Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (32 page)

Even
M*A*S*H,
a hit television show that in its early years during the 1970s had derided military authority in the Korean War, softened its sting in the 1980s. By then the unit commander, Colonel Sherman Potter, was depicted as a far more competent and effective army officer than his predecessor, the inept and often inebriated Henry Blake. Major Margaret Houlihan, nicknamed “Hot Lips” in early installments, evolved from a highly sexed woman who drank heavily into a respected leader of the nurses under her command. The show continued to mock the idiocies of army life, but with less of the sharply anti-authoritarian and satirical bite that had launched it to commercial success in the 1970s.
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R
EAGAN, WHO HAD EARNED WIDESPREAD ADMIRATION
as a figure of authority in 1981, seemed to embody many of the traditional values that were featured in sitcoms such as
Family Ties
. After the economy turned around—a wondrous, long-awaited development—his poll numbers improved steadily. In the election year of 1984, he enjoyed especially great popularity. American successes at the Los Angeles Olympics—boycotted that summer by the Soviets—further promoted patriotic, feel-good emotions that benefited the administration. Political action committees favorable to Reagan’s candidacy amassed $7.2 million, compared to $657,000 raised by groups partial to his opponent, Vice President Walter Mondale.
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That Mondale had the early support of all ninety-nine AFL-CIO labor unions seemed likely to do him relatively little good under such circumstances.
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Republican leaders made especially effective use of key GOP television ads, “Morning Again in America.” While never depicting Reagan, the ads highlighted the homespun, family-centered values, as if lifted from a Norman Rockwell painting, that had supposedly made the nation great and that many Americans by then were associating with the president. They featured communities of friends: a wedding party at which a bride is hugging her mother; an old man and a policeman hoisting a flag to which schoolchildren are pledging allegiance. Voice-overs intoned: “America is prouder, stronger, better. Why would we want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?” Democrats derided these lyrical commercials as hokey. But Reagan loved them. Many Americans who watched the “Morning Again in America” ads were said to be inspired by them, to be pleased that traditional values remained powerful in the United States, and to feel good that a strong leader such as Reagan was in command.

Mondale soldiered on, coping as best as he could against attitudes such as these. Pundits thought that he bested the president in the first televised debate. Democrats, sensing that the president’s poor performance in the debate made him vulnerable on grounds of his age (seventy-three), took heart. But Reagan was at his best in the next debate. With mock seriousness, he said to Mondale: “I will not make age an issue in this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” The audience broke out in laughter.

Mondale fired away at Reagan’s big deficits and said that he would raise taxes if elected. This promise, which made little political sense, delighted Republicans, who branded Mondale a “typical tax-and-spend, gloom-and-doom” Democrat. Reagan appealed to patriotic voters, proclaiming that he had vastly strengthened American defenses and had stood tall against Communism throughout the world. He reminded Americans—as if they needed reminding—that the Carter-Mondale administration had presided over the stagflation years of the late 1970s. Democrats, he added, were captives of interest groups, especially unions, and mindlessly advocated big government. Republicans also implied that Ferraro, the first woman on the presidential ticket of a major American political party, had a husband who was involved in shady financial deals in New York.

Results of the election confirmed what polls had predicted: Reagan won in a walk. He triumphed everywhere except in the District of Columbia and in Mondale’s home state of Minnesota, taking the electoral college 525 to 13. He received 54.5 million votes (58.8 percent of the total) to Mondale’s 37.6 million (40.6 percent). Mondale, like every Democratic presidential candidate since the 1960s, swept all but a very small minority of black voters. He fared better among labor union members and urban voters than among people who lived in the suburbs. He was more popular among women (winning 44 percent of their votes) than among men (37 percent). But it was obvious that Ferraro’s presence on the ticket had not worked wonders.
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It was even more obvious that Reagan enjoyed great popularity among white southerners—especially, it seemed, among those who sympathized with the Religious Right.
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Exit polls indicated that Mondale won only 28 percent of the southern white vote. Though southern Democrats fared respectably in state and local races—political parties at these levels were fairly competitive in the 1980s—Republicans increased their representation among southerners in the House and Senate. The election advanced the steady shift that was transforming southern—and hence national—politics.

Seeking solace from the results, Democrats insisted that Reagan’s triumph was mainly personal: Americans, they said, voted for him because they liked him, not because they agreed with most of his conservative views. Liberal social policies, they maintained, remained popular. Liberals—and other analysts—also argued correctly that the election had not given Reagan a mandate to do anything very specific and that it had not realigned American politics in the dramatic way that FDR’s triumphs had done in the 1930s. Though Republicans still controlled the Senate in 1985, with 53 seats to 46 for the Democrats—they had led 54 to 46 in 1984—they won only seventeen more seats in the House in 1984 and remained a minority in 1985, with 182 seats as opposed to 252 for the Democrats. In 1987, Democrats appeared to maintain a small edge in the partisan identification of voters.
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Thanks to Democratic strength on Capitol Hill, partisan warfare continued to be a feature of divided government during Reagan’s second term.

Still, the election showed that though Reagan had not devoted great attention to party building, the GOP had advanced dramatically between 1974 and 1984. His triumph also moved Democrats, shaken by their defeat, to the right. In February 1985, moderate conservatives and centrists in the party, many from the South, established the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Its first president was Richard Gephardt, a Missouri congressman. (Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas was to head it in 1990–91.) Blaming liberals, including Mondale, for pandering to unions and other interest groups, these “New Democrats” embarked on a quest to broaden the appeal of the party. Many liberal Democrats, however, derided these efforts. Jesse Jackson branded the DLC as “Democrats for the Leisure Class.” Battles between these two factions raged within the Democratic Party for many years thereafter.

The election of 1984 also indicated that critiques of American materialism had had little if any political effectiveness. Yuppies, to be sure, were a convenient target, but they were hardly the majority among the young. Most Americans in their twenties and thirties in the early 1980s were members of the 75-million-strong baby boom generation. While many had embraced liberal causes or hippie styles of life in the 1970s, millions by the mid-1980s had married and bought houses in the suburbs and were trying to provide for young families and keep up their mortgage payments. Having resources to lose, they were becoming a little more conservative, not only concerning economic issues but also concerning some (not all) social and cultural matters, such as the importance of “family values.” “Do as I say, not as I did,” they told their children. In 1984, they were nearly 40 percent of the nation’s voting-age population.
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For these and other reasons, liberals who lamented the president’s conservative views struggled against the tide during the 1980s. In fact, Reagan had proved to be a consequential president, more so perhaps than any chief executive since FDR. His policies had dramatically changed tax laws, greatly increased defense spending, and challenged liberal assumptions about the virtues of big government. His “politics of values,” stressing the blessings of family togetherness, neighborhood solidarity, and hard work, appeared to have resonated favorably with the majority of the electorate. Southern whites, evangelical Christians, and many middle-class suburbanites seemed to be especially receptive to values such as these, as well as to Reagan’s uncompromising opposition to Communism abroad. At least for the time being, political opinion on many issues in the United States had moved to the right.
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The return of good times especially benefited the president. Many Americans in 1984 continued to be uneasy about the economy, but they felt better about their prospects—a whole lot better—than they had in 1980. Reagan, his supporters believed, had also succeeded in resurrecting the majesty of the presidency, which had taken a battering under Nixon and Carter. Perhaps most important, his infectiously optimistic manner, like that of the boy who dug into a pile of manure in search of a pony, had helped him to win. This manner—and his vision of the United States as a great and exceptional nation—continued after 1984 to appeal to millions of Americans and to help him survive serious bungling in his second term. As Lou Cannon later concluded, “Because of his ability to reflect and give voice to the aspirations of his fellow citizens, Reagan succeeded in reviving national confidence at a time when there was a great need for inspiration. This was his great contribution as president.”
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6
America and the World in the 1980s

General Alexander Haig, Reagan’s first secretary of state, was never comfortable in his job. The president’s people, he grumbled, were a “bunch of second-rate hambones.” He added, “to me, the White House was as mysterious as a ghost ship; you heard the creak of the rigging and the groan of the timbers and sometimes even glimpsed the crew on deck. But which of the crew had the helm? Was it Meese, was it Baker, was it someone else? It was impossible to know for sure.”
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Haig, who struck many associates as arrogant, did not last long in his post. In June 1982, Reagan replaced him with George Shultz, a calm and steady man who managed capably at the State Department for the next six and a half years. But Haig’s indictment of the president’s style was only a little more vehement than that of many officials who moved in and out of defense and foreign policy positions under Reagan in the 1980s. Six men served as national security adviser during those eight years, the fourth of whom, Admiral John Poindexter, was at the center of the Iran-contra scandal that threatened to ruin Reagan’s presidency in late 1986. Only under Frank Carlucci, who took over from Poindexter in January 1987, and General Colin Powell, who succeeded Carlucci a year later, did the office begin to operate effectively.

Reagan’s defense secretary until October 1987, Caspar Weinberger, brought a bulldog-like tenacity to the task of expanding the military budget but fought almost incessantly with Shultz.
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Reagan, ignoring their feuding, sometimes kept both of them in the dark about his intentions. In 1983, he announced a hugely ambitious space-based anti-missile plan, the Strategic Defense Initiative—critics called it “Star Wars”—without informing either of them until the last moment that he would do so. This was one of the few times that Shultz and Weinberger agreed on anything of substance. Weinberger did not like the idea. Shultz said it was “lunacy.”
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Reagan, demonstrating the preternatural self-assurance and stubbornness for which he was both beloved and reviled, brushed aside the opinions of these strong-minded men and went ahead with the plan.

Given management such as this, it is ironic that some of the most dramatic transformations of international relationships of the twentieth century took place in the 1980s—transformations that elevated the United States to an economic and military preeminence such as no nation had enjoyed since the days of the Roman Empire. Reagan, who told an audience of southern evangelicals in March 1983 that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire,” was by mid-1985 embracing a useful relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev, who by then had become president of the Soviet Union. In late 1987, the two men fashioned a deal to cut back nuclear arms and—at last—to thaw the Cold War. When Reagan left office in January 1989, some of his admirers were crediting him with promoting a “Pax Reaganica” in the world. Then and for some time thereafter, the majority of American voters seemed to believe that the GOP—since the days of the war in Vietnam the more aggressive party in calling for American hegemony in the world—was the party to be trusted with the management of foreign and military affairs.

By 1989, Communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union, which was evacuating the last of its troops from Afghanistan. The suddenness of these changes, which American intelligence agencies had failed to predict, stunned students of international affairs.
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Other nations, long burdened with authoritarian regimes, were also developing democratic systems of governance. In the summer of 1989, Francis Fukuyama, a conservative writer, rhapsodized about these changes, especially the triumph of liberalism over Communism, in an essay that attracted widespread notice. “What we may be witnessing,” he wrote, “is not just the passing of a particular period in modern history but the end of history . . . the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
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By this time, George H. W. Bush, having won the presidential election of 1988, was in the White House. During Bush’s four years in office, a host of nearly unimaginable developments—most of them accomplished without significant bloodshed—revolutionized international politics. Rhapsodic crowds dismantled the Berlin Wall; Germany was reunited (remaining in NATO); the nuclear arms race slowed down; and South Africa began slowly to jettison its system of apartheid. The Soviet satellites of Eastern Europe escaped from the oppressive hold that the Soviet Union had clamped on them during and after World War II. Gorbachev, having presided over many of these dramatic changes, was forced out of office on Christmas Day, 1991, by which point the Communist Party had been banned and the once vast Soviet empire was crumbling into fifteen independent states. At the end of the year, the red flag was hauled down at the Kremlin and replaced by the Russian tricolor. Bush and Russian president Boris Yeltsin, who had taken over as the most powerful figure in a new federation of republics that aspired to democratic governance, formally declared the Cold War to be history in February 1992.
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The exhilarating trend toward democratization in the world continued during Bush’s tenure encouraged him to proclaim the arrival of a “New World Order” under American auspices. Lebanon’s long and destructive civil war, which killed more than 100,000 people, came to an end in 1990, whereupon a beleaguered democracy began to take shape there. Other nations that turned toward democracy in these years included Senegal, Mozambique, the Philippines, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Chile, where dictator Augusto Pinochet, in power since 1973, was forced to step down as president in 1990. Within a few years the only nations in the Western Hemisphere remaining under authoritarian rule were Cuba and Guyana. It was later estimated that thirty-two new democracies appeared between 1982 and 2002. By 2004, a majority of people in the world lived in countries regarded as democratic—the first time in history that this had been the case. Notwithstanding horrific bloodletting that savaged Rwanda and other places, ethnic and civic strife also declined between 1990 and 2004.
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Fukuyama’s optimism about the future, though a little breathless, seemed to be justified.

Even as Fukuyama wrote, however, it was obvious that instability continued to threaten many parts of the world. The sudden end of the Cold War, for more than forty years the centerpiece of international relations, delighted Americans, who were correct to say that the patient and resolute foreign policies of the West had triumphed in the end. But the collapse of the Soviet Union did not signify the end of Communism. China was building a stockpile of long-range nuclear weapons. North Korea remained a remote and hostile outpost of Stalinism. Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba continued to be Communist states. Murderous fighting between Communists, other leftists, and their enemies continued to ravage Guatemala into the mid-1990s. Other problems also persisted. Syrian troops remained in Lebanon until 2005. Both Russia and the United States retained large numbers of nuclear warheads.

Though the triumph of the West in the Cold War closed what had been a frightening era in world history, many nations, freed from the pressure to side with either the Soviet or American bloc, grew increasingly nationalistic.
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Unrest escalated among the host of ethnic groups, including Muslims, which had earlier been suppressed within the Soviet Union. In Afghanistan, which the United States largely ignored after the Soviets departed in 1989, radical, anti-Western Muslims, the Taliban, came to power and abetted the training of terrorists. Millions of people in the world’s twenty-two Arab nations—all of them authoritarian states that badly oppressed women—were restless under their own rulers and angry about many economic and military policies of the richer, non-Muslim West. A host of Asian and African countries, having liberated themselves from colonialism, struggled to combat poverty, famines, AIDS, civil wars, and aggression from neighboring states. India and Pakistan (which was presumed by 1990 to possess nuclear weapons) nursed historic religious and territorial grievances and regularly threatened to attack each another. Israel, a democratic nation, had invaded Lebanon in 1982 and was constructing settlements for Jews on Arab territory in Gaza and the West Bank that it had taken following the 1967 war. It was surrounded by Muslim nations that refused to accept its legitimacy and that longed to destroy it. Meanwhile, frightening arsenals continued to develop: In 1990 it was estimated that fifteen countries had the capacity to manufacture chemical weapons.
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Thanks to the implosion of the Soviet Union, the United States quickly found itself to be a colossus, the only superpower on the planet. Though it lacked the power that had enabled Britain to exercise direct control over other nations, it was an economic and military giant. An affluent, open society, America lured millions of immigrants to its shores in these and later years. Its ideals of freedom and democracy encouraged many other people in the world: Dissidents at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989 proudly displayed Statue of Liberty symbols on their clothing. Latin American and Eastern European nations drew inspiration from the American Constitution in crafting changes to their own governmental systems. Prestigious universities in the United States, the world’s finest in many fields, attracted streams of ambitious young people, many of whom remained in the States and became productive citizens. Many others, having discovered America to be a free and welcoming place, returned to their native countries to tout its virtues.

Aspects of America’s vibrant popular culture—ranging from McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, and jeans to TV programs, Hollywood films, and rock ’n’ roll—acted as magnets to people all over the world. Penetrating everywhere, these cultural exports irritated cosmopolitan foreigners but at times beguiled even some of the angriest and most religious of dissidents. Las Vegas, America’s “last frontier,” became a mecca for millions of foreign tourists. The English language, especially American English, was becoming a lingua franca. To maintain, as hostile observers often did, that American culture aroused only disgust or hatred was surely to underrate the allure of its dynamism, its non-military institutions, and its democratic ideals. Inspiring goodwill and imitation, these were formidable sources of “soft power” that bolstered America’s image abroad.
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On the other hand, the wealth, power, and foreign policies of the United States frequently incited envy and resentment among millions of people in the world—many of them poor and without prospects for a decent life. Some people, notably in Chile and Iran, remembered bitterly that the CIA had helped to impose tyrannical regimes on their countries. For these and other reasons, overseas acts of murder and terrorism aimed at Americans proliferated during the 1980s. American diplomats, military personnel, and government officials were killed in Greece, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Mexico. Violence, much of it perpetrated by Muslim extremist groups, had escalated even before the Iranian revolutionaries had seized American hostages in 1979. Islamic Jihad was formed in that year, Hamas, a militant Palestinian group, in 1987. Hezbollah, the Iran-backed, Shiite “Party of God,” emerged as perhaps the most implacably anti-American and anti-Israeli organization of all. In April 1983, a delivery van filled with explosives blew up on the grounds of the United States Embassy in Beirut, killing sixty-three people, seventeen of them Americans. Six months later, Hezbollah exploded a truck bomb that killed 241 United States marines at their headquarters in Beirut, where they had been deployed since August 1982 as part of a multinational peacekeeping force. In early 1984, Hezbollah began seizing Americans as hostages in Lebanon.

Elsewhere in the 1980s, bombs and rockets exploded near American embassies or military bases in Portugal, Italy, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, West Berlin, and Kuwait City. Iraqi aircraft accidentally hit an American frigate with a missile in the Persian Gulf in 1987 and killed thirty-seven sailors. An American warship in the Persian Gulf accidentally shot down an Iranian passenger plane in 1988, sending 290 people to their deaths. In December 1988, a terrorist connected to Libya managed to hide explosives on Pan American Airways flight 103. Flying over Lockerbie, Scotland, on its way to New York City, the plane blew up, resulting in the death of 259 passengers and eleven people on the ground.

Contradicting optimism about the eclipse of authoritarian government, a number of long-ruling dictators clung to power during the 1980s, some of them for many years thereafter: Hafez el-Assad in Syria, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya, Suharto in Indonesia, and Kim Il Sung in North Korea, to name only a few. The ultra-conservative royal family of Saudi Arabia, which had the world’s largest known oil reserves, imperiously ruled the country. A number of other nations, including many former republics of the Soviet Union and unstable governments in Latin America, struggled as “illiberal democracies” whose legal and political institutions teetered on fragile foundations.
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Mexico, outwardly a democratic nation, had been a one-party state since 1929. Some regimes brutally stifled dissent. In one of the most barbarous events of the era, the People’s Republic of China used tanks to crush a protest of students in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in June 1989, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people.