent Scowcroft, a former subordinate of Henry Kissinger. The Tower Commission released its report early in 1987, and it was a scathing rebuke of Reagan.

In an introduction to one published version of the report, New York Times Washington correspondent R. W. Apple Jr. wrote of the findings:

The board painted a picture of Ronald Reagan very different from what the world had become accustomed to in the last six years. No trace here of the lopsided smile, the easy wave, the confident mien that carried him through every past crisis; this portrait is of a man confused, distracted, so remote that he failed utterly to control the implementation of his vision of an initiative that would free American hostages and reestablish American influence in Iran, with all of its present and future strategic importance. At times, in fact, the report makes the president sound like the inhabitant of a never-never land of imaginary policies.

The Tower Commission was followed by a congressional investigation in which all the deceptions, lies to Congress and the public, and illegality attached to large amounts of money passing through various sticky fingers began to be revealed. Although never taken as seriously by the public as was Watergate, the abuses of Iran-Contra were dangerous: a president seemingly out of touch with reality and allowing very junior officers to control major foreign policy adventures without any oversight; a plan to set up a secret CIA operation to circumvent the Congress; an attempt to ignore a law by using a technicality, a maneuver that even the president’s closest advisers said might be an impeachable offense. With images of Richard Nixon’s resignation and departure in disgrace still vivid, the specter of another impeachment proceeding was not theoretical.

In the aftermath of Iran-Contra, Admiral Poindexter, Air Force general Richard Secord, Albert Hakim (an Iranian-born U.S. citizen and arms dealer), and Oliver North were charged by a federal grand jury with conspiring to illegally divert profits from the U.S.-Iran arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras. In 1989, a federal court convicted North on three charges relating to the Iran-Contra affair, including altering and destroying evidence. With the judge in the case calling him a “fall guy,” North was sentenced to a suspended sentence, 1,200 hours of community service in a drug program, and a $150,000 fine that he would presumably pay out of his substantial speaking engagement fees. Poindexter was convicted on five charges and received a six-month prison term. North had worked under national security advisers Robert C. McFarlane and John M. Poindexter. In 1989, McFarlane pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress during its investigation. In 1990, Poindexter was convicted of conspiracy and of lying to and obstructing Congress.

But none of the convictions stuck. In 1987, North and Poindexter had testified about the Iran-Contra affair during the congressional hearings and had received immunity, or freedom from prosecution, on matters of their testimony. The courts overturned the convictions of both North and Poindexter on grounds that their 1987 testimony might have influenced the outcome of their later trials. Only one person, former CIA agent Thomas G. Clines, went to prison as a result of Iran-Contra. He was sentenced to 16 months in prison for evading taxes on income from the operations.

In 1992, Caspar W. Weinberger, Reagan’s secretary of defense, was charged with lying to Congress and government investigators in connection with the Iran-Contra affair. But Weinberger, who was indicted by Special Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, was given a presidential pardon by George Bush in 1992. Bush also issued pardons to a number of key participants. Elliott Abrams and Alan Fiers Jr. had pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress. Duane Clarridge had been indicted on seven counts of perjury and was awaiting trial. Clair George had been convicted of two felony counts of perjury and false statements and was awaiting sentencing when pardoned.

Bush’s own role in Iran-Contra remained murky. During the investigation, he stated famously that he was “out of the loop.” After Bush lost his 1992 bid for reelection, entries from diaries that were belatedly given to Special Prosecutor Walsh showed that Bush had been informed about the progress of the arms-for-hostages deal in 1986. Bob Woodward reported later in Shadow that Bush had said, “Good things, such as the release of the hostages and contacts with moderates, will in the long run—in my view—offset this.” In the end, writes Woodward, “the records showed that Bush had attended many meetings on the Iran arms sales, but Independent Counsel Walsh felt at that point that his role was not central. . . . Some of Reagan’s key national security people, even Secretary of State Shultz, supported this view. They dismissed Bush as a decorative yes man, a heartbeat away from the presidency but miles away from heavyweight decision making.”

On January 18, 1994, Special Prosecutor Lawrence E. Walsh issued the final report of the Iran-Contra affair. The report said the Iran-Contra operations “violated United States policy and law,” and it criticized the Reagan and Bush administrations for involvement in a cover-up. However, Walsh acknowledged that there was no credible evidence that the president authorized or was aware of the diversion of the profits from the Iran arms sales to assist the Contras.

Iran-Contra was a potentially dangerous escapade that might have seemed like the work of some novelist forming a scenario for a takeover of the inner workings of American government. Only Oliver North wasn’t fiction. It is exactly his brand of zealotry that created the need for the system of checks and balances that exists at every level of the system.

(Two key Iran-Contra figures, Elliott Abrams and John Poindexter, resurfaced in 2002 in the administration of the younger Bush. Pardoned by senior Bush, Abrams was named to be President Bush’s director of Middle Eastern affairs at the White House. John M. Poindexter, a national security adviser to President Reagan whose convictions on five felony counts were later overturned, was named to direct a controversial Pentagon project that would assemble information on suspected terrorists in the aftermath of September 11.)

AMERICAN VOICES

RYAN WHITE, who contracted AIDS from an infected blood-clotting medicine he took to counter hemophilia, speaking to a presidential commission on AIDS (1988):

I came face-to-face with death at thirteen years old. I was diagnosed with AIDS: a killer. Doctors told me I’m not contagious. Given six months to live and being the fighter that I am, I set high goals for myself. It was my decision to live a normal life, go to school, be with my friends, and enjoy day-to-day activities.

The school I was going to said they had no guidelines for a person with AIDS. . . . We began a series of court battles for nine months, while I was attending classes by telephone. Eventually, I won the right to attend school, but the prejudice was still there. . . . Because of the lack of education on AIDS, discrimination, fear, panic and lies surrounded me. I became the target of Ryan White jokes.

Ryan White died in 1990 at age eighteen.

What was the “gay plague”?

Germs and what goes on behind bedroom doors have always taken a backseat to dates and battles and speeches in most history books, but they have often had much more to do with history than most politicians, kings, generals, or court decisions ever did. Squeamishness among teachers, academics, and publishers, along with America’s resilient Puritan ethics, have long meant that sex, disease, and death are the unmentionable parts of history that the schoolbooks leave out. During the 1980s and 1990s, however, sex and disease were never a bigger part of American history, as a new and terrifying ailment completely altered the way the country behaved and thought about sex.

“Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” The headline appeared inside the New York Times on July 3, 1981. Written by Dr. Lawrence K. Altman, a physician who covered medical news for the Times, the article was about 900 words long. Altman’s story described how doctors were reporting a small but frightening number of patients who were mysteriously dying from a rare and especially fatal form of cancer. “The cause of the outbreak is unknown,” Altman wrote, “and there is as yet no evidence of contagion.”

Little did Altman or anyone else know in 1981 that the appearance of this rare cancer was the visible, early phase of one of the most deadly epidemics in human history. It would not only kill millions but completely alter social behavior, sexual attitudes, and relationships. The medical mystery Altman described would eventually blossom into the full-blown international plague of AIDS. More than twenty years after Altman’s article, the first of more than 900 he would write on the subject, AIDS/HIV had affected some 60 million people worldwide and more than 20 million were dead, according to the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO).³

It was only a few years before Altman’s article appeared that the medical world had announced one of its greatest victories with the eradication of smallpox. The last known naturally occurring case of smallpox was in Somalia in 1977, and the last known case was due to a lab accident in England in 1978. (Two research stores of smallpox are still secured in labs in the U.S. and Russia.) This triumph for modern science, along with the great strides made against polio, yellow fever, and a host of other killing diseases, left the medical world fairly confident.

Then came the mystery ailment. At first, the disease that became known as AIDS was ignored by Americans when the symptoms began to appear in 1981. It seemed to be limited to a few “special cases” in the population—male homosexuals and intravenous drug users. It was first identified as a “new” disease in 1980 and 1981 by physicians in Los Angeles and New York City who recognized that all the patients were previously healthy, young homosexual men suffering from otherwise rare forms of cancer and pneumonia. Among the homosexual community, word of a “gay plague” was spreading. Among the most fearful rumors was that someone actually was targeting homosexuals with this new disease. Some doctors first called the ailment GRID (for gay-related immune deficiency) before the Centers for Disease Control settled on the name AIDS (the acronym stands for “acquired immune deficiency syndrome”).

For a variety of reasons—which included shrinking federal medical research budgets, competition among doctors who wanted to be the first to publish, and miscommunication of basic facts to the public—the initial response to the growing epidemic was slow. Then AIDS began to show up among young hemophiliacs and female sex partners of infected men. The sense of alarm started to grow. When the enormity of the problem became more apparent, and people realized that the nation’s blood supply might be tainted, a sense of national panic ensued. Even as the course of the cause and course of the disease became known, the country was gripped by fear. It took some time to learn that AIDS is the final, life-threatening stage of infection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). The name refers to the fact that the virus severely damages the body’s most important defense against disease, the immune system. After the discovery of the AIDS virus by the Pasteur Institute in Paris in 1983, Dr. Robert Gallo’s team at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, developed a blood test to detect the virus in 1985. The tests to detect evidence of HIV have been used to screen all blood donated in the United States since 1985. These tests were also used to analyze stored tissues from several people who died going back to the late 1950s, and scientists concluded that some of these people had died from AIDS.

In the early days of AIDS, the prevalence of the disease among homosexuals and drug users marginalized the disease, along with stigmatizing those who were suffering. On the community level, small towns were divided over whether to allow students with AIDS to attend schools, an issue brought to life by the poignant story of a young boy named Ryan White. Schools were also debating what role they should play in educating students about AIDS prevention. Condom distribution and “clean needle” exchanges, which were attempts to get infected hypodermics out of the hands of intravenous drug users, were suddenly part of the debate.

The American religious community was split among those who denounced AIDS victims as “immoral,” and other religious groups who responded with greater compassion. But many Americans, though fearful of this new disease that came shrouded in unpleasant realities, felt somewhat removed from AIDS until it started to claim some very visible victims, including film actor Rock Hudson in July 1985. A longtime symbol of American virility and “wholesome” entertainment, Hudson had costarred with Hollywood beauties like Elizabeth Taylor and Jennifer Jones and become a 1960s icon with a series of fluffy romantic comedies with Doris Day. He had moved on to a highly successful television career with McMillan and Wife, a detective show that ran for six seasons. Before Hudson’s death, the face of AIDS was a stranger. But America was shocked to see the former matinee idol’s emaciated and sunken image. His death helped open up a new national discussion of the subject. Eventually, other figures from the world of Hollywood, the arts, and sports began to die or announce that they were infected. They included tennis champion Arthur Ashe, who died in 1993, infected during a transfusion while in surgery. Los Angeles Lakers basketball star Magic Johnson announced he was infected with HIV in 1991, quit playing, and then, remarkably, resumed his career temporarily, a testament to the progress made in treating the disease, as well as the change in attitudes.

There was no aspect of American public and private life that the AIDS/HIV epidemic did not touch during the last two decades of the twentieth century. The economy was impacted as enormous amounts of money began to be devoted to keep up with the ill and infected. Budgets of hospitals, medical insurers, the national medical research facilities, public health and private welfare agencies were all strained to the limits.

The AIDS epidemic fundamentally altered the American landscape. By 1992, both political parties’ nominating conventions prominently featured spokespeople for the AIDS community in prime-time network television speeches. Condoms, safe sex, anal sex—words never before uttered in polite society—all became part of American common parlance. In many ways, the AIDS crisis also brought homosexuality out of the American closet. Once taboo or tittered at, homosexuality was now openly discussed, accompanied by a new political activism among gay Americans. The word “gay” itself became a new part of the American lexicon. Even the staid New York Times eventually accepted the word. The health care and scientific research became politicized and radicalized. Not simply content with increasing funding for AIDS research, the “gay rights” movement began to press for new legislation that would rid America of institutional discrimination against homosexuals. Of course, these demands were not uniformly accepted. Emboldened by the success of AIDS activists in obtaining funding for medical research, women also spoke out forcefully about the disparity of funds being devoted to breast cancer research. The walls of the entire system of medical research, long an almost exclusive domain of white males, were falling down.

The losses from AIDS can’t be totaled in sheer numbers. Just as an entire generation of America’s young men—its “best and brightest”—were wiped out during the Civil War, millions of people around the world fell to AIDS. Their deaths were not only tragic, but the loss of their industry, ingenuity, invention, and potential is the truly incalculable cost of this disease. Twenty years after its appearance, scientists were still not certain how, when, or where the AIDS virus evolved and first infected people. One widely held suspicion is that HIV evolved from viruses that originally infected monkeys in Africa and was somehow transmitted to people.

Must Read: And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts.

AMERICAN VOICES

EDMUND WHITE (b. 1940), American writer, in States of Desire: Travels in Gay America (afterword to 1986 edition):

The Aids epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all of the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main themes of our existence: sex, death, power, money, love, hate, disease, and panic. No American phenomenon has been so compelling since the Vietnam war.

ANTHONY PERKINS (1932–92), American actor best known for his role as Norman Bates in Psycho (quoted posthumously in Independent on Sunday, September 20, 1992):

I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding in this great adventure in the world of AIDS than I ever did in the cut-throat, competitive world in which I spent my life.

What happened to the Evil Empire?

History’s long-range judgment of the Reagan years must wait, but the wear and tear of more than a dozen years out of office have not dulled his “Teflon” finish. Suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, which was first diagnosed in 1994, Ronald Reagan remained a much-loved president at the turn of the century. (A majority of Americans surveyed in a 1999 Gallup poll predicted that Reagan will rank higher than other modern presidents.) Historians were tougher critics. In one post–Reagan era poll, academic historians and political scientists ranked him twenty-second among the then forty U.S. presidents. However, a C-Span poll in 2009 placed Ronald Reagan, who died in 2004, as the tenth best president.

Of course, much of the judgment is partisan. To admirers, Reagan’s successes in changing the American mood, reducing marginal tax rates from 70 percent, and altering the political terrain in America, place him in the pantheon of great presidents. His critics point to his failures, most notably the creation of an enormous national debt; the foreign policy misadventures, in particular Iran-Contra; and a shortsighted plan to assist the rebels fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. The aid given to the Afghan Islamic mujahideen effectively weakened the Soviet Union. But the failure to remain engaged in Afghanistan allowed that country to slip into the chaos and power vacuum in which the Taliban and their allied terrorist group Al Qaeda flourished. A few years after Reagan left office, the tremendous burden of debt his administration’s policies had created during eight years was seen as an anchor on the American economy. The economic boom of the 1990s, which eventually produced budget surpluses, if only temporarily, had erased the worst of that black mark.

But Reagan ultimately may well go down in history for his unique role in altering relations with the Soviet Union and spearheading the beginning of the end of Soviet bloc Communism in Europe. Although the finish would not come until 1991, when his successor George Bush was in office, by the end of Reagan’s second term, the handwriting was on the wall. The Soviet Union had been spiraling downward for a long time. A fatally inefficient industrial system; official corruption; deep political and social problems; competitive pressures not only from the United States but from China, Japan, and other emerging Asian countries; independence movements—some of them Islamic—within the various Soviet republics; and a long, costly, debilitating war in Afghanistan were all factors that had weakened the Kremlin’s control over its empire. The Soviet economy was so deeply flawed that it has to be examined as the first cause of the USSR’s collapse. For years, the Soviet Union had devoted as much as 25 percent of its national output to unproductive military expenditures. (By comparison, the United States allocated in the range of 4 to 6 percent of its much larger gross domestic product to defense.) While the rest of the world was speeding toward the twenty-first century, with rapidly changing technologies and increasing trade, the Soviet Union was saddled with a Third World economy stuck in the 1950s and an agricultural system that still resembled one from the nineteenth century.

In spite of these deep internal structural problems, the military might of the Soviet Union, its sheer size, and its authoritarian control over the Eastern European bloc had dominated relations with the United States for more than forty years. There was almost no aspect of life or history in America after World War II that was not impacted in some way by the competition known as the Cold War.

Reagan’s second term coincided with the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev as the leader of the Soviet Union. The two men began a remarkable working relationship that ushered in a new era in Soviet-American cooperation. At a 1987 summit meeting in Iceland, they agreed to the first treaty in history to reduce the nuclear arsenals of the two superpowers. When Reagan left office in January 1989, the Berlin Wall, long a symbol of division between Germany and all of Europe, was still standing. Within a year, it had been torn down. Germany was unified in 1990, and the Soviet Empire fell apart. On Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev stepped down. In an astonishingly brief and peaceful revolution, the Cold War was over and European Communism, enforced by years of brutal Soviet suppression, was finished. Gorbachev, who won the Nobel Prize in 1990, was clearly the man who had taken history into his own hands. Other key players in the demise of the Soviet system and the end of the Cold War were England’s Margaret Thatcher, George Bush, Germany’s Helmut Kohl, Polish labor leader Lech Wałesa, and Pope John Paul II, the first pope from a Communist country, whose travels to Eastern Europe helped fuel the anti-Soviet mood in that part of the world.

As Lou Cannon wrote, “His legacy in foreign affairs . . . shines brighter with the benefit of hindsight. Reagan launched a military buildup premised on a belief that the Soviet Union was too economically vulnerable to compete in a celebrated arms race and would come to the bargaining table if pressured by the West. The message of freedom that he believed could energize the people of Eastern Europe and penetrate within the Soviet Union itself. Many members of the political establishment thought these views were at best naive. They also were alarmed by Reagan’s provocative comments about communism, particularly his description of the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire.’ But times changed.”

Must Read: President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime by Lou Cannon.

AMERICAN VOICES

NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER COLIN POWELL to Ronald Reagan on his last day in office:

The world is quiet today, Mr. President.

Colin Luther Powell (b. 1937) was born in New York City, the son of Jamaican immigrants. With assistance from an affirmative action program designed to increase minority college enrollment, he graduated from the City College of New York and earned an MBA degree from George Washington University. Commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army in 1958, he served in Vietnam with the 23rd Division in 1968–69, and later commanded forces in South Korea, West Germany, and the United States. In 1986, Powell became commanding general of the Fifth Corps in Frankfurt, Germany, and President Ronald Reagan named him national security adviser, the first black man to fill that position, in 1987. During the next decade, he would extend those achievements.

In the spring of 2002, Russia was invited to join NATO, which had been created to stem the tide of Soviet Russia’s military strength. Although Russia joined the defense alliance as a nonvoting member, it was still a remarkable turnabout in the history of Europe, America, and the world.