Chapter 18
In This Chapter
● Electing and losing JFK
● Entering the war in Vietnam
● Trying to put an end to discrimination
● Forming a counterculture in protest
● Impeaching Nixon
The decade of the 1960s began with a defeat for Richard Nixon and ended in victory for him. In between, America became mired in a war it never understood and saw its citizens take to the streets in the name of peace, justice, and racial rage.
By the mid-1970s, U.S. streets were clearing, Nixon had suffered the last — and worst — defeat of his career, and America was trying to figure out just what the heck had happened in the preceding 14 years.
Electing an Icon
He was rich, handsome, witty, and married to a beautiful woman, and he looked good on the increasingly important medium of television. His opponent was middle class, jowly, whiny, and married to a plain woman, and on TV he looked like 50 miles of bad road.
Even so, Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy won the presidency in 1960 over Vice President Richard Nixon by a very narrow margin — and only, some said, because his father, bootlegger-turned-tycoon Joseph Kennedy, had rigged the results in Illinois and Texas.
Call for volunteers
"Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans . . . .
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country."
— John F. Kennedy, inaugural address, January 20, 1961.
After eight years of the dull and fatherly Eisenhower, “Jack” and Jacqueline Kennedy excited the interest of the country. The administration was dubbed “Camelot,” after the mythical realm of King Arthur. Kennedy — known to headline writers as “JFK” — gave off an aura of youth, vigor, and shiny virtue. In truth, however, he was plagued with health problems from a bad back to venereal disease, popped pain pills and took amphetamine injections, was an insatiable womanizer, and didn’t mind bending the truth when it suited his purposes.
Kennedy called on Americans to push on with a “new frontier” of challenges, and the first big challenge came very soon after he took office.
The Bay of Pigs
Cuba had been a thorn in the United States’ side since 1959, when dictator Fulgencio Batista was overthrown by a young communist named Fidel Castro. Castro soon became an ardent anti-American, ordering the takeover of U.S.- owned businesses in Cuba and establishing close ties with the Soviet Union.
Kennedy gave his approval to a scheme that centered on anti-Castro Cuban exiles being trained by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for an invasion of the island. The idea was that the Cuban people would rally to the invaders’ side and oust Castro. The invasion took place April 17, 1961, at the Bay of Pigs on Cuba’s southern coast. It was a disaster. No one rushed to their side, and many of the invaders were captured and held for two years before being ransomed by the U.S. government.
The resulting embarrassment to America encouraged the Soviet Union to increase pressure in Europe by erecting a wall dividing East and West Berlin and resuming the testing of nuclear weapons. Kennedy, meanwhile, tried to counter the Soviet moves by renewing U.S. weapons testing, increasing foreign aid to Third World nations, and establishing the Peace Corps to export U.S. ideals, as well as technical aid. But the Russians weren’t impressed, and the world found itself on the brink of nuclear war.
Advocating for birds: Rachel Carson
Because a friend of hers noticed some birds dying, Rachel Carson saved millions more.
Carson was born in Pennsylvania in 1907. She earned a zoology degree from Johns Hopkins University, and after teaching awhile, went to work for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries. In 1951, her second book, The Sea Around Us, became a bestseller, allowing Carson to devote herself to writing full-time.
One day, Carson got a letter from a friend in Massachusetts who had a small bird sanctuary. The friend had noticed that a lot of birds had died after the area was sprayed with the insecticide DDT to kill mosquitoes. Carson decided to investigate.
The result, in 1962, was SilentSpring, a carefully researched and eloquently written indictment of the pesticide's impact on the reproductive functions of fish and birds. The book started an avalanche of controversy around DDT. Finally, in 1972, the Nixon Administration ordered a ban on the substance.
Carson didn't live to see the ban. She died of cancer in 1964, at the age of 57. But her landmark work is considered by many to be the start of the modern environmental movement in America.
Facing the possibility of nuclear war
During the summer of 1962, the Soviets began developing nuclear missile sites in Cuba. That meant they could easily strike targets over much of North and South America. When air reconnaissance photos confirmed the sites’ presence on October 14, JFK had to make a tough choice: Destroy the sites and quite possibly trigger World War III, or do nothing, and not only expose the country to nuclear destruction but, in effect, concede first place in the world domination race to the USSR.
Kennedy decided to get tough. On October 22, 1963, he went on national television and announced the U.S. Navy would throw a blockade around Cuba and turn away any ships carrying materials that could be used at the missile sites. He also demanded the sites be dismantled. Then the world waited for the Russian reaction.
On October 26, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev sent a message suggesting the missiles would be removed if the United States promised not to invade Cuba and eventually removed some U.S. missiles from Turkey. The crisis — perhaps the closest the world came to nuclear conflict during the Cold War — was over, and the payoffs were ample.
A hotline was installed between the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union to help defuse future confrontations, and in July 1963, all the major countries except China and France agreed to stop aboveground testing of nuclear weapons.
A dark day in Dallas
Even with his success in the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy admitted he was generally frustrated by his first thousand days in office. Despite considerable public popularity, many of JFK’s social and civil rights programs had made little progress in a Democrat-controlled but conservative Congress. Still, Kennedy was looking forward to running for a second term in 1964, and on November 22, 1963, he went to Texas to improve his political standing in that state.
While riding in an open car in a motorcade in Dallas, Kennedy was shot and killed by a sniper. A former Marine and one-time Soviet Union resident named Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested for the crime. Two days later, a national television audience watched in disbelief as Oswald himself was shot and killed by a Dallas nightclub owner named Jack Ruby, while Oswald was being moved to a different jail.
America was stunned. The age of Camelot was over. And a veteran politician from Texas named Lyndon B. Johnson was president of the United States.
Sending Troops to Vietnam
If John F. Kennedy represented a fresh new face in the White House, his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, was a classic example of the old school of U.S. politics. A Texan, LBJ had served in both houses of Congress for more than 20 years before being elected as JFK’s vice president in 1960 and was considered one of the most effective Senate leaders in history.
As president, Johnson inherited a host of problems, not the least of which was a growing mess in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam. Before World War II, Vietnam had been a French colony, and after the Japanese were defeated and driven out, it reverted to French control. But despite U.S. monetary aid, France was driven out of the country in 1954 by communist forces led by a man named Ho Chi Minh. The country was divided in two, with the communists controlling the northern half. Elections were scheduled for 1956 to reunite the two halves.
But they never took place, mostly because South Vietnam dictator Ngo Dinh Diem was afraid he would lose. The U.S. supported Diem (at least until 1963, when he became so unpopular he was assassinated with the U.S. government’s unofficial blessing). At first, the support amounted to financial aid. Then U.S. military “advisors,” who were not directly engaged in combat, were sent. But the pressure to do more mounted as the fighting dragged on, and by the time of Kennedy’s assassination, 16,000 “advisors” had been sent to Vietnam.
Sinking deeper into a confusing war
Shortly after taking office, Johnson ordered 5,000 more U.S. troops to Vietnam and made plans to send another 5,000. In August 1964, he announced that U.S. Navy ships had been attacked in international waters near the Gulf of Tonkin. Congress reacted by overwhelmingly approving a resolution that gave Johnson the power to “take all necessary measures” to protect U.S. forces. A few months later, LBJ ordered U.S. bombings of targets in North Vietnam. By March 1965, more than 100,000 U.S. troops were in the country. Within three years, that number had swelled to more than 500,000.
It was a lot of people to fight a war no one seemed to understand how to win. The United States had overwhelming military superiority. But it was mostly designed for fighting a conventional war, with big battles and conquered territories.
Vietnam was different. It was essentially a civil war, which meant it was sometimes tough to figure out who was on whose side. The communists in the south were called the Vietcong. They were aided by North Vietnamese Army troops, referred to as the NVA. The dense jungle terrain made it difficult to locate and fight large concentrations of the enemy. There were conflicts between U.S. political leaders who wanted to contain the war and military leaders who wanted to expand it. Finally, the lack of clear objectives and declining public support demoralized many American soldiers.
Taking a look at the Tet Offensive
On January 31, 1968 — the Vietnamese New Year, called Tet — communist forces unleashed massive attacks on U.S. positions throughout Vietnam.
The Tet Offensive, televised nightly in the United States, shocked many Americans who had the idea that the United States was rather easily handling the enemy. In fact, U.S. forces eventually pushed the North Vietnamese forces back and inflicted huge casualties on them. But the impact the fighting had on U.S. public opinion was equally huge. Opposition to the war grew more heated and contributed mightily to LBJ’s decision not to run for reelection in 1968.
Proclaiming himself "the Greatest": Muhammad Ali
He was the most famous sports figure in the world, perhaps the most famous person, period, and if you didn't believe it, all you had to do was ask him. "I am," he would reply, "the Greatest."
Ali was born Cassius Clay in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1942. After a successful amateur boxing career, which included winning a gold medal at the 1960 Olympics, he turned pro. In 1964, Clay won the heavyweight championship and successfully defended it nine times over the next three years. Flamboyant, witty, charming, and arrogant, he was resented and disliked by many white Americans for not being humble enough.
He became even more controversial when he became a Black Muslim and changed his name.
Then in 1967, he was stripped of his title and sentenced to five years in prison for refusing to be drafted into the military, on grounds of his religious beliefs. The Supreme Court eventually reversed the conviction and Ali won the title back in 1974 from George Foreman, defending it 10 more times before losing it in 1978 to Leon Spinks and then winning it for a third time in a rematch with Spinks later that year.
Ali announced his retirement from the ring in 1979 (although he returned for two losing matches in 1980). The onset of Parkinson's disease has made it difficult for him to speak in recent years, but he managed an electrifying appearance as a torchbearer at the 1996 Olympics.
Increasing Pressure in ’Nam and Escalating Fears at Home
With Johnson out of the 1968 race, Republican Richard Nixon narrowly defeated Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, and Alabama Gov. George Wallace, an ardent segregationist who ran as an independent.
Nixon and his top foreign affairs advisor, Henry Kissinger, tried several tactics to extricate the United States from the war without just turning over South Vietnam to the communists. One tactic was to coerce the South Vietnamese government into taking more responsibility for the war. To force the issue, the United States began withdrawing some troops in 1969. At the same time, however, Nixon tried another tactic by ordering an increase in the bombing of North Vietnam, as well as in the neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia. In essence, he was trying to put pressure on both sides to stop the fighting.
Vietnam by the numbers
The following numbers tell a story of their own:
● Number of Americans killed: 58,174
● Number wounded: 304,000
● Cost, 1950-1974: $150 billion
● Peak number of U.S. troops stationed in Vietnam: 535,000
● Average age of U.S. soldier killed: 23
● Age of youngest U.S. soldier killed: 16
● Age of oldest U.S. soldier killed: 62
● Average number of days in combat by U.S. infantry solider in one year in Vietnam: 240
In 1970, Nixon approved the invasion of Cambodia by U.S. troops who were pursuing North Vietnamese soldiers based there. The decision intensified opposition to the war, and massive anti-war demonstrations spread across the country. At Kent State University in Ohio, National Guard troops shot and killed four student demonstrators.
Anti-war fever grew even stronger in 1971, when The New York Times published what became known as the Pentagon Papers. The documents, leaked by a former defense department worker named Daniel Ellsberg, proved the government had lied about the war’s conduct. Later that year, an Army lieutenant named William Calley was convicted of supervising the massacre of more than 100 unarmed civilians at a village called My Lai.
Despite the mounting opposition, Nixon easily won reelection in 1972, in part because of a politically inept opponent (U.S. Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota), and in part because Kissinger announced a few weeks before the election that a peace settlement was not too far off.
After the election, however, Nixon ordered heavy bombing of North Vietnam’s capital of Hanoi. The bombing failed to break North Vietnamese resolve, and 15 U.S. bombers were shot down. On January 27, 1973, the United States and North Vietnam announced they had reached an agreement to end the fighting and would work to negotiate a settlement.
The peace treaty proved to be a face-saving sham, allowing U.S. troops to be withdrawn before the communists closed in. In April 1975, North Vietnamese troops overran South Vietnam and took over the entire country. America had suffered its first decisive defeat in a war, touching off a reassessment of its role in the world — and on how it would approach involvement in conflicts in the future.
Continuing the Fight for Civil Rights
Although the civil rights movement began in the 1950s, it reached full steam in the 1960s, marked by several new tactics that proved effective in breaking down discrimination.
Enforcing their rights: African Americans
In February 1960, four African American students sat down at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and refused to leave after they were denied service. The “sit-in” became a strategy used across the country, and by the end of 1961, some 70,000 people had taken part in sit-ins. In May 1961, black and white activists began “freedom rides,” traveling in small groups to the South to test local segregation laws (see Figure 18-1).
Figure 18-1: Police removing demonstrators from a restaurant.
The inspirational leader of the movement was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a courageous and eloquent orator who founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and won the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize for his civil rights work.
But not all African Americans were enamored of King’s non-violent-demonstration approach. They also didn’t believe equality could be attained through cooperation among the races. Leaders such as the Black Muslims’ Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X warned African Americans to neither expect nor seek help from whites. “If someone puts a hand on you,” said Malcolm X, “send him to the cemetery.”
Both approaches eventually put pressure on the federal government to act. President Kennedy and his brother Robert (who was also his attorney general) used federal troops and marshals to force the admission of black students to the state universities in Alabama and Mississippi. In June 1963, JFK proposed a bill that would ban racial discrimination in hotels, restaurants, and other public places and give the federal government more authority to clamp down on state and local agencies that dragged their feet in enforcing civil rights laws. Black organizers gathered 200,000 demonstrators for a march in Washington, D.C., to support the Kennedy proposal.
After Kennedy’s assassination, JFK’s efforts were taken up by Johnson. Despite his Southern roots, LBJ was a committed liberal whose “Great Society” programs mirrored the New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s. In addition to providing more federal aid to America’s down-and-outs, LBJ pushed the 1964 Civil Rights Act through Congress. It featured many of the same elements Kennedy had proposed. Johnson followed it with another bill in 1965 that strengthened federal safeguards for black voters’ rights.
But events and emotions moved faster than politics. In early 1965, Malcolm X, who had softened his earlier opposition to interracial cooperation, was murdered by Black Muslim extremists who considered such talk traitorous. A few months later, a march led by Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery in Alabama was viciously attacked by state and local police, while a horrified national television audience watched.
Tired of waiting for an equal chance at the U.S. economic pie, many African Americans began demanding affirmative action programs in which employers would actively recruit minorities for jobs. “Black Power” became a rallying cry for thousands of young African Americans.
The anger manifested itself in a rash of race riots in the mid-and late 1960s. The first was in August 1965, in the Los Angeles community of Watts. Before it was over, six days of rioting had led to 34 deaths, 850 injuries, 3,000 arrests, and more than $200 million in damages. Riots followed in the next two years in dozens of cities, including New York, Chicago, Newark, and Detroit, where 43 people were killed in July 1967.
Then things got worse. On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. A white man named James Earl Ray was eventually arrested and convicted of the crime. More riots followed across the country, most notably in Washington, D.C.
The riots, in turn, triggered a backlash by many whites. George Wallace, a racist and ardent segregationist, got 13.5 percent of the vote in the 1968 presidential election, and much of the steam of the civil rights movement had dissipated by the time Richard Nixon moved into the White House.
Big dreams
"I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed. . . . I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
— Martin Luther King Jr., August 28, 1963, before the Lincoln Memorial, Washington, D.C.
Challenging the system: Latin Americans
African Americans weren’t the only minority group on the move in the 1960s. Americans of Latin American descent had been treated as second-class citizens since the 1840s. While their numbers increased during and after World War II, mainly because thousands of Mexicans came to the country as a source of cheap labor, Latinos were largely ghettoized in inner-city barrios and rural areas of the Southwest. They were generally invisible in terms of the political process.
Between 1960 and 1970, however, the number of Latinos in the United States tripled, from three million to nine million, with perhaps another five million living in the country illegally. Cubans came to Florida, Puerto Ricans to New York, and Mexicans to California. With the increase in numbers came an increased interest in better political, social, and economic treatment for La Raza (the race). Leaders, particularly among Mexican Americans or Chicanos, sprang up: Reies Lopez Tijerina in New Mexico, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales in Colorado, and Cesar Chavez in California.
Latinos began to pursue organized efforts to gain access to the educational and economic systems and fight racial stereotypes. Latin Americans were elected to municipal and state offices and gradually began to organize themselves into a formidable political force in some parts of the country.
Maintaining their culture: Native Americans
No minority group had been treated worse than Native Americans, nor had any group been less able to do anything about it. They had average incomes lower than other groups, higher rates of alcoholism, and shorter life expectancies than any other ethnic group. And because their numbers were few, the federal government since the turn of the century had largely ignored them.
Cesar Chavez
His opponents accused him of "sour grapes," but to Cesar Chavez, it was merely a question of tactics.
Chavez was born in 1927 on a small family farm near Yuma, Arizona. During the Depression, his family lost the farm and was forced to move, becoming laborers on other people's farms in California and the Southwest. Chavez only occasionally attended school because the family moved so much, following the crops. After serving in the Navy during World War II, Chavez settled in San Jose, California, and became an official in a Latino community service organization.
In 1962, using his life savings, he founded the United Farm Workers (UFW), a union for a group that no other union was interested in. Chavez was an advocate of nonviolence, and he believed the interests of the union should extend beyond labor contracts to other areas of social justice for farm workers.
By the mid-1960s, Chavez and the UFW had begun to organize farm workers in earnest. When strikes failed to work, he began boycotting products, particularly grapes. The aim of the boycotts was to get consumers not to buy the product until a fair labor agreement was in place. By the end of the 1970s, the UFW's membership was more than 70,000, the state of California had created a state board to mediate disputes between growers and workers, and for the first time, the nation's most downtrodden workers had union contracts.
Chavez died in 1993. The following year, his work not only as a union leader but also as a civil rights leader and humanitarian was recognized when he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
In the 1950s, federal laws and policies had tried to push Native Americans into white society and into abandoning traditional ways. But in the 1960s, some Native Americans began to push back. In 1961, the National Indian Youth Council was established, followed by the American Indian Movement in 1968. The efforts of these and other groups helped lead to the Indian Civil Rights Act in 1968, which granted U.S. rights to Native Americans living on reservations while allowing them to set their own laws according to tribal customs.
It would be nice to say that all the racial wrongs in America were made right by the tumultuous events of the 1960s. It would also be absurd. But it isn’t absurd to say the period was an overall success in terms of civil rights. It established key new laws, instilled a sense of self-pride in minority groups, and served notice that the issue would not be swept under the rug.
“Lord, we ain’t what we ought to be,” observed Martin Luther King Jr. “We ain’t what we wanna be. We ain’t what we gonna be. But, thank God, we ain’t what we were.”
Entering a Generation in Revolt
Not all the groups fighting the status quo were tied to each other by race or national origin. The war in Vietnam and the blooming civil rights movement triggered political activism among many young Americans, particularly on college campuses. Groups like Students for a Democratic Society appeared, and activities like draft card burnings became as common as pep rallies.
Draft dodging, drugs, and demonstrations
Because of opposition to the war, thousands of draft-age males fled to Canada and other countries rather than serve in the military. Their actions baffled many of their parents, whose generations had served in World War II and Korea, and widened the gap of misunderstanding between the age groups.
The gap was also evident in the younger generation’s freer attitudes toward sex, public profanity, and hairstyles. More troubling, and longer lasting in terms of its impact, was the use of drugs by the counterculture. The use of marijuana and hallucinogenics like LSD became commonplace. Most of it could be attributed to the excesses of youth. But it was also a disturbing preview of the plagues of drug use that would sweep over the country during the rest of the century.
Perhaps nowhere was the generation gap more visible then at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. While mostly middle-aged and middle-class delegates debated an anti-war plank for the party platform, hundreds of mostly young and poor demonstrators battled with club-swinging police in the streets outside the convention center. “The whole world is watching!” the demonstrators taunted. Ironically, many of those watching were so troubled by the sight of young people defying authority that they voted for Richard Nixon in 1968, and again in 1972. Nixon appealed to these voters, whom he called the “silent majority,” because he spoke out strongly against the demonstrations.
The rise of feminism
Draft cards weren’t the only things being burned during the period. Women who resented their secondary roles in the workplace, the home, and the halls of government periodically protested, too — and they had plenty to protest. Women faced barriers in getting jobs, and when they did find jobs, they were paid far less than men doing the same work: In 1970, women earned 60 cents for every dollar paid a man. Married women were denied credit in their own names, even when they had jobs of their own.
Jim Henson
They might not have known who Jim Henson was, but to millions of children, Henson's alter ego was the best-loved amphibian in the world.
Henson was born in Mississippi in 1936. While a freshman at the University of Maryland, Henson began doing a kids' puppet show on a local TV station, with characters like "Pierre, the French Rat." Soon he developed puppets out of foam rubber rather than wood to make them more lifelike. He called them "Muppets" — a combination of ""marionettes" and "puppets."
In 1969, the Children's Television Workshop asked Henson to bring his pals to a Public Broadcasting System neighborhood called Sesame Street. Soon, characters like Kermit
the Frog (originally made from an old green coat and a ping pong ball and operated by Henson himself), Bert and Ernie, Big Bird, and Cookie Monster were among the most recognizable TV personalities in the world. They taught kids to read, write, count, and recognize that people were pretty much the same all over. The Muppets also had a successful comedy-variety show and starred in several movies.
Henson died suddenly in 1990, at the age of 53. "He was our era's Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, and Marx Brothers," said a longtime colleague. "And indeed, he drew from all of them to create a new art form that influenced popular culture all over the world."
The women’s liberation movement gave birth to the National Organization of Women (NOW) in 1966, and by 1970 NOW was organizing women’s rights demonstrations and winning court battles over equal pay for equal work. In 1972, Congress approved a constitutional provision called the Equal Rights Amendment and sent it to the states for ratification. But a coalition of conservative and religious groups combined to fight the ERA, and in 1982 it was dead, 3 states short of the 38 needed for ratification.
As it turned out, the amendment hardly mattered, because many of the rights it would have provided were awarded in court decisions. One key decision came in 1973, when in Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court essentially legalized abortion in the first three months of pregnancy. The ruling meant women now had a wider range of legal choices when faced with pregnancy. It also meant the beginning of an intense political, legal, social, and religious battle over abortion that continues today.
Coming out of the closet
The subject of homosexuality was so unspoken in America for most of its history that many Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century had never heard of it or didn’t believe it was real. Even into the 1960s, many psychiatrists believed homosexuality was a mental illness, and same-gender sex between consenting adults was still a crime in many states.
That began to change in the late 1960s, however, as gay men and women began to assert themselves. In June 1969, New York City police busted a gay nightclub called the Stonewall and began arresting patrons. The bust sparked a riot in the predominantly gay and lesbian community of Greenwich Village. Gay activist organizations like the Gay Liberation Front were started. But changing anti-gay laws and homophobic attitudes was still a work in progress in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
Weirdness in the White House
Vietnam and a whole bunch of unhappy people in the streets of America weren’t the only problems Richard Nixon faced when he took over as president in early 1969. Inflation was running wild. Much of the problem was a result of President Johnson’s economic policy of “guns and butter”: paying for the war and expanding social programs at the same time.
Making strides: The Nixon administration
Nixon responded to the situation by cutting government spending and balancing the federal budget for 1969. He also rather reluctantly imposed wage and price freezes on the country. But he wasn’t reluctant at all about dropping federal efforts to enforce school integration laws: He had been elected with Southern support and was mindful that polls showed most Americans opposed forcing kids to take buses to schools in other neighborhoods to achieve racial balance.
Outside of Vietnam, Nixon enjoyed success in foreign policy. He went to China in early 1972, ending 20 years of diplomatic silence between the two countries, and he pursued a policy of ditente (a French term for relaxing of tensions) with the Soviet Union.
These accomplishments, coupled with vague hints of looming peace in Vietnam and a backlash among voters Nixon called the “silent majority” against all the protesting, helped Nixon easily win reelection in 1972. In early 1973, the peace settlement with North Vietnam was announced. And despite Democratic majorities in Congress, Nixon was able to veto bills that challenged his authority in a number of areas. He took advantage of it to greatly expand the White House’s power and cloak its actions from public scrutiny. And then an ex-FBI agent named James McCord wrote a letter to a judge, and the wheels of the Nixon White House began to come off.
Watching it all fall apart: Watergate
In a nutshell, here’s what happened in the greatest presidential scandal in U.S. history (or second-greatest — see Chapter 20):
● On June 17, 1972, McCord and four other men working for the Committee to Re-Elect the President (or CREEP — really) broke into the Democratic Party’s headquarters in the Watergate, a hotel-office building in Washington, D.C. They got caught going through files and trying to plant listening devices. Five days later, Nixon denied any knowledge of it or that his administration played any role in it.
● The burglars went to trial in 1973 and either pled guilty or were convicted.
Before sentencing, McCord wrote a letter to Judge John Sirica, contending that high Republican and White House officials knew about the break-in and had paid the defendants to keep quiet or lie during the trial.
● Investigation of McCord’s charges spread to a special Senate committee.
John Dean, a White House lawyer, told the committee McCord was telling the truth and that Nixon had known of the effort to cover up White House involvement.
● Eventually, all sorts of damaging stuff began to surface, including evidence that key documents linking Nixon to the coverup of the break-in had been destroyed, that the Nixon reelection committee had run a “dirty tricks” campaign against the Democrats, and that the administration had illegally wiretapped the phones of “enemies,” such as journalists who had been critical of Nixon.
● In March 1974, former Atty. Gen. John Mitchell and six top Nixon aides were indicted by a federal grand jury for trying to block the investigation. They were eventually convicted.
● While Nixon continued to deny any involvement, it was revealed he routinely made secret tapes of conversations in his office. Nixon refused to turn over the tapes at first, and when he did agree (after firing a special prosecutor he had appointed to look into the mess and seeing his new attorney general resign in protest), it turned out some of them were missing or had been destroyed. (They were also full of profanity, which greatly surprised people who had an entirely different perception of Nixon.)
● In the summer of 1974, the House Judiciary Committee approved articles of impeachment against the president for obstructing justice.
Small steps and great leaps
It started with a challenge from John F. Kennedy and ended with perhaps the greatest technological feat in human history: Man on the moon.
On May 25, 1961, Kennedy asked Congress for money to put a U.S. astronaut on the moon before the end of the decade. Congress agreed, and more than $1 billion was spent to get to the afternoon of July 20, 1969. At 1:17 p.m. (PDT), a craft carrying two men landed on the lunar surface. A few hours later, astronaut Neil A. Armstrong stepped out. "That's one small step for a man," he said, "one giant leap for mankind."
Armstrong was joined on the surface by Buzz Aldrin, while a third astronaut, Michael Collins, circled above in the mother ship, Columbia. A worldwide television audience estimated at 1 billion people watched from a quarter-million miles away.
Some lunar visit facts: Armstrong and Aldrin spent 21 hours on the surface, but only 2 hours, 15 minutes actually walking around and never ventured farther than 275 yards from their craft. They collected 46 pounds of rocks. And they left behind a plaque attached to the base of the landing craft (they got back to the Columbia in the top half of the two-stage lander.)
The plaque reads: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind."
The tapes clearly showed Nixon had been part of the coverup. On August 8, 1974, he submitted a one-sentence letter of resignation, and then went on television and said, “I have always tried to do what is best for the nation.” He was the first and, so far, only U.S. president to quit the job.
The Watergate scandal rocked the nation, which was already reeling from the Vietnam disaster, economic troubles, assassinations, and all the social unrest of the preceding 15 years. It fell to Nixon’s successor, Vice President Gerald R. Ford, to try to bring back a sense of order and stability to the nation. And no one had voted for him to do it.