Chapter 30 Flashcards

You may prefer our related Brainscape-certified flashcards:
1
Q

New Left

A

One of the most visible results of the increasingly assertive
youth movement was a radicalization of many American college and university students, who in the course of the 1960s formed what became known as the New Left—a
large, diverse group of men and women energized by the polarizing developments of their time. The New Left embraced the cause of African Americans and other minorities, but its own ranks consisted overwhelmingly of white people. Blacks and minorities formed political
movements of their own. Some members of the New Left were the children of radical parents (members of the so-called Old Left of the 1930s and 1940s). The New Left drew from the writings of some of the important social critics of the 1950s—among them C. Wright Mills, a sociologist at Columbia University who wrote a series of scathing and brilliant critiques of modern bureaucracies. Relatively few members of the New Left were communists, but many were
drawn to the writings of Karl Marx and of contemporary Marxist theorists. Some came to revere Third World Marxists such as Che Guevara, the South American revolutionary and guerrilla leader; Mao Zedong; and Ho Chi Minh. But the New Left drew its inspiration above all from the civil rights movement, in which many idealistic young white Americans had become involved in the early 1960s.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
2
Q

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS)

A

In 1962, a group of students, most of them from prestigious
universities, gathered in Michigan to form an organization to give voice to their demands: Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Their declaration of beliefs, the Port Huron Statement, expressed their disillusionment with the society they had inherited and their determination to build a new politics.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
3
Q

Free Speech Movement

A

A 1964 dispute at the University of California at Berkeley over the rights of students to engage in political activities on campus gained national attention. The Free Speech
Movement, as it called itself, created turmoil at Berkeley as students challenged campus police, occupied administrative offices, and produced a strike in which
nearly three-quarters of the Berkeley students participated. The immediate issue was the right of students to pass out literature and recruit volunteers for political causes on campus. But the protest quickly became as well an expression of a more basic critique of the university and the society it seemed to represent.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
4
Q

draft opposition

A

Closely related to opposition to the war was opposition to
the military draft. The gradual abolition of many traditional
deferments—for graduate students, teachers, husbands, fathers, and others—swelled the ranks of those faced with conscription (and thus of those likely to oppose it). Some draft-age Americans simply refused induction, accepting what occasionally were long terms in jail as a result. Others fled to Canada, Sweden, and elsewhere (where they were joined by deserters from the armed forces) to escape conscription. Not until 1977, when President Jimmy Carter issued a general pardon to draft resisters and a more limited amnesty for deserters, did the Vietnam exiles begin
to return to the country in substantial numbers.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
5
Q

hippies

A
Closely related to the New Left was a new youth culture openly scornful of the values and conventions of middle-class society. As if to display their contempt for conventional standards, young Americans flaunted long hair, shabby or flamboyant clothing, and a rebellious disdain for traditional speech and decorum. Also central to the 
counterculture, as it became known, were drugs: marijuana—which after 1966 became almost as common a youthful diversion as beer—and the less widespread but still substantial use of other, more potent hallucinogens, such as LSD. 

There was also a new, more permissive view of sexual
behavior—the beginnings of what came to be known as a sexual revolution. To some degree, the emergence of relaxed approaches to sexuality was a result less of the counterculture than of the new accessibility of effective contraceptives, most notably the birth-control pill and, after 1973, legalized abortion. But the new sexuality also reflected the counterculture’s belief that individuals should strive for release from inhibitions and give vent to their instincts and desires.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
6
Q

Wounded Knee occupation

A

A more celebrated protest occurred in February 1973 at
Wounded Knee, South Dakota, the site of the 1890 massacre of Sioux by federal troops. Members of AIM
seized and occupied the town of Wounded Knee for two months, demanding radical changes in the administration of the reservation and insisting that the government honor its long forgotten treaty obligations. A brief clash between the occupiers and federal forces left one Indian dead and another wounded.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
7
Q

U.S. v. Wheeler

A

In United States v. Wheeler (1978), the Supreme Court

confirmed that tribes had independent legal standing and could not be “terminated” by Congress.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
8
Q

“Chicano”

A

But some did respond to the highly charged climate of the 1960s by strengthening their ethnic identification and organizing for political and economic power. Young Mexican American activists began to call themselves “Chicanos” (once a term of derision used by whites) as a way of emphasizing the shared culture of Spanish-speaking Americans. Some Chicanos advocated a form of nationalism not unlike the ideas of black power advocates. The Texas leaders of La Raza Unida, a Chicano political party in the Southwest, called for the creation of something like an autonomous Mexican American state within a state; it demonstrated significant strength at the polls in the 1970s.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
9
Q

Cesar Chavez

A

One of the most visible efforts to organize Mexican
Americans occurred in California, where an Arizona-born
Latino farmworker, César Chávez, created an effective union of itinerant farmworkers. In 1965, his United Farm Workers (UFW), a largely Mexican organization, launched a prolonged strike against growers to demand recognition of their union and increased wages and benefits. When employers resisted, Chávez enlisted the cooperation of college students, churches, and civil rights groups
(including CORE and SNCC) and organized a nationwide boycott, first of table grapes and then of lettuce. In 1968, Chávez campaigned openly for Robert Kennedy. Two years later, he won a substantial victory when the growers of half of California’s table grapes signed contracts with his union.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
10
Q

Stonewall riot

A

On June 27, 1969, police officers raided the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in New York City’s Greenwich Village, and began arresting patrons simply for frequenting the place. The raid was not unusual; police had been harassing gay bars (and homosexual men and women) for years. The accumulated resentment of this long history of assaults and humiliations caused the extraordinary response that summer night. Gay onlookers taunted the police, then attacked them. Someone started a blaze in the Stonewall Inn itself, almost trapping the policemen inside. Rioting continued throughout Greenwich Village (a center of New York’s gay community) through much of the night. The “Stonewall Riot” helped make the gay liberation movement—a movement that had been gaining strength since at least the 1950s—a significant and highly public force. New organizations sprang up around the country. Public discussion and media coverage of homosexuality, long subject to an unofficial taboo, quickly and dramatically increased. Gay and lesbian activists had some success in challenging the longstanding assumption that homosexuality was “aberrant” behavior. They argued that no sexual preference was any more “normal” than another.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
11
Q

gay liberation movement

A

Most of all, however, the gay liberation movement
transformed the outlook of gay men and lesbians themselves. It helped them to “come out,” to express their preferences openly and unapologetically, and to demand from society a recognition that gay relationships could be as significant and worthy of respect as heterosexual ones. Even the ravages of the AIDS epidemic which affected the gay community more disastrously than it affected any other
group, failed to halt the growth of gay liberation. In many ways, it strengthened it.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
12
Q

Betty Friedan’s the Feminine Mystique

A

The 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique is often cited as an important early event of contemporary women’s liberation. Friedan, a magazine journalist, had traveled around the country interviewing the women who had graduated with her from Smith College in 1947. Most of these women were living out the dream that postwar American society had created for them: they were affluent wives and mothers living in comfortable suburbs. And yet many of them were deeply frustrated and unhappy. The suburbs, Friedan claimed, had become a “comfortable concentration camp,” providing the women who inhabited them with no outlets for their intelligence, talent, and education. The “feminine mystique,” she wrote, was responsible for “burying millions of women alive.” By chronicling their unhappiness and frustration, Friedan did
not so much cause the revival of feminism as help give voice to a movement that was already stirring.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
13
Q

Equal Pay Act of 1963

A

In 1963, the Kennedy administration helped win passage of the Equal Pay Act, which barred the pervasive practice of paying women less than men for equal work.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
14
Q

National Organization for Women (NOW)

A

In 1966, Friedan joined with other feminists to create the
National Organization for Women (NOW), which soon became the nation’s largest and most influential feminist organization. Like other movements for liberation, feminism drew much of its inspiration from the black struggle for freedom.

The new organization responded to the complaints of the women Friedan’s book had examined—affluent suburbanites with no outlet for their interests—by demanding greater educational opportunities for women and denouncing the domestic ideal and the traditional concept of marriage. But the heart of the movement, at least in thebeginning, was directed toward the needs of women already in the workplace. NOW denounced the exclusion of women from professions, from politics, and from countless other areas of American life. It decried legal and economic discrimination, including the practice of paying women less than men for equal work (a practice the Equal Pay Act had not effectively eliminated). The organization called for “a fully equal partnership of the sexes, as part of the worldwide revolution of human rights.”

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
15
Q

Sexual Politics (1969)

A

Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (1969) signaled the new direction by arguing that “every avenue of power within the society is entirely within male hands.” The answer to women’s problems, in other words, was not, as Friedan had suggested, for individual women to search for greater personal fulfillment; it was for women to band together
to assault the male power structure.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
16
Q

women’s political and economic achievements

A

substantial. In 1971, the government extended its affirmative action guidelines to include women—linking sexism with racism as an officially acknowledged social problem. In the meantime, women were making rapid progress in their efforts to move into the economic and political mainstream. The nation’s major all-male educational institutions began to open their doors to women. (Princeton and Yale did so in 1969, and most other all-male colleges and universities soon followed.) Some women’s colleges, in the meantime, began accepting male students. Women were also becoming an important force in business and the professions. Nearly half of all married women held jobs
by the mid-1970s, and almost 90 percent of all women with college degrees worked. Two working parent households became more accepted and there were symbolic changes (Ms.)

Gains were also made in politics and sports.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
17
Q

Equal Rights Amendment

A

In 1972, Congress approved the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, which some feminists had been promoting since the 1920s, and sent it to the states. For a while, ratification seemed almost certain. By the late 1970s, however, the momentum behind the amendment had died. The ERA was in trouble not because of indifference but because of a rising chorus of objections to it from people (including many antifeminist women) who feared it would disrupt traditional social patterns. In 1982, the amendment finally died when the time allotted for its ratification expired.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
18
Q

Roe V. Wade

A

Abortion had once been legal in much of the United States,
but by the beginning of the twentieth century it was banned by statute in most of the country and remained so into the 1960s (although many abortions continued to be performed quietly, and often dangerously, out of sight of the law). But the women’s movement created strong new pressures on behalf of legalizing abortion. Several states had abandoned restrictions on abortion by the end of the 1960s. And in 1973, the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, based on a relatively new theory of a constitutional “right to privacy,” first recognized by the Court only a few years earlier in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), invalidated all laws prohibiting abortion during the “first trimester”—the first three months of pregnancy. The decision would become the most controversial ruling of the century.

How well did you know this?
1
Not at all
2
3
4
5
Perfectly
19
Q

Aldo Leopold

A

A number of American scientists built on Forbes’s ideas in
the early twentieth century, but perhaps the greatest early contribution to popular knowledge of ecology came not from a scientist, but from the writer and naturalist Aldo Leopold. During a career in forest management, Leopold sought to apply the new scientific findings on ecology
to his interactions with the natural world. And in 1949, he published a classic of environmental literature, The Sand County Almanac, in which he argued that humans have a responsibility to understand and maintain the balance of nature, that they should behave in the natural world according to a code that he called the “land ethic.”

20
Q

Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring

A

The influence of these emerging ideas of ecology could be
seen especially clearly in the sensational 1962 book by Rachel Carson, Silent Spring . Carson was a marine biologist who had become a successful science writer. In 1957, she received a letter from a friend reporting the deaths of songbirds in her yard after the area had been sprayed with the insecticide DDT—the chemical developed in the 1930s to kill mosquitos. Carson began investigating the impact of DDT and discovered growing signs of danger. DDT was slowly being absorbed into the food chain through water and plants, and the animals who ate and drank them. It was killing some animals (especially birds and fish) and inhibiting the ability of others to reproduce. Carson wrote eloquently about the growing danger of a “silent spring,” in which birds would no longer sing and in which sickness and death would soon threaten large numbers of animals and, perhaps, people. Silent Spring was an enormously influential book and had a direct, if delayed, influence on the decision to ban DDT in the United States in 1972. It was evidence of the growing power of environmentalism, and of the science of ecology, on public policy and national culture. But Silent Spring was also a very controversial book, which enraged the chemical industry. Critics of Carson attempted to suppress the book and, when that effort failed, to discredit its findings.

21
Q

Environment Protection Agency

A

In 1970, Congress passed and President Nixon signed the National Environmental Protection Act, which created a new agency—the Environmental Protection Agency—to
enforce antipollution standards on businesses and consumers.

22
Q

Henry Kissinger

A

Despite Nixon’s own passionate interest in international aff airs, he brought with him into government a man who ultimately seemed to overshadow him in the conduct
of diplomacy: Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor whom the president appointed as his national security adviser. Kissinger quickly established dominance over the secretary of state, William Rogers, and the secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, who were both more experienced in public life than Kissinger was. That was in part a result of Nixon’s passion for concentrating decision making in the White
House. But Kissinger’s keen intelligence, bureaucratic skills,
and success in handling the press were at least equally important. Together, Nixon and Kissinger set out to find an acceptable solution to the stalemate in Vietnam.

23
Q

“Vietnamization”

A

“Vietnamization” of the war—the training and equipping of the South Vietnamese military to take over the burden of combat from American forces. In the fall of 1969,
Nixon announced reduction of American ground troops from Vietnam by 60,000, the first reduction in U.S. troop strength since the beginning of the war. The reductions continued steadily for more than three years. From a peak of more than 540,000 American troops in 1969, the number had dwindled to about 60,000 by 1972.
Vietnamization helped quiet domestic opposition to the war. But it did nothing to break the stalemate in the negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris. The new administration quickly decided that new military pressures would be necessary to do that.

24
Q

Cambodia bombings and incursion

A

By the end of their first year in office, Nixon and Kissinger
had concluded that the most effective way to tip the military balance in America’s favor was to destroy the bases in Cambodia from which, the American military believed, the North Vietnamese were launching many of their attacks. Very early in his presidency, Nixon ordered the air force to begin bombing Cambodian territory to destroy the enemy sanctuaries. He kept the raids secret from Congress and the public. In the spring of 1970, possibly with U.S. encouragement and support, conservative military leaders overthrew the neutral government of Cambodia and established a new, pro-American regime under General Lon Nol. Lon Nol quickly gave his approval to American incursions into his territory; and on April30, Nixon went on television to announce that he was ordering American troops across the border into Cambodia to “clean out” the bases that the enemy had been using for its “increased military aggression.” Almost overnight, the Cambodian invasion restored the dwindling antiwar movement to vigorous life.

25
Q

Kent State

A

The mood of crisis intensified greatly on May 4, when four college students were killed and nine others injured when members of the National Guard opened fire on antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University in Ohio.

26
Q

Pentagon Papers

A

Then, in June 1971, first the New York Times and later other newspapers began publishing excerpts from a secret study of the war prepared by the Defense Department during the Johnson administration. What came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, leaked to the press by former Defense
Department official Daniel Ellsberg, provided evidence of what many critics of the war had long believed: that the government had been dishonest, both in reporting the military progress of the war and in explaining its own motives for American involvement. The administration went to court to suppress the documents, but the Supreme Court finally ruled that the press had the right to publish them.

27
Q

My Lai massacre

A

Morale and discipline were rapidly deteriorating among U.S. troops in Vietnam, who had been fighting a savage and inconclusive war for more than five years. The trial and conviction in1971 of Lieutenant William Calley, who was charged with overseeing a massacre of more than 300 unarmed South Vietnamese civilians, attracted wide public attention. Many Americans believed that the My Lai
tragedy was not an isolated incident. Less publicized were other, more widespread problems among American troops in Vietnam: desertion, drug addiction, racial hostilities, refusal to obey orders, even the occasional killing of
unpopular officers by enlisted men.

28
Q

Paris Peace Accords of 1974

A

The terms of the Paris accords were little diff erent from
those Kissinger and Tho had accepted in principle a few months before. There would be an immediate cease-fire. The North Vietnamese would release several hundred American prisoners of war. The Thieu regime would survive for the moment—the principal North Vietnamese concession to the United States—but North Vietnamese forces already in the south would remain there. An undefined committee would work out a permanent
settlement. American forces were hardly out of Indochina before the Paris accords collapsed. During the first year after the cease-fire, the contending Vietnamese armies suffered greater battle losses than the Americans had absorbed during ten years of fighting.

29
Q

fall of Saigon

A

Late in April 1975, communist forces marched into Saigon, shortly after officials of the Thieu regime and the staff of the American embassy had fled the country in humiliating disarray. Communist forces quickly occupied the capital, renamed it Ho Chi Minh City, and began the process of reuniting Vietnam under the Hanoi government. At about the same time, the Lon Nol regime in Cambodia fell to the murderous communists of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge—whose genocidal policies led to the deaths of more than a third of the country’s people over the next several years. That was the grim end of over a decade of direct American military involvement in Vietnam.

30
Q

biopolar v. multipolar world

A

The president had become convinced that old assumptions of a “bipolar” world—in which the United States and the Soviet Union were the only truly great powers—were now obsolete. America must adapt to the new “multipolar” international structure, in which China,Japan, and Western Europe would become major, independent forces. “It will be a safer world and a better world,” he said in 1971, “if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan—each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance.”

31
Q

Nixon and China (detente)

A

In July 1971, Nixon sent Henry Kissinger on a secret mission
to Beijing. When Kissinger returned, the president made the
startling announcement that he would visit China himself
within the next few months. That fall, with American approval, the United Nations admitted the communist government of China and expelled the representatives of
the Taiwan regime. Finally, in February 1972, Nixon paid a formal visit to China, which erased much of the deep American animosity toward the Chinese communists.

32
Q

Salt-I (detente)

A

The initiatives in China coincided with (and probably assisted) an effort by the Nixon administration to improve relations with the Soviet Union. In 1969, American and Soviet diplomats met in Helsinki, Finland, to begin talks on limiting nuclear weapons. In 1972, they produced the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), which froze the nuclear missiles (ICBMs) of both sides at present levels.

33
Q

Nixon Doctrine

A

Central to the Nixon-Kissinger policy toward the Third World was the effort to maintain a stable status quo without involving the United States too deeply in local disputes. In 1969 and 1970, the president described what became known as the Nixon Doctrine, by which the United
States would “participate in the defense and
development of allies and friends” but would leave the “basic responsibility” for the future of those “friends” to the nations themselves.

34
Q

Israeli-Palestinian conflict

A

In the Middle East, conditions grew more volatile in the
aftermath of the 1967 “Six-Day War,” in which Israel routed
Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian forces, gained control of the whole of the long-divided city of Jerusalem, and occupied substantial new territories: on the west bank of the Jordan River, the Gaza Strip, the Golan Heights, and elsewhere. The war also increased the number of refugee Palestinians—Arabs who claimed the lands now controlled by Israel and who, dislodged from their homes, became a source of considerable instability in Jordan, Lebanon, and the other surrounding countries into which they now moved.

35
Q

Palestinian Liberation Org

A

-

36
Q

Oil embargo

A

Permitting Israel to continue its drive into Egypt might have jeopardized the ability of the United States to purchase needed petroleum from the Arab states. A brief but painful embargo by the Arab governments on the sale of oil to
supporters of Israel (including America) in 1973 provided an
ominous warning of the costs of losing access to the region’s resources.

37
Q

Engel V. Vitale

A

In Engel v. Vitale (1962), the Court ruled that prayers in public schools violated the constitutional separation of church and state, sparking outrage among religious fundamentalists and others.

38
Q

Miranda v. Arizona

A

In Miranda v. Arizona (1966), the Court confirmed the obligation of authorities to inform a criminal suspect of his or her rights.

39
Q

Baker v. Carr

A

One of the most important decisions of the Warren Court in
the 1960s was Baker v. Carr (1962), which required state legislatures to apportion electoral districts so that
all citizens’ votes would have equal weight. In dozens of states, systems of legislative districting had given
disproportionate representation to sparsely populated rural
areas, hence diminishing the voting power of urban residents. The reapportionment that the decision required greatly strengthened the voting power of African Americans, Hispanics, and other groups concentrated in cities.

40
Q

Bakke case

A

While the Court upheld the principle of affirmative action in its celebrated 1978 decision Bakke v. Board of Regents of
California, it established restrictive new guidelines for such programs in the future.

41
Q

Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)

A

For many years, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (OPEC) had operated as an informal bargaining
unit for the sale of oil by Third World nations, but had seldom managed to exercise any real strength. But in the early 1970s, OPEC began to use its oil both as an economic tool and as a political weapon. In 1973, in the midst of the Yom Kippur War, Arab members of OPEC announced that they would no longer ship petroleum to nations supporting Israel—which meant the United States and its allies in Western Europe. At about the same time, the OPEC nations agreed to raise their prices by 400 percent. These twin shocks produced momentary economic chaos in the West. The United States suff ered its first fuel shortage since World War II. And although the boycott ended a few
months later, the price of energy continued to skyrocket
bothbecause of OPEC’s new militant policies and because of the weakening competitive position of the dollar in world
markets.

42
Q

deindustrialization

A

however, the climate for American manufacturing had changed significantly. Many of the great industrial plants were now many decades old, much less efficient than the newer plants that Japan and European industrial nations had constructed after the war. In some industries (notably steel and automobiles), management had become complacent and bureaucratic. Most important, U.S. manufacturing now faced major competition from abroad—not only in world trade (which still constituted only a small part of the American economy) but also at home. Automobiles, steel, and many other manufactured goods from Japan and Europe established major footholds in the United States markets. Some of America’s new competitors benefited from lower labor costs than their U.S. counterparts. Thus the 1970s marked the beginning of a long, painful process of deindustrialization, during which thousands of factories across the country closed their gates and millions of workers lost their jobs. New employment opportunities were becoming available
in other, growing areas of the economy: technology, information systems, and many other more “knowledge-based” industries that would ultimately drive an extraordinary (if unbalanced) economic revival in the 1980s and 1990s. But many industrial workers were poorly equipped to move into those jobs. The result was a growing pool of unemployed and underemployed
workers; the virtual disappearance of industrial jobs from many inner cities, where large numbers of minorities lived; and the impoverishment of communities dependent on particular industries. Some of the nation’s manufacturing sectors ultimately revived, but few regained the size and dominance they had enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s.

43
Q

stagflation

A

But the tight money policy did little to curb inflation: the cost of living rose a cumulative 15 percent during Nixon’s first two and a half years in office. Economic growth, in the meantime, declined. The United States was encountering a new and puzzling dilemma: “stagflation,” a combination of rising prices and general economic stagnation.

44
Q

Watergate break-in, cover-up

A

Early on the morning of June 17, 1972, police arrested five men who had broken into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office building in Washington, D.C. Two others were seized a short time later and charged with supervising the break-in. When reporters for the Washington Post began researching the backgrounds of the culprits, they discovered that among those involved in the burglary were former employees of the Committee for the Reelection of the President. One of them had worked in the White House. Moreover, they had been paid to execute the break-in from a secret fund of the reelection committee, a fund controlled by members of the White House staff .

Two different sets of scandals emerged from the investigations. One was a general pattern of abuses of power involving both the White House and the Nixon campaign committee, which included, but was not limited to, the Watergate break-in. The other scandal, and the one that became the major focus of public attention for nearly two years, was the way in which the administration tried to manage the investigations of the Watergate break-in and other abuses—a pattern of behavior that became known as the “cover-up.” There was never any conclusive evidence that the president had planned or approved the Watergate burglary in advance. But there was evidence that he had been involved in illegal efforts to obstruct investigations and withhold information. Testimony before the Senate provided evidence of the complicity of Dean, Attorney General John Mitchell, top White House assistants H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, and others. As interest in
the case grew to something approaching a national obsession, the investigation focused increasingly on a single question: in the words of Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee, “What did the President know and when did he know it?”

45
Q

John Dean

A

Public interest in the disclosures grew slowly in the last
months of 1972. Early in 1973, however, the Watergate
burglars went on trial; and under relentless prodding from
federal judge John J. Sirica, one of the defendants, James
W.McCord, agreed to cooperate both with the grand jury and with a special Senate investigating committee. McCord’s testimony opened a floodgate of confessions, and for months a parade of White House and campaign officials exposed one illegality after another. Foremost among them was a member of the inner circle of the White House, counsel to the president John Dean, who leveled allegations against Nixon himself.

46
Q

Saturday Night Massacre

A

Nixon accepted the departure of those members of his administration implicated in the scandals. But he continued to insist that he himself was innocent. There the matter might have rested, had it not been for the disclosure during the Senate hearings of a White House taping system that had recorded virtually every conversation in the president’s office during the period in question. All the groups investigating the scandals sought access to the tapes; Nixon, pleading “executive privilege,” refused to release them. A special prosecutor appointed by the president to handle the Watergate cases, Harvard law professor Archibald Cox, took Nixon to court in October 1973 in an effort to force him to relinquish the recordings. Nixon fired Cox and suffered the humiliation of watching both Attorney General Elliot Richardson and his deputy resign in protest. This “Saturday night massacre” made the president’s predicament infinitely worse. Not only did public pressure
force him to appoint a new special prosecutor, Texas attorney Leon Jaworski, who proved just as determined as Cox to subpoena the tapes; but the episode also precipitated an investigation by the House of Representatives into the possibility of impeachment.