Fault Lines

by Kevin M. Kruse

  Stunning as it was, the resignation of the president initially seemed to resolve the crisis. Vice President Gerald Ford called the decision a “selfless and courageous act” that would allow the nation to focus on the real problems it faced. New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis claimed the episode proved the political system worked, noting that the outcome of the impeachment process demonstrated to Americans that a president “may not turn the regular course of justice aside for the sake of his friends or his own political interest. Nor may he use his great power to violate the constitutional rights of individuals—by invading their privacy without legal cause, for example, or by punishing them for their politics.” Writing for the Washington Post, columnist Joseph Kraft said that Nixon had actually brought the country together “in relief at the resignation of the leader who betrayed every value and every friend in a desperate effort to save his own skin.” After outlining the many accomplishments of Nixon’s presidency, Kraft wrote of a leader who tragically lost his way: “Out of pride and sycophancy there was born a monstrous fraud. Contempt for others festered the belief that lies and tricks would work even as mounting evidence showed the truth would out. In the end, Mr. Nixon was alone, divorced from friends and reality in a psychic bunker of his own making.” The public, it seemed, agreed with the politicians and the press that Nixon had been sufficiently humbled. According to polls taken soon after his resignation, 79 percent of Americans thought the president had done the right thing by stepping down; a majority believed that there was now no need for further criminal investigations.1

  Distrusting Government

  If there was a moment when elected officials hoped that Nixon’s resignation might restore trust in government, it vanished quickly. Never elected to national office, President Gerald Ford had ridden a wave of resignations to the top. In October 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew, long dogged by charges of extortion, bribery, and conspiracy, pleaded no contest to lesser charges of tax evasion and resigned in disgrace. Two months later, the Senate confirmed Ford, a congressman from Grand Rapids, Michigan, who served as House minority leader, to be the new vice president. Only eight months after that, Ford found himself promoted again, to the presidency. The nation Ford now sought to govern was reeling from not just the resignations of both the president and vice president in less than a year’s time, but the resulting revelations about the depths of corruption throughout the executive branch.

  After Watergate, both parties agreed: the nation needed to heal. “Our long national nightmare is over,” Ford promised in his first words as president. He urged his countrymen to put the past behind them and move forward with confidence: “As we bind up the internal wounds of Watergate, more painful and more poisonous than those of foreign wars, let us restore the golden rule to our political process, and let brotherly love purge our hearts of suspicion and hate.” But Ford believed that true healing would require more than words. And so, on September 8, 1974, precisely a month after Nixon announced his decision to resign, Ford announced on television that he was issuing a blanket pardon to him for any crimes he might have committed while in office. Speculating about the impact of further investigations, the new president imagined the worst. “During this long period of delay and potential litigation,” he surmised, “ugly passions would again be aroused, our people would again be polarized in their opinions, and the credibility of our free institutions of government would again be challenged at home and abroad.” Ford pardoned Nixon, he said, to spare the nation.2

  Ford hoped his announcement would bring calm to the country, but it had the opposite effect. No longer seen as an accidental president who could serve as a caretaker and guide the nation to recovery, Ford now seemed implicated in the crimes and their cover-up. Some Americans speculated openly that Ford’s pardon had been the result of a corrupt bargain: that he had been offered the vice presidency on the condition that he would pardon Nixon if the time ever came. Ford quickly became a target of popular outrage. Protesters stood outside the White House holding a long sheet with the words “PROMISE ME PARDON AND I’LL MAKE YOU PRESIDENT,” while one even made it into the president’s press conference to shout “Jail Ford! Jail Ford!” 3 Newspaper columnists and television reporters joined the chorus denouncing him. “He said he was ‘healing the country,’ ” wrote one Washington Post columnist. “What he was doing was a favor to an old friend while simultaneously trying to sink a nasty situation well before his own re-election campaign.” 4 The editors of The New Yorker agreed. “The pardon may be the final blow to [Americans’] faith in America. After the cheering revival of the public’s spirits in the first month of the Ford Administration, there is suddenly gloom everywhere—a compound of shattered hopes, cynicism, despair about the future, and helplessness.” 5 Support for the new president evaporated, with his approval ratings plummeting from an impressive 71 percent after taking office in August 1974 down to just 42 percent by the end of the year, and still falling. In the end, Ford would experience the steepest drop in presidential approval since Gallup started keeping track.6

  Not all Americans were incensed at Ford’s pardon, however. While polls showed that many Republicans had reluctantly come to accept that Nixon had in fact committed crimes in office and deserved his fate, some conservatives saw the Watergate scandal through a different lens. They thought Nixon was far from perfect, but believed the Watergate scandal was simply part of an ongoing series of partisan attacks against the Republican Party that emanated from several corners of the so-called “liberal establishment,” especially the universities, the media, and Congress, which was controlled by the Democratic Party. According to one of his colleagues, Dick Cheney, then the deputy chief of staff for Ford, argued that the entire Watergate scandal was “just a political ploy by the president’s enemies.” 7 Already suspicious, such conservatives believed that the Democratic reaction to the presidential pardon proved that their political opponents had little interest in rebuilding national unity.

  As the nation reacted to Watergate and the pardon controversy, other scandals accelerated Americans’ loss of confidence in Washington. On October 7, 1974, for instance, the Washington Park Police stopped House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills’s speeding car near the Tidal Basin. One of the most powerful figures in Washington, the Arkansas Democrat had shaped national tax policy for decades and designed the Medicare and Medicaid programs of 1965. When the police pulled over the chairman’s car, Annabelle Battistella, a stripper who performed locally as “Fanne Fox, the Argentine Firecracker,” jumped out and began to splash around in the basin. Unfortunately for the chairman, a cameraman who was on the scene captured it all on film. The media soon reported not only that Battistella and the long-married Mills were having an affair but also that the chairman—publicly known for abstaining from the DC cocktail party circuit—was actually an alcoholic who was addicted to prescription pain pills.

  Many politicians hoped that Watergate and Wilbur Mills were aberrations, idiosyncratic problems that could be waved away rather than signs of a serious, systemic crisis in American politics. In the midst of Watergate, proponents of electoral reforms had pushed forward legislation that aimed to diminish the power of money in politics and thereby remove a root cause of corruption. Accordingly, Congress passed legislation that set limits on campaign contributions and spending, established public financing for presidential elections (though not congressional races), and created an independent body called the Federal Election Commission to monitor campaigns. President Ford, still reeling from the public outrage over the pardon, reluctantly signed the bill on October 15, after being warned that refusing to do so would show he had “misread the lessons of Watergate.” “There are certain periods in our nation’s history,” he said upon signing the measure, “when it becomes necessary to face up to certain unpleasant truths. We have passed through one of those periods. The unpleasant truth is that big money influence has come to play an unseemly role in our electoral process. . . . This bill will help to ri
ght that wrong.” 8

  But campaign finance reform was not enough. In the wake of Watergate, the demands for a thorough overhaul of the federal government grew steadily stronger. While promises to “throw the bums out” have been a perennial of American politics, the new crusade for government reform ran much deeper than ever before. Riding the backlash over Nixon’s resignation and Ford’s pardon to the 1974 midterm elections, a new generation of Democrats ran confidently on a promise to clean up government. Candidates like Henry Waxman of California and Gary Hart of Colorado assured voters that they would pursue new ethics and transparency laws to open up the workings of government and subject politicians to more restrictions than ever before. On their watch, they promised, another Watergate would never happen. That fall, Democrats had major successes at the polls. They increased their majority in the House by 43 seats, for a total of 291, and their majority in the Senate by 3 more, for a total of 60.

  The “Watergate Babies,” as the new class of Democrats were known, entered office in January 1975 determined to change the status quo. “There is a mood of reform in the air on Capitol Hill,” the watchdog organization Common Cause noted, and the new arrivals seemed intent on seizing the moment. A large number had won races in traditionally Republican districts and states where frustration with Watergate had created at least a temporary backlash against the GOP. They immediately shook up the status quo, enacting rules changes that made the political process more open and codified ethical principles for political behavior.9 They gave special attention to the role of congressional committee chairmen, who had long enjoyed incredible power and independence, and succeeded in deposing several of them. Meanwhile, they strengthened the tools that could be used by congressional leaders to strip committee chairs of the autonomy they had enjoyed for so long.

  While there were some small glimmers of hope in domestic politics, they were overshadowed by the dismal state of foreign affairs. For a brief moment in 1972 and 1973 it had seemed that Richard Nixon was on the cusp of introducing a new paradigm in foreign policy: détente. According to its supporters, détente had the potential to rebuild America’s relationship to the world in the wake of Vietnam and create a new consensus for the United States that could bring together a sizable number of Democrats and Republicans. By signing the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) in 1972 and opening relations with China that same year, Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger sought to ease tensions between the United States and the Communist superpowers, while still preserving America’s hegemonic power. But the hopes for détente had been severely diminished, first when tensions in the Middle East sparked an oil embargo by Arab states in 1973, and then with Nixon’s downfall. While détente retained support in the Ford administration, where Kissinger continued to serve, its potential to transform US foreign relations seemed much more precarious with Nixon gone.

  Meanwhile, there was the ongoing turmoil in Southeast Asia. As the Vietnam War entered its death throes, Americans took stock of the incredible toll it had taken. More than 58,000 US soldiers had been killed in the decade-long conflict, with another 270,000 badly wounded, many of them permanently. The losses extended well beyond the death and disabling of soldiers, however, with America’s economic strength and national unity suffering considerably, and its overall confidence crushed by its inability to exact a clear victory in Vietnam. The United States had begun orchestrating its gradual withdrawal from the conflict in 1973, but the final stages still came as a shock. In late April 1975, the last Americans left the country, and the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon swiftly fell to the nationalist forces of the North. In the final episodes of the “television war,” Americans watched with horror as crowded helicopters scrambled to evacuate the last remaining military and civilian personnel in a panicked, frantic withdrawal.10

  The embarrassments over American military power abroad coincided with a growing distrust of the nation’s intelligence agencies at home. In 1975 and 1976, Democratic senator Frank Church of Idaho chaired hearings on the operations of the national security state that revealed the types of activities that the CIA had supported in its fight against Communism. With the media breathlessly relaying lurid details to a nation riveted by the televised proceedings, the Church Committee revealed assassination attempts against foreign politicians and incidents of spying on individuals living in the United States. In response, Congress passed new regulations that placed constraints on what national security officials could do and imposed more “sunshine” requirements that required disclosure and open hearings on formerly covert government agencies. Even with the new reforms, revelations from the hearings had further shaken Americans’ confidence that government officials could be trusted to do the right thing on their own.

  At the local level, meanwhile, countless examples reinforced the growing belief that public officials were ineffective across the board. In 1975, reports from New York described a city on the brink. An eleven-day wildcat strike by sanitation workers in early July had left streets overflowing with 70,000 tons of garbage piled on the sidewalks. As the city edged to the brink of bankruptcy, other municipal employees skipped work too. Cars gridlocked as traffic cops stayed home; basic health services for seniors and children shut down without workers. A reporter for the Times filed a bleak account: “With mounted policemen’s horses tied up to park railings, trash piling up in plastic bags and gray barricades blocking off demonstrators from the surrounding park, the exterior of City Hall these days has a besieged air—almost a modern-day equivalent of Mont St. Michel during the Middle Ages.” 11 In the popular imagination, New York was no longer a city of dreams, but a devastated landscape of rampant crime and corruption, crippling poverty, and urban decay. Its dystopian image was best illustrated in the popular film Taxi Driver (1976), which told the story of Travis Bickle, a mentally unstable Vietnam veteran driven to violent acts by the decadence and decay of the city around him. “All the animals come out at night,” he narrates: “whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies; sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”

  As the financial crisis mounted, New York’s governor Hugh Carey warned federal officials that New York City could end up defaulting on its debt. The governor struggled to obtain federal assistance from both the Democratic Congress and the Republican president. Ford, who was focused on attacking congressional spending and tackling rising inflation, informed New York officials that they needed to take stringent measures to get their house in order. Proposals included cutting the salaries of city workers and charging tuition at the city college, which had historically offered a free path for the city’s residents to obtain a first-class education. “The people of this country will not be stampeded,” Ford scolded. “They will not panic when a few desperate New York City officials and bankers try to scare New York’s mortgage payments out of them.” 12 The front page of the New York Daily News broadcast the response in a blunt headline, “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” 13 Congress proved more receptive to the city’s plight, however, and ultimately offered to provide some funds. The government of New York took drastic action itself, imposing severe budget cuts that curtailed government services and creating the Municipal Assistance Corporation, which allowed the city to lend money to itself to avert total catastrophe.

  The city reached a crisis point on July 13, 1977, when New Yorkers suffered a massive blackout. When the city went dark on a scorching summer night at the start of a heat wave, chaos quickly ensued. More than a thousand acts of arson broke out across the five boroughs, and another 1,600 stores were looted. “We’ve seen our citizens subjected to violence, vandalism, theft and discomfort,” the mayor reported. “The blackout has threatened our safety and has seriously impacted our economy. We’ve been needlessly subjected to a night of terror in many communities that have been wantonly looted and burned.” After months of complaints about layoffs and pay freezes, the police showed little interest in going to work. The situat
ion was worse in impoverished African American and Latino communities that were suffering upwards of 80 percent unemployment.14 Even the “looters were being mugged,” according to the New York Post.15 To many, New York City increasingly seemed like a lost cause. It was now commonplace for popular films to depict the city’s future as desolate. The Warriors (1979) showed the city’s landscape ruled by ruthless teenage gangs, while Escape from New York (1981) predicted that the entire island of Manhattan would be handed over to criminals and become a godforsaken federal prison.

  The dystopian image of New York in the 1970s reflected a growing regional division between the booming states of the South and Southwest—collectively known as “the Sunbelt”—and the rusting economies of the industrial Midwest and Northeast. States located between Michigan and New York, which had long been the heart of the national economy as well as the core of the Democratic coalition, suffered greatly as the industries that had sustained the region crumbled. Businesses moved to southern and western states, or even to other countries altogether, seeking places where unions did not exist and labor was therefore cheap. The firms remaining behind in the “Rust Belt” found they simply could not meet their bottom line and soon learned the federal government would not save them. “Like blacks, Hispanics, women and homosexuals, Northeasterners are an oppressed minority,” one New Yorker complained. “We are only beginning to realize how badly the federal government discriminates against us.” 16