Society in Transition in two minutes
- Police caught burglars tied to Nixon's reelection committee at the Watergate in June 1972; hearings revealed White House tapes, the Supreme Court ordered them released, and Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.
- Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon in September 1974, and the Church Committee of 1975 exposed CIA plots and an FBI campaign against Martin Luther King Jr., which deepened distrust of government.
- Prices and unemployment rose together, a mix called stagflation, after the 1973 oil embargo, and Ford's Whip Inflation Now campaign failed; inflation passed 13 percent by the end of 1979.
- In July 1979 Carter described a "crisis of confidence," and in November Iranian students seized the American embassy in Tehran, holding 52 Americans for 444 days and deepening national doubts.
- Conservatism grew from Barry Goldwater's 1964 nomination through Nixon's silent majority appeal, the 1978 Proposition 13 tax revolt and Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority of 1979, and Reagan won 44 states in 1980.
- Cultural fights divided Americans: Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA helped block the Equal Rights Amendment, Roe v. Wade in 1973 prompted a right-to-life movement, and the Bakke case (1978) struck down racial quotas.
- On the exam: Questions ask about the causes of declining trust and the conservative turn, contrast the early 1960s with the 1970s, and link Vietnam, Watergate and the economy to Reagan.
Topic 8.14 key terms
- Watergate
The June 17, 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building, and the scandal that followed. President Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974.
- Committee for the Re-Election of the President
Richard Nixon's 1972 campaign organization. James McCord, one of the five men arrested inside the Democratic offices, was its security coordinator.
- Trust in government
The share of Americans who told interviewers they trusted Washington to do what is right just about always, or most of the time. The American National Election Studies asked it for decades. Pew Research Center's compilation gives 77% in 1964 and 25% in 1980.
- Liberal consensus
The broad agreement, from about 1945 to the mid-1960s, that an active federal government should manage the economy and provide a safety net. Democrats and Republicans both ran on it.
- Young Americans for Freedom
A conservative youth group founded on September 11, 1960, at William F. Buckley Jr.'s family home in Sharon, Connecticut. Its Sharon Statement called for limited government, free markets, and victory over Communism rather than coexistence.
- New Right
The conservative movement that grew from the 1960s on, joining free-market conservatives, anticommunists and, by the 1970s, religious and social conservatives.
- Engel v. Vitale (1962)
The Supreme Court ruled 6–1 that a prayer written by the state and said in public schools violates the First Amendment, even when a student may stay silent. New York's Regents' prayer was twenty-two words: "Almighty God, we acknowledge our dependence upon Thee, and we beg Thy blessings upon us, our parents, our teachers and our Country."
- Law and order
Nixon's 1968 promise, and Wallace's sharper one, to use government against riots, street crime, and protests. It spoke to voters who thought the country was coming apart.
- Silent majority
Nixon's name, on November 3, 1969, for Americans who were not out marching. He asked them to support his plan for the war in Vietnam. Many were Democrats: white Southerners, Northern Catholic blue-collar workers, and new suburbanites.
- Southern strategy
Nixon's effort to win white Southern voters who were angry about school desegregation. He asked the courts to delay integration plans and busing, and he nominated Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. The Senate rejected Haynsworth on November 21, 1969, 45 for and 55 against, and Carswell on April 8, 1970, 45 for and 51 against.
- Plumbers
The White House Special Investigations Unit, set up in July 1971 to stop leaks after the Pentagon Papers. On the night of September 3, 1971, men working for the unit broke into the Beverly Hills office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, Dr. Lewis Fielding.
- CREEP
Critics' nickname for the Committee for the Re-Election of the President. The committee's own short name was CRP. It raised large sums in cash. Some of that money paid for the Watergate break-in.
- Obstruction of justice
Using your position to block an investigation. On June 23, 1972, Nixon agreed to have the CIA tell the FBI to stop tracing Watergate money.
- Saturday Night Massacre
October 20, 1973. Nixon ordered special prosecutor Archibald Cox fired for demanding the tapes. Attorney General Elliot Richardson resigned. Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus refused and resigned. Solicitor General Robert Bork fired Cox.
- Impeachment
The House charges a federal official. The Senate then holds the trial, and conviction takes two-thirds. The Judiciary Committee approved three articles. Nixon resigned before the full House voted.
- Executive privilege
A president's claim that some White House conversations stay secret, so advisers will speak honestly. Nixon used it to hold back the tapes.
- United States v. Nixon (1974)
The Court ruled 8–0 that executive privilege cannot hide evidence in a criminal trial. Chief Justice Warren Burger, Nixon's own appointee, wrote the opinion. Nixon had to turn the tapes over.
- Imperial presidency
Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s term, from his 1973 book The Imperial Presidency, for a presidency that had grown past the limits the Constitution sets.
- Church Committee
The Senate select committee, chaired by Frank Church of Idaho, that investigated U.S. intelligence agencies in 1975 and 1976. Its assassination report said government personnel plotted to kill Fidel Castro from 1960 to 1965. The final report described the FBI's campaign against Martin Luther King Jr.
- Stagflation
Inflation and unemployment rising at the same time. Economists had expected one to fall when the other rose. In the 1970s, a jump in oil prices and competition from newer factories in Germany and Japan helped push both up.
- Misery index
The inflation rate plus the unemployment rate. Economist Arthur Okun offered the sum as a rough measure of how bad the economy felt. Point at a year on this chart to see it.
- WIN (Whip Inflation Now)
Ford's October 1974 volunteer drive. He asked Americans to spend less, save energy, plant gardens, and wear a button that said WIN. It did not stop inflation. Unemployment reached 9 percent in May 1975.
- Supply-side economics
The idea that cutting tax rates can raise the total the government collects, if high rates are discouraging work and investment. Arthur Laffer drew a curve for it in 1974, for two aides in the Ford White House.
- Détente
Nixon and Ford eased Cold War tension with talks and deals with the Soviet Union and China. In his March 31, 1976 speech, Reagan called that policy one-sided. He said the United States should be stronger, and should keep the Panama Canal.
- Panama Canal Treaties (1977)
Two treaties the United States and Panama signed in 1977. They turned the canal over to Panama by the end of 1999. Reagan was already campaigning against those negotiations in 1976.
- Jimmy Carter
The Democrat elected president in 1976. A peanut farmer and former governor of Georgia, he ran as an outsider after Watergate and told voters he would not lie to them.
- Evangelical Christianity
Protestant Christianity that stresses a personal conversion ('born again'), the authority of the Bible, and spreading the faith. Gallup found in 1976 that 34 percent of Americans said they had been born again. Carter was one of them.
- Equal Rights Amendment
A proposed constitutional amendment passed by Congress in 1972. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex. It needed 38 states. The deadline ran out in 1982, three states short.
- STOP ERA
Stop Taking Our Privileges. Phyllis Schlafly's campaign, started in September 1972, to keep the states from ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment. She argued it would subject women to the draft and take away legal protections for homemakers, including a husband's duty of support.
- Roe v. Wade (1973)
The Supreme Court decision of January 22, 1973, 7–2, holding that the right to privacy covers a woman's decision to end a pregnancy. It struck down many state bans on abortion. Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the opinion.
- Right-to-life movement
The campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade and restrict abortion. Catholic organizers built it first. The National Right to Life Committee, founded in 1968, became independent in 1973. Evangelical Protestants joined in growing numbers through the 1970s.
- Burger Court
The Supreme Court under Chief Justice Warren Burger, 1969 to 1986. More conservative than the Warren Court, yet it ordered school busing, decided Roe v. Wade, and ordered Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes. Three of Nixon's four appointees, Burger, Blackmun, and Powell, were in the Roe majority. Rehnquist dissented.
- Proposition 13
The June 6, 1978 California ballot measure that capped property taxes at 1 percent of a home's 1975–76 value, limited later increases to 2 percent a year, and required a two-thirds vote for many new local taxes. It passed with 64.8 percent of the vote.
- Tax revolt
A late-1970s movement to cut taxes and limit what government spent. Proposition 13 was its biggest win. Republicans then pushed federal income-tax cuts, including the Kemp–Roth bill.
- Think tanks
Groups that research policies and argue for them. The Heritage Foundation, founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich and Edwin Feulner with money from Joseph Coors, argued for lower taxes, less regulation, and smaller welfare programs.
- Affirmative action
Policies that take race, and often sex, into account in admissions and hiring, to open work and schools that had been closed to minorities and women. Critics called racial preferences "reverse discrimination." In Bakke (1978) the Supreme Court struck down fixed racial quotas and allowed race as one factor among others.
- Televangelists
Ministers with regular television programs. By early 1980 their shows drew about 20 million viewers in a typical week.
- Moral Majority
A political organization Jerry Falwell founded in June 1979 to register conservative Christians and back conservative candidates. He said the 1973 abortion ruling had brought him into politics. By August 1980 he claimed 72,000 clergy and more than 2 million members.
- Religious right
Conservative Christians, including many evangelicals and religious fundamentalists, who organized in the late 1970s to influence elections and law. Opposition to abortion and support for school prayer were among their aims. Catholics who opposed abortion were part of the same political turn.
- Crisis of confidence
Carter's phrase, in his July 15, 1979 address, for a loss of faith in the country and in the future. He pointed to the murders of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr., to Vietnam, Watergate, inflation, and dependence on foreign oil. Then he asked Americans to face the energy shortage.
- National malaise
The nickname reporters gave Carter's July 15, 1979 speech. The word is not in the text. His pollster, Pat Caddell, had said 'malaise' while briefing reporters. On an exam, use Carter's phrase, crisis of confidence. If you write malaise, say it was the press's name for the speech.
- Iran hostage crisis
On November 4, 1979, Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Fifty-two Americans were held for 444 days. They were angry that the United States had admitted the deposed Shah for medical treatment. A rescue mission failed in April 1980, and eight servicemen died. The hostages were freed on January 20, 1981.
- Confidence in government
How often Americans said they trusted Washington to do what is right just about always, or most of the time. The American National Election Studies asked the question. In Pew Research Center's compilation, that share was 77 percent in 1964 and 25 percent in 1980.
- Political realignment
A lasting change in which party a region votes for. On these maps the South is the region that shifts: five Deep South states for Goldwater in 1964, Wallace's Southern votes in 1968, Nixon's sweep in 1972, Carter carrying the South in 1976, and Reagan carrying it in 1980.
- Contextualization
Explaining how one document or event fits the broader developments around it. On the AP U.S. History exam, this is skill 4.B. A source makes sense when you know what surrounded it.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Tape
June 17, 1972
Key terms: Watergate, Committee for the Re-Election of the President, Trust in government
June 17, 1972 just after midnight · The Watergate, Washington, D.C.
Frank Wills, twenty-four, worked the midnight shift as a guard at the Watergate office building. The job paid eighty dollars a week. Mostly, he checked doors.
On his first round, a door between the stairwell and the garage wouldn't lock.
At 1:47 a.m., he wrote it in his log: call police, found tape on doors.
On the sixth floor, in the Democratic National Committee's offices, police caught five men in surgical gloves. They carried bugging devices, cameras, and hundred-dollar bills numbered in sequence.
One of them, James McCord, was security coordinator for President Nixon's reelection committee. The White House press secretary called it a third-rate burglary attempt. Two years later, the President resigned.
In 1964, about three Americans in four said they trusted Washington to do what is right most of the time. By 1980, one in four did.
What broke that trust? And who stepped into the gap?
Yelling Stop
1955–1964
Key terms: Liberal consensus, Young Americans for Freedom, New Right, Engel v. Vitale (1962)
Rewind.
By 1960, both parties had accepted the New Deal. Highways, dams, Social Security. Both parties were for them.
A young writer named William F. Buckley Jr. thought that was the problem.
William F. Buckley Jr.
It stands athwart history, yelling Stop.
In 1960, about ninety young conservatives met at his family's home and founded Young Americans for Freedom.
Their Sharon Statement braided three strands: freedom from government, free markets, and victory over Communism.
M. Stanton Evans
That the United States should stress victory over, rather than coexistence with, this menace.
In 1962 the Supreme Court banned official prayer in public schools.
In 1964 they nominated one of their own, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona.
Barry Goldwater
I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
His slogan: 'In your heart, you know he's right.' Democrats answered: 'In your guts, you know he's nuts.'
Goldwater lost forty-four states. But he carried five in the Deep South. That June, he had voted against the Civil Rights Act.
Ronald Reagan
You and I have a rendezvous with destiny.
The speaker was an actor, Ronald Reagan. He'd borrowed it from Franklin Roosevelt, whom he'd voted for four times.
The Silent Majority
1968–1972
Key terms: Law and order, Silent majority, Southern strategy, Plumbers, CREEP
The counter clicks forward to 1968.
By 1968, many Americans thought the country was coming apart. Riots, assassinations, war protests, rising crime.
Alabama's George Wallace ran against busing, protesters and federal judges.
Richard Nixon won with 43 percent, promising law and order. Wallace took 13. Together, 57 percent voted against the liberal sixties.
Richard Nixon
And so tonight—to you, the great silent majority of my fellow Americans—I ask for your support.
Zoom out, and you can see who he meant. People who hadn't marched. Many of them were Democrats.
His Southern strategy courted white voters angry about desegregation.
Yet Southern schools desegregated faster under Nixon than under any president before. Historians still argue about what kind of conservative he was.
In 1972, Nixon won forty-nine states. Only Massachusetts voted the other way. During Watergate, its drivers bought bumper stickers: Don't blame me, I'm from Massachusetts.
The Pentagon Papers leaked. White House aides set up the Plumbers to stop leaks. They broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist.
Nixon's reelection committee, CREEP to its critics, kept piles of cash. Some of it paid for the Watergate job.
Expletive Deleted
1972–1974
Key terms: Obstruction of justice, Saturday Night Massacre, Impeachment, Executive privilege, United States v. Nixon (1974), Imperial presidency
Two Washington Post reporters, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, followed the money, helped by a secret source.
In 1973, a Senate committee held hearings on live TV.
Fred Thompson
Mr. Butterfield, are you aware of the installation of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the President?
Alexander Butterfield
I was aware of listening devices; yes, sir.
Since February 1971, the President had been recording himself.
Six days after the break-in, the President approved using the CIA to block the FBI. That was obstruction of justice.
When the special prosecutor demanded the tapes, Nixon had him fired. The attorney general quit rather than do it.
Richard Nixon
And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice.
Richard Nixon
People have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I am not a crook.
He said it at Walt Disney World.
One tape had an 18½-minute gap. His secretary said she'd erased part of it by accident. Court experts found at least five separate erasures.
Nixon released edited transcripts instead of the tapes. All through them ran two words: 'expletive deleted.'
Barbara Jordan
My faith in the Constitution is whole; it is complete; it is total.
The committee voted three articles of impeachment. Some of its Republicans voted yes.
On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 0: hand over the tapes. A Nixon appointee wrote the opinion.
When the June 23 tape came out, Barry Goldwater, the hero of 1964, told Nixon he'd lose a Senate trial.
On August 9, Nixon resigned, in a one-sentence letter.
Gerald Ford
My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. Our Constitution works.
Some said the system had worked. Trust fell anyway.
Whip Inflation Now
1974–1975
Key terms: Church Committee, Stagflation, Misery index, WIN (Whip Inflation Now), Supply-side economics
Nixon had resigned in August. The counter read 1974.
A month after taking office, Ford pardoned Nixon. Approval fell from 71 percent to 50 percent.
Gerald Ford
…a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States…
A Senate committee found CIA plots to kill Fidel Castro. It found an FBI campaign against Martin Luther King Jr.
Prices and unemployment rose together. Economists had thought that couldn't happen. Economists called it stagflation. Oil prices had jumped, and factories in Germany and Japan were beating American ones.
Gerald Ford
It bears the single word WIN. I think that tells it all.
He asked Americans to save energy, plant gardens, and wear the button. Unemployment hit 9 percent anyway.
Laffer drew a curve on a napkin for two Ford aides. Cut tax rates, and the government might collect more. He later said he'd never have ruined a nice cloth napkin. It's in the Smithsonian.
New York City nearly went broke, and Ford refused a bailout. He never said 'drop dead.' The headline stuck. He signed loans that December.
1976
The counter rolled to 1976.
Two Hundred
1976
Key terms: Détente, Panama Canal Treaties (1977), Jimmy Carter, Evangelical Christianity
On July 4, 1976, the United States turned two hundred. At 2 p.m., bells rang across the country.
Sixteen tall ships from fourteen countries sailed up New York Harbor. Two flew the Soviet flag.
That summer, Ronald Reagan nearly took the Republican nomination from a sitting president. He opposed giving up the Panama Canal.
Ronald Reagan
We bought it, we paid for it, we built it, and we intend to keep it.
Barbara Jordan
What is different? What is special? I, Barbara Jordan, am a keynote speaker.
She was the first woman, and the first Black American, to give the Democrats' keynote.
The Democrats chose an outsider: Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer and former governor of Georgia. He told voters, 'I will never lie to you.' After Watergate, that was a platform.
Carter taught Sunday school and called himself born again. So did about one American in three.
Carter won, carrying nearly the whole South.
Trust in Washington kept falling anyway.
Houston
1972–1982
Key terms: Equal Rights Amendment, STOP ERA, Roe v. Wade (1973), Right-to-life movement, Burger Court
The counter clicks forward to 1977.
In 1972 Congress sent the states the Equal Rights Amendment. Thirty states ratified it by the end of 1973. It needed thirty-eight.
Phyllis Schlafly's STOP ERA warned that women would be drafted and homemakers would lose legal protections.
Phyllis Schlafly
Of all the classes of people who ever lived, the American woman is the most privileged.
Her volunteers brought legislators homemade bread and jam. The sign said, to the breadwinners from the breadmakers. It worked.
In Roe v. Wade, the Court ruled that privacy covered a woman's decision to end a pregnancy. Catholics, and soon evangelicals, built a right-to-life movement to reverse it.
In June 1977, Miami-area voters repealed a county law protecting gay people from discrimination. The singer Anita Bryant led the campaign.
That November, both sides of the women's argument came to Houston.
In 1978, California voted on banning gay teachers. Ronald Reagan opposed the ban. It lost.
Three weeks later, Harvey Milk, a gay city supervisor who had fought the ban, was shot dead in City Hall. So was Mayor George Moscone.
The ERA ran out of time on June 30, 1982, three states short. The Republicans, the first major party to back it, had already dropped it.
Mad as Hell
1974–1980
Key terms: Proposition 13, Tax revolt, Think tanks, Affirmative action, Televangelists, Moral Majority, Religious right
The counter clicks forward to 1978.
In June 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13 by nearly two to one. Its leader, Howard Jarvis, later titled his memoir I'm Mad as Hell.
Zoom out. Inflation was pushing tax bills up. It wasn't only California. Trust in Washington stood at 29 percent.
In the 1978 Bakke case, the Court struck down racial quotas in admissions. The Court let race count as one factor.
In Boston, a federal judge ordered busing in 1974. At South Boston High, crowds stoned buses carrying Black students.
In the Bicentennial year, a white teenager attacked Ted Landsmark, a Black lawyer, with an American flag. It happened within sight of the Old State House, where the Boston Massacre had happened.
Evangelical churches were booming. Televangelists reached about twenty million viewers a week.
In 1965, Jerry Falwell preached that ministers should stay out of civil rights marches.
Jerry Falwell
I feel that we need to get off the streets and back into the pulpits and into the prayer rooms.
In 1979 he founded the Moral Majority, to elect conservative candidates.
Jerry Falwell
I preached against what I'm doing… because I never really believed that a Supreme Court of this country would legalize abortion on demand.
The historian Randall Balmer points instead to a 1978 fight with the IRS over private Christian schools.
In 1980, Reagan told a gathering of evangelical leaders:
Ronald Reagan
I want you to know that I endorse you and what you're doing.
Crisis of Confidence
1979–1980
Key terms: Crisis of confidence, National malaise, Iran hostage crisis
The counter clicks forward to 1979.
In April 1979, a swamp rabbit swam straight at the President's fishing boat. He splashed it away with a paddle.
It made the front page that August. That was the kind of year it was.
The gas lines came back that summer. By December, inflation was past 13 percent.
Carter spent ten days at Camp David, asking Americans what was wrong.
Jimmy Carter
It is a crisis of confidence. It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will.
About 65 million people watched, and his ratings rose. Two days later, he asked his whole cabinet to resign. Now the crisis sounded like his.
the “malaise” speech
Reporters called it the 'malaise speech.' Carter never said 'malaise.'
Iranian students seized the American embassy in Tehran and took 66 Americans hostage.
They were furious the U.S. had let in the deposed Shah for medical treatment. Fifty-two Americans were held for 444 days.
Families tied yellow ribbons around trees and waited.
In April 1980, a rescue mission failed in the Iranian desert. Eight American servicemen died.
Maj. Richard L. Bakke Maj. Harold L. Lewis Jr. TSgt. Joel C. Mayo Maj. Lyn D. McIntosh Capt. Charles T. McMillan II Sgt. John D. Harvey Cpl. George N. Holmes Jr. SSgt. Dewey L. Johnson
On November 4, 1980, a year to the day after the embassy was seized, Ronald Reagan won forty-four states.
Republicans won the Senate for the first time since the 1950s.
By then, one American in four trusted Washington to do what is right most of the time. The hostages were still in Tehran.
Zoom Out
1960–1980
Key terms: Confidence in government, Political realignment, Equal Rights Amendment, Contextualization
Zoom out.
Trust broke in pieces: a war, a scandal, an economy that stalled, and a crisis abroad nobody could end.
Into that gap stepped a movement that had been building since 1960. It said government was the problem, not the answer.
Its opponents said the fight for equal rights wasn't finished. Americans are still having both arguments.
That's contextualization. A source makes sense when you know what surrounded it.
It started with a guard who checked a door twice. Frank Wills played himself in the movie about Watergate. He died in 2000, at fifty-two.