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In February, Nixon, his way paved by secret journeys that Kissinger took in 1971 to Peking, made a lavishly televised week-long visit to the People's Republic of China, thereby dramatizing his commitment to better relations with one of America's most determined foes. That Nixon, a life-long Cold Warrior who had assailed Truman for "losing China," could and did make such a journey staggered and excited contemporaries."
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James T. Patterson |
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The Graduate, an Oscar-winning movie that appeared in late 1967, dramatized these changes. It featured a young man (Dustin Hoffman) who was in no way a hippie, a user of drugs, or a political radical. But he seemed unconnected to traditional values. Alienated from many things, he felt no kinship with fraternity men at his university or with materialistic adults of the older generation.
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James T. Patterson |
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Truman charged that Republicans were "Wall Street reactionaries," "gluttons of privilege," "bloodsuckers," and "plunderers." GOP legislators in the 80th Congress, he said, were "tools of the most reactionary elements" who would "skim the cream from our natural resources to satisfy their own greed." Dismissing Dewey, "whose name rhymes with hooey," Truman said, "If you send another Republican Congress to Washington, you're a bigger bunch of ..
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James T. Patterson |
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99fb494
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During the racial confrontations of the 1960s, An American Dilemma encountered rising criticism from activists and scholars who disputed Myrdal's optimism about white liberalism, as well as his negative statements about certain aspects of African-American culture. In the mid- and late 1940s, however, the study received virtually unsparing praise. W.E.B. Du Bois, the nation's most distinguished black historian and intellectual, hailed the bo..
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James T. Patterson |
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The 1965 Voting Rights Act greatly extended federal power in the United States. A frankly regional measure, it took aim at Deep South states by stipulating that the Justice Department could intervene to suspend discriminatory registration tests in counties where 50 percent or fewer of the county's voting-age population had been able to register.
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James T. Patterson |
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ALTHOUGH THE WATTS RIOT of 1965 was an extreme response, it appears in retrospect as an ominous omen of the future. One domestic crisis after another in the next few years, including even bloodier racial confrontations in the cities, shattered the optimism of social engineers and threw liberals back on the defensive. By late 1965 Johnson himself seemed close to despair.
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James T. Patterson |
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77c7ece
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Many black and poor people, moreover, had become politicized by the civil rights movement and had begun to develop higher expectations from life. Some joined a newly formed National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO).
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James T. Patterson |
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1b2b0b7
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Most of the blacks who took part in the riots of 1966 and 1967 apparently did not expect much in the way of tangible results. Fired up by conflicts with the police, they started disturbances that exploded suddenly, raged out of control, and then stopped before participants could develop much of a program.
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James T. Patterson |
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2c25e86
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In 1970 he was hailed on a Time magazine cover as the "Paul Revere of ecology." A year later he published The Closing Circle, an impassioned book that warned of the dangers of environmental pollution. In 1972 the Club of Rome, a loose association of scientists, technocrats, and politicians, produced The Limits to Growth. Employing computers to test economic models, the authors concluded that the world would self-destruct by the end of the c..
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James T. Patterson |
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Perhaps the most prominent young radical in the early 1960s was Tom Hayden, a University of Michigan student who had worked with SNCC in 1961. Raised a Catholic, Hayden was a serious thinker with a commitment to elevating the spirit and improving human relationships in the United States. In 1962 he emerged as chief author of a major position paper of the SDS, the Port Huron Statement.
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James T. Patterson |
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8e33a2b
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The unemployment rate rose between 1968 and 1970 from 3.6 to 4.9 percent--a jump of more than 33 percent. The consumer price index increased by roughly 11 percent in the same period. Analysts of the economy coined a new and memorable term for what seemed to be happening: "stagflation."
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James T. Patterson |
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By 1971 the United States had an unfavorable balance of international trade for the first time since 1893.
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James T. Patterson |
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Less apparent at the time, but in many ways more problematic, were deep-seated structural developments in the work force. By the late 1960s millions of baby boomers were already crowding the job market. Ever-higher percentages of women were also looking for employment outside the home. A rise in immigrant workers, made possible after 1968 by the immigration law of 1965, did not affect most labor markets but further intensified popular uneas..
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James T. Patterson |
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8091c05
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In January 1971 he startled the newsman Howard K. Smith by telling him, "I am now a Keynesian in economics," and in August he jolted the nation by announcing a New Economic Policy. This entailed fighting inflation by imposing a ninety-day freeze on wages and prices. Nixon also sought to lower the cost of American exports by ending the convertibility of dollars into gold, thereby allowing the dollar to float in world markets. This action tra..
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James T. Patterson |
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Prominent opponents of the war, among them Dr. Spock and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, openly counseled young men to resist the draft and were indicted.
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James T. Patterson |
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For these reasons the Vietnam-era army (unlike the armies that had fought in World War II or Korea) consisted disproportionately of the poor, minority groups, and the working classes. They were getting drafted and killed while others--many of them university students who were loudest against the war--stayed safely at home.92
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James T. Patterson |
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607a3e5
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Moreover, Kissinger and Nixon deeply distrusted each other. Kissinger was sometimes contemptuous (behind Nixon's back) of the President. He called Nixon "our drunken friend," a "basket case," or "meatball mind." Kissinger was also given to fits of temper. After one of these tantrums Nixon confided that he might have to fire Kissinger unless he got psychological help."
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James T. Patterson |
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But the Great Society did not do nearly as much to improve the economic standing of people as did the extraordinary growth of the economy. When this stopped--in the 1970s--the flaws in LBJ's programs seemed glaring. Hyperbole about the Great Society aroused unrealistic popular expectations about government that later came to haunt American liberalism.
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James T. Patterson |
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Congress, responding with patriotic fervor, approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as it was called, with only desultory debate.
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James T. Patterson |
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Members of Congress, outraged by the events at Selma, forty times interrupted his address with applause. Johnson closed by raising his thumbs, fists clenched, and proclaiming, "Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And, we shall . . . overcome."
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James T. Patterson |
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After 1970, however, many American institutions--corporations, unions, universities, others--were required to set aside what in effect were quotas, a process that engaged the federal government as never before in a wide variety of personnel decisions taken in the private sector. This dramatic and rapid transformation of congressional intent took place as a result of executive decisions--especially Nixon's--and court interpretations. Affirma..
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James T. Patterson |
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5d6e85e
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By 1967 McNamara was pacing about his expansive Pentagon office, staring at the large framed photograph of Defense Secretary Forrestal (who had committed suicide), and weeping. By late 1967 Johnson had given up on him. The war had savaged the self-confidence of the most certain of men.53
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James T. Patterson |
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The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed that the Engel decision "practically suppresses all religion, especially in the public schools." Engel and other cases did more than anything else over time to arouse the religious Right from its political quietism. Other Americans, too, thought that the justices had lost their minds.20"
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James T. Patterson |
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Environmentalists had enjoyed modest successes during the New Frontier-Great Society years: a Clean Air Act in 1963, a Wilderness Act in 1964, a Clean Water Act in 1965, and an Endangered Species Act in 1966. In 1967 movement leaders coalesced to form the Environmental Defense Fund, a key lobby thereafter.
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James T. Patterson |
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Sustained by popular responses such as these, conservatives in Congress mobilized to attack an administration effort then pending to exterminate rats in the ghettos. One denounced the measure as a "civil rats bill." Another suggested that the President "buy a lot of cats and turn them loose."
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James T. Patterson |
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By the time Nixon reached office the environmental cause had grown stronger than ever, thanks in part to media attention given to Malthusian prophets of doom. Paul Ehrlich, a professor of biology at Stanford, published The Population Bomb (1968), which foresaw the starvation of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world during the 1970s and 1980s if population growth were not controlled.
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James T. Patterson |
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Roughly 80 percent of American soldiers in Vietnam were from poor or working-class backgrounds. Neither in college nor in graduate school--where most students received near-automatic deferments until mid-1968--they often found themselves drafted after they got out of high school.
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James T. Patterson |