FALL AND RESTORATION
From Nixon to Reagan
OF ALL THE PRESIDENTS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, THE one about whom historical opinion is most unsettled, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, is Richard Nixon. Nixon himself predicted that it would take at least fifty years before his presidency could be properly assessed, and his prediction has proven accurate. Like Truman, he was controversial and reviled by many in his time and left office with rock-bottom approval ratings, hated by his opponents. Like Johnson, he had none of the charm or charisma of a John Kennedy, and he suffered for it, an unloved leader who almost seemed uncomfortable in his own skin and who was openly mocked in the media for his chronic awkwardness and strange, lurching gestures. We even have an adjective in the English language, Nixonian, used to describe politicians who are devious and secretive by nature, as Nixon himself seemed to be.
But the passage of time, and the lessening of passions, have led to significant reappraisals of Nixon’s career, and there will likely be more in the years to come. In many respects, as we shall see, he was a talented and highly intelligent man who was consumed by the circumstances of the time: by the intractable war in Vietnam, by the terrible social divisions of the country, and by the outsized demands upon the presidential office. His presidency evoked passions that are still alive today. He provides us with a good example of why it becomes more and more difficult to write about history with perspective and balance the more closely one’s subject matter approaches the present day.
Born in 1913 into a lower-middle-class Quaker family in southern California, Nixon was the son of a struggling grocer, forced to grasp hold of his opportunities and successes through extremely hard work. As a high school student, he rose every day at 4:00 A.M. and drove to the Seventh Street market in Los Angeles, where he bought vegetables, delivered them to his father’s business, washed and displayed them, and then went for a full day of school, at which he was always an outstanding student. Such an exhausting round of dutiful burdens and responsibilities were the abiding themes of a remarkably joyless and careworn youth.
That hard school of experience fueled his immense drive and characteristic opportunism and also gave him a particular sympathy for people without pedigree, the ones he would later call the Silent Majority. “Even when he achieved positions too exalted for general attention to the less fortunate,” his biographer Conrad Black writes, “his heart and his thoughts … were always for those who had little, who struggled, who had been shortchanged.… He identified with them.”
After law school at Duke, several years of legal practice, and service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, Nixon returned to California and entered into politics, making a name for himself as a hardball politician and a tough-minded anti-Communist concerned about foreign spying in the government. Elected first to the House, then in 1950 to the Senate, and then on to the vice presidency at the age of thirty-nine, Nixon was a rapidly rising star of the Republican Party. He would experience setbacks, but his relentless ambition was not to be denied. A mere eight years after his disappointing defeat of 1960, and six years after an even more humiliating defeat for the California governorship in 1962 – after which he angrily informed the press corps that “you don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference” – he had turned it all around and had ascended to the pinnacle of American politics.
I have said that Nixon was a hardball politician, and although that is true, it is only part of the story. One of Nixon’s greatest political skills, paradoxically, was his remarkable talent for compromise and coalition building. The Republicans had been bedeviled for nearly four decades by a liberal–conservative divide, beginning with the split between Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft and later continued in the ideological split between Rockefeller establishment liberals and Goldwater insurgent conservatives. Nixon managed to be different from either side but conversant with both. He was not an ideologue and would make a political career out of skillfully walking a political tightrope between the two sides, often doing unexpected things in the process. Balancing an assertive and consistently anti-Communist national-security policy with largely moderate social and economic policies, Nixon was always able to put together effective electoral combinations and eventually brought his formerly embattled party within hailing distance of majority status. On matters of principle, however, he was not always so clear.
In any event, getting elected was the easy part. Upon coming into the White House, he found a mountain of unfinished business piled on his presidential desk, problems left behind by his predecessor. Most pressing of all was a new approach to the deep and bloody gash that had been opened up by the ongoing American involvement in Vietnam. Nixon had campaigned on the promise of ending the conflict, and now he would have to find a way to make good on the promise. He did not shrink from the task. “The greatest honor history can bestow,” Nixon proclaimed in his inaugural address, “is the title of peacemaker. This honor now beckons America.… [It] is our summons to greatness.”
First, though, he would have to do something about the half million American troops in Vietnam – and the three hundred American soldiers who were dying every week. How to reduce that number, rapidly and visibly, without the action being seen as an American capitulation? How was he to achieve the oft-promised “peace with honor”? For Nixon, the answer was to seek the withdrawal of American forces, but in so seamless a way that South Vietnam could remain secure. To that end, he quickly formulated a strategy he called “Vietnamization,” a systematic plan that would gradually replace American troops with loyal and competently trained South Vietnamese ones and turn the war effort over to the South Vietnamese themselves. The plan worked well, and by the end of 1972, the total number of American military personnel in Vietnam was fewer than twenty-five thousand.
Meanwhile, Nixon sought a settlement on the diplomatic front with equal energy, deploying his suave and brilliant German-born national-security advisor Henry Kissinger to conduct secret meetings with North Vietnam’s Lê Đúc Thọ. After some back and forth between the two sides, including a premature announcement by Kissinger in fall 1972 that “peace is at hand,” followed by the use of heavy bombing attacks against the North to force a settlement, the antagonists finally arrived at an armistice, the Paris Peace Accords of 1973, which allowed the United States finally to withdraw its troops and to get back more than five hundred prisoners of war. Unfortunately, the agreement did not require the withdrawal of a sizable number of North Vietnamese regulars from the South – a sticking point on which the North Vietnamese had been adamant – and that would prove in time to be a fatal mistake. Still in the short term, Nixon had achieved his fundamental object, and on March 29, 1973, the last American combat troops left Vietnam. Kissinger and Lê Đúc Thọ were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. The cease-fire seemed unlikely to hold, but that was a problem for another day.
There was another important, and far more enduring, diplomatic breakthrough to come from the Nixon administration. U.S. foreign policy had hitherto failed to take advantage of the fact that, during two decades of conflict and competition, a bitter rivalry had emerged between the two great Communist nations of the world, the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China (PRC). American loyalty to the democratic regime in Taiwan had dictated that the United States had not recognized the PRC and had forsworn any relations with it. The strong anti-Communism of the time, particularly in Nixon’s own party, militated against any change of that state of affairs. But Nixon himself had already hinted before the election that this isolation of the “Red” Chinese was misguided and counterproductive, a policy that needed to be revisited, if not ended altogether. For one thing, both Nixon and Kissinger grasped that improving relations with China was an essential step if the Chinese rivalry with the Soviets was to be made to work to the United States’ benefit. Why not play them off against one another? But to do that effectively, better relations with China were an absolute imperative.
Keenly aware of the sensitivity of the matter, Nixon first sent Kissinger to conduct secret talks with the Chinese and then, in July 1971, made the stunning announcement that he would be traveling to China and meeting with Chinese leaders the following February. In an intricately choreographed and highly publicized weeklong visit, accompanied by more than a hundred journalists, Nixon and Kissinger laid the groundwork for diplomatic recognition, sidestepping for the time being the status of Taiwan. In turn, the developing relationship with China had the desired effect on the Soviet Union, which, suddenly fearing the possibility of an American–Chinese alliance, took steps to improve relations with the United States, including working toward an agreement on the limitation of strategic nuclear weapons. Once again, Nixon made a surprise visit to Moscow and repeated a spectacle similar to the one they had enacted in China. Nixon and Kissinger’s grand playing-off strategy had worked extremely well.
It has been said, rightly, that only a president with Nixon’s conservative and anti-Communist credentials could have made the opening to China without major pushback. But there was more to it than that. Nixon and Kissinger were exponents of “realism” in foreign policy, and their position entailed some revision of the containment doctrine and a reversal of Kennedy’s exuberant world-spanning ambition, which had promised to “pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” Nixon disagreed. The United States could not be the world’s policeman, he believed, and it could not “undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world.” The Nixon Doctrine, which undergirded the philosophy of Vietnamization, posited that the United States would continue to assist in the support of allied nations, but not to the extent of committing its own military forces. The deciding factor in any foreign-policy commitment would be the national interest of the United States: “our interests must shape our commitments, rather than the other way around.” The effort to establish improved relations with both the Soviet Union and the Chinese flowed from that view.
On the domestic front, Nixon faced greater challenges. The deck was stacked against him. The Democrats held majorities in both houses of Congress, and Nixon’s ability to work with a variety of ideological bedfellows and antagonists would be put to the test. In fact, the Democratic Congress was able to get its own way repeatedly, passing a flood of Great Society–like bills such as the Occupational Health and Safety Act, the Clean Air Act, the Federal Election Campaign Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, increased funding for Social Security and food stamps, plus other similar legislation. Nixon was largely helpless to stop the flood and did not try very hard.
In addition, Nixon surprised everyone in his approach to the weak and troubled economy, lurching from right to left unpredictably. The smooth and steady hand Nixon brought to foreign affairs was not evident in these matters. To be sure, the problems left on his desk were considerable and limited his options. The efforts by the Johnson administration to have both “guns and butter” – to expend vast sums of money both on the war in Vietnam and on large and lavish social programs, without imposing commensurate tax increases – had led to large deficits and soaring inflation. A recession in 1970, partly brought on by Nixon’s clumsy efforts to raise interest rates, had added to the economic woes. Nixon had also tried reducing the deficit by raising taxes and cutting the budget, but the congressional Democrats would have no part of the latter.
Finally, in 1971, in an act of desperation, Nixon abandoned free-market orthodoxy altogether and imposed temporary wage and price controls on the economy, something he had previously vowed he would never do. This move had the effect of curbing inflation by freezing existing prices in place, but the effect was only temporary and fleeting, because it treated the symptoms rather than the underlying disease. Nixon also ended the convertibility of dollars into gold, effectively establishing “fiat” currency, unbacked by a precious metal. These moves became known as the Nixon shock, and they were politically popular in the short run and widely applauded by economists. But the experts were wrong; such measures proved economically ineffective and only set the stage for much more severe problems later in the decade.
The mired-down economy, undergoing both high inflation and no-growth stagnation at the same time, would force economists to invent a new word, stagflation – a word as ugly and ungainly as the thing it denoted – to describe it. Most economists had thought such a condition was not possible, because they believed there was a stable inverse relationship between inflation and unemployment, meaning that higher inflation would always mean a growing economy, which would in turn mean lower unemployment. But actual economic conditions were not cooperating with economic theory: both inflation and unemployment were high and on the increase at the same time. Once again, the experts were wrong and were inadvertently providing evidence that the dream of a micromanaged economy was not likely to work out as planned.
In economic matters, then, Nixon was far from conservative, and such actions enraged his conservative supporters. Yet, in other respects, Nixon was able to steer the public mood toward conservatism in small but significant ways that could manifest themselves more fully in the decades ahead. One of his successes in this regard was in implementing policies that he called the New Federalism, an attempt to reverse the steady centralization of government in Washington that had begun in the Progressive years, accelerated under the New Deal, and moved to breakneck speed in the Johnson years. Nixon attempted to move power back to the states and municipalities through revenue sharing, in which up to $30 billion in federal funds would be block-granted to the states and cities to be used for their own purposes.
It was not the same thing as the Constitution’s original federalism, in which the states and localities were able to operate independently of the national government, empowered to make their own taxing and spending decisions without any involvement from Washington. But it was a sensible innovation that many conservatives welcomed, and it was acceptable to Democrats: an example of politics as the art of the possible, under conditions of divided government.
In any event, then, despite the lingering economic uncertainties, and despite the challenges of dealing with a Democratic Congress, Nixon’s overall record heading into the 1972 elections was surprisingly strong. He had enjoyed spectacular successes in his dealings with China and the Soviet Union, he had wound down the American commitment to Vietnam without incurring the humiliation of defeat, he had brought a measure of peace and stability to a troubled nation, and he had at least shown energy and flexibility in his approach to the economy. His Democratic opponent, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, was in a sense the Democrats’ Goldwater, a principled man of honesty and decency, but far too ideologically liberal ever to win a national election, with a campaign too feckless and amateurish to show him in a favorable light.
On election day, Nixon won a huge victory, mirroring Lyndon Johnson’s smashing triumph eight years before, gaining 60.8 percent of the popular vote and 520 electoral votes, compared to a pathetic 17 for McGovern. Unlike Johnson, he would still have to deal with a Congress dominated by the other party; Democrats continued to hold on to their solid majorities in both houses and even managed to increase it slightly in the Senate. But a closer analysis of the overall vote showed that the party realignment that had begun to be visible in 1964 was now fully under way. With the steady flow of Sunbelt and suburban voters into the Republican Party, and with Nixon’s image as a consummate diplomat abroad taking hold, the Republicans stood on the brink of achieving majority-party status for the first time since the 1920s.
But that was not to be. Nixon’s penchant for hardball politics, even in an election that he was almost guaranteed to win, got the better of him and proved to be his undoing. McGovern had complained during the campaign of a pattern of “dirty tricks” in the Nixon campaign, such as wiretaps, false claims about adulteries and racist comments, and forged documents, all designed to harass and embarrass opponents. His complaints were mostly ignored as the sour grapes of a losing campaign. But one incident stood out and eventually attracted attention. There had been an odd occurrence in June 1972 in which five intruders had been caught breaking into the Democratic Party’s national headquarters at the Watergate office complex and attempting to plant bugging devices to enable eavesdropping on telephone communications. The trial of these five Watergate burglars led to revelations that the Nixon administration had been connected in some manner to the operation – one of the burglars, John McCord, was the chief of security for Nixon’s reelection campaign committee – and that the administration was going to great lengths to cover up that connection and ensure the silence of the five, fearing that such a revelation would endanger the president’s reelection prospects.
A nearly two-year-long battle ensued, as government investigators and journalists tried to uncover the nature of this connection and the Nixon administration stubbornly resisted them. In the process, it began to become clear that there were many far more disturbing abuses of power emanating from the Nixon White House than the Watergate break-in. Nixon was concerned, as all leaders are, by the leaking of confidential government information to the press or the larger world. That concern had become heightened in the stormy environment of the Vietnam years, when details about secret military operations were often being spilled out onto the front pages of major American newspapers. But Nixon had responded to that challenge by resorting to the use of illegal wiretaps on the phones of journalists and government employees who were suspected of the leaking. Moreover, it turned out that the “dirty tricks” had not been figments of McGovern’s imagination but were part of a larger effort to sabotage the campaigns of Nixon rivals. Most disturbing of all was the possibility that Nixon might have used, or considered using, agencies of the federal government, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the CIA, or the Internal Revenue Service, to derail opponents.
As the effort to “cover up” these illegal acts began to unravel, more and more individuals associated with the administration, including the president’s own legal counsel John Dean, began to cooperate with the investigators. A Senate select committee was empaneled to investigated matters more fully. The investigation might have gone nowhere, however, were it not for two fortuitous developments. First, reporters for the Washington Post were fortunate to have the benefit of copious leaking from a disgruntled FBI official, Mark Felt, who had access to the FBI’s files and was angry at Nixon for repeatedly passing him over as FBI director. Second, there was the casual disclosure in one of the committee’s hearings that the Nixon White House used a taping system to record all conversations and telephone communications. This was a potential gold mine for investigators. Such tapes would show clearly whether there had ever been conversations about a cover-up.
Nixon resisted handing over the tapes to investigators, citing executive privilege. But when the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that he had to hand them over, and at the same time the House Judiciary Committee recommended three articles of impeachment for various abuses of power, Nixon knew that the game was up. On August 9, 1974, he resigned from the presidency rather than face near-certain impeachment and removal from office.
It was a sad ending to a promising presidency, one that was not without its extraordinary achievements, even if the long shadow of Watergate made it difficult to perceive those achievements clearly or to credit them for their true worth. But it had ramifications even beyond Nixon himself. It also cast a shadow over the office of the American presidency itself. The steady growth of federal power, and particularly the power of the executive branch, which had begun in earnest in the Progressive Era, grown during the New Deal and the subsequent years of war and Cold War, and the ever more expansive state that had come with those things – it now seemed to Americans of all stripes, liberal as well as conservative, that these developments carried real dangers with them.
Historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a close advisor to John F. Kennedy and an ardent defender of New Deal liberalism – and an impassioned Nixon foe – reflected the mood of the moment in a 1973 book called The Imperial Presidency. In it he argued that the American presidency was out of control, having exceeded its constitutional limits and, like a metastasizing cancer, threatened to destroy the very structure of constitutional democracy if it was not brought under control. Interestingly, Schlesinger was especially critical of what he called “indiscriminate global intervention,” or more pungently, “messianic globalism,” which strained the use of American power beyond its constitutional limits. This was precisely the expansive feature of American foreign policy that Schlesinger’s hero Kennedy had sought to expand even further and that the “realists” Nixon and Kissinger had sought to rein in. It is worth noting, too, that one of Nixon’s chief domestic innovations was the New Federalism, an effort to move power away from the federal government and the executive branch.
But the general point that Schlesinger made was nevertheless a valid one, and one that spoke to abiding concerns of the moment. Had the genius of the U.S. Constitution – its ability to limit the abuses of power of any one individual or entity by placing it in conflict with other, countervailing forces – been compromised by the growth of the size and scope of the presidential office? And might we not need to return to the earlier forms?
To do so would mean taking on a very different view of American history. Ever since the onset of the Progressive Era, many reformers had argued that the Constitution was obsolete, with too many barriers to the decisive use of power, and that greater and greater centralization and coordination of power was essential. A vigorous and assertive chief executive had been an essential part of that vision. But perhaps this had been entirely wrong. Didn’t the case of Nixon show why constitutional restraints were more important than ever? After all, the constitutional system had worked in the case of Nixon; the combination of a free press and a vigorous legislative branch had seen to it that his abuses were called to account. But would it always work so well in the future? Might there be future presidents who would cover their tracks more skillfully than Nixon did? Might it not be necessary to do things to restrain such future presidents, even to weaken their office? The War Powers Act, passed over Nixon’s veto in 1973, was an important reform of presidential war-making power, restoring constitutional accountability to Congress that had been lost since the days of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Would more measures like this have to be adopted?
All of these were worries trailing in the wake of what became known, somewhat oversimply, by the single word Watergate. And as if that were not enough to worry about, there was another worry, one that crossed the minds of those who knew something about American history and remembered the example of Andrew Johnson. For three decades after Johnson’s impeachment and near-removal, the presidency suffered from a diminished role in American governance. Could this happen again? Had Watergate not only shown the limits of the imperial presidency, but left the presidency too damaged to perform its legitimate and proper functions? This too was a distinct possibility.
Nixon’s vice president and successor, longtime Michigan Republican congressman Gerald R. Ford, had an unenviable task in carrying on, after the unprecedented resignation in office of an American president. He carried it off as well as could be imagined, with modesty and humor. “I am a Ford, not a Lincoln,” he humbly submitted, and his easygoing middle American demeanor was a welcome contrast to Nixon’s tightly coiled intensity. Two years into Nixon’s second term, Ford inherited a basketful of near-insoluble problems, including a rapidly deteriorating situation in Vietnam, continuing stagflation, and the threat of a Middle Eastern oil embargo. Nevertheless, he came into office as the beneficiary of a great deal of public goodwill.
First of all, though, he had to stanch the bleeding from Watergate. Nixon was still potentially liable, as a private citizen, to criminal prosecution for his misdeeds, and Ford reasoned that this could keep the controversy going endlessly, with untold damage to the nation. So he made the decision to use his presidential power to pardon Nixon of any crimes that he might have committed. Instantly, Ford’s standing with the public evaporated, and his approval ratings dropped like a stone. The pardon made it difficult to imagine that Ford could ever hope to win the presidency in his own right in 1976. Yet today most historians would agree that the pardon was the right thing to do, for the sake of the country, and even that it was a heroic and sacrificially patriotic act on Ford’s part.
In any event, the price of Watergate, and the diminution of presidential power, were visible enough elsewhere. The Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress had swelled in response to Watergate and continued stagflation; in the House, the Democrats picked up a whopping forty-nine seats. Thus emboldened, the Democrats were in no mood to accommodate Ford or to do what was necessary to uphold the peace agreement Nixon and Kissinger had brokered in Vietnam. By 1974, the South Vietnamese government was under intense attack from Communist forces and desperately in need of American aid if it were to survive. But Congress drastically cut that aid, from $2.8 billion in fiscal 1973 to $300 million in 1975. Once the aid had been cut, it took the North Vietnamese only fifty-five days to finish off the South Vietnamese and reunify the country under Communist rule.
At the same time, the U.S.-supported government in Cambodia was overthrown by the Communist Khmer Rouge, a radical Maoist-influenced group that proceeded to massacre a million of its own people in an effort to eliminate “Western” influences. Both these developments produced a flood of refugees to the West, particularly to the United States. In the meantime, the economic situation at home worsened steadily, with both the inflation rate and the unemployment rate approaching 10 percent. It was a dark time for America’s standing in the world, and American morale at home was heading for rock bottom.
At this low point in the nation’s fortunes came an obligatory moment of national celebration, a great national milestone: the commemoration of the nation’s two-hundredth anniversary, on July 4, 1976. Under the troubled circumstances, the requirement to observe the American Bicentennial might have seemed tinged with irony, even a touch of sadness. Yet attention had to be paid; the event had been years in the making, with an elaborate set of events – speeches, exhibitions, radio and television shows, a nation-spanning American Freedom Train, fireworks in the skies above major American cities – planned for the occasion. Perhaps such events could begin to shift the national mood and impart a fresh perspective, reminding Americans of how far they had come. As the novelist John Dos Passos wrote, “in times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present.” Sometimes it is important to look back, in order to be able to look forward.
In fact, the Bicentennial was a great success. But one event in particular stole the show: the Parade of Ships organized by Operation Sail, an international gathering of magnificent tall-masted sailing ships in New York Harbor on Independence Day (and then in Boston about one week later). OpSail 76, as it was called, was the creation of Frank Braynard, a museum curator and ship enthusiast from New York who also was involved in planning the city’s South Street Seaport project, which transformed the derelict East River waterfront into a vibrant historical showcase and festival marketplace.
The “tall ships” came from Italy, Norway, Denmark, Poland, Chile, Ecuador, Germany, Panama, Portugal, the Soviet Union, Spain, Colombia, Romania, Argentina, Japan, Turkey – all over the world, though each flew a banner bearing the tricolor star insignia of the Bicentennial. Gathering on the edge of New York Harbor, they made their way in a stately procession from Staten Island, past Brooklyn and Governor’s Island, past the Statue of Liberty, past the canyons of Wall Street, and up the Hudson to the northern tip of Manhattan. Alongside and behind them came a flotilla of other vessels: pleasure boats, schooners, yawls, ketches, sloops, military vessels, frigates and destroyers, submarines, amphibious vessels, plus a Chinese junk and a Spanish galleon, just for good measure. Each one was a magnificent and unforgettable sight – a glimpse of a bygone age, but also something timelessly beautiful and captivating in its own right. It is estimated that five million people watched the event live that day, and television coverage, and photographs of the ships appearing in magazines, captured the experience and fired the imaginations of Americans everywhere.
Why? What on earth did a stately procession of old ships, trailed by newer ones, have to do with anything? Why did those who saw it not only enjoy the spectacle but feel uplifted and reinvigorated by it, as so many testified then and since? Perhaps the answer is that there was something restorative, at a time of confusion and change, in being able to reach back to the solidity and beauty of the past, to feel a sense of connection to its grace and nobility, to be lifted out of the ordinariness of everyday life, and to do it all together. It should be noted, too, that New York City itself was experiencing extreme financial and social problems at the time, with rampant crime in the streets and the prospect of fiscal collapse and bankruptcy looming over it. OpSail 76 was a harbinger of hope for the city itself, at a time when it was in even more dire straits than the country as a whole.
The fall presidential election also offered a hopeful political prospect. Out of a crowded field of Democratic contenders, there emerged a fresh face, a little-known peanut farmer, naval officer, and former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter. Running against the corruptions of the Washington establishment, which included not only the transgressions of Watergate but the deceptions and misjudgments of those who created and directed the Vietnam War, Carter pledged himself to a standard of simple and direct honesty: “I will never tell a lie to the American people.” Carter was an avowed evangelical Protestant and arguably the most openly religious presidential candidate since William Jennings Bryan. As a pro–civil rights white southerner, he could attract both white and black support and give the Democrats a shot at winning back some southern states from the Republicans.
Ford, conversely, had an uphill battle even to win his own party’s nomination. He was strongly challenged by former California governor Ronald Reagan, who had the support of the Goldwater conservatives in the party. They had become restive under Ford, finding him too willing to accede to Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and faulting him, perhaps unfairly, for the loss of South Vietnam. Nor did they care for the fact that Ford had appointed Nelson Rockefeller as his vice president, even though his running mate in 1976 was combative Senator Bob Dole of Kansas. Ford was an unelected president and as such made for an unusually vulnerable incumbent. Reagan was energetic and charismatic and had the enthusiastic Goldwater troops solidly behind him. Nevertheless, Ford squeaked out a nomination victory.
Carter started the campaign with a huge advantage, but by election day, the vote was surprisingly close. Carter’s inexperience started to become evident, and he performed poorly in the first presidential debates. He was helped by Republican blunders in the ensuing debates, in which Ford made injudicious comments about there being “no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” and Dole, in a first-ever vice presidential debate, blamed “Democrat wars” for American military casualties, a barbed comment that seemed ungracious, even coming from a wounded World War II veteran like Dole. In the end, Carter was able to hang on and win relatively narrowly, 50–48 percent in the popular vote, in an election marked by low (53 percent) voter turnout – a mark of the general skepticism and disaffection from politics still afflicting much of the populace.
From the start, Carter was intent upon singlehandedly repealing the imperial presidency. He tried to signal this with even the smallest gesture. After his inaugural address, he and his wife, Rosalynn, chose to walk up Pennsylvania Avenue holding hands, from the Capitol to the White House, rather than making use of the usual limousine. He conspicuously insisted on carrying his own luggage and wore jeans and cardigan sweaters when giving televised “fireside chats.” But after a while, the folksiness began to seem contrived, and the immense problems facing the presidency began to bear down on him. Washington insiders observed that Carter depended too much on his inner circle, a group of Georgians who knew how to campaign, but not much else.
Carter’s talent for gesture showed in his offer of amnesty to those who had dodged the draft for Vietnam – controversial at the time, but a positive move toward national reconciliation after a bitter national defeat. But large-scale matters consistently defeated him. He attempted to grasp the nettle of energy policy, the reform of which had become central to the well-being of the nation, by devising a huge, comprehensive plan, emphasizing conservation in a coming era of scarce and high-priced oil and a shift from natural gas and oil to coal, nuclear power, and solar energy. Warning of a bleak future, praising conservation, appealing to patriotism, and criticizing the “special interests,” the president gave a televised address, wearing his iconic cardigan sweater and referring to the energy challenge as the “moral equivalent of war” – a familiar, if demonstrably ineffective, appeal.
What he had not done, however, was attend to the basic politics of including key political and industry leaders in his deliberations, both to get the benefit of their knowledge and perspective and to secure their “buy in” in support of the bill that emerged. Practical politics is the art of the possible, but Carter disliked that sort of thing and more generally had a distaste for the wheeling and dealing involved in much practical politics. His provincial and inexperienced aides were ill equipped to deal with the subtle ways of Washington. As a result, his bill became altered beyond recognition by the legislative process. One of his aides said, by the time the bill passed in 1978 as the National Energy Act, that it looked as if it had been “nibbled to death by ducks.”
Carter also had no luck in controlling inflation, which steadily rose during his administration, from an already high 5.2 percent when he took office in January 1977 to a frightening 14.76 percent in March 1980. Unemployment leveled out at just below 8 percent, but there were few signs of general economic recovery. His foreign-policy thinking did not resonate with many Americans either. For example, his decision to reorient American foreign policy toward an emphasis on promoting human rights fit his evangelical temper but seemed at odds with some of his own rhetoric about limiting the American role in the world and seemed to move back from the chastened “realism” of Nixon toward the idealism of Kennedy, and even further, of Woodrow Wilson. His decision to transfer operation of the Panama Canal to the Panamanian government struck many Americans as a needless “giveaway” of a precious national asset.
Carter did enjoy a partial triumph, however, in brokering a treaty between Egypt and Israel, known as the Camp David Accords, a major development that owed much to the visionary courage of Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat. To be sure, though, significant parts of the agreement, particularly those related to the Palestinian refugee situation, unraveled as soon as it was signed, and Sadat was branded a traitor by Islamic extremists and assassinated by them for his brave acts. The loss of Sadat alone was an incalculable blow. But it still represented a breakthrough, leading to Egyptian recognition of Israel, though not to a hoped-for breakthrough in regional peace.
However, Carter’s final undoing came from Iran. Resentment of American foreign policy there had been intense ever since the 1950s, when the CIA and its British counterpart had installed Reza Pahlavi in place of the country’s elected leader. In early 1979, a revolution led by Shi’ite Muslim clerics overthrew the Shah and installed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as a theocratic leader of revolutionary Iran. When Carter allowed the deposed Shah to come to America for cancer treatments, the response, on November 4, 1979, was a seizure of the American embassy in Tehran by militant revolutionary “students,” holding more than fifty embassy personnel as hostages. It was a difficult situation, with no easy solution. Carter tried appealing to the UN, tried freezing Iranian assets in the United States, tried sanctions, tried a commando raid (which had to be aborted), and nothing worked. Meanwhile, television crews recorded the taunts and threats of the militants and the display of the helpless hostages, all directed at an American audience and at a president who seemed impotent to act. This state of affairs continued for 444 days, making for a steady drip-drip erosion of Carter’s credibility.
It only added to Carter’s foreign-policy woes that, in December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in an effort to gain greater control over its southeastern border. Despite his human-rights emphasis, Carter had also been offering a somewhat softer and more accommodating face to the Soviet Union and China, seeking additional arms-limitation treaties with the former and revoking recognition of Taiwan to accommodate the wishes of the latter. Carter had already signaled a changed American view by speaking, in a 1977 commencement speech at Notre Dame, of America’s being “free” of an “inordinate fear of communism.”
With the invasion of Afghanistan, though, along with the revolutionary situation in Iran, the fears of the past no longer seemed so obviously inordinate. Carter imposed sanctions on the Soviets, cancelled American participation in the Moscow Summer Olympic Games, and began to be much more hawkish in his statements while initiating the rebuilding of the American military after its post-Vietnam decline. Under the circumstances, these were the right and requisite things to do. But it was too late for him to recover from the public’s impression of him as a well-meaning but inept leader who had been overwhelmed by circumstances. The question lingered in many minds, though, whether the failure of a good, intelligent, honest, and dedicated man like Carter might mean that the presidency itself had become an impossible job, too great a task for any one man.
Or perhaps we had the wrong kind of people serving in the office. The liberal political scientist James MacGregor Burns, in a 1978 book Leadership, posited that there were two kinds of leaders, “transactional” ones and “transforming” ones. Jimmy Carter (he said) was the first kind, someone who merely dealt with the exchange of existing goods, playing the game within the existing boundaries, rather than speaking to the deeper needs of people, and calling forth fresh political possibilities for the realization of those needs. Burns’s book was a clear call for a different kind of Democratic politician, one perhaps more in the vein of Franklin Roosevelt or the late Robert Kennedy. Ironically, though, the leader who best fit Burns’s prescription turned out not to be a Democrat at all. It was Ronald Reagan.
The aftereffects of the failed 1964 campaign of Barry Goldwater continued to reverberate through the 1970s, as the intellectual currents he set into motion continued to gather strength and as an intellectual alternative to the dominant liberalism of the 1960s continued to take shape. By the late 1970s, the structure of a conservative alternative to elements of Democratic orthodoxy was clearly emerging.
Not all views would be shared in every way by every self-described conservative. This was and would remain a coalition. “Social” conservatives who were concerned about the strict enforcement of drug laws might well clash with “libertarian” conservatives who wanted to see all such laws abolished. Some conservatives wanted to see an American withdrawal from the UN, from all multilateral treaties, and from world leadership more generally; others insisted that American leadership was indispensable to the furtherance of world order and an essential part of the nation’s self-understanding. Not all were of the same mind about the importance of religion, and not all agreed about whether programs like Social Security should be kept or abolished.
But there was rough consensus on principles of smaller government with lower taxes, a relatively free economy with a minimum of regulation, and opposition to Communism. These were essential points of agreement. On all of these points and more, the burgeoning movement found a winsome spokesperson in Ronald Reagan, whose presidential time had at last come in 1980, after several previous attempts.
Reagan was far more than just a vehicle for other people’s ideas, however. Ideas never translate automatically into politics; they have to be embodied in people. And Reagan’s persona gave a particular cast to the ideas he espoused. He was a superbly gifted speaker whose years as a movie actor and television performer had given him an instinctive feel for the requirements of the television age, to an extent that no politician before him, and few since, have had. His speeches were extraordinarily well crafted and well delivered, spiced with humor and presented with timing that could rival that of the best stand-up comedian. He had the benefit of Hollywood good looks and a manner that was genial, witty, generous, and comforting, with none of the dour eat-your-broccoli harshness that many people associated with conservatism. He had been a liberal Democrat himself in his younger days, and even when he had come to reject many of the policies of the New Deal and Great Society, he never rejected the example of Franklin Roosevelt or neglected the great lesson of Roosevelt’s presidency: a democratic leader’s essential role, above all else, is to be a purveyor of hope and a prophet of possibility. That was what Burns meant by a “transforming” leader, and it was why historian Alonzo Hamby would call Reagan the “Roosevelt of the Right,” a shrewd name that captures much of what Reagan was about and rightly places him in a longer stream of modern American history.
That was not all there was to him, of course. He was a clear and unapologetic conservative. During his years as governor of California, he developed a national reputation as a tough and decisive leader by staring down the student protestors on college campuses. And yet the part of that reputation that included an image of him as a hardheaded ideologue in the mold of Goldwater – that was not quite accurate. He was also a bit like Nixon: far more principled and focused than Nixon, but like Nixon, a coalition builder, who succeeded in joining together groups – the newly politicized evangelicals making up the so-called Religious Right; the blue-collar and urban-ethnic Catholics who were dismayed by the Democrats’ embrace of social liberalism, including approval for unrestricted abortion rights; and the economic libertarianism of antiregulation businessmen and free-market enthusiasts – that might not naturally be nesting in the same place.
At the same time, Reagan made establishment Republicans, particularly those of the Rockefeller stripe, very nervous, in ways they hadn’t been since 1964. Many of them opposed his nomination, and the rest tended to be lukewarm at best. Their preferred candidate was George H. W. Bush, a well-pedigreed and experienced former Texas congressman who had served in various administrative posts in the Nixon and Ford administrations. But a self-confident and battle-ready Reagan easily swept past Bush, and past his other Republican rivals, and the establishment was finally forced to swallow him, however grudgingly. As a concession to them, and a gesture toward party unity, he made Bush his running mate.
Carter would prove to be no match for Reagan either in the 1980 campaign – not only because Carter’s own record in office was so poor, or because of the incessant coverage of the hostages in Iran, but because Reagan offered a vision of the future that was so much more hopeful than Carter’s increasingly gloomy one. On the two critical issues driving the election – the economy and America’s standing in the world – it was Reagan who conformed most closely to Burns’s definition of a transforming leader, someone who was willing to speak to the whole person and present the problems of the economy and the world in terms that ordinary people can grasp, and grasp hold of in their lives. He concluded his campaign by asking his television audience a simple question: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” It would be hard for most viewers to say yes to that question. Carter was finally driven to caricature Reagan as an ideologue, but the desperate expedient did not work; Reagan could flick such attacks away with a gentle and expertly delivered quip: “There you go again.”
Television pundits were saying the election was “too close to call,” but in the end, it wasn’t close at all. Reagan won by a landslide, carrying forty-four states and receiving 489 electoral votes. Just as importantly, he had “long coattails,” meaning that his success redounded to the benefit of Republicans running in congressional elections, particularly in the Senate, where the Republicans gained twelve seats and achieved a clear majority for the first time since 1954, while picking up thirty-four seats in the House. Reagan would come to Washington with many of the pieces in place for some truly transformative change. Meanwhile, on the very day in January 1981 that he was inaugurated, the Iranians released the fifty-two hostages in Tehran as a last pointed humiliation hurled at Jimmy Carter. It was a reminder to Reagan and the nation that, in some sense, the dignity and standing of the American presidency were going to be at stake in the coming years.
In his inaugural address, Reagan blamed government itself for many of the nation’s current problems and proposed that with a more open, less heavily regulated and less heavily taxed economy, growth would surge and government revenues would increase. The argument that lower tax rates would in fact increase revenues was hardly new and had been successfully demonstrated as recently as the Kennedy administration. Even so, it remained disfavored by most mainstream economists, who remained committed to the Keynesian idea of using carefully managed government spending to boost demand and incomes in times of economic sluggishness. Reagan proposed that reductions in taxes and government spending would free up capital for investment by the private sector, which would in turn lead to business expansion, job creation, and general prosperity.
To accomplish this, the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 featured a 25 percent decrease in personal income taxes, phased in over the course of three years. The top tax rate was reduced to 28 percent, and small investors were allowed to invest on a regular basis in tax-deferred individual retirement accounts. There were also cuts in corporate, capital gains, gift, and inheritance taxes and significant reductions in domestic budget items such as funding for mass transportation and social-welfare benefits. However, Reagan also came into office promising a rebuilding of America’s military power, and increased spending on defense offset the budgetary gains from cuts. Would the resulting deficits be reduced by economic growth? That was a question mark, even for supporters of Reagan’s general outlook.
Democratic critics found much to fault in Reaganomics, as his approach became labeled, and most of all they objected to the ways that these proposals, while benefiting all, were especially favorable to the wealthy. In any event, it appeared at first that Reagan’s policies were going to fail on their own terms. By 1982, the country had entered a steep recession, partly brought on by tight money policies from the Federal Reserve meant to break the back of inflation, but which also stalled growth and pushed unemployment up to 11 percent. Reagan even faced calls from Republican lawmakers to raise taxes, cut defense spending, and otherwise respond. But Reagan stayed the course; the recession turned out to be sharp but brief; and by early 1983, the economy was in recovery and humming along by mid-year, just as predicted. Meanwhile, inflation had dropped to under 4 percent and would reach 2.5 percent by July. The economy grew by 4.6 percent in 1983, 7.3 percent in 1984, and 4.2 percent in 1985.
Public confidence was buoyed by this startlingly rapid restoration of prosperity, and the Reagan–Bush ticket would be reelected in 1984 by a truly mammoth margin, carrying forty-nine states and winning 525 electoral votes, the most electoral votes won by any candidate in American history. The economic figures by the end of Reagan’s second term were truly impressive: twenty million new jobs created, inflation stabilized at 4 percent, unemployment at 5.5 percent, GNP growth of 26 percent, interest rates down from 21.5 percent in January 1981 to 10 percent in August 1988. Growth in government spending slowed from 10 percent in 1982 to 1 percent in 1988. And even with the tax cuts, total federal revenues doubled from just over $517 billion in 1980 to more than $1 trillion in 1990. In constant inflation-adjusted dollars, this was a 28 percent increase in revenue. The economic gloom of the 1970s, which seemed as if it would go on forever, was suddenly a thing of the past. “It’s morning in America,” crowed Reagan’s reelection campaign advertisements, and for once, the extravagant claim seemed plausible.
But for those whose eyes were not dazzled by the morning light, there was still the same dark cloud looming on the horizon: rampant deficit spending, which had only grown despite Reagan’s efforts to rein it in. The cloud continued to grow. By the end of his second term, the national debt had grown from $900 billion to nearly $2.7 trillion. Behind that was what Reagan himself confessed to be his greatest failure: his inability, despite all his rhetoric to the contrary, to reduce the size and scope of government. Blame for the mounting deficits could be spread around widely. Reagan’s tax cuts and sharply increased defense spending (up 50 percent during the Reagan years) of course bore some part of the responsibility, but so did the relentless growth of social spending; means-tested entitlement programs rose by 102 percent, and spending on defense was always dwarfed by domestic social spending. In any event, this massive national debt was an unwanted and ominous aspect of the otherwise highly successful Reagan economic program.
The other principal goal of the Reagan administration was rebuilding the nation’s standing in the world, after the humiliations of Vietnam and Iran, and waging the Cold War with the Soviet Union more effectively and decisively. No president since Kennedy had proposed to conduct the Cold War competition in so vigorous and aggressive a manner; in fact, the forceful and unapologetic anti-Communism of Reagan’s rhetoric made Kennedy’s language look tame by comparison. Reagan didn’t want merely to gain ground; he wanted to end the Cold War in victory. In 1977, he candidly told a visitor, “Here’s my strategy on the Cold War: we win, and they lose.” That view never changed, though the details filled themselves out in changing and sometimes unexpected ways. In his 1984 reelection campaign, as a bookend to “Morning in America,” Reagan used an extremely effective advertisement called “Bear,” which depicted a rampaging bear wandering through a forest, using the familiar national symbol of Russia to remind voters of the continuing threat posed by the Soviet “bear in the woods.”
At times, particularly in the early part of his first term, his expressions recalled the morally charged language of Woodrow Wilson: the Soviet Union was, he said, an “evil empire” and “the focus of evil in the modern world.” He lambasted and pitilessly mocked Communism for its many failures: its cruelty, its disdain for human rights, its economic incompetence, its atheism, its drabness. In a speech at Notre Dame in 1981, he subtly signaled that even the containment doctrine had reached its sell-by date, at least in his estimation: “The West will not contain Communism,” he declared, “it will transcend Communism.” He didn’t use the word “defeat,” but it was clear that the goal was no longer accommodation or coexistence.
If he was to accomplish these things, the commitment would have to go beyond tough words. And it quickly did. First and foremost, Reagan increased spending on defense, continuing the trend that Carter had already begun after the invasion of Afghanistan. There were new weapons systems, such as the B-1B bomber and MX Peacekeeper land-based ballistic missile, the Bradley armored fighting vehicle, and the Abrams tank. There was the building of a near-invincible six-hundred-ship navy, including new Ohio-class ballistic-missile submarines, Los Angeles–class attack submarines, and Nimitz-class super-carriers, plus recommissioned Iowa-class battleships. Most intriguing of all was the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), an antimissile defense system designed to intercept and destroy enemy missiles in space using lasers and particle beams. Critics of SDI called it “Star Wars” and worried that it would not work and could only fuel another round of the arms race in space. Yet it seems as likely, in retrospect, that Soviet leaders understood that they did not have the economic or scientific means to match the American efforts and that the effective deployment of SDI could render the United States virtually invulnerable to their existing weapons.
Reagan proceeded then to confront Soviet aggression around the world, with varying degrees of effectiveness: in Poland, where he supported the Solidarity labor movement in its struggle against the Communist government; in Central America, where he attempted to stem Communist influence in El Salvador and Nicaragua; and in the Caribbean island of Grenada. A crucial development was his firm decision in 1983, in the face of massive and near-hysterical opposition from media and organized pressure groups, to press for NATO’s deployment of American cruise missiles and Pershing 2 medium-range ballistic missiles in Western Europe to counter the Soviet deployment during the Carter years of SS-20 ballistic missiles aimed at European cities and NATO air bases in Great Britain. The Soviets sought to shatter NATO, but failed. The West German Parliament approved the deployment on November 22, 1983, and the American missiles began arriving the next day.
Reagan’s handling of the “Euromissile crisis” was, in retrospect, a great breakthrough. In 1985, with the ascent of Mikhail Gorbachev to general secretary of the Communist Party, there was a conspicuous and dramatic change in tone from the Soviet leadership. Gorbachev wanted to reform Soviet life, with a view toward greater freedom and openness (glasnost) and a restructuring (perestroika) of the Soviet economy to remove the dead hand of top-down control and allow some free-market practices to flourish in it. Gorbachev understood that the Soviet economy was a shambles, unable to provide a decent material existence for its own people, and that the Soviet Union could no longer afford an arms race with the United States.
Reagan grasped the opportunities opened up by these changes, and responded favorably, with a willingness to negotiate. But he was insistent that words be followed by deeds. In a 1987 visit to West Berlin, in a speech delivered in front of the Berlin Wall and the Brandenburg Gate separating East and West Berlin, two of the most powerful symbols of the Cold War, he addressed Gorbachev and urged him,
We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
Gorbachev did not oblige him in that regard. But he did negotiate with Reagan a treaty to abolish intermediate-range (three hundred to three thousand miles in range) nuclear missiles (INFs), the first time that the two nations had agreed to eliminate an entire class of weapon – a move that would have been unthinkable without Reagan’s firmness in the Euromissile confrontation just eighteen months before. In 1988, Gorbachev began to withdraw Soviet troops from Afghanistan and joined with the United States in diplomatic initiatives, such as the effort to end the war between Iran and Iraq. Was the end of the Cold War in sight? At long last, it was realistic to hope so.
Historians will argue for many years about the relative importance of Reagan and Gorbachev in the vast improvement of Soviet–American relations. Both were transformational leaders. But in some sense, both needed one another. There had to be a man like Gorbachev, a reform-minded leader who was willing to break through the ossified structure of an inert and dehumanizing Soviet system to try for something better. But there had to be a Reagan, too, whose clarity and determination, and whose success in restoring the American economy and its military strength, limited the options that were open to Gorbachev.
There can be little argument, though, about the success of Reagan in restoring the dignity and élan of the office of the presidency, which had been in steady decline since the Kennedy assassination; in restoring the productivity of the American economy; and in restoring national self-confidence in a people whose sense of hope had been badly bruised by the reversals of the previous quarter-century. Whether that restoration could be carried forth into the new era that seemed on the verge of dawning was yet to be seen. But for the time being, there was a lot less talk about the presidency being an impossible job.