Chapter 15

Disneyland: Post-War America

In This Chapter

bulletLiving the dream of fifties America

bulletBattling for – and against – civil rights

bulletFighting against the Vietnam War

bulletSurviving (or not surviving) Watergate

Historians – and not just American ones – have called the twentieth century the American century. That title doesn’t simply reflect American power, it also means this was the century when the whole world, even countries who opposed or hated America, adopted American culture and technology, bought (or copied) American goods, and tried to share in the American dream.

Land of Dreams – Fifties America

‘When you wish upon a star,’ runs the Walt Disney song, ‘Your dreams come true.’ America was founded on dreams and the American Dream, the idea that anyone can make it big, is what kept the country going through the good times and the bad. In 1955 Walt Disney even created a dream-come-true kingdom at Disneyland in California. Children and adults could meet their favourite characters and go on rides based on moments from the films. Everything was clean, wholesome, all-American family fun. Welcome to fifties America.

Fifties America was basking in the wealth and security it had won in the war. American factories had built the tanks and ships that beat Hitler and now the whole world was buying American. America hadn’t been bombed or invaded so it didn’t have the sort of reconstruction problems other countries faced. In fact America was busy sending aid to Europe and Asia and establishing economic links all over the world. Meanwhile at home, all-American boys and their dads went fishing and all-American girls and their mums baked apple pie and the sun shone and everyone smiled and felt very lucky to be living in the greatest country on God’s earth. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Or could it?

Yabba Dabba Doo!

If you want to get a picture of how fifties America thought of itself, catch a few episodes of The Flintstones (it first aired in 1960, but the idea developed from the fifties into the following decade). The joke is that Fred and Wilma are from the stone age but really they’re suburban fifties Americans, with a neat house, friendly neighbours, and a smart car. Americans enjoyed TV comedies like I Love Lucy or the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show that added a little sparkle or craziness to suburban life without in any way challenging or subverting it.

All-American presidents

Being president of a mighty superpower that is going through a period of unprecedented prosperity might sound like a dream job, but America’s problems both at home and abroad proved challenging enough for the two men who led the country through the fifties.

bulletHarry S. Truman (Democrat) 1945–53: Tough anti-communist. Stood up to Stalin at the Potsdam conference in 1945 and issued the Truman Doctrine saying the US would help any country fighting communism. He organised UN help for South Korea in 1950, though he had to sack the megalomaniac UN commander General Douglas MacArthur before he could start the Third World War. Truman outlawed racial discrimination in the armed forces and started looking into civil rights, but the Korean War left him exhausted. He retired after the 1952 presidential election.

bulletDwight D. Eisenhower (Republican) 1953–61: Known as ‘Ike’. Allied Supreme Commander in the Second World War. He promised to sort out the Korean War and he did. He didn’t sort out much else, though: His presidency saw the first big clashes over civil rights. Everyone liked Ike but he developed a reputation for being old and tired. He served his two terms as president and left the White House in 1961.

Reds under the beds!

In 1949 Americans got scared, for two main reasons: First, China became communist; second, the Russians exploded an atom bomb. Most Americans believed that communism was an evil force that would destroy all that was good about the American way of life, so these events were very scary. Where was Superman when America needed him? And then a man stepped forward to save America from the reds. Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.

Are you now or have you ever been a pathological liar?

McCarthy, who claimed he’d been a tail gunner during the war (he hadn’t), told Americans to be Very Afraid: He had a list of 205 card-carrying communists working within the State Department. When journalists pressed him for details, McCarthy said okay maybe not 205 but definitely 81. Well, call it 57. It was definitely lots of them, honest. No, he couldn’t give any names (most journalists doubted he had any to give and they were right), so he started accusing General George C. Marshall, the man responsible for organising economic aid to post-war Europe, of standing by while Stalin took over eastern Europe and Mao took over China. That proves the Reds are in the State Department, said McCarthy. Well, doesn’t it? Incredibly, many Americans believed him: They were scared of communists and McCarthy was telling them just what they wanted to hear.

DidItReallyHappen

People often assume that McCarthy’s accusations were false. Most were, but not all: Some of the people he accused were communists, or had been. Alger Hiss, a State Department adviser who was prosecuted by the young Richard Nixon, certainly was a communist and may well have been passing papers to the Soviet Union. But the number of active traitors was always very small: Being a communist or communist sympathiser and a loyal American was perfectly possible (and legal). McCarthy could never see this.

McCarthy chaired the Senate Permanent Investigations Sub-Committee (not the House Un-American Activities Committee – that piece of information might win you a bet one day), where he bullied and shouted at witnesses, not caring (well, actually quite pleased) that he was destroying their reputations and careers along the way. People found guilty of having been members of the communist party were usually sacked and blacklisted. Many Hollywood directors and screenwriters hauled in front of McCarthy had to use pseudonyms to get any sort of work afterwards. McCarthy finally went too far when, on national television, he started claiming the US army, busy fighting the communists in Korea, was riddled with traitors. The viewing public saw through his lies and his support collapsed.

Remember

In the way they bullied people into confessing and accusing others, McCarthy’s hearings bore a resemblance to Stalin’s show trials (see Chapter 4 to find out about those). After Arthur Miller wrote his play The Crucible, which was apparently about the seventeenth-century witch trials at Salem but was really about McCarthy, it became common to refer to the McCarthy hearings as ‘witch-hunts’. Just remember, though, that no one who went before McCarthy was hanged, shot, or sent to a labour camp.

In 1953 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were found guilty of passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union and condemned to agonising deaths in the electric chair. The Rosenbergs thought that helping the Soviet Union to get nuclear weapons would make the world fairer and safer. Ironically, the American and Russian governments eventually agreed that the world was safest when both sides were armed to the teeth, but it was too late to help the Rosenbergs.

Fridges speak louder than war

The Cold War was so taken up with talk of war and nuclear confrontation that it was easy to lose sight of the question it was meant to be about: Were people happier under communism or under capitalism? In theory, the Soviet Union was the workers’ paradise, but the Americans asked why so many workers seemed to want to escape from paradise to the Big Bad Capitalist West. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was confident that communism would win: ‘We will bury you!’ he declared, and many Americans were scared that he might just be right. The communists had pushed the US out of North Korea in the Korean War (see Chapter 10 for the details), taken over North Vietnam, and would probably take over the rest of South East Asia (choose between Chapters 10, 11, and 14 for the details), and in 1959 they took over the Americans’ favourite holiday island of Cuba (see Chapter 13).

TechnologicalBreakthrough

But then in 1959 Mr Khrushchev and his wife dropped in on an exhibition of American life at the US embassy in Moscow and were shown a typical American kitchen, with a fridge and all mod cons. The Russians, who were used to kitchens where you only got electricity every other month and where fridges were reserved for high party officials, were amazed – Mrs Khrushchev kept trying out all the gadgets. But her husband was convinced the whole thing was a capitalist trick: Surely only the rich could afford this sort of luxury? But Vice President Richard Nixon assured them that this was how ordinary Americans lived. We call it capitalism, he added, ever so slightly gloating. The Khrushchevs went off in a huff and two years later Khrushchev oversaw the building of the Berlin Wall to stop anyone else heading west in search of a fridge.

Beep-beep-beep – Ha! Ha! Ha!

Americans got a shock in 1957 when the Russians beat them into space with Sputnik, the world’s first space satellite. Khrushchev took every opportunity to rub the Americans’ noses in it – ‘Beep beep: Stick that in your fridges!’ – and Americans had to get used to the idea of a communist beeping device passing directly overhead. Perhaps the time was ripe to get rid of kindly old Ike and get someone a bit more dynamic in the White House.

Blue suede shoes

For young Americans the fifties ended in 1956 when Elvis Presley recorded ‘Heartbreak Hotel’. The song went to number one in the charts and created rock and roll virtually overnight. The record industry liked the way he mixed country with rhythm and blues; young people liked how he looked and sounded. Nervous TV executives, worried that his gyrating hips might shock the Bible Belt, told cameramen to shoot him from the waist up. Elvis carried on recording hits through the sixties – one of very few stars to succeed in both decades – but his real importance is that he provided young people with an icon they could relate to – and their parents couldn’t.

The long fight for civil rights

The fifties American dream could sound pretty hollow to Americans who didn’t fit into the image of white church-going suburban America. Many black Americans, descendants of Africans brought over as slaves in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, lived in poverty and even those who didn’t had to cope with racial insults and violence. Conditions were worst in the former slave-owning areas of the South, where many white Americans liked to think that white supremacy was part of God’s plan. They had all sorts of clever ideas for keeping their African American neighbours in their place:

bulletStrict segregation: Public spaces such as parks, cafes, cinemas, theatres, buses, and waiting rooms, even churches had ‘blacks only’ and ‘whites only’ areas and these rules were strictly enforced. Black and white Americans lived in different parts of town and sent their children to blacks-only or whites-only schools.

bulletUnequal education: Southern state governments made sure that blacks-only schools got a fraction of the money they spent on schools for whites. ‘Black’ schools had fewer books and resources and their teachers got paid less. Any bright African Americans who wanted to go to college in the South could forget it: They had to go to the integrated colleges in the northern states – if they could afford it.

bulletDeny voting rights: African Americans had enjoyed equal voting rights since President Lincoln emancipated the slaves in 1863 but the southerners had worked out ways to stop them exercising those rights. State laws imposed special voting tests designed for black voters to fail, such as asking them ‘How many bubbles are there in a bar of soap?’ or getting them to read out a passage of difficult text and then saying they’d pronounced it wrong. African Americans who managed to vote were sacked from their jobs or had their State food aid stopped or – and all too often this was the preferred method – they ended up dead.

bulletViolence and intimidation: Any African American who stepped out of line was liable to be murdered and all-white juries were happy to acquit anyone who got accused of the crime. Fourteen-year-old Emmet Till was murdered and his body thrown into the Mississippi for saying ‘Bye, baby’ to a white woman in a shop; war veteran Lamar Smith was shot in broad daylight in front of a white crowd for organising black voting in Lincoln County, Mississippi. No witnesses came forward and no one was ever tried for his murder.

I like to be in Am-err-icA!

In 1957 a sizzling new musical opened on Broadway called West Side Story. It updated Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to fifties New York, shining a pitiless spotlight on the downside of the American dream. Instead of feuding Montagues and Capulets, the show had warring gangs, the all-white Jets and their deadly enemies, the Puerto Rican Sharks, disillusioned with the racism and poverty they found on New York’s West Side. In the lively Latin number ‘America’ the Sharks and their girls argue about whether or not life is better in their new homeland. ‘Buying on credit is so nice!’ sing the girls. ‘One look at us and they charge twice!’ the boys answer. This musical was a sign that problems of poverty and racial violence were by no means confined to America’s black community, nor even to the Deep South.

Separate cannot be equal – official

President Truman had made a start on the civil rights issue by outlawing segregation in the armed forces and government service and setting up a commission to report on racial discrimination in the rest of society. The real kick-start, however, came from a little girl called Laura Brown, who in 1954 brought a case against her local school board in Topeka, Kansas. She argued that having to go to a ‘black’ school when she lived round the corner from a perfectly good ‘white’ school was demeaning and harmful, even though (this was Kansas, not the Deep South) the two schools were both equally good. The law seemed to be against her: The 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case had established that separate schooling was allowed under the constitution as long as it was equal in all other aspects, but her counsel, Thurgood Marshall, argued that the very idea of having to go to a ‘black’ school suggested that Laura was somehow not good enough for the ‘white’ one and that this notion was psychologically damaging. The Supreme Court agreed and ruled that racially segregated schooling was unconstitutional.

This ruling didn’t mean that racially segregated schools suddenly disappeared, however. Southern states dragged their feet and raised as many objections to the change as they could and the Supreme Court had to rule a second time to declare all segregation illegal. In 1957 white students and parents barred the way to a group of black students trying to enrol at the Central High School at Little Rock, Arkansas and screamed abuse at one, Elizabeth Eckford, who defied them and walked into the school. When the State Governor Orval Faubus called out the National Guard to keep the black students out of the school, President Eisenhower sent in federal troops to protect the students and enforce the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Remember

Pictures of white mobs screaming hate at black students played straight into the hands of America’s communist enemies, who accused the United States of blatant hypocrisy in claiming to stand for human rights when it couldn’t even defend them for its own citizens.

The son of a preacher man – Martin Luther King

Martin Luther King’s father, ‘Daddy’ King, was a Baptist preacher who believed in keeping your head down and thanking God for your blessings. His son, Martin Luther King Jr, didn’t see life that way, which is why in 1955 he was approached by the leaders of the black community in Montgomery, Alabama to help with a problem that had arisen on the town’s buses. Rosa Parks, an official of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP), had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white man. The black community were going to boycott the city’s buses in protest and they wanted King to lead them. King proved a powerful speaker (well, he was a preacher) and after a year of the boycott, with people walking or sharing taxis rather than travel on segregated buses, the bus company, which depended heavily on its black passengers, finally gave in and desegregated its buses. King became a national hero.

Don’t hit back!

King was a devout Christian and he campaigned according to Christian principles of non-violence. He drew inspiration from the way Gandhi had used non-violence to highlight the brutality of British rule in India and win over world opinion (Chapter 11 tells you more about how Gandhi managed it). King was under no illusions about the violence he was up against: Many of the bus boycotters had been arrested and beaten up. But he taught his followers not to hit back or even defend themselves, no matter what was done to them. He even sought out the most brutal local police chiefs to challenge knowing that the more the police used violence, the more public and international opinion would swing round behind the case for civil rights.

Remember

Both Eisenhower and the president who followed him, John F. Kennedy, had to approach civil rights with great care. If they appeared to be bullying the southern states – as some people thought Eisenhower had done at Little Rock – they could lose support from voters who feared their own states might be next. The civil rights fighters were going to have to keep a careful eye on the political situation if they were to win the White House round.

Crazy Time – The Sixties

America’s high hopes came crashing down during the 1960s, which began with the election of the young, popular President Kennedy and ended with Americans walking on the moon. But in between America saw assassinations, violent clashes over civil rights, and the long drawn-out agony of Vietnam.

JFK

1960 was presidential election year and it had an interesting new twist. The two candidates, Richard Nixon for the Republicans and John F. Kennedy for the Democrats, went head to head in a series of TV debates. People who heard the men on radio didn’t think there was much to choose between them but people who watched on TV preferred Kennedy: He was young and good looking and he obviously knew how to charm a TV audience; by contrast, Nixon looked awkward and he didn’t smile much. The election was close: Kennedy won by just 0.1 per cent, but it was enough. ‘The torch has been passed,’ he declared in his inaugural address, ‘to a new generation.’ He and his beautiful wife Jackie held court at the White House, inviting poets, artists, and musicians: It was nicknamed ‘Camelot’ after the fabled court of King Arthur. After the tired years of Eisenhower, Americans could look forward to a glittering future. Or so they thought.

King of the New Frontier

For Americans the ‘Frontier’ didn’t just mean the Wild West: It symbolised any big challenge that would sort out the all-American men from the all-American boys. Kennedy talked of addressing poverty and providing proper health care as America’s ‘New Frontier’. Unfortunately Congress wasn’t in pioneering mood: It thought the New Frontier was too expensive and would allow the government to interfere too much with the states. It rejected the whole package. Back to the drawing board, Jack.

Foreign affairs . . .

Kennedy’s record in foreign affairs was mixed:

bulletAuthorises the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, 1961. Anti-Castro Cubans invade Cuba to topple his regime. They’d planned with Eisenhower’s administration. Kennedy inherited the plan and gave it the go-ahead. Bad idea: The invasion flops. Chapter 13 explains why.

bulletQuarrels with Khrushchev in Vienna, 1961. The two men meet for a constructive summit conference but end up arguing fruitlessly about the merits of capitalism and communism and just irritating each other. Not such a great idea.

bulletCuban missile crisis, 1962. Depending on your point of view, Kennedy either stood courageously firm against the Russians or he recklessly brought the world to the brink of nuclear war. Chapter 10 has more on the crisis.

bulletVisits Berlin and sees the Wall, 1963. Good move: The Germans appreciate his support (they appreciate it even more when he gets his German slightly wrong so that ‘I am a Berliner!’ comes out as ‘I am a doughnut!’). For more on the Berlin Wall, see Chapter 18.

Kennedy was also responsible for committing the United States to defending South Vietnam, which didn’t prove such a good idea either.

. . .and domestic affairs

Kennedy presented a squeaky-clean family image but all was not as it seemed. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, knew about Kennedy’s affair with Marilyn Monroe and he tried to use this information to blackmail the president into softening his liberal policies. Mind you, Kennedy wasn’t above using dirty tactics himself. When US Steel wanted to put its prices up against Kennedy’s wishes, the president called in the FBI to look out dirt on the US Steel bosses and carry out interrogations of journalists in the middle of the night.

Dallas

Kennedy went to Dallas, Texas in November 1963 to try to build up his support in the important southern states, though looking through some of the local leaflets attacking him (he was too northern, too Irish, and too Catholic for southern tastes) he reckoned he was heading into Nut Country. So it proved on 22 November when Lee Harvey Oswald took aim and shot him.

DidItReallyHappen

Yes, Lee Harvey Oswald did shoot JFK. The plaza wasn’t a pheasant shoot full of gunmen on grassy knolls taking pot shots at the presidential car. As so often in history, the simple explanation is the right one, but if you believe the conspiracy theories, nothing written here will change your mind.

OnTheOneHand

Partly because of the way he died, Kennedy became an international hero. For many years afterwards people could say exactly where they were when they heard the news of his assassination. More recently, historians have been much more critical of him. Revelations about his private life have tarnished the image, but more serious is the accusation that he didn’t actually achieve much for America’s poor or blacks or even for America’s allies abroad. But American politicians were still conjuring up his image to boost their electoral ratings in the 1990s and beyond, so Camelot hasn’t entirely vanished.

Civil rights or Black Power?

By the time Kennedy arrived in the White House in 1960, young blacks were becoming impatient for progress on civil rights. They decided to take action:

bulletLunch counter sit-ins: Black students sat at whites-only lunch counters and waited to be served. They had a long wait, and many of them got beaten up or arrested (and frequently both).

bulletFreedom rides: Inter-state buses were still segregated once they reached the south, so black and white civil rights campaigners staged ‘freedom rides’, boarding the buses in the north and sitting defiantly together all the way to the buses’ destinations in the south. White mobs attacked many of the buses and beat the freedom riders with metal bars while the police stood by and watched.

Martin Luther King joined in the lunch counter sit-ins and got himself arrested for his pains. While he was in prison, Kennedy, who was standing for election, phoned Mrs King to express his sympathy for her husband, so when Kennedy was elected, many civil rights campaigners thought, ‘Great. Now we’ll get some action.’ Not so fast. Kennedy needed southern support to get his New Frontier plans through Congress (see the section ‘King of the New Frontier’ for details). That situation meant he could send federal marshals to protect the freedom riders but he couldn’t afford to alienate southern senators by doing anything more. So King decided to turn up the pressure.

Marching for freedom

To pressurise Kennedy into taking some action on civil rights, Martin Luther King launched two of his most famous campaigns. The idea was to get maximum worldwide publicity, so he launched two very different kinds of march, one in the deep south, and one in Washington DC itself.

bulletBirmingham, Alabama: King organised a series of civil rights marches in the heart of the most racist, segregationist town in the south. Local sheriff ‘Bull’ Connor sent in police with fierce dogs and powerful fire hoses to attack the marchers (fire hoses are powerful enough to blast the bark off a tree, so using these was no empty gesture). People criticised King for putting schoolchildren at the head of the marches where they took the full force of the dogs and the water, but he knew the TV pictures of police attacking children would win people over and he was right.

bulletMarch on Washington, DC: To mark the centenary of emancipation from slavery, but really to tell Kennedy to get a move on and pass a civil rights bill, King organised a massive march on Washington, where he addressed the crowd whilst stood in front of the Lincoln memorial (a symbolic venue because Lincoln had emancipated the slaves in the nineteenth century). King’s speech was a masterpiece. ‘I have a dream,’ he declared, ‘that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal”.’

Civil Rights Act 1964

Kennedy couldn’t just sit by and watch children being blasted by fire hoses or vast crowds listening to classic oratory just outside his window, so he started to draft a civil rights bill to guarantee equality under the law for all US citizens regardless of their colour. Kennedy was assassinated before he could pass this bill, but his successor as president, Lyndon Johnson, signed it into law in 1964. Instead of a Thank You card, however, all Johnson got from King was a complaint that the bill didn’t mean diddly squat if black people couldn’t vote. So King organised another set of marches in the jurisdiction of another not-very-bright redneck sheriff, this time at Selma, Alabama and the world watched news coverage of helmeted policemen baton charging the unarmed marchers. In 1965 President Johnson signed a voting rights bill into law to guarantee black Americans the same voting rights as white Americans. He probably wanted to add ‘PS Now will you get off my back?’ at the bottom.

Malcolm says: Shoot the dog!

Young blacks in the ghettos of America’s cities thought Martin Luther King’s non-violent tactics were stupid. They weren’t interested in voting rights or who could sit where on a bus: They wanted an end to the poverty they were stuck in and they turned to a fiery young speaker called Malcolm X. Malcolm had been born Malcolm Little but on joining a Muslim group called the Nation of Islam, he learned that the surnames African Americans carried were imposed on them when their original African names were taken away from them by the slave owners. So, until he could find his true African name, Malcolm dropped ‘Little’ and substituted ‘X’.

Malcolm X argued that marchers who were attacked by police with dogs should fight back and shoot the dog. But at which end of the lead?

Remember

Martin Luther King and Malcolm X represented two different approaches to the issue of equal rights and treatment for African Americans. Without King’s campaign for equal rights, black Americans wouldn’t be able to address the issues of poverty and justice Malcolm X highlighted.

Both men died violently. Malcolm X was murdered by the Nation of Islam (he’d fallen out with them); Martin Luther King was murdered by a white gunman at a motel in Memphis.

Black Power!

The most radical black movement was the Black Panthers, who carried guns and openly said they wanted to start a revolution in America. They set up self-help clinics and shops for black people in the poor areas of Los Angeles, but their leaders were all either killed or arrested in a big shoot-out with the police. People still talked of Black Power but it was overtaken by other issues, especially Vietnam.

Dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee

One of the most effective role models for African Americans in the 1960s and 1970s was Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Clay and the greatest boxer in the whole history of the world. At least he said he was, and I suppose he ought to know. At first Americans weren’t sure they liked this cocky young boxer who was always boasting about how good he was. When he joined the Nation of Islam, changed his name, and refused to be drafted into the US military, white America was decidedly unamused: Ali was stripped of his heavyweight title and imprisoned. But gradually, as he won the big stage-managed fights with Joe Frazier and George Foreman and delighted press conferences by reading his poems about how he would soon be reducing his opponent to pulp and leaving him to the cleaners to scrape up, he won America – and the world – over. Later in life he fell victim to Parkinson’s Disease, but he had done more than almost anyone else to change America’s perception of its black citizens.

I have a dream too and this ain’t it: LBJ and Vietnam

No one had expected Lyndon Johnson to become president. Kennedy had chosen the big Texan as his vice president as a way of winning over southern voters who would be put off by Kennedy’s own northern, Catholic image. After Kennedy’s death, Johnson was sworn in on the plane out of Dallas with Jackie standing beside him, still wearing the blood-stained outfit she’d worn in the fateful motorcade.

People underestimated Johnson. He was no hick but an intelligent and thoughtful statesman. He had big plans, especially for America’s poor. He wanted to create a Great Society, a bit like a European welfare state, and to declare War on Poverty. Sadly, he had to put the Great Society on hold while he waged a very different war. In Vietnam.

Kennedy should take the blame for getting into Vietnam in the first place, when he sent thousands of US troops to ‘advise’ the South Vietnamese on how to fight their communist neighbours (Chapter 14 has the details on what the fighting in Vietnam was all about). Johnson didn’t feel he could duck the commitment Kennedy had made to defend South Vietnam. The situation became a nightmare for Johnson, and here’s why:

bulletJungle fighting: The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had bases deep in the jungle where it was very difficult for the Americans to find them. The Americans lost thousands of men in search and destroy missions without gaining any very obvious military advantage.

bulletBombing: The US poured bombs onto North Vietnam, onto Cambodia, and onto the jungles of South Vietnam. All this tactic seemed to do was kill thousands of civilians and created a storm of controversy at home and around the world. Protestors would gather at the White House gates and chant ‘Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?’

bulletProtests at home: TV news reports from Vietnam brought Americans onto the streets to protest against the war. Young people who could afford the fare and the hotel bills (that is, mainly kids from white middle-class families) skipped off to Canada to avoid being drafted to fight in it.

OnTheOneHand

Historians can’t decide on exactly how far the protests at home affected the outcome of the war. The US forces were actually doing well and defeating many of the big communist offensives, but to TV audiences at home the situation didn’t look that way. It’s important to remember that most Americans, especially older people, believed in what America was doing in Vietnam and supported the president, but it’s also true that the protests made for bad headlines for Johnson at home and abroad and added enormously to the pressure he was under.

In 1968, tired and drained, Johnson went on TV to announce that he would not seek, and would not accept, the Democratic nomination in the next presidential election.

Woodstock

A wet weekend in August 1969 defined the youth culture of the sixties. The Woodstock Festival, held on farmland in upstate New York, attracted some 300,000 people, which was rather more than the organisers had catered for, but no one seemed to mind. The line-up included Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Who, and the psychedelic Jefferson Airplane; the facilities included mud, sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll. And mud.

Fly me to the moon

Ever since the Russians had put the first satellites and the first man into space, the Americans had been desperate to get up there too. John Glenn orbited the earth three times in 1962 but doing that wasn’t enough. President Kennedy announced that America would send a man to the moon and bring him safely home again before the end of the decade. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Ivan.

The moon programme was named Apollo after the Greek god of the sun. The Apollo missions gradually got closer to the destination, leaving the earth’s atmosphere, orbiting the moon, and sending an unmanned module onto the surface, until, on 21 July 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin set foot on the surface. And they planted the Stars and Stripes – America had the first inter-planetary empire.

The public lost interest in moon landings until, in 1970, Apollo 13 suffered serious engine problems. The world was gripped by the fate of the three trapped astronauts until they finally managed to splash down safely in the Pacific Ocean. The first sign that anything was wrong was when the astronauts radioed Mission Control ‘Houston, we have a problem’. The second sign was when someone was heard saying ‘Beam me up, Scottie’.

America in the Seventies

After the roller-coaster ride of the sixties (refer to the preceding ‘Crazy Time – The Sixties’ section), Americans were hoping for a more settled decade. After all, 1976 would bring the two hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The seventies certainly produced some classic American films, like Taxi Driver and The Godfather, but in public life the decade brought a series of humiliations: The Watergate scandal, the less-than gripping presidency of Gerald Ford, and the agony of the Iran hostage crisis. This was going to be a difficult decade.

Tricky Dicky

Republican Richard Milhouse Nixon won the 1968 election and immediately looked for an exit strategy from Vietnam. He did not mean giving in, though. Nixon increased the bombing and kept up the pressure on the North Vietnamese to persuade them to negotiate. He also authorised massive bombing of Cambodia, which had been giving help to the North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies. So the protests at home continued. In 1970 National Guardsmen fired on protestors at Kent State University, Ohio and killed four of them. Student protestors now openly burned the American flag and defied the government. Vietnam was tearing America apart.

Finally, talks opened in Paris between Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and the North Vietnamese. The fighting wound down and in 1973 the Americans pulled out. The agreement was that North Vietnam would leave South Vietnam alone, but no one believed that would happen and it didn’t. In 1975 the North Vietnamese invaded again and this time they took the whole country. Look at the outcome any way you like: America had lost.

My fellow Americans, the party’s over

Nixon came into office determined to balance the books. He thought Johnson’s Great Society (see the earlier section) was just an excuse to spend money America couldn’t afford, so instead of setting up aid programmes he announced big cuts in government spending. To make things worse, in 1973 the price of oil went through the roof (this happened around the world and Chapter 17 explains why), which meant Nixon had to try to keep inflation – and American pay packets – under strict control. On the whole, Nixon was successful and the American people seemed to appreciate it. Certainly they re-elected him in 1972 by a huge majority.

China in your hand

Nixon made a huge breakthrough in foreign policy. The two communist super powers, Russia and China, had fallen out and become deadly enemies. So Nixon played the classic game of divide and rule and made friends with China. As a young man he’d helped prosecute ‘traitors’ who had supposedly helped Mao Tse-tung come to power in Beijing; now Nixon travelled to China and shook hands with Chairman Mao in person. Historians agree that this trip was a momentous event, and it completely changed the power politics of the world. The US president’s visit kick-started China’s re-engagement with the outside world; Nixon also got China’s support for his policy of withdrawing gracefully from Vietnam. Well, okay, cutting and running if you prefer.

A pinch of SALT

Good relations with China helped Nixon brush Vietnam under the carpet and talk tough to the Soviet Union. The two sides finally started talking about limiting the number of nuclear missiles they had pointing at each other. No, not getting rid of any – do try to keep up – just not producing quite as many new ones. The talks were called SALT – Strategic Arms Limitation Talks – and they were the first sign that reaching a thaw in the Cold War might just be possible.

Well, I’m not a crook. Okay, maybe I am

Everyone remembers Nixon for one thing: Watergate. What happened was that a gang was caught breaking in to bug the Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate hotel and office complex in Washington – hence the name of the scandal. At first it looked like the work of a rogue dirty tricks brigade, but one of the men wrote to the judge in the case saying that the president had known all about it. Two reporters on the Washington Post smelled a story and started digging. They struck gold with a mysterious source they nicknamed ‘Deep Throat’, who confirmed that a massive cover-up was in operation and that the trail led right to the White House. Nixon angrily denied it, but soon the police vans started arriving for some of his closest aides and the world learned that Nixon had secretly taped White House discussions. The courts demanded the tapes and after a long tussle the White House handed them over. They were dynamite.

The White House tapes had long blank passages that had obviously been wiped, but the parts that survived were damaging enough. Nixon was clearly heard shouting in the foulest language demanding that the whole affair be covered up. He had a choice: Stay and be impeached or walk. He walked.

OnTheOneHand

Some historians say that Nixon’s presidency shouldn’t be defined by Watergate, claiming that it overlooks his real achievements at home and abroad; others say Nixon was a shady character who brought it on himself.

After Nixon and Watergate

After Watergate, the seventies didn’t bring much good news America’s way:

bulletPresident Gerald Ford issued a pardon to Nixon and saw America through its bicentennial celebrations but couldn’t solve America’s economic crisis.

bulletPresident Jimmy Carter kept up the SALT talks with Russia, negotiated a deal between Israel and Egypt, and demanded that other countries respect human rights. No one took much notice.

bulletThe nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania overheated and threatened a nuclear catastrophe. Luckily the emergency was prevented but it was a close call.

bulletIran had an Islamic revolution that toppled the Shah and turned the country into America’s Enemy Number One. Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took the staff hostage. President Carter could do nothing about it.

The Eighties, Reagan, and the End of the Cold War

Former film actor Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 by an America tired of the well-meaning but weak Carter White House. People joked about Reagan’s short attention span and hazy grasp on detail but he did a lot better than people expected and the people loved his style. He brazened it out when sources revealed he’d been backing the Contra guerrillas fighting the socialist government of Nicaragua with the profits from illegal sales to, er, Iran and got away with it (see Chapter 13 for more about Nicaragua).

Reagan abandoned Carter’s talk of détente (easing of tension) with the Soviets: He called them the ‘evil empire’ and massively expanded America’s stockpile of nuclear missiles. The Soviets tried to keep up but their economy was feeling the strain and Reagan raised the stakes still higher with ‘Star Wars’, officially the Strategic Defence Initiative, a system of killer satellites in space. With Russia facing bankruptcy, the new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to meet Reagan and talk. The two men got on famously and went further than anyone had expected: They agreed to scrap the whole missile programme. Suddenly the Americans and Russians ditched their Cold War posturing and became best buddies. Reagan’s successor, George Bush, declared the Cold War over and a New World Order about to begin.

So I guess Ronald Reagan had the last laugh.

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