Politics and Diplomacy After Watergate

• Gerald Ford inherited the presidency under unenviable circumstances.

• He had to try to rebuild confidence in government after the Watergate scandals and restore economic prosperity in the midst of difficult domestic and international conditions.

• 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.

• Much of the public suspected a secret deal with the former president.

• 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

• Jimmy Carter, a former governor of Georgia who organized a brilliant primary campaign by offering honesty, piety, and an outsider’s skepticism of the federal government

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.

• Carter had campaigned for the presidency as an “outsider,” representing Americans suspicious of entrenched bureaucracies and complacent public officials

• Carter was exceptionally intelligent, but his critics charged that he provided no overall vision or direction to his government.

• His ambitious legislative agenda included major reforms of the tax and welfare systems; Congress passed virtually none of it.

• Carter devoted much of his time to the problems of energy and the economy.

• Entering office in the midst of a recession, he moved first to reduce unemployment by raising public spending and cutting federal taxes

Human Rights and National Interests

• Among 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 spoke out sharply and often about violations of human rights in many countries

• In the meantime, Carter tried to improve relations with China and the Soviet Union and to complete a new arms agreement

The Year of the Hostages

• Only weeks after the hostage seizure, on December 27, 1979, Soviet troops invaded Afghanistan, the mountainous Islamic nation lying between the USSR and Iran

31.1: 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 known as the “Sunbelt”— a term coined by the political analyst Kevin Phillips.

• The Sunbelt included the Southeast (including Florida), the Southwest (particularly Texas), and above all, California, which became the nation’s most populous state, surpassing New York, in 1964.

• The rise of the Sunbelt helped produce a change in the political climate.

The Politics of Religion

• In the 1960s, many social critics had predicted the extinction of religious influence in American life

• Indeed, in the 1970s the United States experienced the beginning of a major religious revival, perhaps the most powerful since the Second Great Awakening of the early nineteenth century.

• It continued in various forms into the early twenty-first century.

The New Right

• Conservative Christians were an important part, but only a part, of what became known as the “New Right”—a diverse but powerful coalition that enjoyed rapid growth in the 1970s and early 1980s

The Tax Revolt

• Equally important to the success of the New Right was a new and potent conservative issue: the tax revolt

• The tax revolt helped the right to solve one of its biggest problems.

• For more than thirty years after the New Deal, Republican conservatives had struggled to halt and even reverse the growth of the federal government

The Campaign of 1980

• By the time of the crises in Iran and Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter was in political trouble—his standing in popularity polls lower than that of any president in history

• On the day of Reagan’s inauguration, the American hostages in Iran were released after their 444-day ordeal.

• The government of Iran, desperate for funds to support its floundering war against neighboring Iraq, had ordered the hostages freed in return for a release of billions in Iranian assets that the Carter administration had frozen in American banks.

31.2: The Reagan Revolution

The Reagan Coalition

• Reagan owed his election to the widespread disillusionment with Carter and to the crises and disappointments that many voters associated with him.

• Central to this group’s agenda in the 1980s was opposition to what is considered the “redistributive” politics of the federal government (especially its highly progressive tax structure) and hostility to the rise of what it believed were “anti-business” government regulations.

• Reagan courted these free-market conservatives carefully and effectively.

• A second element of the Reagan coalition was even smaller, but also disproportionately influential: a group of intellectuals commonly known as “neo-conservatives,” a firm base among “opinion leaders.”

• Some of these people had once been liberals and, before that, socialists.

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 a master of television, a gifted public speaker, and—in public at least—rugged, fearless, and seemingly impervious to danger or misfortune.

• Reagan made active use of his office to support his administration’s programs by fusing his proposals with highly nationalistic rhetoric.

Supply-side Economics

• Reagan’s 1980 campaign for the presidency had promised to restore the economy to health by a bold experiment that became known as “supply-side” economics or, to some, “Reaganomics.

• A goal of the Reagan economic program was a significant reduction of the federal budget

The Fiscal Crisis

• The economic revival did little at first to reduce federal budget deficits or to slow the growth in the national debt (the debt the nation accumulates over time as a result of its annual deficits).

• By the mid-1980s, the sense of a growing fiscal crisis had become one of the central issues in American politics.

Reagan and the World

• Reagan encountered a similar combination of triumphs and difficulties in international affairs.

• Determined to restore American pride and prestige in the world, he argued that the United States should once again become active and assertive in opposing communism and in supporting friendly governments whatever their internal policies.

• Relations with the Soviet Union, which had been steadily deteriorating in the last years of the Carter administration, grew still more chilly in the first years of the Reagan presidency.

• Reagan remained skeptical about arms control. In fact, the president proposed the most ambitious new military program in many years: the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), known to some as “Star Wars.”

• Reagan claimed that SDI, through lasers and satellites, could provide an effective shield against incoming missiles and thus make nuclear war obsolete.

• The Soviet Union claimed that the new program would elevate the arms race to new and more dangerous levels and insisted that any arms control agreement begins with an American abandonment of SDI.

• 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 in the 1980s calling for an end to nuclear weapons buildups.

• The Reagan administration supported opponents of communism anywhere in the world, whether or not they had any direct connection to the Soviet Union.

• This new policy became known as the Reagan Doctrine, and it meant new American activism in the Third World.

• A series of terrorist acts in the 1980s—attacks airplanes, cruise ships, commercial and diplomatic posts; the seizing of American and other Western hostages—alarmed and frightened much of the Western world.

The Election of 1984

• In the campaign that falls, Reagan spoke of what he claimed was the remarkable revival of American fortunes and spirits under his leadership.

• His campaign emphasized such phrases as “It’s Morning in America” and “America Is Back.” Reagan’s victory in 1984 was decisive.

• He won approximately 59 percent of the vote and carried every state but Mondale’s native Minnesota and the District of Columbia

31.3: America and the Waning of the Cold War

The Fall of the Soviet Union

• The severe economic problems at home evidently convinced Gorbachev that the Soviet Union could no longer sustain its extended commitments around the world

• Early in 1990, the government of South Africa, long an international pariah for its rigid enforcement of “apartheid” (a system designed to protect white supremacy), began a cautious retreat from its traditional policies.

• In 1991, communism began to collapse at the site of its birth: the Soviet Union

Reagan and Gorbachev

• Reagan and Gorbachev exchanged cordial visits to each other’s capitals, the two superpowers signed a treaty eliminating American and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) from Europe—the most significant arms control agreement of the nuclear age.

• At about the same time, Gorbachev ended the Soviet Union’s long and frustrating military involvement in Afghanistan.

The Fading of the Reagan Revolution

• For a time, the dramatic changes around the world and Reagan’s personal popularity deflected attention from a series of political scandals.

• There were revelations of illegality, corruption, and ethical lapses in the Environmental Protection Agency, the CIA, the Department of Defense, the Department of Labor, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

• A more serious scandal emerged within the savings and loan industry, which the Reagan administration had helped deregulate in the early 1980s.

The Election of 1988

• The fraying of the Reagan administration helped the Democrats regain control of the U.S. Senate in 1986 and fueled hopes for a presidential victory in 1988

The First Bush Presidency

• The broad popularity George H. W. Bush enjoyed during his first three years in office was partly a result of his subdued, unthreatening public image

• But like Reagan, he eventually cooperated with Gorbachev and reached a series of significant agreements with the Soviet Union in its waning years

• On domestic issues, the Bush administration was less successful.

• His administration inherited a heavy burden of debt and a federal deficit that had been growing for nearly a decade

• The Congress and the White House managed on occasion to agree on significant measures.

• They cooperated in producing the plan to salvage the floundering savings and loan industry.

The First Gulf War

• The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–1991 had left the United States in the unanticipated position of being the only real superpower in the world.

• The Gulf War preserved an independent nation and kept an important source of oil from falling into the hands of Iraq

• The most conservative and militant Muslims were insulted by the presence of women in the United Nations forces.

• But even more-moderate Middle East Muslims began to believe that America was a threat to their world.

• Even before the Gulf War, Middle Eastern terrorists had been targeting Americans in the region.

• Their determination to threaten America grew significantly in its aftermath.

The Election of 1992

• President Bush’s popularity reached a record high in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War.

• But the glow of that victory faded quickly as the recession worsened in late 1991, and as the administration declined to propose any policies for combating it

• Clinton won a clear, but hardly overwhelming, victory over Bush and Perot