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This Is the Dawning of the Age of Self-Reliance
The volatile political and economic conditions of the 1970s profoundly affected the way ordinary Americans thought of themselves and their country. A great many felt betrayed and forgotten. The country they were raised to believe in as the land of opportunity seemed to have dissolved into the land of dead ends. Worse, there was no familiar remedy. The government, exposed by Watergate and other scandals as corrupt, seemed to pursue policies more out of political expediency than out of concern for the average man or woman. As business exerted new influence, and as American cities catered more to investors than their own residents, many Americans with no prior activist experience instinctively turned to community organizing and to consumer and public interest advocacy—if only to try to regain control over their lives. On the national level, it was a lost opportunity for the two major parties. As Michael Kazin noted, the political allegiance of the “upset and forgotten” workingman “seemed up for grabs” in the 1970s. A candidate or party sounding like the movie Nashville’s Hal Phillip Walker or like Ralph Nader might have been able to form a New Majority that would have made Richard Nixon envious. But maybe it was not possible. More important, maybe it did not matter so much. What mattered was that Americans now felt that they were on their own, pushed out of their midcentury comfort and confidence to a new, unsparing frontier. Looking across the plains of American experience from the vantage point of their own front porches, they could see a variety of social, political, cultural, and environmental threats encroaching from different directions. They reacted passionately—sometimes out of outrage, or fear, or despair—and channeled that passion into the only avenue for redress that seemed promising: grassroots organizing.
Much of what one expert called the “government versus the people” culture of the 1970s was cultivated by Richard Nixon’s political operation. Certainly, Nixon’s handling of the war, of protesters, and of political opponents betrayed the public trust. After 1968, most Americans wanted the Vietnam War just to end, and Nixon won the presidency in part by pledging “peace with honor.” Instead, in his first year in office, he willfully deceived the public by creating the appearance of extricating the United States from Vietnam—via a policy of “Vietnamizing” (or de-Americanizing) the ground war and bringing GIs home—while secretly escalating the air war, expanding it beyond Vietnam into Cambodia. Not until the spring of 1970 did it emerge that American B-52s had dropped more than 108,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia over fourteen months, a campaign coordinated in the White House and with the knowledge of only a handful of National Security Council staff members, a few military commanders, and the pilots themselves. And then, of course, Nixon seemed to subvert his own carefully crafted de-escalation narrative by sending ground forces from South Vietnam into Cambodia. The nation erupted in fury, and not only on college campuses.
Just as important as Nixon’s secrecy and deception—at least in terms of the public’s trust in government—was the president’s treatment of his critics. In the same way that candidate Nixon had made political hay out of disparaging protesters of all types during the 1968 campaign, President Nixon wasted no time attacking anyone who dared to challenge his war policies, either by ridiculing them publicly or by spying on them illegally. As early as May 1969, when The New York Times reported that American planes were bombing targets in Cambodia, the White House used both the FBI and its own private surveillance team—the first “plumbers” hired to plug leaks—to place illegal wiretaps on the telephones of National Security Council staffers and several journalists. Five months later, following the October 15, 1969, Moratorium protest, when millions of Americans in at least two hundred cities across the country skipped work and school to participate in a wide variety of demonstrations against the war, Nixon famously dismissed them as a “vocal minority” whom he would ignore. Calling instead for “the great silent majority” of Americans to support his plans for winning the peace, the president questioned the patriotism of the Moratorium participants. “North Vietnam cannot defeat or humiliate the United States,” he said. “Only Americans can do that.”1 And in the wake of the Cambodian invasion, when a student strike spread to hundreds of colleges and universities across the country, Nixon again denounced the protesters, saying that even if he ended the war, these campus “bums” would find another issue to protest violently. Even after National Guard troops opened fire on unarmed Kent State University protesters, killing four and wounding fourteen, the White House blamed the protesters, sternly warning that “this should remind us all once again that when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy.”2
In 1971, Nixon’s assaults on the antiwar movement escalated. After a cascade of rallies and peaceful demonstrations brought hundreds of thousands of protesters to Washington in late April, the White House mobilized a joint military and D.C. police response to organizers’ threat to block streets and bridges all over Washington and prevent government employees from getting to work.
As the sun came up on May 3, 1971, military jeeps and other transports swarmed through Washington, tear gas greeted protesters and residents alike, and six Chinook helicopters landed on the Washington Monument grounds, dispatching 198 soldiers in what looked like a massive search and destroy mission. By 8:00 a.m., D.C. police had arrested two thousand protesters, and by noon they had rounded up seventy-five hundred. Police detained thousands in a fortified football field near RFK Stadium, where they “languished without benefit of arraignment.” Such tactics may have been illegal, but they helped keep Washington from being shut down.3 For mainstream America, however, the seemingly constant conflict grew tiring. The news never seemed good. The war labored on, and so did the division in the country.
Six weeks later, the leaking of the Pentagon Papers sparked another high-profile suppression of dissent. Officially known as the “History of U.S. Decision Making Process on Vietnam Policy,” the forty-seven-volume “Top Secret” report had been commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in 1967 and completed in January 1969, as the Johnson administration left office. One of the report’s authors was Daniel Ellsberg, a former Marine and Pentagon staffer under McNamara and an ex-student of Henry Kissinger’s. After the Cambodia invasion, he turned unequivocally against the war and made multiple copies of the report in hopes that he could convince certain congressional officials to hold hearings. When Ellsberg found little interest in Congress, he turned to the reporter Neil Sheehan and The New York Times, which began publishing revelatory excerpts beginning on June 13. Over the next couple of...