Penguin History of the United States of America (126 page)

His countrymen, dismayed by defeat in war, violent social conflict and now by betrayal of law and democracy at the very heart of their political system, wondered if they could ever trust any President, or politician, or voter again. For if Nixon had perverted public life with his lies and recklessness, who had believed him, and put him into office, and collaborated with him almost to the last? And the bicentenary (‘bicentennial’ in American) of independence less than two years away!

Fortunately for the Americans, history waits for nothing, not even a fit of national introspection. Nixon was replaced by his Vice-President, Gerald Ford (b. 1913). Ford had for years been the Republican leader in the House of Representatives, and his loftiest ambition had been to win the Speakership. Then, in the summer of 1973, as the Watergate affair reached its climax, Nixon’s first Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, was found to have engaged in corrupt practices and had to resign his office, later pleading guilty, by arrangement with the prosecutors, to the least of the charges brought against him.
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Nixon nominated Ford to replace Agnew, and less than a year later found that by so doing he had picked his own replacement.

Ford was a good-humoured, honest, straightforward man, who did not pretend to genius: as President he consciously modelled himself on Harry Truman, whose reputation as an unpretentious but successful statesman had grown steadily since he left office, even among Republicans. The new President’s family was attractive and reassuring: they began to exorcize the cloud of sulky secrecy which had lain over the White House for so long. Ford lost some goodwill by formally pardoning Nixon, for it seemed to many that the ex-President was getting off a great deal too lightly. Nixon did not help matters by trying to get possession of the celebrated tapes: a
special act of Congress had to be passed to thwart him. But it is likely that Ford did the right thing; without the pardon the aftermath of Watergate would probably have been as long-drawn-out and painful as the crisis itself.

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honour until the shock of Watergate. We remember when the phrase ‘sound as a dollar’ was an expression of absolute dependability, until ten years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our nation’s resources were limitless until 1973, when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil. These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.

President Jimmy Carter, 1979

America is back and standing tall.

President Ronald Reagan, 1984

The defeat in Vietnam and the Watergate scandal together marked a watershed in American history. The effects of the two crises would still be felt at the end of the twentieth century, not least because they made the conduct of foreign policy more difficult and presidents less secure in office. People and politicians alike had to take account of these and related changes, and the struggle to contain the after-effects was a major theme of politics from the mid-seventies until the mid-eighties. But to some extent the double crisis hid for too long the importance of America’s abiding power, wealth and energy: there was much unnecessary concern and loose talk about national decline. In part this was because, beyond the country’s borders, huge historical developments – which the United States, however deeply involved, might influence but could not control – solved some old problems, created some new ones, and cumulatively left the world looking perplexingly different from its appearance in 1945, or even 1976. It was clear only that
it was still not a safe world. The lesson of Pearl Harbor held good. As the twenty-first century drew near it became apparent that although America in 2000 would have no less to celebrate than she had had at her bicentenary, still her voyage was going to be endless: no snug haven lay ahead for the ship of state. The task for Americans, as for all the nations, was to fit themselves for the eternal struggle to avoid shipwreck and make the voyage as happy as might be, while avoiding the complacency which had contributed to the wreck of so many actual ships in 1941.

In 1977 few saw the future in precisely these terms. The new president was inclined rather to view the present as one big emergency and the future as marked by a sharp diminution of the promise of American life: he was an early believer in the theme of decline. He had reasons for this comparatively sober outlook which seemed persuasive to him. The expense of the Vietnam War, and Lyndon Johnson’s refusal to meet it by raising taxes sufficiently, had led to rapid inflation. This undermined the international monetary system established at Bretton Woods in 1944,
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for it was based on an American preponderance and power in the world economy, and on an assumption that the dollar was as good as gold, which inflation eroded. In 1971, with the United States beginning to run a large trade deficit, President Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold, which had stood since Franklin Roosevelt’s time, and thereby devalued it by 8 per cent. From now on, the world markets would determine the exchange value of the world’s currencies at any given moment. Wiseacres shook their heads over the loss of the fixed rate system, but it is doubtful if it could have coped as well as did the floating rate system with the next great economic emergency, the 1973 ‘oil shock’.

This was a consequence of American presidential politics. Nixon engineered an economic boom in 1972 to secure his re-election, and this boom continued in 1973. The United States imported larger and larger quantities of raw materials, especially oil. America’s vast reserves, which had once made her the biggest oil-producing country in the world, were now seriously depleted, and you couldn’t drive Cadillacs on water. War again broke out between Egypt and Israel, and the oil-producing countries of the Middle East took action against Israel’s great patron. They had been amazingly patient, but they were tired of sacrificing their earnings to the profligate ways of the Americans, of pampering a country which at moments of crisis always supported their bitterest foe. Why should they subsidize the American way of life? Cheap petrol was not one of the rights of man, whatever American consumers thought. So the cartel of producers, the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries (OPEC), increased the price of oil fourfold in December, 1973. Within months the United States was experiencing inflation of more than 12 per cent per annum. The Nixon boom ended, and there was a record crop of bankruptcies in the building
industry. A new economic crisis, less dramatic, but as deadly and intractable as the one which began in 1929, engulfed the globe. So far as the United States was concerned there was no immediately obvious remedy.

President Gerald Ford, loyal to the stern tradition of Herbert Hoover, adopted a severely deflationary policy. Americans (headed by the federal government) must abandon extravagance and learn to live within their means. Ford relentlessly vetoed what seemed to him to be the wasteful proposals of Congress (which the Democrats still controlled) and when the city of New York, finding itself on the brink of bankruptcy, appealed to the President for help, he turned it down fiat,
FORD TO CITY: ‘DROP DEAD’
, said the headline in the
New York Daily News
, and the President could reflect that he had added substantially to the odds against his re-election.
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Otherwise he achieved nothing. When he left office, unemployment stood at nearly 8 per cent, and the budget deficit was at a destabilizing and record-breaking $66.4 billion.

Given this Republican record, it was reasonable to expect a crushing Democratic victory in 1976. As if inflation and the memory of Watergate were not bad enough, the glittering edifice of Kissinger’s foreign policy had collapsed: in 1975 the communists finally conquered Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam. The last Americans in Saigon fled ignominiously, leaving behind all too many of their collaborators. The victors renamed Saigon ‘Ho Chi Minh City’ and set up a regime quite as oppressive as those in other communist countries; in Cambodia the Khmer Rouge went much further and, under their morally and intellectually perverted leader Pol Pot, began to massacre their countrymen by the million. Ford did, and probably could do, nothing to help, but America was shamed. In the same year, at Helsinki, agreements were signed with the Soviet Union by which, for the first time, the West recognized Russian hegemony in Eastern Europe as legitimate; the fact that by the same instrument the Russian communists pledged themselves to respect human rights in the Soviet Union did not impress the critics; the undertaking, they complained, was mere words (in this they were eventually proved wrong). So Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, but only by a small margin after all: he took 48 per cent of the popular vote to Carter’s 50 per cent, and the winning margin in the electoral college was only 57.

Democrats (especially northerners) might attribute this rather dismal result solely to Carter’s lacklustre campaign; in reality it was a warning that the geography of American politics had shifted profoundly. The old Rooseveltian coalition of organized labour, ethnic minorities, liberals and blacks delivered for Carter magnificently, and the total Democratic vote was no more than two million short of Lyndon Johnson’s record-setting tally of 1964; but Carter won only because he reclaimed the South, where blacks voted for him because he was a Democrat and, his record showed, wholly committed to civil rights, and whites (but not a majority of them) because he was one of their own: he was the first President elected from the Deep South since the Civil War. Outside the South, the Democrats only carried two states west of the Mississippi – Missouri and Hawaii.
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Yet California, Texas and Florida were the fastest growing of all the states. The question arose whether the Democrats could ever again win with a candidate from the North-East at the head of their ticket, and whether Jimmy Carter would be adroit and impressive enough in office to ensure his re-election in 1980 by rebuilding his party’s strength outside its heartland in the Frostbelt.

‘Frostbelt’ was a new term, the counterpart of ‘the Sunbelt’ – that newly powerful region which, by some reckonings, stretched round the southern border of the United States from Virginia to California. The Sunbelt abounded in exuberant self-confidence and new money; it also included the country’s greatest oil-producing areas. Reconciling its views with those of the oil-consuming Frostbelt (or Rustbelt, as it was sometimes even more unkindly called, in allusion to its decaying heavy industry) would tax any president, and a Democratic one most of all.

Carter certainly recognized that the times required a new politics, and he supposed that he could supply it. He had demonstrated, by his success in winning the nomination, that even within the Democratic party there was a feeling that the New Deal tradition was of shrinking relevance to modern America. The great bureaucratic state which was one of the legacies of the New Deal, the Second World War and the Cold War had to many eyes become too large, inefficient and corrupt. Carter gloried in being an outsider to Washington and campaigned against its folly and wickedness as demonstrated by Vietnam and Watergate. He promised ‘compassion and competence’ in government, as a way of getting round the perpetual struggle between liberal Democrats, who supported activist policies, the welfare state and high taxes, and Republicans, still decrying ‘big government’ and wasteful expenditure, and wanting tax cuts. Before becoming a peanut farmer, and then a politician, Carter had served six years in the navy as an engineer. This training largely determined his outlook: he believed that government, like engineering, was a process of problem-solving, and that problems yielded most readily to those who worked hard and mastered all details (so he tended to immerse himself in one thing at a time, however many other urgent matters were in need of his attention). He looked always for comprehensive solutions, which is fine in principle but not often sensible when you have a country as large and diverse as America to govern and a body as incalculable as Congress to manage: Carter needed to learn the arts of negotiation and compromise, and how to settle for half a loaf (in
some respects he learned the lesson very well). His entire political career before 1976 had been passed in Georgia, and that was not helpful: it took him a long time to learn, if he ever did, that the presidency and Congress were much more complex and recalcitrant organisms than the Georgian governorship and legislature, and that the little knot of faithful Georgians who had helped him get to the White House were inadequate assistants when it came to governing the country. But in other ways his Georgian background was the best thing about Carter. He had been a leader in the new generation of white Southern politicians who had recognized the victory of the civil rights revolution and had insisted that the fact must be accepted generously and finally. His profound religious faith was that of a Southern Baptist, and his spontaneous friendliness was Southern too. He had a slightly corny, hayseed side to him: he once presented the prime minister of Israel with a sign reading ‘Shalom, Y’all’. In the spirit of Jefferson he was ostentatiously determined to strip the presidency of ostentation. Ignoring Speaker O’Neill’s wise view that ‘most people prefer a little pomp in their presidents’,
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he insisted on carrying his own luggage and cut down the number of renditions of the presidential anthem, ‘Hail to the Chief’. After his inauguration at the Capitol, instead of driving to the White House in an armoured limousine, he and his family walked the whole way down Pennsylvania Avenue. He had promised reform, if not a revolution; he was going to clean up Washington and demolish the ‘Imperial Presidency’ (a phrase recently made popular by the historian and liberal activist, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr). But his unreadiness for the task was perhaps symbolized by the fact that when after his walk he reached the White House and wanted to set to work, he realized that he did not know the way to the Oval Office.