by Jill Lepore
Five days before his inauguration, in January 1973, Nixon announced the end of the war in Vietnam; the peace treaty would be signed in Paris later that month. In his inaugural address, on the twentieth, he heralded the beginning of a new era of peace and progress, driven by a conservative revolution. “Abroad and at home, the time has come to turn away from the condescending policies of paternalism—of ‘Washington knows best,’” he said. “Let us encourage individuals at home and nations abroad to do more for themselves, to decide more for themselves.” If Americans had trusted too much in government, this wasn’t because government couldn’t be trusted, because presidents had lied to the American people; this was because people should do more for themselves. The atrocities waged in the name of the American people in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, the chaos on American streets—these were not the fault of elected officials who made grave mistakes, lied to the press, and obstructed justice. These things were the faults of liberalism, which had taught Americans to expect too much of government. “In trusting too much in government, we have asked of it more than it can deliver,” Nixon declared. “This leads only to inflated expectations, to reduced individual effort, and to a disappointment and frustration that erode confidence both in what government can do and in what people can do.” Kennedy had urged Americans, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” Nixon urged Americans to ask what they could do for themselves.
Two days after the inauguration, Lyndon Johnson, sixty-four, had a heart attack at his ranch in Texas. Johnson, who had given up his sixty-cigarettes-a-day habit after his first heart attack in 1955, had smoked his first cigarette in fourteen years on the plane ride home from Nixon’s first inauguration. Alone at home on January 22, seized with pains in his chest, he telephoned for help, but help arrived too late.
Ten days before his death, in his last interview, with Walter Cronkite, a weary Johnson, in a button-down flannel shirt and thick, wire-framed eyeglasses, had talked with a swelling pride about the role he’d played in advancing civil rights: the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the “We Shall Overcome” speech he’d made during the crisis at Selma, and his 1967 appointment of Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. “We’re living in a fast age, and all of us are rather impatient, and, more important, we’re rather intolerant of the opinions of our fellow man and his judgments and his conduct and his traditions and his way of life,” Johnson told Cronkite, his languid voice heavy with pain. When Johnson died, Thurgood Marshall said, “He died of a broken heart.”129
Nixon’s own collapse came more slowly, a festering, self-inflicted wound. In February, the Senate voted to convene a special committee to investigate the Watergate burglary. In May, Nixon’s incoming attorney general, Elliot Richardson, named Archibald Cox as a special prosecutor. In July, the Senate committee learned about the tapes, but when Cox subpoenaed them, Nixon refused to turn them over, citing executive privilege. The cover-up had gone badly. Charges against Ellsberg were dropped when the Watergate investigation revealed that Liddy’s operatives had broken into the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist in California. Still, Nixon had little fear of impeachment with the notoriously corrupt and much-despised Agnew as his vice president. (He called Agnew the “assassins’ dilemma.”)130 But in October, Agnew pled no contest to a charge of tax evasion and resigned. Ten days later, in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon told Richardson to fire Cox; when Richardson refused and resigned instead, Nixon told Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to do it; Ruckelshaus also resigned. Finally, Nixon got Solicitor General Robert Bork to fire Cox—an abuse of power that would haunt Bork, the FBI, and the Justice Department itself.
“Act like a winner,” Nixon wrote in a note to himself, listing his New Year’s resolutions. But his efforts to block the release of the tapes failed. Finally, in April 1974, he released 1,200 pages of transcripts to 46 tapes. The public discovered the nature of Nixon’s wrath, his pettiness, and his vengefulness. But the June 23, 1972, transcripts were not included, and when the committee demanded them, the White House refused, and the case went to the Supreme Court, in United States v. Nixon. While the justices were deliberating, eighty-three-year-old Earl Warren, who had retired from the court five years before, had a heart attack. On July 9, Justices William O. Douglas and William J. Brennan went to see him at Georgetown University Hospital. Warren grabbed Douglas’s hand. “If Nixon is not forced to turn over tapes of his conversations with the ring of men who were conversing on their violations of the law,” Warren warned, “then liberty will soon be dead in this nation.” Brennan and Douglas assured him that the court would order the president to hand over the tapes. Warren died hours later. The Supreme Court delivered its unanimous opinion on July 24 (Nixon nominee William Rehnquist recused himself): the White House had to release the tapes.131
The content of the tapes was reported on August 6, 1974. Impeachment seemed certain. To avoid it, Nixon announced his resignation the next day, speaking into television cameras from his desk at the White House. In a brief, curt speech, he touted his foreign policy achievements, which were many, and of deep and abiding significance. He’d opened diplomatic relations with China, after a quarter century. For all that he’d done to prolong it, he had in fact ended the war in Vietnam. He’d improved U.S. relations in the Middle East. He’d negotiated arms limitation agreements with the Soviet Union, building on relationships he’d established on his trip to Moscow in 1959. He said nearly nothing about conditions in the United States, except to allude to “the turbulent history of this era”—a turbulence he had done little to alleviate and much to aggravate.132
Nixon left the White House by helicopter on August 9, 1974. The next morning, bidding farewell to his White House staff, he said, “Always remember, others may hate you—but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.”133 Then, carrying on his stooped shoulders the weight of a troubled nation, he walked down a red carpet on the South Lawn to a waiting helicopter, climbed the stairs to its open door, and turned back to deliver his trademark wave, spreading both arms wide. Disappearing inside, he flew away, last seen peering out through a bulletproof window as the whirling helicopter wended its way toward the Washington Monument and over the National Mall, where another man had not so very long ago told a story about a dream.
Fifteen
BATTLE LINES
Phyllis Schlafly led a resurgent conservative movement in the 1970s by making opposition to equal rights one of its signature issues.
BETTY FORD AND MORLEY SAFER WERE SITTING ON either end of a floral sofa in the solarium on the third floor of the White House on a summer’s day in 1975 when the CBS 60 Minutes reporter asked the First Lady what she thought about equal rights and abortion. Safer wore a black suit; Ford, a former fashion model and dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company, wore a beige dress: a belted, gathered smock with a yoked neck. Safer kept apologizing for asking questions about subjects that he described as “taboo,” but Ford answered each question with candor, even though her answers were often at odds with the views of her husband and, increasingly, of the Republican Party. After the president watched the hour-long interview, he told his wife, “Well, honey, there goes about 20 million votes.”1 He was not entirely wrong.
Betty Ford’s 60 Minutes interview came two years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade and at a moment when the Equal Rights Amendment seemed mere months away from becoming law. These two issues would together produce the greatest cleavage in American politics since the debate over slavery.
The origins of the dispute lie in the Constitution itself, but a turning point came in 1963, a year that saw the publication of both Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and American Women, the official report of the Commission on the Status of Women. The commission, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt and including Pauli Murray, had been established by JFK in 1961, a step he t
ook to quiet the complaint that he was the first president since Hoover whose cabinet did not include a woman.
In The Feminine Mystique, Friedan lamented “the problem that has no name,” the suffering of gingham-aproned housewives, frustrated, lonely, and bored. “Each suburban wife struggled with it alone,” she wrote.2 Betty Ford had that problem.
A congressional wife raising four children, Ford began mixing alcohol and painkillers in 1964 and had a nervous breakdown in 1965, the year her husband assumed a new national prominence. “Congress got a new Minority Leader, and I lost a husband,” she later said.3 While Ford struggled with loneliness, Friedan and Murray led a small group of women and men who established the National Organization for Women in 1966.4 The next year, NOW made the ERA its top priority and added to its agenda the legalization of abortion.
Nothing about equal rights for women, contraception, or abortion is inherently partisan. The public was divided on many issues relating to women, but in the 1960s and 1970s, and well into the 1980s, those divisions did not fall along party lines.5 Only in 1980 did the leadership of the two parties place legalized abortion on their platforms, Republicans against and Democrats in favor (in their 1976 platforms, both parties equivocated on the issue).6 But by the 1990s, abortion had become an overwhelmingly partisan issue—a defining issue of a widening divide.7
Nor were gun ownership and gun safety legislation partisan issues before the 1970s. But during that decade, political strategists undertook the work of making guns partisan, too. In truth, the very character of partisanship changed. Paul Weyrich, a conservative strategist and a founder of the Heritage Foundation, announced a new war. “It is a war of ideology, it’s a war of ideas, and it’s a war about our way of life,” Weyrich said. “And it has to be fought with the same intensity, I think, and dedication as you would fight a shooting war.”8
In the waning decades of the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as matters of law and order than as matters of life and death. Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom. How this sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation. “The economy, stupid” became the mantra of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, when he tried to set aside the guns-and-abortion divide.9 That proved impossible. Especially after the Cold War came to an end, a domestic cold war began, uncompromising, all-or-nothing, murder or freedom, life or death.
I.
MAKING SOCIAL ISSUES into partisan issues took a great deal of work, much of it done by political strategists and well-paid political consultants and made easier by mainframe and desktop computers. By the 1970s, the Lie Factory that had begun manufacturing public opinion in the 1930s when Campaigns, Inc., opened its doors and George Gallup started conducting polls had grown into a billion-dollar industry that divided the electorate by inciting outrage, having demonstrated that, the more emotional the issue, the likelier voters were to turn up at the polls. And the most emotional issues—those most likely to get out the vote—turned out to be abortion and guns.
In the first decades of the twenty-first century, the Internet would come to function as a polarization machine, fast, efficient, and cheap, and all but automated. But in the last decades of the twentieth century, the work was still done manually. Quite how much labor and money went into the project can only be appreciated by how differently issues like abortion and guns looked before the work began.
Before the 1980s, neither the ERA nor women’s health were partisan issues, except insofar as Republicans had historically offered more support to equal rights and family planning than had Democrats. Planned Parenthood, the birth control organization founded by Margaret Sanger in 1916, had forced her out decades before her death in 1966, objecting to her feminism. Beginning in the 1920s, its leaders had been more Republican than Democrat. By the 1950s, many were conservatives—Barry Goldwater and his wife served on the board of Planned Parenthood of Phoenix—family planning having become, politically speaking, a family value. In campaigning for the legalization of contraception, Planned Parenthood also enjoyed the broad support of both doctors and clergymen. In 1958, Alan F. Guttmacher, chief of obstetrics at Mount Sinai Hospital, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia, and a member of Planned Parenthood’s medical advisory board, challenged New York City municipal hospitals to reverse an institutional policy that forbade doctors from giving out contraceptives or contraceptive information. Hospital chaplains lined up behind him. In 1960, Planned Parenthood’s Clergymen’s National Advisory Council issued a statement, “The Ethics of Family Planning,” describing family planning as fulfilling “the will of God” by allowing married couples to enjoy intercourse for the sake of love.10
Efforts to legalize abortion were begun in the 1960s, not by women’s rights activists, but by the doctors, lawyers, and clergymen who ran Planned Parenthood. In 1962, when Guttmacher became president of Planned Parenthood, he launched a campaign to secure federal government support for family planning programs for the poor, to overturn bans on contraception, and to liberalize abortion law. In 1965, former presidents Eisenhower and Truman, Republican and Democrat, together served as co-chairmen of a Planned Parenthood committee, signaling an across-the-aisle commitment to contraception. That year, in Griswold v. Connecticut, the Supreme Court struck down state bans on contraception, overturning the conviction of Estelle Griswold, the head of a Planned Parenthood clinic in Connecticut, who’d been arrested for dispensing contraception. It had been nearly fifty years since Sanger had been arrested on the same charges. But the right to contraception secured in Griswold would turn out to be fragile.11
The men who wrote and ratified the Constitution had left women, sex, marriage out of it. “Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams had warned her husband in 1776, advice he had ignored. The consequences of writing women out of the republic’s founding documents were both lasting and devastating. That the framers of the Constitution had not resolved the question of slavery had led to a civil war. That they regarded women as unequal to men nearly did the same. Over the course of American history, women had often written themselves into the Constitution by way of analogy. Discrimination by sex was like discrimination by race, and language that barred one could be understood to bar another. This, however, was not the argument by which the Supreme Court granted to women the right to contraception and abortion. In Griswold, the court based its ruling not on equality but instead on privacy.
“We deal with a right of privacy older than the Bill of Rights,” Justice Douglas said in the majority opinion. Although no right to privacy is mentioned in either the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, Douglas maintained that it is nevertheless there, not in words, but in the shadow cast by words, in “penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.”12 This would prove a dangerously imperfect support for the many cases that would try to build upon Griswold over the next half century.
In 1969, Nixon had asked Congress to increase federal funding for family planning, and in the House, George H. W. Bush, a decorated navy pilot and young Republican congressman from Texas, pressed the case. “We need to make family planning a household word,” Bush said. (So known was Bush for his support for family planning that he got the nickname “Rubbers.”) In 1972, in Eisenstadt v. Baird, the court extended Griswold’s notion of privacy from married couples to individuals. “If the right of privacy means anything,” Justice Brennan wrote, “it is the right of the individual, married or single, to be free from unwarranted governmental intrusion into matters so fundamentally affecting a person as the decision whether to bear or beget a child.”13
Between 1967 and 1970, under pressure from doctors and lawyers, often supported by clergy, legislators began lifting restrictions on abortion in sixteen states, including California, where the law was signed by Governor Reagan. When the Catholic Church objected to New York’s new abortion law, in apocalyptic terms, Protesta
nt and Jewish clergy asked whether “the cause of ecumenism is best served by attributing to us the advocacy of murder and genocide.” In 1970, Nixon signed Title X, which included a provision under which doctors on military bases could perform abortions. “No American woman should be denied access to family planning assistance because of her economic condition,” Nixon declared that year.14
But if a broad, bipartisan political consensus supported family planning, women themselves had grown divided over many other matters. The “women’s movement” of the 1960s and 1970s was really three movements: radical feminism, liberal feminism, and conservative antifeminism. The radical women’s movement came out of the New Left, where women had found precious little support for arguments about the oppression of women. “Let them eat cock!” said one Berkeley student leader.15 Stokely Carmichael, asked about the position of women in the Black Power movement, answered, “The only position for women in the movement is prone.” Radical feminists fought for liberation from the bondage of womanhood, the shackles of femininity. Their arguments, at first Marxist and economic, turned swiftly to culture. Emblematically, Shulamith Firestone of the New York Radical Women held a funeral for “Traditional Womanhood,” burying a mannequin with blond hair and curlers. Firestone’s form of guerrilla theater gained a national audience in 1968 during a protest of the Miss America contest, when radical feminists crowned a sheep Miss America; burned girdles, high-heeled shoes, and Playboy magazine in a trash can; and unfurled a “Women’s Liberation” banner, shouting, “Freedom for Women!”16
Carmichael notwithstanding, radical feminism had been deeply influenced by the Black Power movement, with its disdain for liberalism and its emphasis on separatism and pride, and had close ties, too, to the nascent gay rights movement, which had begun in the 1950s but grew in strength and intensity over the course of the next decade. In 1965, lesbian and gay rights activists picketed the United Nations, Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, and the White House (three times). In 1968, at a homosexual rights conference in Chicago, participants, inspired by “Black Is Beautiful,” declared, “Gay Is Good.” A year after a 1969 police raid of New York’s Stonewall Inn, homosexual rights groups held a march from Greenwich Village to Central Park. “We have to come out into the open and stop being ashamed or else people will go on treating us as freaks,” said one activist. “This march is an affirmation and declaration of our new pride.”17
