History Chapter 28 & Chapter 29

By the late 1970s, a well-organized, well-financed backlash against the feminist movement reinforced the rise of the New Right. Republican Phyllis Schlafly, a formidable Catholic attorney from Illinois who had created the Eagle Forum in 1972 to give voice to conservative women, became a powerful activist for conservative values. Many argued that she singlehandedly stopped the Equal Rights Amendment from being ratified by the required thirty-eight states.

Anti-feminist Backlash

List of conservative promises in response to the supposed liberalism of the Clinton administration; drafted by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and other congressional Republicans as a campaign tactic for the 1994 midterm elections.

Contract with America (1994)

The same liberationist ideals that prompted young people to revolt against mainstream values and protest against the Vietnam War led many of them to embrace other causes. The civil rights movement inspired women, Latinos and Native Americans, gays and lesbians, the elderly, and people with physical and mental disabilities to demand equal opportunities and equal rights.

Influences from civil rights movement

Massive increases in military spending complicated the situation. In essence, Reagan gave the Defense Department a blank check, telling the secretary of defense to "spend what you need." Over the next five years, the administration would spend $1.2 trillion on military expenses. Something had to give. In the summer of 1981, Stockman warned, "We're heading for a crash landing on the budget. We're facing potential deficit numbers so big that they could wreck the president's entire economic program." The fast-growing federal deficit, which had helped trigger the worst recession since the 1930s, was Reagan's greatest failure.

Managing the Budget

Centrist ("moderate") Democrats led by President Bill Clinton that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s to challenge the "liberal" direction of the party.

New Democrats

During his first term, President Nixon followed through on campaign pledges to blunt the momentum of the civil rights movement. He appointed no African Americans to his cabinet and refused to meet with the all-Democratic Congressional Black Caucus. He also launched a concerted effort to block congressional renewal of the Voting Rights Act

Nixon and Civil Rights

During the late sixties, a new wave of younger and more radical feminists emerged to challenge everything from women's economic, political, and legal status to sexual double standards for men and women. They sought "women's liberation" from all forms of "sexism", not simply equality in the workplace. The new generation of feminists, often called "women's libbers," was more militant than Betty Friedan and others who had established NOW. Friedan failed to dampen or deflect the younger generation of women activists, just as Martin Luther King, Jr., had failed to suppress the Black Power movement. The goal of the women's liberation movement, said Susan Brownmiller, a self-described "radical feminist," was to "go beyond a simple concept of equality. NOW's emphasis on legislative change left the radicals cold." She dismissed Friedan as "hopelessly bourgeois." For women to be truly equal, Brownmiller and others believed, required transforming every aspect of society: child rearing, entertainment, domestic duties, business, and the arts. Lesbianism, she and others argued, should be celebrated rather than hidden.

Radical Feminism movement

Ronald Reagan achieved the unthinkable by helping to end the Cold War. Although his massive defense buildup almost bankrupted the United States, it did force the Soviet Union to the bargaining table. By negotiating the nuclear disarmament treaty and lighting the fuse of democratic freedom in Soviet-controlled East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, Reagan set in motion events that would lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Reagan's Global Legacy

On November 5, 1996, Clinton won with an electoral vote victory of 379 to 159 and 49 percent of the popular vote to Dole's 41 percent. Third-party candidate Ross Perot got 8 percent.

The 1996 Campaign

The idea of a programmable machine that would rapidly perform mental tasks had been around since the eighteenth century, but it took the Second World War to gather the intellectual and financial resources needed to create such a "computer." In 1946, a team of engineers at the University of Pennsylvania developed ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and computer), the first all-purpose, all-electronic digital computer. It was huge, requiring 18,000 vacuum tubes to operate and an entire room to house it. The following year, researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories invented the transistor, which replaced the bulky vacuum tubes and enabled much smaller, yet more-powerful, computers-while serving as the foundation for new devices such as hearing aids and transistor radios. chip. The microprocessor chip revolutionized computing by allowing for the storage of far more data in much smaller machines. The microchip made possible the personal computer. In 1975, an engineer named Ed Roberts developed the Altair 8800, the prototype of the personal computer. Its potential excited a Harvard University sophomore named Bill Gates, who improved the software of the Altair 8800, dropped out of college, and formed a company called Microsoft. During the 1980s, IBM (International Business Machines), using a microprocessor made by the Intel Corporation and an operating system provided by Microsoft, helped turn the personal computer into a mass consumer product. In 1963, a half-million computer chips were sold worldwide; by 1970, the number was 300 million. Computer chips transformed televisions, video recorders, calculators, wristwatches, clocks, ovens, phones, laptops, video games, and automobiles-while facilitating efforts to land astronauts on the moon and launch satellites into space.

The Computer Revolution microprocessor - An electronic circuit printed on a tiny silicon chip; a major technological breakthrough in 1971, it paved the way for the development of the personal computer.

Ronald Reagan's supporters loved his simple solutions and genial personality, and they responded passionately to his recurring question: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Their answer was a resounding "No!" Jimmy Carter had not been able to gain the release of the Americans held hostage in Iran prior to Election Day, nor had he improved the economy.

The Election of 1980

The feminist movement coincided with the so-called sexual revolution as Americans became more tolerant of premarital sex and women became more sexually active. Between 1960 and 1975, the number of college women engaging in heterosexual intercourse doubled, to 50 percent. Enabling this change, in large part, was the birth-control pill, approved for public use by the Food and Drug Administration in 1960. Widespread access to the pill gave women a greater sense of sexual freedom and led to open discussions of birth control, reproduction, and sexuality in general.

The Sexual Revolution and Birth Control

Russian term for "openness"; applied to the loosening of censorship in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev.

glasnost

As Timothy Leary hoped, illegal drugs-marijuana, amphetamines, cocaine, peyote, hashish, heroin, and LSD, the "Acid Test"--became commonplace. Said Todd Gitlin, a former SDS president, "More and more, to get access to youth culture, you had to get high." The Byrds sang about getting "Eight Miles High," and Bob Dylan proclaimed that "everybody must get stoned!" Getting stoned was the goal of those who participated in the 1967 "Summer of Love," a series of nationwide cultural and social festivals protesting the Vietnam War and celebrating the youth revolt. In San Francisco, more than 100,000 hippies ("flower children") converged in search of tribal intimacy and anarchic freedom. They included runaways, delinquents, seekers, and mere followers of fashion.

"Eight Miles High"

Richard Nixon courted working- and middle-class Whites who feared that America was being corrupted by permissiveness, anarchy, and the tyranny of the rebellious minority. Above all, he promised to restore "law and order" by "cracking down" on anti-war Nixon's promise to restore "law and order" protesters, civil rights demonstrators, and activists who challenged traditional gender roles. Once, he visited his mother to wish her happy birthday, followed by a camera crew, and when she came to the door, he shook her hand. Nixon and his wife, Pat, had separate bedrooms for most of their marriage, and he wrote sterile memos to her with the formal salutation, "To Mrs. Nixon, from the President." Nixon displayed violent mood swings (punctuated by alcohol binges), raging temper tantrums, frequent profanity, and anti-Semitic and anti-feminist outbursts. As he once told an aide, "I'm not for women frankly, in any job. I don't want any of them around. Thank God we don't have any in the Cabinet." Critics nicknamed him "Tricky Dick" because he excelled at deceit. In his speech accepting the Republican nomination in 1968, Nixon pledged "to find the truth, to speak the truth, and live with the truth." In fact, however, he often did the opposite. One of his presidential aides admitted, "We did often lie, mislead, deceive, try to use [the media], and to con them."

"Law and Order"

Meanwhile, unemployment, at only 3.3 percent when Nixon took office, hit 6 percent by the end of 1970. Economists coined the term "stagflation" to describe the simultaneous problems of stalled economic growth (stagnation), rising inflation, and high unemployment. Consumer prices usually increased with a rapidly growing economy and rising employment. This was just the reverse, and there were no easy ways to fight the unusual combination of recession and inflation. Stagflation had at least three causes. First, the Johnson administration had financed both the Great Society social welfare programs and the Vietnam War without a major tax increase, thereby generating large federal deficits, a major expansion of the money supply, and price inflation. Second, U.S. companies were facing stiff competition from West Germany, Japan, and other emerging international industrial powers. Third, America's prosperity since 1945 had resulted in part from the ready availability of cheap sources of energy. No other nation was more dependent upon the automobile, and no other nation was more wasteful in its use of fossil fuels. During the seventies, however, oil and gasoline became scarcer and costlier. High energy prices and oil shortages took their toll on the economy. Just as America's domestic petroleum reserves began to dwindle and dependence upon foreign sources increased, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) decided to use its huge oil supplies as a political and economic weapon. In 1973, the United States sent massive aid to Israel after a devastating Syrian-Egyptian attack that was launched on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. OPEC responded by announcing that it would not sell oil to the United States and other nations supporting Israel in the so-called Yom Kippur War and that it was raising its oil prices by 400 percent. President Nixon alerted Americans to a stark new fact: "We are heading toward the most acute shortage of energy since the Second World War." He asked the airlines to reduce their flights, lowered the maximum speed limit on federal highways to 55 miles per hour, halted plans to convert electricity-generating plants from coal to oil, and urged all Americans to conserve energy. The Nixon administration responded erratically and ineffectively to stagflation, trying old remedies for a new problem. First, the president sought to reduce the federal deficit by raising taxes and cutting the budget. When the Democratic Congress refused to cooperate, he encouraged the Federal Reserve Board to reduce the nation's money supply by raising interest rates. The stock market immediately nosedived, and the economy plunged into the "Nixon recession."

"Stagflation" - Term coined by economists during the Nixon presidency to describe the unprecedented situation of stagnant economic growth and consumer price inflation occurring at the same time.

During this turbulent period, one event briefly united both the country and the world. On July 16, 1969, some 600 million people around the world watched on television as US. astronauts Neil Armstrong, Edwin "Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins set off atop a Saturn V rocket on the long awaited Apollo 11 space mission to land on the moon. Armstrong quickly overrode the automatic pilot, took control of the module, and frantically searched for a smoother landing site. The problem was that these unplanned maneuvers were using up precious fuel needed to fire the rockets to leave the moon. The engineers at Mission Control in Houston relayed their sense of urgency to Armstrong: he had only sixty seconds of fuel left. "There ain't no gas stations on the moon," a flight controller reminded the astronauts. At that moment, the NASA technician in Houston monitoring the radar system scanning the landing site fainted. Yet the lunar lander, named Eagle, was still a hundred feet from the surface. "Thirty seconds of fuel left," yelled Mission Control. Armstrong's heart rate soared to 156 beats per minute. Finally, Aldrin reported: "Contact!" Then Armstrong followed with, "Houston, the Eagle has landed"—with just twenty seconds of fuel to spare. Armstrong became the first human to walk on the moon's surface; he famously called the moment "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Soon thereafter, Aldrin joined him to plant an American flag, organize several experiments, and collect moon rocks.

"The Eagle Has Landed"

By July 1979, President Carter had grown so discouraged with the nation's tepid efforts to reduce U.S. oil consumption that for eleven days he left the White House and holed up at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains. There he met with some 150 representatives from business, labor, education, politics, religion, and even psychiatrists. Then on July 15, he returned to the White House and delivered a televised speech in which he sounded more like an angry preacher than a president. A "crisis of confidence," he claimed, was paralyzing the nation. The people, he said, had lost confidence in his leadership and with legislators, and America had become rudderless, with no "sense of purpose" other than "to worship self-indulgence and consumption." Carter blamed the citizenry for the nation's problems. "All the legislation in the world can't fix what's wrong with America," he stressed, for Americans had become preoccupied with "owning and consuming things" at the expense of "hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God."

A "Crisis of Confidence"

Mikhail Gorbachev, who became the Soviet president in 1985, was a transformational leader who launched three dramatic initiatives that altered the political and diplomatic behavior of the Soviet Union. He renewed the foreign policy of détente, encouraging a reduction of tensions with the United States so that he could reduce military spending and focus on more-pressing problems, especially a notoriously inefficient, stagnant economy and a losing war in Afghanistan.

A Historic Treaty

In late December 1979, President Carter faced another crisis when 100,000 Soviet soldiers invaded Afghanistan, a remote, mountainous country where a faltering Communist government was being challenged by Islamist jihadists ("holy warriors") and ethnic warlords. The invaders soon found themselves mired in what some called the Soviet Vietnam. Carter responded with a series of steps. In January 1980, he refused to sign a Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) treaty with the Soviets, suspended U.S. grain shipments to the Soviet Union, began using the CIA to supply Afghan "freedom fighters" with weapons to use against Soviet troops, requested large increases in U.S. military spending, required all nineteen-year-old men to register for the military draft, and called for an international boycott of the 1980 Olympic Games, scheduled that summer in Moscow. Unfortunately, Carter's doctrine set in motion an endless U.S. military presence in the Middle East, as future presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, relied on armed force and technological firepower as the primary instruments of foreign policy in that strategic yet fractured and fractious region.

Afghanistan

But less than a month after taking office, Fond reopened the wounds of Watergate by issuing Nixon a "fall, free, and shuilute pardon for any crimes he may have commited while in office. Ford's pardon unleashed a storm of controversy as most Americans opposed the decision. They wanted the former president arrested, indicted, and prosecuted. Even the president's press secretary resigned in protest of the pardon.

An Unelected President

During the mid-1960s, the ideals and tactics of the Free Speech Movement spread across the country. FSM served as the bridge between the college students who participated in the civil rights movement and those who fueled the anti-war movement. By 1965, the growing U.S. involvement in Vietnam had changed the New Left's agenda as millions of young men suddenly faced the prospect of being drafted to fight in the increasingly unpopular conflict. The Vietnam War was primarily a poor man's fight. Most college students were able to postpone military service until they received their degree or reached the age of twenty-four. From 1965 through 1966, they made up only 2 percent of military inductees. Of the 1,200 men in Harvard's class of 1970, only 56 served in the military, and just 2 of them went to Vietnam. African Americans and Latinos were twice as likely to be drafted as Whites. As the war dragged on, opposition to U.S. involvement exploded. Some 200,000 young men ignored their draft notices, and some 4,000 served prison sentences for doing so. Another 56,000 qualified for conscientious objector (CO) status, meaning that they presented evidence to officials authenticating their moral, ethical, or religious opposition to war and/or the military. If their petition was granted, COs had to perform alternative civilian service, often in hospitals or clinics. Others defied the draft by burning their draft cards while shouting "Hell no, we won't go!" Still others fled to Canada or Sweden or found creative ways to flunk the physical examination.

Anti-war Protests

For all his faults, Bill Clinton presided over an unprecedented period of peace and prosperity (115 consecutive months of economic growth and the lowest unemployment rate in thirty years), generated record federal budget surpluses, and passed a welfare-reform measure with support from both parties. Crime rates fell during his presidency, and he facilitated the rapid rise of the internet and the rapid expansion of globalization. At the same time, he revitalized the Democratic party by moving it from the left to the "vital center" of the political spectrum. Clinton also helped bring peace and stability to the Balkans. At times, however, he displayed arrogant recklessness, and his effort to bring health insurance to the uninsured was a clumsy failure. Yet in 2000, his last year in office, his public approval rating was 65 percent, the highest end-of-term rating since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Bill Clinton's popularity was not enough, however, to ensure the election of his vice president, Al Gore, as his successor.

Assessing the Clinton Presidency

The turmoil of the sixties spawned a cultural backlash among what President Richard Nixon called the "great silent majority" of middle-class Americans that had propelled him to victory in 1968. He had been elected as the representative of middle America-voters fed up with student radicals, hippies, radical feminism, gay and lesbian rights, and affirmative-action programs that gave preferential treatment to people of color and women to atone for past injustices.

Backlash towards Nixon affirmative action - Programs designed to give preferential treatment to women and people of color as compensation for past injustices and to counterbalance systematic inequalities.

During the 1980s, Ronald Reagan reduced tax rates so people would have more money to spend. During the "age of Reagan," advertisements celebrated instant gratification. Consumers went on self-indulgent spending sprees, and the more they bought, the more they wanted. As the stock market soared, the number of multimillionaires working on Wall Street and in the financial industry mushroomed as income inequality widened. The economy shifted from manufacturing to service industries, where wages were lower (a process known as "deindustrialization"). Most new jobs created during the 1980s paid only the minimum wage.

Carefree Consumers and the Stock Market Plunge

When the two foreign leaders arrived at Camp David, Maryland, they refused to be in the same room together, so Carter shuttled back and forth with various versions of a settlement. After twelve days, his strenuous efforts paid off. It was the first time that an Arab nation (Egypt) had officially recognized the existence of Israel. However, this historic agreement, dubbed the Camp David Accords for the presidential retreat where the negotiations took place, created only a "framework for peace," not a true settlement of differences. In the wake of the Camp David Accords, most Arab nations condemned Sadat as a traitor, and Islamic extremists assassinated him in 1981. Still, Carter's high-level diplomacy made another war between Israel and the Arab world less likely.

Carter's Foreign Policy Camp David Accords (1978) - Peace agreement facilitated by President Carter between Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel and President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt, the first Arab head of state to officially recognize the state of Israel.

During his first two years in the White House, he served as his own chief of staff, but he grew so busy handling mundane tasks like his daily calendar that he failed to establish an uplifting vision for the nation's future. Instead of focusing on a few priorities, Carter tried to do too much too fast, and his inexperienced team was often more a burden than a blessing. Worst of all, Carter, the self proclaimed "outsider" president, saw little need to consult with Democratic congressional leaders, which helps explain why many of his legislative requests went nowhere.

Carter's Limitations

In the early 1960s, impoverished Mexican American farmworkers formed their own civil rights organization, the United Farm Workers (UFW). In 1962, Chavez formed the National Farm Workers' Association. Like the earlier farm Alliances, it was more than a union. It was La Causa, a broad social movement intended to enhance the solidarity and dignity of migrant farmworkers, most of whom traced their ancestry to Mexico. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., Chavez viewed his efforts to organize migrant workers as a religious crusade for social justice. His life was a public prayer for a life of suffering. "I am convinced," he explained, "that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness, is to sacrifice ourselves for others in a totally non-violent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men." By 1965, Chavez and Dolores Huerta, a former teacher who would raise eleven children, had converted the Farm Workers' Association into the United Farm Workers (UFW), a union for migrant lettuce workers and grape pickers, many of them undocumented immigrants who could be deported at any time. Over the next ten years, Chavez and Huerta led a series of nonviolent protest marches, staged hunger strikes, and managed nationwide boycotts. In 1968, Chavez began a twenty-five-day hunger strike to raise national attention for his efforts. On the day he broke his fast, the first to greet him was Robert F. Kennedy, then campaigning for the Democratic presidential nomination. "The world must know, from this time forward, that the migrant farm worker, the Mexican-American, is coming into his own rights," Kennedy declared, adding that the farmworkers were gaining "a special kind of citizenship.... You are winning it for yourselves--and therefore no one can ever take it away." As Chavez recognized, the chief strength of the civil rights movement in the western states lay in the rapid growth of the Hispanic American population. From 1970 to 2015, their numbers soared from 9 million (4.8 percent of the total population) to 55 million, making them the nation's largest minority group

Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers United Farm Workers (UFW) - Organization formed in 1962 to represent the interests of Mexican American migrant workers.

Another factor supporting withdrawal from Vietnam was the collapse of military morale. Discipline among the troops eroded and drug use soared; in 1971, four times as many troops were hospitalized for drug overdoses as for combat-related wounds. Hundreds of disgruntled soldiers tried to kill or injure their officers. More than a million went AWOL (absent without leave) during the war, and almost a half million left military service with a less-than-honorable-discharge. Revelations of atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers caused even the staunchest supporters of the war to wince. Late in 1969, the My Lai Massacre exposed the country to the tale of William L. "Rusty" Calley, a twenty-six-year-old army lieutenant who ordered the murder of 347 Vietnamese civilians in the village of My Lai in 1968. Calley himself killed some fifty unarmed Vietnamese.

Collapse of Military Morale

President Reagan's foremost international concern was Central America. The tiny nation of El Salvador was caught up in a brutal struggle between Communist-supported revolutionaries and the right-wing military government, which received U.S. economic and military assistance. Critics argued that U.S. involvement ensured that the revolutionary forces would gain favor among the people by capitalizing on "anti-Yankee" sentiment. Reagan's supporters countered that a victory by the revolutionaries would lead Central America into the Communist camp. By 1984, the US-backed government of President José Napoleón Duarte had brought some stability to El Salvador.

Communist Insurgencies in Central America

For some, the counterculture involved experimenting with alternative living arrangements, especially "intentional communities" or "communes." Communal living in urban areas such as San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, New York's Greenwich Village, Chicago's Uptown, and Atlanta's 14th Street neighborhood were popular for a time, as were rural communes. Thousands of young runaways headed to the countryside, eager to live in harmony with nature, coexist in love and openness, deepen their sense of self, and forge authentic community ties. Yet all but a handful of the back-to-the-land experiments quickly collapsed. Few participants knew how to sustain a farm, and many were unwilling to do the hard work that living off the land required.

Counterculture communes

Then came the Iranian hostage crisis, a series of dramatic events that illustrated the inability of the United States to control world affairs. In January 1979, Iranian revolutionaries had ousted the pro-American government led by the hated shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. As the crisis continued and gasoline prices rose to record levels, Carter authorized a risky rescue attempt by U.S. commandos on April 24, 1980. (His secretary of state, Cyrus Vance, resigned in protest.) The raid had to be aborted when several helicopters developed mechanical problems; the operation ended with the loss of eight U.S. soldiers when a helicopter collided with a transport plane in the Iranian desert.

Crisis in Iran Iranian hostage crisis (1979) - Storming of the U.S. embassy in Tehran by Iranian revolutionaries, who held fifty-two Americans hostage for 444 days, despite President Carter's appeals for their release and a botched rescue attempt. Operation Desert Storm (1991) - Assault by American-led multinational forces that quickly defeated Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War, ending the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.

Reagan's conduct of foreign policy reflected his belief that trouble in the world stemmed mainly from Moscow, the capital of what he called the "evil empire." Ronald Reagan believed that Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford (who followed Henry Kissinger's advice) had been too soft on the Soviets. Kissinger's emphasis on détente, Reagan said, had favored the Soviets. By contrast, Reagan wanted to reduce the risk of nuclear war by convincing the Soviets that they could not win such a conflict. To do so, he and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger embarked upon a weapons. Reagan claimed that such massive military spending would bankrupt the Soviets by forcing them to spend much more on their own military budgets major buildup of nuclear and conventional. In 1983, Reagan escalated the nuclear arms race by authorizing the Defense Department to develop the controversial Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), featuring a complex antimissile defense system using satellites with laser weapons to "intercept and destroy" Soviet missiles in flight.

Defense Strategic Defense Initiative (SDD) (1983) - Ronald Reagan's proposed space-based anti-missile defense system, dubbed "Star Wars" by the media, which aroused great controversy and escalated the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union.

By 1968, the nation seemed to be unraveling. During the spring-when Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for reelection and Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated-campus unrest boiled over. The disorder reached a climax at Columbia University, where SDS student radicals and Black militants occupied the president's office and classroom buildings. They renamed the administration building Malcolm X Hall. "After negotiations failed, the university's president canceled classes and called in the New York City police. More than 100 students were injured, 300 were arrested, and the leaders of the uprising were expelled. President Nixon declared that the rebellion was "the first major skirmish in a revolutionary struggle to seize the universities." The events at Columbia inspired similar clashes at Harvard, Cornell, and San Francisco Sute, among others. Vice President Spiro Agnew dismissed the militants as "impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals" and condemned the "circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting...enterwauling, riot-inciting, bum-America-down" anti-war protesters, whom he labeled "thieves and traitors" and "atering nabobs of negativism."

Disarray 1968

Just as Nixon had expected, the escalation of the air war in Vietnam and the extension of the war into Cambodia triggered widespread anti-war demonstrations. By late 1969, the diverse groups and individuals making up the anti-war movement had crystallized around a national effort known as the Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam. The effort centered on a national work stoppage that would enable huge numbers of people to engage in protest marches. On October 15, 1969, the Moratorium mobilized marches in 200 cities by 2 million people. Wearing black armbands, they participated in nonviolent rallies, demonstrations, and candlelight vigils designed to force Nixon to remove U.S. forces sooner.

Divisions at Home

During the first two years of his presidency, Jimmy Carter enjoyed several successes, both symbolic and real. To demonstrate his frugality with taxpayers' money, he sold the presidential yacht, cut the White House staff by a third, told cabinet officers to give up their government cars, and installed solar panels on the White House roof to draw attention to the nation's need to become energy independent. His administration included more African Americans and women than any before.

Early Success

Troubled by the agreements between the United States and China, Soviet leaders were also eager to ease tensions with the Americans. In 1972, President Nixon again surprised the world by announcing that he would visit Moscow for discussions with Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet premier. Nixon and Brezhnev signed the pathbreaking Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT D), which negotiators had been working on since 1969. The agreement did not end the nuclear arms race, but it did limit the number of missiles with nuclear warheads and prohibited the construction of missile-defense systems.

Embracing the Soviet Union Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALTI) - Agreement signed by President Nixon and Premier Leonid Brezhnev prohibiting the development of missile defense systems in the United States and Soviet Union and limiting the quantity of nuclear warheads for both.

In the early 1970s, Gloria Steinem joined members of Congress, the Supreme Court, and NOW in advancing the cause of gender equality. A major victory occurred with the congressional passage of Title IX of the Educational Amendments of 1972. It barred gender discrimination in any "education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance." Most notably applied to athletics, Title IX spurred a tremendous surge in female participation in high school and college sports. Women, the justices wrote, have a fundamental "right to choose" whether to bear a child or not, since pregnancy necessarily affects a woman's health and well-being. The Roe v. Wade (1973) decision, and the ensuing success of NOW's efforts to liberalize local and state abortion laws, generated a powerful conservative backlash, especially among Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants, who mounted a "right-to-life" crusade that helped fuel the conservative political resurgence in the seventies and thereafter. By the mid-1990s, Norma McCorvey had dramatically switched sides and become a born-again Christian and an anti-abortion crusader. Just before her death in 2007, however, she confessed that right-wing Christian evangelical groups had paid her $450,000 to reverse her public stance. They even coached her to deliver the appropriate anti-abortion statements.

Feminist Victories Roe v. Wade (1973) - Landmark Supreme Court decision striking down state laws that banned abortions during the first trimester of pregnancy.

By the end of the seventies, sharp disputes between moderate and radical feminists had fractured the women's movement in ways similar to the fragmentation experienced by civil rights organizations a decade earlier. The movement's failure to broaden its appeal beyond White middle-class heterosexual women also caused reform efforts to stall.

Fractured Feminism

The liberationist impulses of the sixties also encouraged lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgender, and queer people (LGBTQ), long defamed as sinful or mentally ill, to assert their right to be treated as equals. Throughout the 1960s, this diverse population of outcasts had continued to suffer social and institutional discrimination. Many local ordinances and state laws deemed "non-heterosexual behavior" a vice crime, meaning an activity was illegal because it "offended" the moral standards of the community. At 3 A.M. on June 28, 1969, a New York City Police Department vice squad raided the Stonewall Inn, the most popular gay/transgender club in Greenwich Village. There had been police raids before, but this time the cops were determined to shut down the Stonewall Inn--for good. The surging crowd, led by transgender women of color, drag queens, and street people, fought back with pent-up anger brought to a roiling rage. The outnumbered police took shelter inside the bar. Outraged customers threw whatever they could find-rocks, bricks, bottles, beer cans, pennies-and then torched the building. The Stonewall Uprising lasted six nights and involved thousands of people-not only gays, but transsexuals, people of color, bar patrons, militants, street youth, and sex workers. In the end, four policemen were injured, thirteen patrons were arrested, and the New York City police commissioner issued a public apology to the LGBTQ community. The Stonewall Inn Uprising was a turning point in the LGBTQ movement. Although there had been many protests and demonstrations before, the Stonewall riots crystallized the quest for gay legitimacy. The widely publicized event helped many gays and transsexuals "come out of the closet," and it helped many others see the gay/lesbian/trans liberation movement as interwoven with the struggle for civil rights. Colleges and universities began offering courses and majors in gay and lesbian studies (also called queer studies), and groups began pushing for government recognition of same-sex marriages. As with the civil rights and women's movements, however, the campaign for gay and lesbian rights soon witnessed internal divisions over inclusiveness, definitions, tactics, and goals and sparked a conservative counterattack.

Gay and Lesbian Rights Stonewall Uprising (1969) - Violent clashes between police and gay patrons of New York City's Stonewall Inn, seen as the starting point of the modem gay rights movement.

In the end, Bush won decisively over the Democratic nominee, Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, winning 426 to 111 in the Electoral College, but the Democrats retained control of the House and Senate. Yet, for the most part, Bush sought to consolidate the initiatives that Reagan had put in place rather than launch his own programs and policies. "We don't need to remake society." he announced. As an example of his compassionate conservatism, Bush readily supported the Democratic proposed Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, a landmark piece of civil rights legislation that protected the millions of people with disabilities from various forms of discrimination: employment, public transportation and parking, and housing.

George H.W. Bush

Another feature of the new economy was globalization, the process by which people, goods, information, and cultural tastes circulated across national boundaries. People began talking about a "borderless economy" as high-tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon developed a worldwide presence. The end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union accelerated economic globalization by opening new opportunities for U.S. companies in international trade. In addition, new globe-spanning communication technologies, the internet, and massive new container-carrying ships and cargo jets shortened time and distance, enabling multinational companies to conduct more business abroad. In 1994, more than a hundred nations sent representatives to the founding meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO), whose primary purpose was to facilitate free trade worldwide.

Globalization - An important and controversial transformation of the world economy led by the growing number of multinational companies and the internet, whereby an international marketplace for goods and services was created.

The women's movement received a boost from the energetic leadership of Gloria Steinem, who co-founded Ms. magazine in 1971. It was the first feminist periodical with a national readership. Its first edition of 300,000 copies sold out in eight days, and at the end of the first year it enjoyed half a million subscribers. In hard-hitting essays in Ms. and other magazines, Steinem expanded the scope of feminism beyond what Betty Friedan and others had started. It also made Steinem famous. In 1968, she helped found New York magazine, which enabled her, the only woman on the staff, to write about political topics and progressive social issues. A year later, Steinem attended an event in Greenwich Village sponsored by the Redstockings, a radical feminist group, at which women stood and recounted their experience with abortion. Having had an illegal abortion in London at age twenty-two, Steinem told her story. "Why should each of us," she asked, "be made to feel criminal or alone?" Steinem soon became the public face and voice of the women's liberation movement. She was usually the first choice of reporters eager for provocative interviews and comments. As feminist scholar Rebecca Traister explained, Steinem was "young and white and pretty, and she looked great on magazine covers. I'm not deriding her. She tells this story about herself." Steinem testified before a Senate committee in 1970 on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment and was co-founder of the Women's Action Alliance and the National Women's Political Caucus.

Gloria Steinem

The Vietnam policy implemented by Nixon and Henry Kissinger moved along three fronts. First, U.S. negotiators in Paris demanded the withdrawal of Viet Cong forces from South Vietnam and the preservation of the U.S.-backed government of President Nguyen Van Thieu. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong negotiators, for their part, insisted on retaining a Communist military presence in the south and reunifying the Vietnamese people under a government dominated by the Communists. On the second front, Nixon tried to quell domestic unrest. He labeled the anti-war movement a "brotherhood of the misguided, the mistaken, the well-meaning, and the malevolent." He sought to defuse the anti-war movement by steadily reducing the number of U.S. troops in Vietnam, justifying the reduction as the natural result of "Vietnamization"--the equipping and training of South Vietnamese soldiers and pilots to assume the burden of combat. On the third front, while steadily reducing the number of U.S. combat troops in Southeast Asia, Nixon and Kissinger greatly expanded the US. bombing of North Vietnam in hopes of pressuring the Communist leaders to end the war. Kissinger felt that "a fourth-rate power" like North Vietnam must have a "breaking point" at which it would decide it was suffering too much damage. Nixon agreed, suggesting that they let the North Vietnamese leaders know that he was so "obsessed about Communism" that he might use the "nuclear button" if necessary.

Gradual Withdrawal Vietnamization - Nixon-era policy of equipping and training South Vietnamese forces to take over the burden of combat from U.S. troops.

On November 29, 1990, President Bush signed the bipartisan Immigration Act of 1990, which amended the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. It initially increased the total number of immigrants allowed each year to 700,000 between 1992 and 1994, and then capped the number at an annual 675,000 thereafter.

Immigration Act of 1990

Carter, the former naval officer, nuclear engineer, efficiency expert, and business executive, wanted to be a "strong, aggressive president," who would use his technical expertise to clean up the "Washington mess." Voters expected Carter to restore U.S. stature abroad, cure the prolonged economic recession, and reduce both unemployment and inflation at a time when industrial economies around the world were struggling.

Jimmy Who?

In the spring of 1970, news of the secret Cambodian "incursion" by US. forces set off explosive protests on college campuses and across the nation. In Ohio, the governor sent the National Guard to Kent State University to control campus rioting. The poorly trained guardsmen panicked and opened fire on rock-throwing demonstrators, killing four student bystanders. The widely publicized killings at Kent State added new fury to the anti-war and anti-Nixon movement. That spring, demonstrations occurred on more than 350 campuses. Eleven days after the Kent State tragedy, on May 15, Mississippi highway patrolmen riddled a dormitory at predominantly Black Jackson State College with bullets, killing two student protesters and wounding twelve others. In New York City, anti-war demonstrators who gathered to protest the student deaths and the invasion of Cambodia were attacked by conservative "hard-hat" construction workers, many of them shouting "All the way, USA" and "America: Love it or leave it." They forced the protesters to disperse and then marched on City Hall to raise the U.S. flag, which had been lowered to half-staff in mourning for the Kent State victims. "Thank God for the hard hats," Nixon exclaimed. It was later discovered that the Nixon White House had urged a New York labor union to recruit the 200 burly workers to confront the thousand protesters. Three weeks after the "Hard Hat Riot," Peter Brennan, head of the New York union of construction workers, visited the White House and gave Nixon a hard hat. In 1973, President Nixon named Brennan the new US. secretary of labor.

Kent State and Jackson State

The word Latino, referring to people who trace their ancestry to Spanish-speaking Latin America, came into increasing use after 1945 in conjunction with efforts to promote economic and social justice. Labor shortages during the Second World War had led defense industries to offer Latinos their first significant access to skilled-labor jobs. And as with African Americans, service in the military helped to heighten an American identity among Latinos and increase their desire for equal rights and social opportunities. Social equality, however, remained elusive as Latinos still faced widespread discrimination in hiring, housing, and education. Latino activists denounced segregation, called for improved public schools, and struggled to increase their political influence, economic opportunities, and visibility in the curricula of schools and colleges.

Latino Rights

Others, herwever, were caught. On June 17, 1972, police in Washington, DC., captured five burglars becaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the sprawling Watergate hotel-apartment-office complex. The burglars were all former CIA agents; four were Miami-based Cuban exiles, and the other, James W. McCord, was the Nixon campaign's security director. Two others-Gordon Liddy and E. Howard Hutt-were also arrested while directing the break-in from a hotel across the street. The purpose of the break-in was to plant illegal listening devices on phones in the Democratic party offices. Nixon and his staff dismissed the Watergate incident as a "third-rate burglary." The president denied any involvement, but he was lying; he told Alexander Haig, then his national security adviser, that "we will cover up the Watergate burglary] until hell freezes over." Nixon encouraged the cover-up, stressing that his "main concem is to keep the White House out of it." In August 1972, he told reporters that his own investigation into the Watergate incident had confirmed that no one in the White House or the administration was involved. In fact, there had been no such investigation.

More "Dirty Tricks" Watergate (1972-1974) - Scandal that exposed the criminality and corruption of the Nixon administration and ultimately led to President Nixon's resignation in 1974.

American Indians--many of whom began calling themselves Native Americans—also emerged as a political force in the late 1960s. Two conditions combined to make Indian rights a priority. First, many Whites felt guilty for the destructive actions of their ancestors toward a people who had, after all, been the first Americans. Second, Indian unemployment was ten times the national rate, life expectancy was twenty years lower than the national average, and the suicide rate was a hundred times higher than the rate for Whites. Although President Lyndon Johnson attempted to funnel federal anti-poverty-program funds to reservations, many Native American activists grew impatient. Those promoting "Red Power" organized protests and demonstrations against local, state, and federal agencies. In 1973, AIM led 200 Sioux in the occupation of the tiny South Dakota village of Wounded Knee, where the U.S. Seventh Cavalry had massacred an entire Sioux village in 1890. Outraged by the light sentences given a group of local Whites who had killed a Sioux just a year earlier, the organizers sought to draw attention to the plight of Native Americans and took eleven hostages. Federal marshals and FBI agents surrounded the encampment. When AIM leaders tried to bring in food and supplies, a shoot-out erupted, with two activists killed and a US. marshal shot and paralyzed. The confrontation ended with a government promise to reexamine Indian treaty rights. In Alaska, Maine, South Carolina, and Massachusetts, the groups won substantial settlements that officially recognized their tribal rights and helped to upgrade the standard of living on several reservations.

Native Americans' Quest for Equality Red Power - Activism by militant Native American groups to protest living conditions on Indian reservations through demonstrations, legal action, and at times, violence.

During the seventies, dramatic increases in the price of oil and gasoline fueled a major energy crisis. Natural resources grew limited-and increasingly precious. Nixon shrewdly recognized that the public mood and the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate had shifted in favor of greater federal environmental protections, especially after two widely publicized environmental disasters in 1969. Nixon knew that if he vetoed legislative efforts to improve environ-mental quality, the Democratic majorities in Congress would overrule him, so he chose not to stand in the way. In late 1969, he signed the amended Endangered Species Preservation Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. In 1970, Nixon signed the Clean Air Act and an executive order that created two federal agencies, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Two years later, he vetoed a new clean water act, only to see Congress override him. He also undermined many new environmental laws by refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress to fund them.

Nixon and Environmental Protection Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) - Federal environmental agency created by Nixon to appease the demands of congressional Democrats for a federal environmental watchdog agency.

In his first term, Nixon selected for his cabinet and staff only White men who would blindly carry out his orders. John Mitchell, the gruff attorney general who had been a senior partner in Nixon's New York law firm, was his closest confidant. H. R. "Bob" Haldeman, a former Los Angeles advertising executive, served as chief of staff. Nixon called him his "chief executioner." Yet for all their differences, Nixon and Kissinger worked well together on foreign policy initiatives, in part because they both loved intrigue, power politics, and diplomatic flexibility, and in part because of their shared vision of a multipolar world order that was beginning to replace the bipolar Cold War.

Nixon's Appointments

During his first term, Nixon focused on developing policies and programs that would please conservatives and ensure his reelection. To recruit conservative Democrats, he touted his New Federalism, which sent federal money to state and local governments to spend as they saw fit. He also disbanded the core agency of Lyndon Johnson's war on poverty-the Office of Economic Opportunity--and cut funding to several Great Society programs.

Nixon's Domestic Agenda

A major reason for Nixon's election victories in 1968 and 1972 was his shrewd southern strategy for converting the Democratic South into a Republican region. Rising crime, civil disobedience, and urban riots had changed the context of national politics. Nixon forged a new voting majority by nurturing the fears, resentments, and racism of working-class Whites and middle-class suburbanites in the South (and in conservative Catholic ethnic neighborhoods in the Midwest). He pledged to restrain the Supreme Court's efforts to accelerate racial integration and promote even faster economic growth in the Sun Belt states.

Nixon's Southern Strategy

Comprehensive welfare-reform measure aiming to decrease the size of the "welfare state" by limiting the amount of government unemployment aid to encourage its recipients to find jobs.

Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996 (PRWOA)

Reagan also opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, abortion rights, and proposals from women's rights organizations to require comparable pay for jobs of comparable worth. He cut funds for civil rights enforcement and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and he opposed renewal of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Reagan's Anti-Liberalism

Ronald Reagan succeeded where Jimmy Carter failed for three main reasons. First, Reagan focused on a few priorities like slowing the rate of inflation, lowering tax rates, reducing the scope of the federal government, increasing military spending, and conducting an anti-Soviet foreign policy. Second, he was a shrewd negotiator with congressional leaders and heads of state. He also recognized early on that governing a representative democracy requires compromises. He thus combined the passion of a revolutionary with the pragmatism of a diplomat. Third, Reagan's infectious optimism, like that of Franklin Roosevelt before him, gave people a sense of common purpose and renewed confidence. Public affection for Reagan spiked just two months into his presidency when John Hinckley, Jr., an emotionally disturbed young man, fired six shots at the president as he was returning to his limousine after a speaking engagement at the Hilton Hotel in Washington, DC. In his deranged mind, Hinckley thought by killing the president he would impress actress Jodie Foster, a woman he had never met but was obsessed with and had been stalking. Hinckley's bullets wounded a police officer and a Secret Service agent, and critically wounded press secretary James Brady, who remained paralyzed the rest of his life. Another bullet ricocheted off the presidential limousine and punctured the president's lung and lodged near his heart. Reagan inherited an economy in shambles. The annual rate of inflation had reached 13 percent, and unemployment hovered at 7.5 percent. At the same time, the Cold War was heating up again. The Soviet Union had placed missiles with nuclear weapons in the nations of Central and Eastern Europe under its control-which threatened the entire continent.

Reagan's First Term

The cost of Social Security grew by 27 percent under Reagan, as some 6,000 people each day turned sixty-five years old. Moreover, he failed to fulfill his campaign promises to the Religious Right, such as reinstituting daily prayer in public schools and banning abortion. Reagan did reshape the federal court system by appointing 368 mostly conservative judges, including Supreme Court justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.

Reagan's Half-Hearted Revolution

Spurred by his landslide reelection, Ronald Reagan called for "a Second American Revolution of hope and opportunity." Through much of 1985, he drummed up support for a tax-simplification plan. After vigorous debate, Congress passed a comprehensive Tax Reform Act in 1986. It cut the number of federal tax brackets from fourteen to two and reduced rates from the maximum of 50 percent to 15 and 28 percent-the lowest since Calvin Coolidge was president in the 1920s.

Reagan's Second Term

On August 1, 1981, President Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Tax Act (ERTA), which cut personal income taxes by 25 percent, lowered the maximum tax rate from 70 to 50 percent for 1982, and offered a broad array of tax concessions. The bill was the centerpiece of Reagan's "common sense" economic plan. While theorists called the philosophy behind the plan supply-side economics, journalists dubbed the president's proposals Reaganomics. Simply put, Reaganomics grew out of the assumption that the stagflation of the seventies had resulted from excessive corporate and personal income taxes, which weakened incentives for individuals and businesses to increase productivity, save money, and reinvest in economic expansion. The solution, according to Reagan, was to slash tax rates, especially on the wealthy, in the belief that they would spend their tax savings on business expansion and productivity, save money, and reinvest in economic expansion. The solution, according to Reagan, was to slash tax rates, especially on the wealthy, in the belief that they would spend their tax savings on business expansion and Economic Recovery Tax Act (1981) leads to economic recession consumer goods (the "supply side" of the economy). Such spending, Reagan and others believed, would provide "trickle-down" benefits to the masses.

Reaganomics - President Reagan's "supply-side" economic philosophy combining tax cuts with the goals of decreased government spending, reduced regulation of business, and a balanced budget.

Throughout 1967 and 1968, inner-city neighborhoods in Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, and other large urban areas exploded in flames fanned by racial injustice. Frustration over discrimination in employment and housing, as well as staggering rates of joblessness among inner-city African American youths, ignited the rage. In July 1967, President Lyndon Johnson had appointed a blue-ribbon commission to analyze the causes of the nation's growing "civil disorder." When the Kerner Commission, named for its chair, Illinois governor Otto Kerner, issued its findings in early 1968, President Johnson was so infuriated by the results that he canceled a White House ceremony intended to share the report with the nation. Why such anger? After visiting several cities ravaged by rioting, the commissioners concluded that the fundamental cause of urban violence was the nation's oldest and most explosive problem: White racism.

Separate and unequal

Israeli tanks and infantry then captured the Gaza Strip, much of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and East Jerusalem. After just six days of fighting, the Arab nations requested a cease-fire, which the United Nations helped to negotiate. Egypt, Syria, and Jordan had suffered more than 18,000 killed or wounded, compared with only 700 for Israel. The lopsided Six-Day War had long-range consequences, as the Israelis took control of strategic Syrian and Egyptian territories that almost doubled the nation's size. More important, the war launched a new phase in the perennial conflict between Israel and the nation-less Palestinians. The brief conflict uprooted hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees and brought more than 1 million Palestinians Six-Day War in Middle East expands Israel's border and displaces hundreds of thousands in the occupied territories under Israeli rule. The Nixon-Kissinger initiatives in the Middle East were less dramatic and less conclusive than those in China and the Soviet Union, but they showed that the United States at last recognized the legitimacy of Arab interests in the region and America's dependence upon Middle Eastern oil. But the Arab-Israeli conflict continued to ignite periodic warfare. On October 6, 1973, Syria and Egypt, backed by Saudi Arabia and armed with Soviet weapons, attacked Israel, triggering what became the Yom Kippur War. It created the most dangerous confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union since the Cuban missile crisis. When the Israeli army, with weapons supplied by the United States, launched a fierce counterattack that threatened to overwhelm Egypt, the Soviets prepared to intervene militarily. As the crisis unfolded, Nixon was bedridden because he was drunk, according to Henry Kissinger and other aides, so Kissinger, as secretary of state, presided over a National Security Council meeting that placed America's military forces on full alert. On October 20, Kissinger flew to Moscow to meet with Soviet premier Brezhnev. Kissinger skillfully negotiated a cease-fire agreement and exerted pressure on the Israelis to prevent them from taking additional Arab territory.

Shuttle Diplomacy

Gorbachev replied, "Go to hell," whereupon he was arrested. All political activity was suspended, and newspapers were shut down. The coup, however, was poorly planned and clumsily implemented. The plotters neglected to close airports or cut off telephone and television communications, and they were opposed by key elements of the military and KGB (the Soviet secret police). The hard-liners also failed to arrest popular leaders such as Boris Yeltsin, the feisty president of the Russian Republic who energized nationwide resistance to the coup. President Bush responded favorably to Yeltsin's request for support and persuaded other leaders to refuse to recognize the new Soviet government. On August 2, the coup collapsed, and the plotters fled. Several committed suicide, and a freed Gorbachev ordered the others arrested. Gorbachev resigned and handed governing authority to Boris Yeltsin. That evening, the Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin and replaced with the Russian flag. The Soviet Union was no more. Ronald Reagan's strategy of spending the Soviet Union into bankruptcy had triggered the astonishing disintegration of a superpower that had fascinated and frightened the world for seventy years. What had begun as a reactionary coup against Gorbachev turned into a powerful accelerant for the "Soviet Disunion," as one journalist termed it.

Soviet Coup Fails

The Middle East remained a tinderbox. In September 1980, the Iraqi despot, Saddam Hussein, had attacked neighboring country Iran. The brutal war involved the extensive use of chemical weapons and generated hundreds of thousands of casualties. In 1984, both Iran and Iraq began to attack tankers in the Persian Gulf, a major source of the world's oil. American administrations continued to consider Israel the strongest and most reliable ally in the volatile region, while still seeking to encourage moderate Arab groups. But the forces of moderation were dealt a blow during the mid-1970s when Lebanon, long an enclave of peace, collapsed into warring groups. The most powerful of the rival factions was the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), which sought the "liberation of Palestine" from Israeli control through armed struggle, with much of its violence aimed at Israeli civilians on Lebanon's southern border.

Strife in the Middle East

Bill Clinton's presidency benefited from a prolonged period of unprecedented prosperity. During the 1996 campaign, he took credit for having generated "ten million new jobs, over half of them high wage jobs." During his last three years in office (1998-2000), the federal government produced unheard of budget surpluses. What came to be called the "new economy" featured high-flying electronics, computer, software, telecommunications (cell phones, cable TV, etc.), and e-commerce internet firms called "dot-com" companies.

The "New Economy" new economy - Period of sustained economic prosperity during the 1990s marked by federal budget surpluses, the explosion of dot-com industries, low inflation, and low unemployment.

Carter revived the New Deal voting alliance of southern Whites, Blacks, urban labor unionists, and ethnic groups like Jews and Latinos to eke out a narrow win, receiving 41 million votes to Ford's 39 million. A heavy turnout of African Americans in the South enabled Carter to sweep every state in the region except Virginia. He also benefited from the appeal of Walter F. Mondale, his liberal running mate and a favorite among blue-collar workers and the urban poor

The 1976 Election

Another group of severely marginalized people were those suffering from a deadly new disease called AIDS (acquired immunodeficiency syndrome). At the beginning of the 1980s, public health officials reported that gay men and intravenous drug users were especially at risk for developing AIDS. People contracted the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes AIDS, through contact with the blood or body fluids of an infected person. Those infected showed signs of extreme fatigue, developed infections and ghastly purple cancerous lesions, and soon died in excruciating pain and discomfort. Some 86 percent of those who contracted AIDS died within eighteen months. By 1982, 43 percent of gay men in San Francisco and 28 percent in New York City had been infected, and AIDS had become one of the worst epidemics in world history. The Reagan administration showed little interest in AIDS because it was viewed as a "gay" disease. Patrick Buchanan, who served as Reagan's director of communications, said that gays had "declared war on nature, and now nature is extracting an awful retribution." Buchanan and others convinced Reagan not to address the HIV/AIDS issue, and even though millions of people, not just gays, were at risk, there was little funding for medical research. As a result, by 2000, AIDS had terrorized the gay community and become the leading cause of death among men ages twenty-five to forty-four.

The AIDS Epidemic HIV/AIDS - Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) transmitted via the bodily fluids of infected persons to cause acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), an often-fatal disease of the immune system when it appeared in the 1980s.

Born in Tampico, Illinois, in 1911, the son of an often-drunk Irish Catholic shoe salesman and a devout, Bible-quoting mother, Ronald Reagan earned a football scholarship to attend tiny Eureka College during the Great Depression; he washed dishes in the dining hall to pay for his meals. After graduation, Reagan worked as a radio sportscaster before starting a movie career in Hollywood. He served three years in the army during the Second World War, making training films. At that time, as he recalled, he was a Democrat, "a New Dealer to the core," who had voted for Franklin Delano Roosevelt four times.

The Actor-Turned-President

US-NATO intervention in the Balkans President Clinton also felt compelled to address turmoil in the Eastern European nations recently freed from Soviet domination. In 1991, Yugoslavia had disintegrated into ethnic warfare as four of its six multiethnic republics declared their independence. Serb minorities, backed by the new Republic of Serbia, stirred up civil wars in neighboring Croatia and Bosnia. In Bosnia, the conflict involved genocidal efforts to eliminate Muslims. Clinton decided that the situation was "intolerable" because the massacres of thousands of Bosnian Muslims "tore at the very fabric" of human decency. He ordered food and medical supplies sent to Bosnia and dispatched warplanes to stop the massacres. In 1995, US. negotiators finally persuaded the foreign ministers of Croatia, Bosnia, and Yugoslavia (by then a loose federation of the Republics of Serbia and Montenegro) to agree to a comprehensive peace plan. Bosnia would remain a single nation divided into two states: a Muslim-Croat federation controlling 51 percent of the territory, and a Bosnian-Serb republic controlling the rest. To enforce the agreement, 60,000 NATO peacekeeping troops were dispatched to Bosnia. In 1998, the Balkan tinderbox flared up again, this time in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, long considered sacred ground by Christian Serbs, although 90 percent of the 2 million Kosovars were in fact Albanian Muslims. Yugoslav president Slobodan Milošević began a program of "ethnic cleansing" whereby Yugoslav forces burned Albanian villages, murdered men, raped women, and displaced hundreds of thousands of Muslim Kosovars.

The Balkans ethnic cleansing - Systematic removal of an ethnic group from a territory through violence or intimidation in order to create a homogeneous society; the term was popularized by the Yugoslav policy brutally targeting Albanian Muslims in Kosovo.

The CIA then encouraged Chilean military leaders to oust him. In September 1973, the army took control, Allende either committed suicide or was murdered, and General Augusto Pinochet, a ruthless dictator supposedly friendly to the United States, declared himself head of the government. Within a few months, Pinochet had taken over dozens of U.S.-owned businesses in Chile and executed thousands of political opponents. For the next sixteen years, Pinochet kept Chile in a grip of terror. Thousands of his political opponents were rounded up, tortured, and never heard from again.

The CIA in Chile

Reagan's popularity resulted in part from his skill as a speaker and his commitment to a few basic principles and simple themes. He rejected Carter's assumption that Americans needed "to start getting along with less, to accept a decline in our standard of living." He instead promised boundless economic expansion and endless prosperity. By reducing taxes and easing government regulations of businesses, he pledged, the engine of free-enterprise capitalism would spread wealth to everyone.

The Candidate of Hope and Optimism

The California tax revolt fed into a national conservative resurgence led by the rapidly growing "Christian Right." Religious conservatives promoting a faith-based political agenda formed the strongest grassroots movement of the late twentieth century.

The Christian Right Christian Right - Christian conservatives with a faith-based political agenda that includes prohibition of abortion and allowing prayer in public schools.

Report On September 9, 1998, Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr submitted to Congress documents that included a graphic account of the Lewinsky episode. The Star Report claimed that there was "substantial and credible" evidence of presidential wrongdoing (perjury, obstructing justice, and abuse of power). On October 8, the Republican-dominated House of Representatives began a wide-ranging impeachment inquiry, which led Clinton to claim that he was the victim of a rogue prosecutor run amok. "When this thing is over," Clinton said, "there's only going to be one of us left standing. And it's going to be me." On December 19, 1998, William Jefferson Clinton was impeached (accused of "high crimes and misdemeanors"). The House of Representatives charged Clinton with obstructing justice and lying under oath to a federal grand jury. House Speaker Newt Gingrich initially led the impeachment effort, even though he himself was secretly engaged in a long-standing sexual affair with a congressional staff member. (Gingrich resigned as Speaker in November 1998 and left both the House and A "soap opera" impeachment his wife, escaping with his new wife from elected office altogether.) Journalists began calling Clinton's Senate trial the "soap opera" impeachment after Gingrich's successor as Speaker, Robert Livingston of Louisiana, suddenly resigned after admitting that he, too, had been involved in adulterous affairs.

The Clinton Impeachment

On March 29, 1973, the last US. combat troops left Vietnam. The same day, the North Vietnamese released almost 600 U.S. prisoners of war. Within months, however, the cease-fire collapsed, the war resumed, and Communist forces gained the upper hand. In Cambodia (renamed the Khmer Republic after a 1970 military coup) and Laos, where fighting had been sporadic, a Communist victory seemed inevitable. The longest, most controversial, and least successful war in American history to that point was finally over. It left a bitter legacy. During the period of U.S. involvement, the combined death count for combatants and civilians reached nearly 2 million. North Vietnam absorbed incredible losses-some 600,000 soldiers and countless civilians. South Vietnam lost 240,000 soldiers, and more than 500,000 Vietnamese became refugees in the United States.

The Collapse of South Vietnam

Alabama's Democratic governor, George Wallace, led the conservative White backlash. "Liberals, intellectuals, and long hairs," he shouted, "have run the country for too long." He repeatedly attacked "welfare queens," unmarried African American mothers whom he claimed "were breeding children as a cash crop" to receive federal child-support checks. Wallace became the voice for many working-class Whites fed up with political liberalism and social radicalism.

The Conservative Backlash

Looking back over the 1960s, Tom Hayden, the founder of SDS, recalled that most of the youthful rebels "were not narrowly political. Most were not so interested in attaining elected) office but in changing lifestyles." Hayden acknowledged that the shocking events of 1968 lod hippies to embrace the counterculture, an unorganized and leaderless rebellion that focused more on cultural change, personal exploration, and tribal intimacy than political activism. Both the counterculture and the New Left rejected the status quo, but most hippies preferred to "drop our of mainstream society rather than mobilize to change the political system. They had no desire to take control of society or redirect it toward new goals. They showed little interest in reforming the world they lived in since its values were inelevant to them. They instead pursued a much easier goal: changing what was inside their heath. Self-exploration and self-expression were their goals, not taking over campuses and communities. Their preferred slogans were "Do Your Own Thing" and "Make Love, Not War." Hippies rejected mainstream culture and its neurotic materialism. They defied traditional notions of behavior and strove to exceed limits, trespass across boundaries, and heighten sensibilities by using "mind-blowing" drugs. They rejected the pursuit of wealth and careers and embraced plain living, authenticity, friendship, peace, and, especially, freedom. The counterculture lifestyle included an array of ideals and activities: peace, love, harmony, rock music, mystical religions, illicit drugs, casual sex, yoga, vegetarianism, organic food, and communal living.

The Counterculture Revolution Counterculture - Unorganized youth rebellion against mainstream institutions, values, and behavior that more often focused on cultural radicalism rather than political activism.

George H. W. Bush entered the White House with more foreign policy experience than most presidents, and like Richard Nixon, he preferred to deal with international relations rather than domestic problems. In the Soviet Union, amazing changes were under way. In December 1988, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev shocked the world by renouncing his country's actions in fomenting the Cold War. New circumstances, he said, were causing the Soviets "to abandon traditional stereotypes and outdated views, and free ourselves from illusions." A new world was emerging that required "a different road to the future." With the Soviet economy failing, Gorbachev responded with policies of perestroika economic restructuring and glamost openness, a loosening of centralized economic planning and censorship of the press.

The Democracy Movement Abroad perestroika - Russian term for economic restructuring, applied to Mikhail Gorbachev's series of political and economic reforms that included shifting a centrally planned Communist economy to a mixed economy allowing for capitalism.

For virtually the first time since 1945, Congress had passed a major bill without a single Republican vote, a troubling indication of the nation's growing partisan divide. Bipartisanship in Congress was a dying tradition. Clinton's deficit-reduction effort worked as planned, however. It led to lower interest rates, which, along with low energy prices, helped spur economic growth. An equally difficult battle for Clinton was gaining congressional approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), largely Ronald Reagan's idea, which the Bush administration had negotiated with Canada and Mexico. In 1994, Clinton urged Congress to approve NAFTA, which would make North America the largest free-trade zone in the world. Opponents favored tariffs to discourage the importation of cheaper foreign products, especially from Mexico. Yet Clinton prevailed with solid Republican support. A sizable minority of Democrats, mostly labor unionists and southerners, opposed NAFTA, fearing that textile mills would lose business (and millions of jobs) to "cheap labor" countries-as they did.

The Economy North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (1994) - Agreement eliminating trade barriers that was signed in 1994 by the United States, Canada, and Mexico, making North America the largest free-trade zone in the world.

By 1983, prosperity had returned, the stock market was soaring, and Reagan's supply-side economic program was at last working as advertised-except for the growing federal budget deficits. By 1984, reporters had begun to speak of the "Reagan Revolution." The slogan at the Republican National Convention was "America is back and standing tall."

The Election of 1984

The most spectacular event in the collapse of the Soviet empire came on November 9, 1989, when tens of thousands of East Germans gathered at the Berlin Wall and demanded that the border guards open the gates to West Berlin. The guards reluctantly did so, and soon Germans on both sides began tearing the wall down. What Germans called the "peaceful revolution" had occurred with dramatic suddenness. With the borders to West Germany now fully open, the Communist government of East Germany collapsed. (On October 3, 1990, the five states of East Germany were reunited with West Germany.)

The End of the Berlin Wall

The biggest problem facing the Bush administration was the huge national debt, which stood at $2.96 trillion in 1989, nearly three times its 1980 level. President Bush's pledge not to increase taxes made it all the more difficult to reduce the annual budget deficits or trim the accumulating national debt. Likewise, Bush was not willing to make substantial spending cuts to defense or social welfare programs like Social Security, Medicare, and food stamps. As a result, by 1990 the country faced "a fiscal mess." Republicans in Congress were so angry that they joined with Democrats in nixing Bush's budget proposal. A fuming Bush lashed out at Newt Gingrich: "You're killing us. You're killing us." With Congress and the White House unable to reach agreement on the budget, government agencies and offices, including national parks, shut down. People were furious, and their widespread anger forced Bush to admit defeat and sign a new resolution that reopened government offices. To do so, however, he had to agree to a new budget drafted by Democrats. It replaced his proposed gasoline tax with an increase in the top income tax rate, from 28 to 31 percent. Only a fourth of Republicans supported the idea, but the Democrats marshaled enough votes for it to become law in October 1990.

The Federal Debt and Recession

As president, Gerald Ford continued the role he had developed as minority leader in the House of Representatives naysaying head of the opposition who believed the federal government exercised too much power. In his first fifteen months as president, Ford vetoed thirty-nine bills passed by the Democratic-controlled Congress, outstripping Herbert Hoover's all time veto rected in less than half the time. By far the most important issue during Ford's brief presidency was the struggling economy. In the fall of 1974, the nation entered its deepest recession since the Great Depression. Unemployment jumped to 9 percent in 1975, the rate of inflation reached double digits, and the federal budget deficit hit a recoed.

The Ford Years

The logjam in the disarmament negotiations suddenly broke in 1987, when Mikhail Gorbachev announced that he was willing to consider mutual reductions in nuclear weaponry. A member of the Soviet negotiating team acknowledged Ronald Reagan's role in the breakthrough. The U.S. president, he explained, "takes you by the arm, walks you to the cliff's edge, and invites you to step forward for the good of humanity." After nine months of strenuous negotiations, Reagan and Gorbachev met amid much fanfare in Washington, D.C., on December 9, 1987, and signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INE) Treaty, an agreement to eliminate thousands of intermediate-range (300- to 3,000-mile) missiles. Reagan's steadfast show of strength against the Soviets and a new kind of Soviet leader in Mikhail Gorbachev combined to produce the most sweeping reduction in nuclear weaponry in history.

The INF Treaty Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (1987) - Agreement signed by US. president Ronald Reagan and Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev to eliminate the deployment of intermediate-range missiles with nuclear warheads.

Worse for the administration were reports that it had been secretly selling arms to U.S.-hating Iran (which Reagan had called an "outlaw state") in hope of securing the release of American hostages held in Lebanon by extremist groups sympathetic to Iran. Such action contradicted Reagan's insistence that his administration would never negotiate with terrorists. The disclosures angered America's allies as well as many Americans who vividly remembered the 1979 Iranian hostage situation. Over the next several months, revelations emerged about a complicated series of covert activities carried out by administration officials. At the center of what came to be called the Iran-Contra affair was Marine lieutenant colonel Oliver North, a swashbuckling aide to the National Security Council who specialized in counterterrorism. Working from the basement of the White House, North had been secretly selling military supplies to Iran and using the proceeds to provide weapons to the Contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua at a time when Congress had voted to ban such aid. North's illegal activities, it turned out, had been approved by Reagan's national security adviser Robert McFarlane; McFarlane's successor, Admiral John Poindexter, and CIA director William Casey. After information about the secret dealings surfaced, North and others erased incriminating computer files and destroyed documents. McFarlane attempted suicide before being convicted of withholding information from Congress. Poindexter resigned, and North, described by the White House as a "loose cannon," was fired.

The Iran-Contra Affair Iran-Contra affair (1987) - Reagan administration scandal over the secret, unlawful U.S. sale of arms to Iran in partial exchange for the release of hostages in Lebanon; the arms money in turn was used illegally to aid Nicaraguan right-wing insurgents, the Contras.

The first wave of the women's movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had focused on gaining the right to vote. The second wave, in the sixties and seventies, challenged the conventional ideal of female domesticity and worked to ensure that women gained equal treatment in the workplace and on college campuses. Although the Equal Pay Act of 1963 had made it illegal to pay women less than men for doing the same job, discrimination and harassment continued. Women, who were 51 percent of the nation's population and held 37 percent of the jobs, were paid 42 percent less than men on average. Betty Friedan, a forty-two-year-old mother of three from Peoria, Illinois, who supplemented her husband's income by writing articles for women's magazines, emerged as one of the leaders of the postwar women's movement. Then, in 1963, Friedan published her searing first book, The Feminine Mystique, which helped launch the second phase of the feminist movement Rarely has a single book exercised such influence. Friedan argued that her generation of upper- and middle-class college-educated White mothers and wives had actually lost ground after the Second World War, The Feminine Mystique (1963) when many left wartime employment and settled in suburbia as full-time wives and mothers. In 1966, Friedan and other activists founded the National Organization for Women (NOW). It promoted "true equality for all women in America... as part of the worldwide revolution of human rights now taking place." The new organization sought to end gender discrimination in the workplace and spearheaded efforts to legalize abortion and obtain federal and state support for child-care centers. Change came slowly, however. By 1970, there was still only one woman in the U.S. Senate, ten in the House of Representatives, and none on the U.S. Supreme Court or in the president's cabinet.

The New Feminism women's movement - Wave of activism sparked by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (1963); it argued for equal rights for women and fought against the cult of domesticity that limited women's roles to the home as wife, mother, and homemaker.

The political arm of the youth revolt originated in 1962 when Tom Hayden and Alan Haber, two University of Michigan students, convened a meeting of sixty young activists at Port Huron, Michigan, and formed Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Their goal was ambitious: to remake the United States into a more democratic society. Several participants were the children of former leftists or Communists; even more were Jewish. Hayden and others adopted the term New Left to distinguish their efforts at grassroots democracy from those of the "Old Leff" of the 1930s, which had embraced an orthodox Marxism. Hayden's proposed revolution would be energized by hope and change, not abstract economic theories. Within a few years, more than 1,000 campuses hosted SDS chapters, and the organization began publishing an underground newspaper, The Rag In the fall of 1964, students at the University of California at Berkeley took Hayden's New Left program to heart. Several had spent the summer working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee's (SNCC) voter registration project in Mississippi ("Freedom Summer"), where three volunteers had been killed by Klansmen and many others had been arrested or harassed. When the university's chancellor announced that campus political demonstrations were banned, thousands of students staged a sit-in. After a thirty-two-hour standoff, the administration relented, lifting the ban on political demonstrations. Student groups then formed the free-speech movement (PSM) led by Mario Savio.

The New Left New Left - Term coined by the Students for a Democratic Society to distinguish their efforts at grassroots democracy from those of the 1930s Old Left, which had embraced orthodox Marxism and admired the Soviet Union under Stalin.

In July 1969, while announcing the first troop withdrawals from Vietnam, President Nixon unveiled what came to be called the Nixon Doctrine. Unlike John F. Kennedy, who had declared that the United States would "pay any price, bear any burden" to win the Cold War, Nixon explained that "America cannot--and will not-conceive all the plans, design all the programs, execute all the decisions, and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world." That Nixon, with his history of rabid anti-communism, would embrace such a policy of détente (a French word meaning "easing of relations") shocked many and demonstrated yet again his pragmatic flexibility.

The Nixon Doctrine détente - Period of improving relations between the United States and Communist nations, particularly China and the Soviet Union, during the Nixon administration.

By the summer of 1974, Nixon was in full retreat, and his efforts to orchestrate the cover-up unhinged him. Henry Kissinger found him increasingly unstable and drinking heavily. After meeting with the president, Senator Barry Goldwater reported that Nixon "jabbered incessantly, often incoherently." On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the president must surrender all the tape recordings. A few days later, the House Judiciary Committee voted to recommend three articles of impeachment: obstruction of justice through the payment of hush money to witnesses and the withholding of evidence; abuse of power through the use of Federal agencies to deprive citizens of their constitutional rights; and defense of Congress by withholding the tapes. The president, new chief of staff Alexander Haig confided to White House aides, was "guilty as hell." He told Nixon that he did not "see how we can survive this one." Before the House of Representatives could vote on impeachment, Nixon grudgingly handed over the tapes. The drama continued, however, when investigators learned that segments of several recordings were missing, including eighteen minutes of a damning conversation in June 1972 during which Nixon first mentioned the Watergate burglary. The president's loyal secretary took the blame for the erasure, claiming that she had accidentally pushed the wrong button, but technical experts later concluded that the missing segments had been intentionally deleted. The incriminating recordings led Republican leaders to decide that the embattled president must resign for the good of the country rather than face a Senate impeachment trial. "There are only so many lies you can take and now there has been one too many." Senator Barry Goldwater concluded. Nixon had begun his presidency promising to heal a fractured America. He left the White House having orchestrated the most pervasive corruption in American political history.

The Nixon Tapes

Conservatives blasted Carter's "giveaway" of a major strategic asset. In Ronald Reagan's view, "We bought it, we paid for it, it's ours." Legal scholars and the Panamanian government disagreed, however. No Panamanian had signed the 1903 document granting the United States perpetual control of the strategic waterway. The new agreement called for the Canal Zone to be transferred to Panama at the end of 1999. Carter said the exchange reflected the American belief that "fairness, not force, should lie at the heart of our dealings with the world."

The Panama Canal

The so-called Pentagon Papers, leaked to the press by Daniel Ellsberg, a former marine and thereafter a Defense Department official, confirmed what many critics of the war had long suspected: Congress and the public had not received the full story on the Gulf of Tonkin incident of 1964. Plans for U.S. entry into the war were being drawn up even as President Johnson was promising that combat troops would never be sent to Vietnam. Although the Pentagon Papers dealt with events only up to 1965, the Nixon administration blocked their publication, arguing that release of the classified information would endanger national security and would prolong the war.

The Pentagon Papers

Now, however, Nixon felt the time was ripe for a renewal of ties. Both the United States and Communist China were exhausted from domestic strife (anti-war protests in America, the Cultural Revolution in China), and both were eager to resist Soviet expansionism. Most of all, Nixon relished the shock effect of his action, which he told senior aide John Ehrlichman would "discombobulate" the "********ed liberals." Nixon's announcement on July 15, 1971, that Kissinger had just returned from Beijing and that the president himself would be going to China the following year, stunned the world. Nixon became the first U.S. president to publicly use the term People's Republic of China, a symbolic step in normalizing relations. The Nationalist Chinese in Taiwan felt betrayed, however, and the Japanese, historic enemies of China, were furious. In October 1971, the United Nations voted to admit the People's Republic of China and expel Taiwan. On February 21, 1972, during the "week that changed the world." Nixon arrived in Beijing. Americans watched on television as the president shook hands and drank toasts with Prime Minister Zhou Enlai and Communist party chairman Mao Zedong. In one simple but astonishing initiative, Nixon and Kissinger had ended two decades of diplomatic isolation of the People's Republic of China. Nixon's bold transformation of relations with Communist China virtually ensured his reelection, transformed superpower politics, opened China to the outside world, and dazzled the media.

The People's Republic of China

Despite unprecedented prosperity in the eighties, homelessness became an acute social issue. An estimated 400,000 people were dispossessed by the end of the decade. Several factors had led to a shortage of low-cost housing. The government had given up on building public housing. urban-renewal programs had demolished blighted areas but provided no housing for those who were displaced, and owners had abandoned unprofitable buildings in poor inner-city neighborhoods or converted them into expensive condominiums for high-income city dwellers, a process called gentrification. In addition, the working poor saw their incomes decline at the same time that the Reagan administration was making cuts in federal social welfare programs. By 1983, over 15 percent of adults were living below the poverty line, even though half of them lived in households where at least one person worked. Still another factor was the unintended effects of new medications that allowed some patients to be discharged from mental institutions. Once released, many ended up on the streets, homeless and without care, because promised mental-health services failed to materialize.

The Poor

In October 1986, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Reykjavik, Iceland, to discuss ways to reduce the threat of nuclear war. Both leaders recognized that each side had far more nuclear weapons than needed, and they both were determined to banish them. During ten hours of intense negotiations, Reagan shocked Gorbachev and the Soviets by saying, "It would be fine with me if we eliminated all nuclear weapons."

The Reykjavik Summit

The activism of student revolts, the civil rights movement, and the crusade for women's rights soon spread to various ethnic groups. Everywhere, it seemed, long-oppressed minority groups asserted their right to be treated equally and fairly.

The Rise of Identity and Group Politics

A related development was a growing tax revolt. As consumer prices and home values rose, so did property taxes. In California, Ronald Reagan's home state, skyrocketing property taxes threatened to force many working class people from their homes. This spurred efforts to cut back on the size and cost of government to enable reductions in property taxes.

The Rise of the New Right

Clinton initially denied the charges, telling the nation in late January 1998, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." Yet the scandal would not disappear. A former aide, David Gergen, warned that if the president was lying, "he has betrayed the public trust and is a scoundrel." A desperate Clinton went to extraordinary lengths to camouflage the truth, even drawing his secretary into his web of deceit. For the next thirteen months, the media circus surrounding the "Monicagate" affair captured public attention like a daily soap opera. With the economy booming, however, Clinton's public approval ratings actually rose during 1998. In August, however, the bottom fell out of Clinton's denials when Monica Lewinsky provided a federal grand jury with a detailed account of her intimate relationship with the president.

The Scandal Machine

The document called for a "white fighting force" to take the revolution from campuses to the streets. They would ally with the Black Panthers and others to destroy "U.S. imperialism and achieve a classless world: world communism." By embracing revolutionary violence, however, the now so-called Weathermen essentially killed SDS by abandoning the pacifist principles that had given the movement moral legitimacy. Radical activi Members of the Weather Underground took to the streets of Chicago in October 1969 to launch what they called the Days of Rage. Their goal was to lead white kids into armed revolution." Between September 1969 and May 1970, the so-called Days of Rage, the Weathermen bombed 250 draft board offices, ROTC buildings (for military training on university campuses), federal govemment facilities, and corporate headquarters. The Weathermen and other radical groups were forced underground by the aggressive efforts of federal law enforcement agencies. But they remained determined to overthrow America's capitalistic society. Spokesperson Bernardine Dohm issued a "Declaration of War" in which she insisted that "revolutionary violence is the only way" to address "the frustration and impotence that comes from trying to reform this system." Yet the appeal of revolutionary violence diminished as President Nixon ended the draft and systematically began withdrawing US troops from Vietnam. Mark Rudd, one of the Weathermen organizers, later confessed that they intended to destroy SDS "because it wasn't revolutionary enough for us.

The Weather Underground

The countercultural alternative to SDS and the New Left was the Youth International party, better known as the Yippies. It was founded in New York City in 1967 at a New Year's Eve party when a half dozen stoned partiers led by two irreverent pranksters, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, announced, "We declare ourselves to be the Youth International Party--YIP!" The Yippie platform called for peace in Vietnam, absolute personal freedom, free birth control and abortions, and the legalization of marijuana and LSD. The anarchistic Yippies organized marijuana "smoke-ins," threw pies at political figures, nominated a squealing pig ("Pigasus") for the presidency, passed out brownies laced with marijuana, urged voters to cast their ballots for "None of the Above," and threatened to run naked in the streets and put LSD in Chicago's water supply during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. When asked what being a Yippie meant, Hoffman replied, "Energy-fan-fierceness-exclamation point!"

The Yippies

The countercultural rebels were primarily middle-class Whites alienated by the Vietnam War, racism, political corruption, and parental authority. In their view, a superficial materialism had settled over mainstream life. They defied it by embracing the pathway to freedom popularized by former Harvard psychology professor Timothy Leary: "Tune in, turn on, drop out." He added that "your only hope is dope. Leary, the self-styled high priest of the psychedelic revolution, had been dismissed by Harvard in 1963 for using students in experiments with hallucinatory drugs. In 1966, the same year that Congress banned LSD, Leary formed the League of Spiritual Discovery (LSD) to lobby for decriminalization of mind-altering drugs. He promised his mostly young supporters that "proper drugs and rock music can make everybody young forever." Leary's crusade on behalf of expanded consciousness frightened most Americans, for LSD ruined many young people, some of whom committed suicide under its influence. A psychiatrist reported that one of his LSD-using patients "thinks he's an orange, and that if anybody touches him, he'll squirt juice." The celebrated rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix revealed that during his first "acid trip," he looked in the mirror and saw not his own face but that of actress Marilyn Monroe. Six months later, however, Leary pulled off a dramatic penitentiary escape and, with the help of friends, left the country. He was ultimately captured in Afghanistan and returned to prison in California, where he was a cellmate of mass murderer Charles Manson.

Timothy Leary

Luck, as it happened, presented Ronald Reagan the chance for an easy triumph closer to home. On the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada, the smallest independent country in the Western Hemisphere, a leftist government had hired Cuban workers to build a new airfield and signed military agreements with Communist countries. In 1983, an even more radical military council seized power and killed the prime minister. Appeals from neighboring countries convinced Reagan to send 1,900 U.S. Marines to depose the new military government and evacuate a small group of American students at the country's medical school. The United Nations General Assembly condemned the invasion, but it was popular among Grenadians and their neighbors and in the United States.

U.S. Invasion of Grenada

The end of the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet Union did not spell the end of international tensions, however. Before the close of 1989, some 26,000 U.S. troops were engaged in combat in Panama. In 1983, General Manuel Noriega had become the head of the Panamanian Defense Forces, which made him head of the government-in fact if not in title. He indulged himself with luxurious mansions and cocaine-fueled parties. He lusted after power and became a tyrant; he lusted after wealth and became an international criminal. In 1988, federal grand juries in Florida indicted Noriega and fifteen others on charges of conspiring with Colombia's drug lords to ship cocaine through Panama to the United States. The next year, the Panamanian president tried to fire Noriega, but the National Assembly ousted the president and named Noriega "maximum leader." After a series of bruising party primaries, Clinton showed amazing resiliency overcoming all the criticisms and charges to win the Democratic presidential nomination in the summer of 1992, promising to restore the "hopes of the forgotten middle class." He chose Senator Albert "Al" Gore, Jr. of Tennessee as his running mate. Gore described himself as a "raging moderate." Flushed with their convention victory and sporting a ten-point lead over President Bush in the polls, the Clinton-Gore team hammered Bush on economic issues to win over working-class voters. Clinton pledged that, if elected, he would cut the federal budget deficit in half in four years while cutting taxes paid by middle-class Americans. Such promises helped Clinton win the election with 370 electoral votes and about 42 percent of the popular vote; Bush received 168 electoral votes and 39 percent of the popular vote; and Ross Perot garnered 19 percent of the popular vote, more than any other third-party candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.

U.S. Invasion of Panama

James W. McCoed, security chief of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP), was the first in what would become a long line of informers to reveal Nixon's systematic efforts to create an "imperial presidency." By the time of the Watergate break-in, money to finance dirty tricks was being illegally collected through CREEP and controlled by the White House staff. The trail of evidence was pursued first by Sirica, then by a grand jury, then by the Withington Post, and then by a Senate committee headed by Democrat Samuel J. Ervin, Jr., of North Carolina. The investigations lod directly to what White House legal counsel John Dean called a "cancer close to the Presidency." By this point, Nixon was using his presidential powers to block the investigation. He ordered the CIA to keep the FBI off the case and coached his aides on how to lie under oath. Yet the cover-up crumbled as people involved began to cooperate with prosecutors. Nison thereafter behaved like a comered lion. He refused to provide Ervin's committee with documents it requested, citing "executive privilege" to protect national security. Then, in another shocking disclosure, a White House aide told the committee that Nixon had installed a secret taping system in the White House, meaning that many of the conversations about the Watergate burglary and cover-up had been recorded. Cox's dismissal produced a firestorm of public indignation. Numerous newspapers and magazines, as well as a growing chorus of legislators, called for the president to resign or be impeached for obstructing justice. A Gallup poll revealed that Nixon's approval rating had plummeted to 17 percent, the lowest in presidential history. Still, Nixon pledged neither to resign nor to turn over the tapes. The new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, a prominent Texas attorney, took the president to court to get the Oval Office recordings. In March 1974, the Watergate grand jury indicted Ehrlichman, Haldeman, and John Mitchell for obstruction of justice and named Nixon an "unindicted co On April 30, Nixon, still refusing to turn over the tapes, released 1,254 pages of transcribed recordings that he had edited himself, often substituting the phrase "expletive deleted" for his vulgar language and septic rants about Jews and Blacks.

Uncovering the Cover-up

As it turned out, however, Kissinger's announcement was a cynical ploy to win votes for Nixon's reelection bid. Several days earlier, the Thieu regime in South Vietnam had rejected the cease-fire plan, fearful that allowing North Vietnamese troops to remain in the south would guarantee a Communist victory. The peace talks broke off on December 16, and two days later the newly reelected Nixon ordered massive bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong, the two largest cities in North Vietnam. The so-called Christmas bombings and the simultaneous U.S. decision to place underwater mines in North Vietnam's Haiphong harbor to prevent ships from offloading their cargoes aroused worldwide protests. The air strikes stopped on December 29, and the talks in Paris soon resumed. A month later on January 27, 1973, the United States, North and South Vietnam, and the Viet Cong signed an "agreement on ending the war and restoring peace in Vietnam," known as the Paris Peace Accords. In fact, however, the agreement was a carefully disguised surrender that enabled the United States to end its combat role. While Nixon and Kissinger claimed that the massive bombings had brought North Vietnam to its senses, in truth the North Vietnamese never altered their basic stance; they kept 150,000 troops in South Vietnam while forcing the United States to remove all its troops. What had changed was the willingness of the South Vietnamese leaders, who had not been allowed to participate in the negotiations, to accept the agreement on the basis of Nixon's promise that the United States would respond "with full force" to any Communist violation of the agreement.

War without End

Nervous about possible efforts to renew military assistance to South Vietnam, Congress passed the War Powers Act (1973) over President Nixon's veto. It requires the president to inform Congress within forty-eight hours if US troops are deployed in combat abroad and to withdraw them after sixty days unless Congress specifically approves their stay or passes a declaration of war.

Watergate and the Presidency War Powers Act (1973) - Legislation requiring the president to inform Congress within forty-eight hours of the deployment of US troops abroad and to withdraw them after sixty days unless Congress approves their continued deployment.

Huge outdoor concerts-music-infused psychedelic picnics were wildly popular. The largest and most publicized was the Woodstock Music and Art Fair ("Aquarian Exposition"). In mid-August 1969, more than 400,000 mostly young people converged on an alfalfa farm near the tiny rural town of Bethel, New York, for what was billed as the world's "largest happening." three days "of peace and music." Three weeks earlier, Jimi Hendrix had also died of an overdose. He too was 27. Several months later, Jim Morrison, the iconic singer for The Doors, died of an overdose at age 27. They lived fast and died young. Their explosive music, however, lives forever. Woodstock's carefree "spirit of love" was short-lived too. Just four months later, when concert promoters tried to replicate the experience at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival near San Francisco, the counterculture fell victim to the drug-addled criminal culture. Greed, hustle, and hype drove the organizers and many of the performers at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival, which attracted 300,000 spectators. The Rolling Stones foolishly hired the Hells Angels motorcycle gang to provide "security." High on booze and drugs, the motorcyclists rampaged through the crowd with pool cues, assaulting musicians and members of the stage crew and cracking the heads of anyone foolish enough to storm the stage. After 1969, the hippie phenomenon began to fade as the spirit of liberation ran up against the hard realities of poverty, drug addiction, crime, and mental and physical illness among the flower children. The frantic search for self-fulfillment among alienated young people generated illusions of gratification and liberation that often yielded more self-destruction than social justice.

Woodstock

The sit-ins, marches, protests, and sacrifices associated with the civil rights movement inspired other groups-women, Native Americans, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and people with disabilities-to demand justice, freedom, and equality. As Bob Dylan sang in 1963, "How many times can a man turn his head / And pretend that he just doesn't see?" Many idealistic young people decided that they could no longer ignore the widespread injustice and inequality staining the American dream. A full-fledged youth revolt erupted. Time magazine acknowledged the social significance of the younger generation when it announced that its "Man of the Year" in 1967 was not an individual but a generation: "Twenty-Five and Under." By 1970, more than half of Americans were under thirty.

Youth revolt towards the Cold War