Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (20 page)

In early April, by which time the shah had moved to Egypt, Brzezinski and his circle were ready for action. Choosing a weekend when Vance was out of town, they convinced the president to approve a rescue mission. When Vance returned, the president told him of this decision, at which point the secretary of state said he would resign whether the mission succeeded or not. The plan featured sending eight helicopters carrying a rescue team to a remote desert site in central Iran, where cargo planes would refuel them, so that the copters could transport the team several hundred more miles to a staging area some 100 miles southeast of Tehran. The rescue team would then climb onto trucks that had been bought by American agents, motor to Tehran, attack the building where the hostages were being held, overpower the captors, and save the captives. Taken to a nearby abandoned airstrip, the hostages would be flown by waiting transport planes to safety in Saudi Arabia.

It was a harebrained scheme, and it failed. Swirling dust and hydraulic problems at the first site disabled three of the helicopters, whereupon the American commander recommended aborting the mission. Carter agreed, but before the rescuers could fly off, a helicopter crashed into a cargo plane. Ammunition blew up, lighting up the sky. The explosion and fire killed eight American soldiers and severely burned others. Seven aircraft were destroyed. Television later showed pictures of the wreckage and the bodies. Vance resigned, and the captors dispersed the hostages to a number of undisclosed locations. In September, Iraq, which had been ruled by Saddam Hussein since July 1979, invaded Iran, setting off a ten-year war (during which the United States gave support to Iraq). At this point Khomeini let it be known that he would negotiate. With Algeria as intermediary, talks finally got under way.
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But the captors were slow to budge. The fifty-two hostages, many of them badly treated, remained in Iran until America’s inauguration day in January 1981. At that time the captors finally dropped their demand for an apology and accepted $7.955 billion and the unfreezing of Iranian assets. The settlement, though leading to the release of the hostages, was a victory for the radicals in Iran—and in the long run for anti-American and terrorist activities that were to multiply in the Middle East in the future. In a final insult to Carter, Iran waited until his successor, Ronald Reagan, had been sworn in before sending the hostages home. It was Reagan, not Carter, who then delivered the long-awaited news to the nation.

T
HESE DRAWN-OUT, DEMORALIZING DEVELOPMENTS
contributed to worsening economic conditions in the United States. Galloping inflation became an especially frightening specter in the late 1970s—and lasted until 1982. The roots of this inflation were deep, stemming in part from federal deficits that dated to spending on the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. Rising prices and unemployment afflicted many nations at the time and helped to drive a number of European leaders from office. In the United States, where Carter’s “stimulus” package of 1977 had encouraged consumer spending, the president was slow to take steps against inflation. American prices, increasing alarmingly even before the ousting of the Shah, had already climbed to a rate that averaged 9 percent in 1978.
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As later events were to demonstrate, the staggering inflation of these years helped to transform American attitudes toward money. To let savings sit during inflationary times in a bank, where interest rates were relatively low, was to risk losing money. Thereafter, Americans were even more likely than earlier to borrow and to buy consumer goods—and to demand higher returns from investments than bank deposits could normally provide. A brave new world of credit cards and high-risk personal finance was at hand.
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After the Iranian revolution, the inflationary spiral began to spin out of control. OPEC hiked oil prices four times in five months, most sharply in June 1979. The war between Iran and Iraq then made oil shortages worse. Shortages of gasoline became serious in the United States. In 1979, fights broke out among angry American motorists desperate to find gasoline. Spurred in part by the rise in oil prices, the rate of inflation for 1979 ultimately averaged 11.3 percent. This was an extraordinarily high rate that more than any other single development unnerved the American people and damaged the president’s political standing.

The restive mood of Americans in mid-1979 knocked down Carter’s approval ratings to 29 percent and prompted him to reassess the course of his administration. In July 1979, he called Cabinet secretaries, top aides, and a host of thinkers and experts to an extended retreat at Camp David. Reporters, speculating madly, had no good information on what was happening. Finally, Carter emerged to deliver a televised talk to the nation. America, he said, was caught in a “crisis of confidence” and a “crisis of the spirit.” At a press briefing later, an aide spoke about the “malaise” that had descended on American society. Then and later the word “malaise,” which the president had not used, was what Americans remembered about Carter’s message.
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Many people seemed to believe that Carter had spoken effectively. But they also sensed that he was blaming them for the nation’s problems, and the pessimistic message was neither inspiring nor politically helpful. Carter then stunned the nation by announcing that he had asked for the resignations of all Cabinet secretaries and top aides. Four Cabinet resignations were quickly accepted, including Health, Education, and Welfare chief Joseph Califano, who was close to leading liberals in the party. It appeared to many Americans that Carter, shaken by the inflationary economy, had panicked and was losing control of his administration.

T
HE PRESIDENT HAD NO INTENTION OF GIVING UP
. In these difficult days—as in the even more troubled days that followed the capture of the hostages in November—he was determined to rally his forces and win a second term. In waging his campaign, he encountered liberal revolts from within his own party. But the major story of the election—and of politics in the future—was a coming of age of political conservatism in the United States.

Liberals, having stewed since 1977 over Carter’s fiscal conservatism, rallied during the campaign behind Ted Kennedy. Carter professed to be unafraid of him, reportedly commenting, “I’ll whip his ass.”
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But when Kennedy announced his candidacy in the fall of 1979, polls indicated that he had a two-to-one lead over the president. The seizure of hostages, however, unleashed patriotic feelings that during the primary season benefited the commander-in-chief. Kennedy, moreover, could not shake people’s memories of Chappaquiddick, on Martha’s Vineyard, where in 1969 he had driven off a bridge, swum to shore, and gone home to bed at his hotel. The next morning it was learned that a twenty-eight-year-old passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, had drowned in the accident. His irresponsible behavior did not hurt him with voters in Massachusetts, who seemed to accept an apology that he made over television, but it left him politically vulnerable as he sought the nation’s highest office. Enjoying the advantages of presidential incumbency and of patronage, Carter outlasted Kennedy and won renomination on the first ballot. Mondale ran again as the Democrats’ vice-presidential nominee.

The contest for the GOP nomination quickly turned into a two-person race between Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, who had served two terms in the House, as Nixon’s ambassador to the United Nations, as chairman of the GOP National Committee, and as Ford’s last CIA director. Bush gave Reagan a scare early in the race by winning the Iowa caucuses and by ridiculing his opponent’s call for a 30 percent tax cut as “voodoo economics.” Reagan regrouped, campaigned vigorously, captured a string of primaries, and won the nomination on the first ballot. To secure party unity, Reagan selected Bush as his running mate.

Reagan had a varied background. Born in the small town of Tampico, Illinois, in 1911, he was the son of a pious mother and an alcoholic father who moved his wife and two sons to various towns in Illinois while trying to make a living as a shoe salesman. Eventually the family settled in Dixon, Illinois, where Reagan went to high school and which he considered to be his hometown. In the 1930s, his father landed a job with the WPA, a key public works program of Roosevelt’s New Deal, thereby helping to steer the family through hard times. His mother, working as a seamstress, was also a breadwinner. Reagan later quipped, “We didn’t live on the wrong side of the tracks, but we lived so close we could hear the whistle real loud.” A handsome, athletic young man, Reagan was football captain and president of his class in high school and student body president at Eureka College in Illinois. All his life he made concerted efforts to please people, and he developed a special gift (which his father also had) as a teller of jokes and raconteur of humorous stories.

After graduating from college, Reagan worked as a radio sportscaster in Iowa before striking out for Hollywood. There he succeeded quickly as an actor, ultimately appearing in fifty-three films between 1937 and 1953. Though he was leading man in some of them, he joked later that he was the “Errol Flynn of the B’s.” Highly regarded by fellow actors, he headed the Screen Actors Guild, a union, between 1947 and 1952 (and again in 1959–60).
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During the late 1940s—years of growing Cold War fears—Reagan came to believe that Communists were trying to take over Hollywood. Retaliating, he secretly provided the FBI with names of suspected Communists. Though these experiences turned him toward the right politically, Reagan was slow to abandon the Democratic Party. Having earlier voted for FDR, he remained an active member of Americans for Democratic Action, an anti-Communist, liberal political organization, in the late 1940s. He voted for Truman in 1948 and for Helen Gahagan Douglas, an ardently liberal Democrat who lost to Richard Nixon in his scurrilous race for the U.S. Senate, in 1950. Later, Reagan spoke of the “hemophiliac liberalism” that he had endorsed in his youth and early middle age.

Thereafter a series of developments—Reagan’s anger at high income taxes, his marriage in 1952 to Nancy Davis, who came from a conservative family, and his work as a traveling spokesman for the General Electric Company from 1952 to 1962—moved Reagan solidly to the right of the political spectrum. Millions of Americans came to know him as the handsome, genial host between 1954 and 1962 of television’s highly rated Sunday night program of dramas
General Electric Theater.
Then and later, he was an extraordinarily relaxed and effective performer on TV. In 1962, he formally became a Republican, and in 1964 he gave a widely noted speech for GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, an ardent conservative.

“The Speech,” as admirers called it, earned Reagan great praise among conservatives throughout the nation. Financing his entry into statewide politics, these conservatives helped him to score an impressive victory as the GOP candidate for governor of California in 1966. In 1970, he won a second four-year term. Conservatives did not always like what he did—Reagan, a politically astute compromiser, raised taxes to cover a budgetary shortfall left by his predecessor and signed a liberal abortion bill into law—but they recognized that he was solidly in their camp on most issues and that he had outstanding skills as a speaker and campaigner.
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For these reasons, he had nearly taken the 1976 presidential nomination from President Ford. Though he turned sixty-nine years of age in February 1980, he remained a fit and vigorous man.
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I
T WAS REAGAN’S GOOD FORTUNE
to ride on a large new wave that swelled in the late 1970s and that was to leave its considerable traces on American politics for the rest of the century and beyond: political conservatism. This wave, which greatly invigorated the Right, rushed ahead from a great many sources, for conservatives, famously disputatious, hardly saw eye to eye on all matters. Isolationists on the right challenged Cold Warriors and internationalists, fiscal conservatives battled against tax-cutters, and libertarians and foes of big government argued with advocates—some of them branded as “theo-cons”—of federal programs to promote socially conservative values. By 1980, however, several previously unconnected groups—white blue-collar workers, southern white foes of civil rights, Republicans who opposed big government, and socially conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants—were converging to crusade for a range of causes and to fight on behalf of candidates who would promote them. This conservative coalition, adeptly exploited by Reagan, dramatically altered the landscape of politics in the United States.

Many of the new conservatives, so-called Reagan Democrats, were white working-class people in the North who still supported a range of liberal bread-and-butter economic programs. But like white Democrats in the Sunbelt who had earlier been turning to the GOP, these blue-collar Americans resented the “reverse discrimination,” as they saw it, of social policies such as busing and affirmative action. They raged at the growth of crime, which they blamed on violent and lawless blacks. Some of these white Americans, having backed the presidential candidacies of Richard Nixon or Alabama governor George Wallace in the 1960s and the 1970s, seethed at the derisive and supercilious “elitism,” as they perceived it, of well-educated, upper-middle-class liberal intellectuals and prominent figures in the media and Hollywood. Defending their ways of life, they were gathering together to fight against what they damned as the culturally permissive legacies of the 1960s.

Other conservatives, such as those who advanced the agenda of the Committee on the Present Danger, were aroused by what they regarded as the softness of Carter’s military and foreign policies. Many of them were Republicans who had supported GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater’s hawkish stance in 1964. Among them were a number of the thirty-six freshmen Republican congressmen elected in 1978. Two of these newcomers, Richard Cheney of Wyoming and Newt Gingrich of Georgia, moved rapidly up in the ranks of the GOP House leadership during the 1980s.
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Deeply anti-Communist, these conservatives called for considerably greater spending on the military and for uncompromising opposition to Communism abroad. Though other conservatives—considerably more isolationist in their views—differed sharply with them, officeholders like Cheney and Gingrich helped to strengthen the already hawkish stance of the GOP in the 1980s.