Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (106 page)

Although the vast majority of radicals remained non-violent, a few zealots in the Weatherman and other sects resorted at that time to violence on a scale rarely experienced in American history. Between September 1969 and May 1970, there were at least 250 bombings linked to white-dominated radical groups in the United States. This was an average of almost one per day. (The government placed the number at six times as high.) Favorite targets were ROTC buildings, draft boards, induction centers, and other federal offices. In February 1970 bombs exploded at the New York headquarters of Socony Mobil, IBM, and General Telephone and Electronics. The spate of bombings slowed down only in March, when three members of Weatherman accidently killed themselves while preparing explosives in a Greenwich Village townhouse. Ironically, they were the only people killed in the bombings to that time.
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The collapse of SDS did not signify the end of anti-war activity in the United States. Far from it—foes of war in Vietnam, reaching beyond students, gathered ever-greater strength in 1969 and 1970. Nor did the death of SDS mean that radicals left no legacy.
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Many on the left moved on in later years to work for social change as advocates of the poor and as community organizers. Still, the fall of SDS distressed many radicals both then and in later years, for it had been the largest and most visible New Left organization in postwar United States history. Moreover, many of the blows that sank it—and other groups of radicals at the time—were self-inflicted. The SDS and other New Left groups, mostly composed of students, never established strong institutional bases off-campus. Disdaining unions, the students aroused increasingly vehement backlash from labor leaders and from the working classes. They failed for the most part to reach the poor, especially in black ghettos. The radicals, individualistic and sectarian, also resisted organizational discipline. Many became petulant, intolerant, millenarian, and extreme.

The splintering of the New Left exposed broader social and economic forces that affected American society in the Nixon years. Most of the youthful protestors and demonstrators of the early and mid-1960s had grown up in a prosperous era that had encouraged dreams of social transformation. In particular, the cause of civil rights had inspired them. Losing many of their battles, however, they lashed out ever more fiercely against Authority. The internecine brawls that tore them apart in 1969 and 1970 were microcosms of larger frustrations that were accumulating as crusaders for greater rights encountered increasingly unyielding opposition. The struggles between these antagonists symbolized and reflected the very contentious home front that Richard Nixon had been elected to preside over.

N
IXON WAS A PROFESSIONAL POLITICIAN
with no interest in challenging authority. It was impossible to imagine him going to Woodstock or signing up for therapy at the Esalen Institute. The President was an avid fan of professional football, which had enjoyed a boom during the 1960s: the first Super Bowl took place in 1967. He watched
Patton
(1970), which celebrated military discipline, many times. Otherwise he never seemed to relax: even on vacation he appeared always to be garbed in suit, white shirt, and tie. Nixon not only disliked hippies and anti-war activists; he also seized countless opportunities while President to arouse backlash against them. Like LBJ, he set the FBI to work to destroy the Black Panthers and others whom he presumed to be revolutionaries.

Nixon would have sneered at the notion that it was his job to promote personal liberation or transcendence. He remained a wary, humorless, tightly controlled man who felt the need constantly to stiffen himself for crises and to protect himself against enemies, especially intellectuals and journalists. A hard worker, he put in twelve- to sixteen-hour days, in part because he was unable to delegate authority, even on trivial matters. Much of the time he isolated himself. Weeks went by without press conferences. It proved extraordinarily difficult for people, even representatives and senators, to get beyond his top aides, John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman. Neither of these men had had political experience outside of campaigns. Wholly loyal to their boss, they were curt, humorless, and ruthless in their quest for efficiency. Critics soon referred to the Ehrlichman-Haldeman team as the Berlin Wall.
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When Nixon took office in 1969, it seemed highly unlikely that much in the way of domestic legislation would emerge. Having denounced the Great Society during the campaign, he had no desire to expand social programs. Like Kennedy, he had little interest in domestic policies. He said later, "I've always thought this country could run itself, without a president. All you need is a competent Cabinet to run the country at home."
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It therefore came as something of a surprise to contemporary observers that Nixon signed a fair amount of significant legislation between 1969 and 1972. This was mainly the doing of Democrats in Congress, who pursued a more liberal course. Nixon often went along with them, in part because he did not care a great deal about domestic matters, in part because he recognized the political gains to be harvested by supporting generous social legislation, and in part because he was, in fact, a moderate himself. Throughout his career he had been a Republican centrist, closer in fact to liberals like Rockefeller than to conservatives like Taft or Goldwater. Nixon was easily the most liberal Republican American President, excepting Theodore Roosevelt, in the twentieth century. In 1971 he even called for passage of a comprehensive national health insurance plan—one that would have combined private with expanded public initiatives to provide coverage for all. No President since Truman had gone so far; none until President William Clinton in 1993 would try again.
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The list of domestic legislation signed during Nixon's first term was indeed fairly impressive, some of it bolstering the quest for rights that lay at the heart of the culture. It included extension for five more years of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, funding for the "war on cancer," and greater federal spending for medical training and the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.
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Nixon also signed what later became an important measure (so-called Title IX) in 1972 banning sex discrimination in higher education. Title IX became vital in subsequent efforts by women to counter patterns of gender bias in colleges and universities.
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Although Nixon ultimately reorganized the bureaucratic apparatus of the war on poverty, he did not dismantle the programs themselves. Head Start, publicly financed job training, and other OEO efforts continued to be funded at modest levels. Thanks to the urging of Daniel Moynihan, a Democrat who became chief adviser concerning social policies, Nixon also introduced a Family Assistance Plan (FAP) that would largely have replaced AFDC with guaranteed annual incomes for poor families—whether working or not. Minimum incomes for families of four would be $1,600 a year, plus $800 or more worth of food stamps. The plan, which Nixon hoped would reduce the role of welfare bureaucrats, got caught in a political crossfire: the National Welfare Rights Organization protested that the payments were far too low, liberals objected to requirements that some recipients work, conservatives denounced the idea as a giveaway, Democrats in general distrusted the President, and Nixon himself—never deeply engaged in the issue—lost interest. In the end, FAP did not pass. If it had, it would not have addressed the roots of poverty; there was still no consensus on how to do that. Still, FAP was a bold new approach. It would have made life a little more comfortable for many poor families, especially in the South where welfare benefits were low, and it might have simplified the bureaucratic apparatus of welfare. Nixon's association with the plan, while fleeting, suggested that he was open to ideas for streamlining the system.
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Nixon also indicated his willingness to support unprecedentedly high levels of spending that his rights-conscious Democratic Congresses approved for domestic purposes. In this respect he and Congress exercised much less fiscal restraint than federal officials—including the supposedly extravagant liberal Democrats in the Johnson years—had shown in the past. During Nixon's first term, meanstested federal spending per person in poverty rose by approximately 50 percent. Much of this increase represented congressionally approved hikes in entitlements such as food stamps and Medicaid; much of it also went to provide welfare to women, now exercising their rights to aid, who (with their children) swelled the rolls of AFDC.
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In 1972 Congress also enacted a Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program, which replaced existing federal-state assistance to the indigent aged, blind, and disabled with national (and therefore uniform) payments. Benefits under SSI, which began in 1974, were considerably higher than they had been and were indexed to keep pace with inflation.
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At the same time Congress approved substantial raises in Social Security benefits and indexed them, too. Total government outlays for social insurance, which as always were much higher than spending targeted at the poor, jumped from $27.3 billion in 1969 to $64.7 billion in 1975. In time, as more and more Americans reached retirement age, these increases proved to be extraordinarily important.
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These and other changes—and especially continuing economic growth—helped in the short run to cut poverty from 12.8 percent of the population in 1968 to 11.1 percent in 1973, a low in modern United States history, and in the long run to guarantee more generous entitlements to the indigent aged and disabled.
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Nixon, anxious (like Congress) to win the support of the elderly—by then a well-organized, highly rights-conscious lobby—was happy to sign these measures into law in an election year.
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The President hoped that these increases in federal expenditures for social welfare could bolster what he called a New Federalism.
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His "revenue-sharing" plan, approved in 1972, earmarked block grants of federal money—a proposed $16 billion between 1973 and 1975—to states and localities, which were given greater freedom to spend it as they wished. Cutting back on the federal bureaucracy, indeed, greatly appealed to Nixon, who distrusted Washington officialdom.
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Revenue-sharing appealed to many governors. Thanks in part to Nixon's political problems during his second term, however, it did not greatly change the balance of power between Washington and the states.

Some Native American groups, too, gained modestly during Nixon's terms of office. By then they had definitely caught the fever of rights-consciousness. In 1969 a group captured national attention by seizing the island of Alcatraz, which they said was Indian land, and by proclaiming their intention to turn it into an Indian cultural center. Four years later activists in the American Indian Movement (AIM) forcibly occupied Wounded Knee, South Dakota, site of a massacre of Sioux in 1890, forcing a seventy-one-day stand-off with United States marshals before the government agreed to reconsider the treaty rights of the Oglala Sioux. Other Indians overran and wrecked the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Washington. Congress, with Nixon's support, responded to moderate demands. In 1970 it agreed to return the sacred Blue Lake and surrounding lands in New Mexico to Taos Pueblo. In 1971 it approved the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, thereby resolving long-standing controversies to the satisfaction of most Alaskan Indians. In 1973 it formally reversed the "termination" policy of the 1950s by re-establishing the Menominees as a federally recognized tribe and providing for the return of their common assets to tribal control. An Indian Education Act, passed in 1972, authorized new and federally supported programs for Indian children. These and other efforts—mainly to resolve land claims—barely made a dent in the poverty and isolation afflicting most Native Americans, especially those on reservations. Still, they represented signs that officials were beginning to recognize the history of exploitation by whites.
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One of the most surprising acts of Nixon in the field of domestic policy concerned racial discrimination in employment. With his approval, Secretary of Labor George Shultz established in October 1969 the so-called Philadelphia Plan. This required construction unions in Philadelphia employed on government contracts to set up "goals and timetables" for the hiring of black apprentices. In 1970 this mechanism was incorporated in government regulations governing all federal hiring and contracting—thereby involving corporations that employed more than one-third of the national labor force. In so doing the Nixon administration transformed the meaning of "affirmative action." When Congress approved Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to ban job discrimination, it had affirmed a meritocratic and color-blind principle: hiring was to be done without regard to race, religion, sex, or national origin. Although executive orders issued in the Johnson years had called on employers to pursue affirmative action in order to counter discrimination against
individuals
, the orders had not demanded "goals and timetables" or "set-asides" that would protect
groups
. After 1970, however, many American institutions—corporations, unions, universities, others—were required to set aside what in effect were quotas, a process that engaged the federal government as never before in a wide variety of personnel decisions taken in the private sector. This dramatic and rapid transformation of congressional intent took place as a result of executive decisions—especially Nixon's—and court interpretations. Affirmative action of this sort never had the support of democratically elected representatives.
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