James T. Patterson - Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush vs. Gore

Restless Giant

The Oxford History of the United States

David M. Kennedy, General Editor

ROBERT MIDDLEKAUFF
THE GLORIOUS CAUSE
The American Revolution, 17631789

JAMES M. MCPHERSON
BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM
The Civil War Era

DAVID M. KENNEDY
FREEDOM FROM FEAR
The American People in Depression and War, 19291945

JAMES T. PATTERSON
GRAND EXPECTATIONS
The United States, 19451974

JAMES T. PATTERSON
RESTLESS GIANT
The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore

The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore

JAMES T. PATTERSON

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Copyright 2005 by James T. Patterson

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Patterson, James T.
Restless giant : the United States from Watergate to
Bush v. Gore / James T. Patterson.
p. cm. (The Oxford history of the United States ; v. 11)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-19-512216-9
ISBN-10: 0-19-512216-X
1. United StatesHistory1969 I. Title. II. Series.
E839.P38 2005 973.92dc22 2005016711

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

To Cynthia, with love

Many people offered helpful comments on earlier drafts of this book and in so doing enabled me to bring forth the final version. Among these are former and current graduate students at Brown University, where I taught United States history from 1972 until 2002. They include Richard Canedo, Robert Fleegler, and Daniel Williams. John Snyder, a long-ago undergraduate research assistant, had an important role in shaping my prologue. I also thank present and former history faculty colleagues at Brown who criticized various draft chapters: Philip Benedict, Howard Chudacoff, Carl Kaestle, Luther Spoehr, John Thomas, and Gordon Wood. Cherrie Guerzon of the history department offered expert assistance in editing and distributing a series of drafts. Other scholars whose advice improved substantial parts of drafts include William Berman, John Morton Blum, Gareth Davies, Michael Heale, Morton Keller, David Patterson, Tom Roberts, Daniel Rodgers, John Skrentny, Alan Wolfe, and Joshua Zeitz.

Tony Badger, Brian Balogh, Gareth Davies, Townsend Ludington, John Thompson, and Stephen Tuck invited me to present overviews of my book to informed audiences. My children, Stephen Patterson and Marnie Cochran, encouraged me to rethink some of my ideas. Susan Ferber of Oxford University Press commented constructively on some of my chapters. Others at the press who provided vital help in the production process include Joellyn Ausanka, India Cooper (who copyedited the manuscript), and Furaha Norton.

I am especially grateful to the following, all of whom carefully evaluated one or another draft of the entire manuscript: Steven Gillon, Michael Klarman, and Bruce Schulman. Andrew Huebner commented thoughtfully and at length on an entire early draft. Trevor ODriscoll, a former Brown student, joined me in going over every line of a near-final draft. His perceptive eye caught many errors of fact and interpretation. The extensive comments of David Kennedy, general editor of the Oxford History of the United States series, and of Peter Ginna, my editor at Oxford University Press, were invaluable.

My wife, Cynthia, was a constant source of encouragement and advice. Without her intelligent and patient help I would have needed far more time to write this book.

Providence, R.I.
May 2005

James Patterson

Illustrations appear following pages

Grand Expectations: The United States, 19451974, James Pattersons earlier volume in The Oxford History of the United States, opened with a masterful evocation of the exuberant American mood in the postWorld War II yearsa time aptly characterized by the novelist Philip Roth as the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history... the clock of history reset and a whole peoples aims limited no longer by the past (American Pastoral, 4041). Grand Expectations went on to chronicle the remorseless tempering of that extravagant mood in the cauldron of postwar history, as events like the hardening Cold War, the escalating nuclear arms race, the scourge of McCarthyism, the bloody American humiliation in Vietnam, the struggles to secure full citizenship for African Americans and women, the abortive war on poverty, and the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr. provided painful reminders that reality would not easily yield to the aspirations of historys most hopeful dreamers, even at the height of their national power and self-confidence. Grand Expectations concluded with the trauma of the Watergate scandal, which Patterson used to write a mordant epitaph for the inflated expectations of the postWorld War II generation.

Restless Giant begins where Grand Expectations left off, in the sour atmosphere of disenchantment left in the wake of President Richard Nixons disgrace and resignation. But if Grand Expectations told a story about chastised innocence, about a people reluctantly forced to disenthrall themselves from easy assumptions about the malleability of their world, Restless Giant tells a tale of national resilience and even regenerationuntil another enormous trauma, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, once again threatened to transform the tenor and the very terms of American life.

Patterson, the only author to contribute two volumes to The Oxford History of the United States, begins his account of the post-Watergate era by imaginatively recapturing the odd blend of political disillusionment and pop-culture daffiness that gave the 1970s their distinctive flavor. Challenges abounded in that decadefrom the oil shocks administered by the newly assertive Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, the tax revolt that spread from California in 1978 and helped to propel Ronald Reagan to the presidency, the agony of the Iranian hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, divisive Supreme Court decisions concerning abortion and affirmative action, the continuing sexual revolution, often wrenching redefinitions of womens role and the nature of the family, the emerging AIDS epidemic, and the stubborn persistence of stagflationa devils brew of faltering economic productivity and galloping price increases. All of these Patterson recounts with his customary crispness and color, enlivening his story with deft portraits of figures like Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, and a cast of supporting characters that includes Ayatollah Khomeini, Mikhail Gorbachev, O. J. Simpson, Bill Gates, and Steven Spielberg.