American History – A Survey

By Alan Brinkley
Chapter 33

• The “Age of Limits”

o Politics and Diplomacy After Watergate

The Ford Custodianship
• Gerald Ford inherited the presidency under unenviable circumstances
o The new president’s effort to establish himself as a symbol of
political integrity suffered a setback only a month after he
took office, when he granted Richard Nixon "a full, free, and
absolute" pardon for any crimes he may have committed
during his presidency

The pardon caused a decline in Ford’s popularity
from which he never fully recovered
• The Ford administration enjoyed less success in its effort to solve the
problems of the American economy
o The president rejected the idea of wage and price controls and
called instead for largely ineffective voluntary efforts

Supported high interest rates, opposed increased
federal spending, and resisted pressures fro a tax
reduction
• Ford had to deal with a serious recession in 1974 and 1975
• Central to the economic problems was the continuing energy crisis
• At first it seemed that the new administration’s foreign policy would
differ little from that of its predecessor
o Late in 1974, Ford met with Leonid Brezhnev at Vladivostok
in Siberia and signed an arms control accord that was to serve
as the basis for SALT II
o The following summer the Soviet union and Western nations
agreed to ratify the borders that had divided Europe since
1945
o In the Middle East, Henry Kissinger helped produce a new
accord by which Israel agreed to return large portions of the
occupied Sinai to Egypt
o In China the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 brought to power a
new, apparently more moderate government eager to expand
its ties with the United States
• As the 1976 presidential election approached, Ford’s policies were
coming under attack from both the right and the left
o Republicans – Ford
o Democrats – Jimmy Carter

Carter won by 2.1%

The Trials of Jimmy Carter
• Like Ford, Jimmy Carter assumed the presidency at a moment when the
nation faced problems of staggering complexity and difficulty
o Carter had campaigned for the presidency as an “outsider,”
representing Americans suspicious of entrenched
bureaucracies and complacent public officials
• Carter devoted much of his time to the problems of energy and the
economy
o He moved first to reduced unemployment by raising public
spending and cutting federal taxes
 o During Carter’s last two years in office, prices rose at well
over a 10% annual rate

Carter responded with a combination of tight money
and calls for voluntary restraint
o The problem of energy also grew steadily more troublesome in
the Carter years

Faced with increasing pressure to act upon the major
price increase brought forth by OPEC, Carter
retreated to Camp David
• Ten days later, he emerged to deliver a
remarkable television address
o It included a series of proposals for
resolving the energy crisis
o He complained of a “crisis of
confidence” that had struck “at the
very heart and soul of our national
will”
o The “Malaise” speech

Human Rights and National Interests
• Among Jimmy Carter’s most frequent campaign promises was a pledge
to build a new basis for American foreign policy, one in which the
defense of “human rights” would replace the pursuit of “selfish
interests”
• Carter completed negotiations begun several years earlier on a pair of
treaties to turn over control of the Panama Canal to the government of
Panama
o The Senate ratified the treaties
• Less controversial was Carter’s stunning success in arranging a peace
treaty between Egypt and Israel
o In November 1977, the Egyptian president, Anwar Sadat,
accepted an invitation from Prime Minister Menachem Begin
to visit Israel

In Tel Aviv, he announced that Egypt was now
willing to accept the state of Israel as a legitimate
political entity
o When talks between Israeli and Egyptian negotiators stalled,
Carter invited Sadat and Begin to a summit conference at
Camp David in September 1978, and persuaded them to
remain there for two weeks while he and others helped
mediate the disputes between them

On March 26, 1979, Begin and Sadat returned
together to the White House to sign a formal peace
treaty between their two nations
• The Camp David Accords
• In the meantime, Carter continued trying to improve relations with
china and the Soviet Union and to completer a new arms agreement
• On December 15, 1978, Washington and Beijing announced the
resumption of formal diplomatic relations between the two nations
• A few months later, Carter traveled to Vienna to meet with Brezhnev to
finish drafting the new SALT II arms control agreement
o The treaty set limits on the number of long-range missiles,
bombers, and nuclear warheads on each side
o By the fall of 1979 ratification was already in jeopardy

The Year of the Hostages
 • Ever since the early 1950s, the United States had provided political
support an massive military assistance to the government of the Shah of
Iran
o By 1979 the Shah was in deep trouble with his own people

A combination of resentments produced a powerful
revolutionary movement
o In January 1979, the Shah fled the country
• The United States made cautious efforts in the first months after the
Shah’s abdication to establish cordial relations with the succession of
increasingly militant regimes that followed
o What power there was resided with the Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini
• In late October 1979, the deposed Shah arrived in New York to be
treated for cancer
o Days later, on November 4, an armed mob invaded the
American embassy in Teheran, seized the diplomats and
military personnel inside, and demanded the return of the Shah
to Iran in exchange for their freedom

53 Americans remained hostages in the embassy for
over a year
• Only weeks after the hostage seizure, on December 27, 1979, Soviet
troops invaded Afghanistan
o Many claimed it was a Russian “stepping stone to their
possible control over much of the world’s oil supplies”

Carter angrily imposed a series of economic
sanctions on the Russians, canceled American
participation in the 1980 summer Olympic Games in
Moscow, and announced the withdrawal of SATL II
from Senate consideration
• The combination of domestic economic troubles and international
crises created widespread anxiety, frustration and anger in the United
States
o The Rise of the New American Right

The Sunbelt and Its Politics
• The most widely discussed demographic phenomenon of the 1970s was
the rise of what became know as the “Sunbelt”
o A term used to describe a collection of regions that emerged
together in the postwar era to become the most dynamically
growing parts of the country
• In addition to shifting the nations’ economic focus from one region to
another, the rise of the Sunbelt helped produce a changing the political
climate
o The strong populist traditions n the South and the West were
capable of producing progressive and even radial politics
o More often in the late twentieth century, the produced a strong
opposition to the growth of government a resentment of the
proliferating regulations and restrictions that the liberal state
was producing
• Both the South and the West embraced myths about their own pasts
that reinforced the hostility to the liberal government of the mid- and
later 20th century
• If anything, the growth of the Sunbelt seemed to make the politics of
the regions even more hostile to government
 o The so-called Sagebrush Rebellion mobilized conservative
opposition to environmental laws and restriction on
development

It also sought to portray the West as a victim of
government control

Complained about the very large amounts of land the
federal government owned in many western states
and demanded that the land be opened for
development
• Suburbanization also fueled the rise of the right
o Orange County
o Suburbs tended to attract people who wished to flee the
problems and the jarring diversity of cities, who preferred
stable, homogeneous surroundings
o The seemingly tranquil life of the suburb reinforced the
conservative view that other parts of the nation were
abandoning the values and norms that society required

Religious Revivalism
• In the 1960s, many social critics had predicted the virtual extinction of
religious influence in American life
• In the 1970s the United States experienced the beginning of a major
religious revival
• Some of the new religious enthusiasm found expression in the rise of
various cults and pseudo-faiths
o Scientology, Unification Church of the Reverend Sun Myung
Moon, People’s Temple
• The most important impulse of the religious revival was the growth of
evangelical Christianity
o For many years, the evangelicals had gone largely unnoted by
much of the media and the secular public, which had
dismissed them as a limited, provincial phenomenon
• In the 1970s, some Christian evangelicals became active on the
political and cultural right
o By the late 1970s, the “Christian right” had become a visible
and increasing powerful political force
• Jerry Falwell
o Moral Majority
o Attacked the rise of “secular humanism”
• Pat Robertson
o Christian Coalition
• Their goal was a new era in which Christian values once again
dominated American life

The Emergence of the New Right
• Evangelical Christian were an important part of what became known as
the new right
o A diverse but powerful movement that enjoyed rapid growth
in the 1970s and early 1980s
• By the late 1970s, there were right-wing think tanks, consulting firms,
lobbyists, foundations, and scholarly centers
• Another factor in the revival of the right was the emergence of a
credible right-wing leadership in the 1960s and early 1970s
o Ronald Reagan
• The presidency of Gerald Ford also played an important role in the rise
of the right, by destroying the fragile equilibrium that had enabled the
right wing and the moderate wing of the Republican Party to coexist

The Tax Revolt
• At least equally important to the success of the new right was a new
and potent conservative issue
o The tax revolt

It had its public beginning in 1978, when Howard
Jarvis, a conservative activist in California, launched
the first successful major citizens’ tax revolt in
California with Proposition 13
• A referendum question on the state ballot
rolling back property tax rates
• The tax revolt helped the right solve one of its biggest problems
o For years after the new Deal, Republican conservatives had
struggled to halt and even reverse the growth of the federal
government

Most of those efforts had ended in futility
• In Proposition 13 and similar initiatives, members of the right found a
better way to discredit government than by attacking specific programs
o Attacking taxes
• The right exploited the resentment of paying taxes and expanded its
constituency far beyond anything it had known before
o The 1980 presidential election propelled it to a historic victory

The Campaign of 1980
• By the time of the crises in Iran and Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter was in
desperate political trouble
• Democrats – Carter
• Republicans – Reagan
o Reagan won
• On the day of Reagan’s inauguration, the American hostages in Iran
were released after their 444 day ordeal
o The “Reagan Revolution”

The Reagan Coalition
• Reagan owed his election to widespread disillusionment with Carter
and to the crises and disappointments that many voters associated with
him
• But he owed it as well to the emergence of a powerful coalition of
conservative groups
o The Reagan coalition included a small but highly influential
group of wealthy Americans associated with the corporate and
financial world

What untied this group was a firm commitment to
capitalism and to unfettered economic growth
• That the corporate world is entitled to a
special position of influence and privilege in
society
• A second element of the Reagan coalition was even smaller, but also
disproportionately influential
o A group of intellectuals commonly known as “neo-
conservatives”

Gave the right a firm base among “opinion leaders”
• Their principal concern was to reassert
legitimate authority and reaffirm Western
democratic, anticommunist values and
commitments
• These two groups joined in an uneasy alliance in 1980 with the
growing new right
 • The most important different between the two groups was a
fundamental distrust of the “eastern establishment”
o A suspicion of its motives and goals
• These populist conservatives expressed the kinds of concerns that
outsiders, nonelites, have traditionally voiced in American society
o An opposition to centralized power and influence

Reagan in the White House
• Even many people who disagreed with Reagan’s policies found
themselves drawn to his attractive and carefully honed public image
• Reagan was not much involved in the day-to-day affairs of running the
government

“Supply-Side” Economics
• Reagan’s 1980 campaign for the presidency had promised among other
things, to restore the economy to health by a bold experiment that
became known as “supply-side” economics or “Reaganomics”
o It operated from the assumption that the woes of the American
economy were in large part a result of excessive taxation,
which left inadequate capital available to investors to
stimulate growth
o The solution was to reduce taxes, with particularly generous
benefits to corporations and wealthy individuals, in order to
encourage new investments
o A cornerstone of the Reagan economic program was a
dramatic cut in the federal budget
• In its first months in office the new administration hastily assembled a
legislative program based on the supply-side idea
o Its proposed $40 billion in budget reductions and managed to
win congressional approval of almost all of them
o The president proposed a bold three year, 30% reduction on
both individual and corporate tax rates

In the summer of 1981 the Congress passed it
• Men and women whom Reagan appointed fanned out through the
executive branch of government committed to reducing the role of
government in American economic life
• “Deregulation”, an idea many Democrats had begun to embrace in the
Carter years, became almost a religion in the Reagan administration
• The Environmental Protection Agency
o Relaxed or entirely eliminated enforcement of major
environmental laws and regulations
• The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department
o Eased enforcement of civil rights laws
• The Department of Transportation
o Slowed implementation of new rules limiting automobile
emissions and imposing new safety standards on cars and
trucks
• By early 1982 the nation had sunk into the most severe recession since
the 1930s
o The recession convinced many people that the Reagan
economic program had failed
• The recovery was a result of many things
o The years of tight money policies by the Federal Reserve
board had helped lower inflation
o The Board also lowered interest rates
 o The virtual collapse of the OPEC cartel had produced at least a
temporary end to the inflationary pressures of spiraling fuel
costs

The Fiscal Crisis
• The economic revival did little to reduce the staggering federal budget
deficits or to slow the growth in the national debt
• By the mid-1980s, this growing fiscal crisis had become one of the
central issues in American politics
• Regan had accumulated more debt in his eight years in office than the
American government had accumulated in its entire previous history
• The enormous deficits had many causes
o The budget suffered from enormous increases in the costs of
“entitlement” programs
o A result of the aging of the population and dramatic increases
in the cost of health care
o The 1981 tax cuts contributed to the deficit

In the face of these deficits, the administration
refused to consider raising income taxes

It would not agree to reductions in military spending

It could not much reduce the costs of entitlement
programs
• Its answer to the fiscal crises was further cuts in “discretionary”
domestic spending
o Reductions in funding for food stamps, a major cut in federal
subsidies of low-income housing, strict new limitations on
Medicare and Medicaid payments, reductions in student loans,
school lunches, and other educational programs, and an end to
many forms of federal assistance to the states and cities
• By the end of Ragan’s third year in office, funding for domestic
programs had been cut nearly as far as Congress was willing to tolerate
o And still no end of the rising deficit was in sight

Reagan and the World
• Reagan encountered a similar combination of triumphs and difficulties
in international affairs
• Although the president had long denounced the SALT II arms control
treaty as unfavorable to the Untied States, he continued to honor its
provisions
• Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)
o Widely known as “Star Wars”
o Reagan claimed that SDI, through the use of lasers and
satellites, could provide an effective shield against incoming
missiles and thus make nuclear war obsolete
• The escalation of Cold War tensions and the slowing of arms control
initiatives helped produce an important popular movement in Europe
and the United States calling for an end to nuclear weapons buildups
• In America, the principal goal of the movement was a “nuclear freeze”
o An agreement between the two superpowers not to expand
their atomic arsenals
o Nearly a million people rallied in Central Park in 1982 to
support the freeze
• The administration began to support opponents of communism
anywhere in the world, whether or not the regimes or movement there
where challenging had any direct connection to the Soviet Union
o This new policy became known as the Reagan Doctrine
 • The most conspicuous example of the new activism came in Latin
America
o Grenada

American forcers were sent to oust an anti-American
Marxist regime that showed signs of forging a
relationship with Moscow
o El Salvador

The president provided increased military and
economic assistance
o Nicaragua

“Sandinistas”

The Reagan administration gave both rhetorical and
material support to the so-called contras
• A guerilla movement drawn from several
antigovernment groups and fights fighting to
topple the Sandinista regime
• In other parts of the world, the administration’s bellicose rhetoric
seemed to hide and instinctive restraint
o In 1982, the Israeli army launched an invasion of Lebanon in
an effort to drive guerillas of the Palestinian Liberation
Organization from the country

An American peacekeeping force entered Beirut to
supervise the evacuation of PLO forces from
Lebanon
o The Americans became the targets in 1983 of a terrorist
bombing of a U.S. military barracks in Beirut that left 241
marines dead

The tragedy in Lebanon was an example of the
changing character of Third World struggles
• An increasing reliance on terrorism by
otherwise powerless groups to advance their
political aims

The Election of 1984
• Reagan approached the campaign of 1984 at the head of a united
Republican Part firmly committed to his candidacy
• Democrats – Mondale
o Took on Geraldine Ferraro as his vice president running mate
• Reagan won