Chapter 39

By 1968 the nation was exhausted by the Vietnam War, urban riots, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. A splintered Democratic party nominated Hubert Humphrey, while segregationist George Wallace ran a strong third-party campaign. Republican Richard Nixon, promising "peace with honor" in Vietnam and a return to "law and order," narrowly won the presidency.

Nixon appealed to what he called the "Silent Majority" — the millions of Americans he believed were quietly weary of protest, disorder, and the counterculture. His administration pursued a "southern strategy," courting conservative white voters in the once solidly Democratic South.

Domestically, Nixon expanded federal regulation in some areas — creating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 and endorsing wage-and-price controls to fight inflation — even as he championed a rhetoric of smaller government and "New Federalism," returning some power and funds to the states.

Nixon's strategy for extricating the United States from Vietnam was Vietnamization — gradually withdrawing American troops while shifting the burden of combat to the South Vietnamese army, backed by continued American airpower and aid. Troop levels fell steadily from their 1969 peak.

Yet the war widened before it narrowed. In 1970 Nixon secretly ordered American and South Vietnamese forces into neutral Cambodia to strike communist supply lines, triggering a firestorm of protest at home. National Guardsmen killed four student demonstrators at Kent State University, and two more died at Jackson State, deepening national divisions over the war.

In 1971 the New York Times published the leaked Pentagon Papers, a secret government history revealing that officials had long misled the public about the war's progress and prospects, further eroding trust in Washington.

Working closely with national security adviser Henry Kissinger, Nixon pursued a dramatic reversal of two decades of Cold War hostility toward communist China. In February 1972 Nixon made a historic weeklong visit to Beijing, meeting Chairman Mao Zedong and Premier Zhou Enlai and opening formal diplomatic contact between the two nations.

The China opening was paired with a broader policy of detente — an easing of tensions with the Soviet Union. Later in 1972 Nixon traveled to Moscow and signed the SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks) agreement and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev, capping the growth of nuclear arsenals on both sides.

By playing the two communist giants — China and the USSR, themselves rivals — against each other, Nixon and Kissinger sought greater flexibility and leverage for American diplomacy while easing Cold War tensions.

In June 1972, operatives connected to Nixon's reelection committee, CREEP (Committee to Re-Elect the President), were caught breaking into and wiretapping Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. Nixon won reelection that November in a landslide, and the break-in initially drew little public attention.

Investigative reporting, notably by Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, gradually exposed a widening web of illegal activity and a White House cover-up. Senate hearings in 1973 revealed that Nixon had secretly taped conversations in the Oval Office.

When Nixon refused to surrender the tapes to special prosecutor Archibald Cox, he ordered Cox fired in October 1973 — an episode that became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, in which the attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned rather than carry out the order, gravely damaging Nixon's credibility.

The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in United States v. Nixon (1974) that executive privilege could not shield the president from surrendering the tapes to investigators. One recording, made in June 1972, became known as the "smoking gun" tape — clear evidence that Nixon had directed the cover-up almost from the start.

With impeachment by the House of Representatives now all but certain and conviction in the Senate likely, Nixon chose to resign the presidency on August 9, 1974 — the first and only U.S. president ever to do so. Vice President Gerald Ford, who had himself replaced the disgraced Spiro Agnew under the Twenty-fifth Amendment in 1973, was sworn in as his successor.

Watergate left a deep scar on public trust in government and prompted new laws on campaign finance, government transparency, and the limits of executive power.

Gerald Ford inherited a nation exhausted by scandal and a weakening economy. In September 1974 he granted Nixon a full and unconditional pardon for any crimes committed as president, hoping to let the country move past Watergate. The pardon proved deeply unpopular and cost Ford politically, feeding suspicions of a secret deal.

Ford confronted rampant stagflation — the unusual combination of high inflation and stagnant economic growth — and launched the largely symbolic "Whip Inflation Now" (WIN) campaign, urging voluntary belt-tightening that did little to solve the underlying economic problems.

In April 1975 South Vietnamese resistance finally collapsed as North Vietnamese forces overran Saigon, forcing a chaotic American evacuation and formally ending decades of U.S. involvement in Vietnam.

Running as a Washington outsider in the wake of Watergate, Georgia governor Jimmy Carter narrowly defeated Ford in 1976. Carter made human rights the centerpiece of his foreign policy, criticizing authoritarian allies as well as adversaries and cutting off aid to some repressive regimes.

Carter's greatest diplomatic achievement came in September 1978, when he brokered the Camp David Accords between Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. The negotiations produced a historic peace treaty between Egypt and Israel, the first between Israel and an Arab neighbor.

Carter also completed negotiations to return the Panama Canal to Panamanian control by the year 2000 and extended formal diplomatic recognition to the People's Republic of China in 1979, continuing Nixon's opening.

In October 1973, in retaliation for U.S. support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War, the Arab members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an oil embargo on the United States. The resulting energy crisis produced long lines at gas stations, fuel rationing, and a fourfold spike in oil prices.

The embargo exposed how dependent the American economy had become on imported oil and contributed to the decade's punishing stagflation. Congress responded with a national 55-mile-per-hour speed limit and support for the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline.

A second energy shock struck in 1979 amid the Iranian Revolution, again sending oil prices soaring and gas lines snaking around city blocks. President Carter addressed the crisis of confidence in a televised speech, later dubbed the "malaise" speech, though he never used that word himself.

In 1979 Iranian revolutionaries overthrew the American-backed shah and installed a fundamentalist Islamic government under Ayatollah Khomeini. When the United States admitted the exiled shah for medical treatment, enraged Iranian militants stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November 1979, seizing more than fifty American hostages.

The Iran hostage crisis dragged on for 444 days, dominating the news and paralyzing the Carter presidency. A daring April 1980 rescue mission ended in disaster when helicopters malfunctioned in the desert, killing eight American servicemen and further embarrassing the administration.

The hostages were finally released in January 1981, moments after Ronald Reagan's inauguration, closing out a turbulent decade of diminished American confidence at home and abroad.