Chapter 31 Flashcards
nixon’s pardon
Ford’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. Ford explained that he was attempting to spare the nation the ordeal of years of litigation and to spare Nixon himself any further suffering. But 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. Nevertheless, most Americans considered him a decent man; his image of honesty and amiability did much to reduce the bitterness and acrimony of the Watergate years.
“malaise” speech
In the summer of 1979, instability in the Middle East produced a second major fuel shortage in the United States. OPEC announced another major price increase. Faced with increasing pressure to act (and with a dismal approval rating of 26 percent), Carter retreated to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains. Ten days later, he emerged to deliver a remarkable television address. It included a series of proposals for resolving the energy crisis. But it was most notable for Carter’s bleak assessment of the national condition. Speaking with unusual fervor, he complained of a “crisis of confidence” that had struck “at the very heart and soul of our national will.” The address became known as the “malaise” speech (although Carter himself had never used that word), and it helped fuel charges that the president was trying to blame his own problems on the American
people.
Camp David Accords
Carter’s greatest achievement was his success in arranging
a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Middle East negotiations between Egyptian president Anwar Sadat and Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin had begun in 1977. When those talks 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 September 17, Carter announced agreement on a framework for an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. On March
26, 1979, Begin and Sadat returned together to the White House to sign a formal peace treaty—known as the Camp David accords—between their two nations.
Deng Xiaoping
In the meantime, Carter tried to improve relations with
China and the Soviet Union and to complete a new arms agreement. He responded eagerly to the overtures of Deng Xiaoping, the new Chinese leader who was attempting to open his nation to the outside world. On December 15, 1978, Washington and Beijing announced the resumption of formal diplomatic relations.
Salt II
Carter traveled to Vienna to meet with the aging Brezhnev to finish drafting the new SALT II arms control agreement. The treaty set limits on the number of long-range missiles, bombers, and nuclear warheads for both the United States and the USSR. Almost immediately, however, SALT II met with fierce conservative opposition in the United States.
Iranian Revolution
Ever since the early 1950s, the United States had provided political support and, more recently, massive military assistance to the government of the shah of Iran, hoping to make his nation a bulwark against Soviet expansion in the Middle East. By 1979, however, many Iranians had come to resent his autocratic rule. At the same time, Islamic clergy (and much of the fiercely religious populace) opposed his efforts to modernize and Westernize a fundamentalist society. The combination of resentments produced a powerful revolutionary movement. 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 militant regimes that followed. By late 1979, however, revolutionary chaos in Iran was making any normal relations impossible. What power there was resided with a zealous religious leader, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
Iran hostage crisis
In late October 1979, the deposed shah arrived in New York to be treated for cancer. Days later, on November 4, an armed group of militants 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. Fifty three Americans remained hostages in the embassy for over a year.
Sunbelt
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 (particularly Florida), the Southwest (particularly Texas), and above all, California, which became the nation’s most populous state, surpassing New York, in 1964. By 1980, the population of the Sunbelt had risen to exceed that of the older industrial regions of the North and the East. In addition to shifting the nation’s economic focus from one region to another, the rise of the Sunbelt helped produce a change in the political climate. The strong populist traditions in the South and the West were capable of producing progressive and even radical politics; but more often in the late twentieth century, they produced a strong opposition to the growth of government and a resentment of the proliferating regulations and restrictions that the liberal state was producing. Many of those regulations and restrictions—environmental laws, land use restrictions, even the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit created during the energy crisis to force motorists to conserve fuel—affected the West more than any other region.
Sagebrush rebellion
White southerners resented the federal government’s effort to change racial norms in the region. Westerners embraced an image of their region as a refuge of “rugged individualism” and resisted what they considered efforts by the government to impose new standards of behavior on them.
The so-called Sagebrush Rebellion, which emerged in parts of the West in the late 1970s, mobilized conservative opposition to environmental laws and restrictions on development. It sought to portray the West (which had probably benefited more than any other region from federal investment) as a victim of government control. Its members 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.
Moral majority
By the late 1970s, the “Christian right” had become a visible
and increasingly powerful political force. Jerry Falwell, a fundamentalist minister in Virginia with a substantial television audience, launched a movement he called the Moral Majority, which attacked the rise of “secular humanism”—a term many conservative evangelicals used
to describe the rejection of religion in American culture.
Pat Robertson
The Pentecostal minister Pat Robertson began a political movement of his own and, in the 1990s, launched an organization known as the Christian Coalition.
“New Right”/Barry Goldwater
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. Its origins lay in part in the 1964 presidential election. After Republican senator Barry Goldwater’s shattering defeat, Richard Viguerie, a conservative activist and organizer, took a list of 12,000 contributors to the Goldwater campaign and used it to begin a formidable conservative communications and fund-raising organization. Beginning in the 1970s, largely because of these and other organizational advances, conservatives usually found themselves better funded and organized than their opponents. By the late 1970s, there were right-wing think tanks, consulting firms, lobbyists,
foundations, and schools.
Reagan and Ford were also important in helping the New Right gain traction.
tax revolt
Equally important to the success of the New Right was a new and potent conservative issue: the tax revolt. It had its public beginnings 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. Similar antitax movements soon began in other states and eventually spread to
national politics.
The tax revolt helped the right 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. But attacking government programs directly, as right-wing politicians from Robert Taft to Barry Goldwater discovered, was not often the way to attract majority support. Every federal program had a political constituency.
The biggest and most expensive programs—Social Security,
Medicare, Medicaid, and others—had the broadest support.
In Proposition 13 and similar initiatives, members of the
right separated the issue of taxes from the issue of what taxes supported. That helped them achieve some of the most controversial elements of the conservative agenda (eroding the government’s ability to expand and launch new programs) without openly antagonizing the millions of voters who supported specific programs. Virtually no one liked to pay taxes, which grew the right’s constituency.
election of 1980
On election day 1980, the one-year anniversary of the seizure of the hostages in Iran, Reagan swept to victory, winning 51 percent of the vote to 41 percent for Jimmy Carter, and 7 percent for John Anderson—a moderate Republican congressman from Illinois who had mounted an independent campaign. Carter carried only five states and the District of Columbia, for a total of 49 electoral votes to
Reagan’s 489. The Republican Party won control of the Senate for the first time since 1952; and although the Democrats retained a modest majority in the House, the lower chamber too seemed firmly in the hands of conservatives.
neo-conservatives
A disproportionately influential: a group of intellectuals commonly known as “neo-conservatives,” who gave to the right something it had not had in many years—a firm base among “opinion leaders.” Many of these people had once been liberals and, before that, socialists. But during the turmoil of the 1960s, they had become alarmed by what they considered the dangerous and destructive radicalism that was destabilizing American life, weakening the liberal ardor in the battle against communism. Neo-conservatives were sympathetic to the complaints and demands of capitalists, but their principal concern was to reaffirm Western democratic, anticommunist values and commitments. Some neo-conservative intellectuals went on to become important figures in the battle against multiculturalism and “political correctness” within academia.
“Reagonomics”
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.” Supply-side economics 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. The solution, therefore, was to reduce taxes, with
particularly generous benefits to corporations and wealthy individuals, in order to encourage new investments. Because a tax cut would reduce government revenues (at least at first), it would also be necessary to reduce government expenses. A goal of the Reagan economic program was a significant reduction of the federal budget.
deregulation
Men and women whom Reagan appointed fanned out
through the executive branch of government, reducing the
role of government. Secretary of the Interior James Watt, previously a major figure in the Sagebrush Rebellion, opened up public lands and water to development. The Environmental Protection Agency (before its directors were indicted for corruption) relaxed or entirely eliminated enforcement of many environmental laws and regulations. The Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department eased enforcement of civil rights laws. The Department of Transportation slowed implementation of new rules limiting automobile emissions and imposing new safety standards on cars and trucks. By getting government “out of the way,” Reagan officials promised, they were ensuring economic revival.
Strategic Defense Initiative
Although the president had long denounced the SALT II
arms control treaty as unfavorable to the United States, he continued to honor its provisions. But 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), widely known as “Star Wars.” 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 Soviet Union claimed that the new program would elevate the arms race to new and more dangerous levels (a complaint many domestic critics of SDI shared) and insisted that any arms control agreement begin with an American abandonment of SDI.
Reagan Doctrine
Rhetorically at least, 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, above all, a new American activism in the Third World.
contras
In October 1982, the administration sent American soldiers and marines into the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada to oust an anti-American Marxist regime that showed signs of forging a relationship with Moscow. In Nicaragua, a pro-American dictatorship had fallen to the revolutionary “Sandinistas” in 1979; the new government had grown increasingly anti-American (and increasingly Marxist) throughout the early 1980s. The Reagan administration supported the so-called contras, a guerrilla movement drawn from several antigovernment groups and trying to topple the Sandinista regime.
“Morning in America”
In the campaign that fall, Reagan scarcely took note of his
opponents and spoke instead 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.
Mikhail Gorbachev
Many factors contributed to the collapse of the Soviet empire. The long, stalemated war in Afghanistan proved at least as disastrous to the Soviet Union as the Vietnam War had been to America. The government in Moscow had failed to address a long-term economic decline in the Soviet republics and the Eastern-bloc nations. Restiveness with the heavy-handed policies of communist police states was growing throughout much of the Soviet empire. But the most visible factor at the time was the emergence of Mikhail Gorbachev, who succeeded to the leadership of the
Soviet Union in 1985 and, to the surprise of almost everyone, very quickly became the most revolutionary figure in world politics in several decades.
glasnost
Gorbachev quickly transformed Soviet politics with two dramatic new initiatives. The first he called glasnost (openness): the dismantling of many of the repressive
mechanisms that had been conspicuous features of Soviet life for over half a century.
perestroika
The other policy Gorbachev called perestroika (reform): an effort to restructure the rigid and unproductive Soviet economy by introducing, among other things, such elements of capitalism as private ownership and the profit motive.
