Доклад: History of the USA

nation rose to the status of a major world power, a position that was not

abandoned but confirmed in the cold-war years of the late 1940s and the

1950s.

Total War: 1941-45

In September 1940, Congress established the first peacetime draft in American

history, and 6 months later it authorized Roosevelt to transfer munitions to

Great Britain, now standing practically alone against Hitler, by a procedure

called LEND- LEASE. On Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese reacted to stiffening

American diplomacy against its expansion into Southeast Asia by attacking the

U.S. fleet at PEARL HARBOR in the Hawaiian Islands. This thrust was aimed at

immobilizing American power long enough to allow the establishment of a wide

imperial Japanese perimeter including all of the western Pacific and China,

henceforth to be defended against all comers. Japan, however, in one stroke

had succeeded in scuttling American isolationist sentiment, forcing the

United States into World War II, and unifying the American people as never

before in total war.

The first American military decision was to concentrate on defeating Hitler

while fighting a holding action in the Pacific. The next was to form an

alliance with Great Britain so close that even military commands were jointly

staffed. The year 1942 was devoted to halting, after many defeats, the

outward spread of Japanese power and to keeping Hitler's forces from

overwhelming America's British and Soviet allies. Large shipments of

munitions went to both allies. In November an American force invaded North

Africa; it joined the British in defeating the German armies in that region

by May 1943.

In 2 months the Allies were fighting the Germans in Sicily and Italy; at the

same time U.S. forces in the Pacific were pushing in toward the Japanese home

islands by means of an island- hopping offensive. On the long Russian front,

German armies were being defeated and pushed back toward their borders. In

June 1944 a huge Allied force landed on the French coast, an invasion

preceded by 2 years of intense day-and-night bombing of Germany by British

and American aircraft. By August 1944, Paris was recaptured. Hitler's empire

was crumbling; clouds of bombers were raining destruction on German cities;

and on Apr. 30, 1945, with the Soviet troops just a few miles from Berlin,

Hitler committed suicide. Peace in Europe followed shortly.

The Pacific war continued, the Japanese home islands being rendered

practically defenseless by July 1945. American aerial attacks burned out city

after city. In April, Harry S. TRUMAN had succeeded to the presidency on

Roosevelt's death. Now, advised that the alternative would be an invasion in

which multitudes would perish, including many thousands of young Americans,

he authorized use of the recently tested atomic bomb. On Aug. 6, the city of

Hiroshima was obliterated; on Aug. 9, the same fate came to Nagasaki. Within

a week, a cease-fire (which later research suggests was reachable without

atomic attack) was achieved.

The political shape of the postwar world was set at the YALTA CONFERENCE

(February 1945) between Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin, and Winston Churchill.

Soviet occupation of Eastern European countries overrun by the Red Army was

accepted, in return for a pledge to allow democratic governments to rise

within them. Soviet and Allied occupation zones in Germany were established,

with Berlin, deep in the Soviet zone, to be jointly administered. In return

for Soviet assistance in the invasion of Japan (which was eventually not

needed), it was agreed that certain possessions in the Far East and rights in

Manchuria, lost to the Japanese long before, would be restored to the USSR.

Soon it was clear that the kind of democratic government envisioned by the

Americans was not going to be allowed in the East European countries under

Soviet control. Nor, as the Soviets pointed out, was the United States ready

to admit the Soviets to any role in the occupation and government of Japan,

whose internal constitution and economy were rearranged to fit American

desires under Gen. Douglas MACARTHUR.

Cold-War Years

The breach widened steadily. Charges and countercharges were directed back

and forth, the Soviets and Americans interpreting each other's actions in the

worst possible light. Americans became convinced that the Soviets were

thrusting out in every direction, seeking to communize not only the Soviet-

occupied countries, but also Turkey, Greece, and Western Europe. In February

1946, Stalin declared in Moscow that there could never be a lasting peace

with capitalism. Shortly thereafter, Churchill warned of the "iron curtain"

that had descended across the middle of Europe. The COLD WAR had begun.

In March 1947, Truman asked Congress for funds to shore up Turkey and Greece,

both under Soviet pressure, and announced the Truman Doctrine: that "it must

be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting

attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures." Then the

MARSHALL PLAN (named for George C. MARSHALL, U.S. chief of staff during the

war and at this time secretary of state), approved by Congress in April 1948,

sent $12 billion to the devastated countries of Europe to help them rebuild

and fend off the despair on which communism was believed to feed.

True to its Democratic tradition, the Truman administration stressed

multilateral diplomacy; that is, the building of an international order based

on joint decision making. Nationalism, it was believed, must be tamed. The

United Nations received strong American support. Meanwhile, the United States

continued the drive toward a lowering of world tariffs (begun in the 1930s).

During the war, all recipients of Lend-Lease had been required to commit

themselves to lowered tariffs. These commitments were internationally

formalized in 1947 in the GENERAL AGREEMENT ON TARIFFS AND TRADE, when 23

nations participated in an extensive mutual lowering of trade barriers. In

1948, at American initiative, the ORGANIZATION OF AMERICAN STATES was

established to provide a regional multilateral consultative body in the

Western Hemisphere. Within Europe, the Marshall Plan required the formation

of Europe-wide organizations, leading eventually to the Common Market.

Toward the USSR, the basic American policy was that known as containment:

building "situations of strength" around its vast perimeter to prevent the

outward spread of communism. Angered Americans blamed the USSR for world

disorder and came to regard the peace of the entire world as a U.S.

responsibility. After their immense war effort, many Americans believed that

the United States could accomplish whatever it desired to do. Also, having

defeated one form of tyranny, fascism, and now being engaged in resisting

another, Stalinist communism, the American people assumed with few questions

that, since their cause was just, whatever they did in its name was right.

Critics of national policy were harshly condemned.

A series of East-West crises, most dramatically the Berlin Blockade of 1948-

49, led to the creation (April 1949) of the NORTH ATLANTIC TREATY

ORGANIZATION. The NATO alliance sought to link the United States militarily

to Western Europe (including Greece and Turkey) by making an attack against

one member an attack against all. As Europe recovered its prosperity, the

focus of East-West confrontation shifted to Asia, where the British, French,

and Dutch empires were collapsing and the Communist revolution in China was

moving toward its victory (October 1949). In June 1950 the North Korean army

invaded South Korea. The United Nations Security Council (which the Soviets

were then boycotting) called on UN members jointly to repel this attack.

Shortly afterward, a multinational force under Gen. Douglas MacArthur was

battling to turn back North Korean forces in the KOREAN WAR. As the UN army

swept northward to the Manchurian border, Chinese forces flooded southward to

resist them, and a long, bloody seesaw war ensued. An armistice was not

signed until July 1953, following 150,000 American casualties and millions of

deaths among the Koreans and Chinese.

Domestic Developments during the Truman Years

In 1945, President Truman called on Congress to launch another program of

domestic reform, but the nation was indifferent. It was riding a wave of

affluence such as it had never dreamed of in the past. Tens of millions of

people found themselves moving upward into a middle-class way of life. The

cold war, and the pervasive fear of an atomic war, induced a trend toward

national unity and a downplaying of social criticism. The Atomic Energy Act

of 1946 nationalized nuclear power, putting it under civilian control, but no

other bold departures were made. What fascinated Americans was the so-called

baby boom--a huge increase in the birthrate (the population was at 150

million by 1950 and 179 million by 1960)--and the need to house new families

and teach their children.

In the presence of rapidly rising inflation, labor unions called thousands of

strikes, leading in 1948 to passage of the Taft-Hartley Act (see LABOR-

MANAGEMENT RELATIONS ACT), which limited the powers of unions, declared

certain of their tactics "unfair labor practices," and gave the president

power to secure 80-day "cooling off periods" by court injunction. As union

benefits increased nationwide, however, industrial warfare quieted. In 1948

the United Automobile Workers won automatic "cost of living" pay increases in

their contracts and in 1955 the guaranteed annual wage. In 1955 merger

negotiations were completed for the formation of the AMERICAN FEDERATION OF

LABOR AND CONGRESS OF INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONS (AFL-CIO); more than 85

percent of all union members were now in one organization.

Fears that Russian communism was taking over the entire world were pervasive

during the Truman years. Soviet spy rings were discovered in the United

States, Canada, and Great Britain. In 1948-50 a sensational trial for perjury

led to the conviction of a former State Department official, Alger HISS, on

the grounds that while in the department he had been part of a Communist cell

and had passed secrets to the Soviets. In 1950 a Soviet spy ring was

uncovered in the Los Alamos atomic installation. These events, together with

the explosion (1949) of a Soviet atomic bomb and the victory (1949) of the

Communists in China, prompted a widespread conviction that subversive

conspiracies within the American government were leading toward Soviet

triumph.

In February 1950, Republican Sen. Joseph R. MCCARTHY of Wisconsin began a 4-

year national crisis, during which he insisted repeatedly that he had direct

evidence of such conspiracies in the federal government, even in the army.

The entire country seemed swept up in a hysteria in which anyone left of

center was attacked as a subversive. A program to root out alleged security

risks in the national government led to a massive collapse in morale in its

departments; it destroyed the State Department's corps of experts on Far

Eastern and Soviet affairs. The Truman administration's practice of foreign

policy was brought practically to a halt. In 1952, Dwight D. EISENHOWER,

nationally revered supreme commander in Europe during World War II, was

elected president (1953-61) on the Republican ticket, but soon McCarthy was

attacking him as well for running a "weak, immoral, and cowardly" foreign

policy. In 1954 a long and dramatic series of congressional hearings, the

first to be nationally televised, destroyed McCarthy's credibility. He was

censured by the Senate, and a measure of national stability returned.

The Eisenhower Years

Eisenhower declared himself uninterested in repealing the New Deal, but he

was socially and economically conservative and his presidency saw the

enactment of few reforms. His appointment of Earl WARREN as chief justice of

the Supreme Court, however, led to a Court that suddenly seized so bold and

active a role in national life that many called it revolutionary. During

Warren's long tenure (1953-69), the Court swept away the legal basis for

racial discrimination; ruled that every person must be represented equally in

state legislatures and in the U.S. House of Representatives; changed

criminal-justice procedures by ensuring crucial rights to the accused;

broadened the artist's right to publish works shocking to the general public;

and in major ways limited the government's ability to penalize individuals

for their beliefs or associations.

No decision of the Warren Court was more historic than that in BROWN V. BOARD

OF EDUCATION OF TOPEKA, KANSAS (1954), which ruled unanimously that racial

segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional. This great decision--

followed by others that struck down segregation in all public facilities and

in elections and marriage laws--sparked a revolution in race- relations law.

The separate-but-equal principle was cast aside, and the Second

Reconstruction could get underway. Now black Americans could charge that the

statutory discrimination that tied them down and kept them in a secondary

caste was illegal, a fact that added enormous moral weight to their cause.

Resistance by southern whites to desegregated public education would make the

advance of that cause frustratingly slow, however. By 1965 black children had

been admitted to white schools in fewer than 25 percent of southern school

districts. The fight for racial equality was not limited to the South, for by

1960 only 60 percent of black Americans remained there; 73 percent of them

also lived in cities: they were no longer simply a scattered, powerless rural

labor force in the South.

In 1957 the Soviet government launched its first orbiting satellite, Sputnik,

and a national controversy erupted. Why are we so far behind in the crucial

area of rocketry? Americans asked. Many critics replied that weaknesses in

public education, especially in science and technology, were the root cause.

In 1958, Congress enacted the first general education law since the Morrill

Act of 1862--the NATIONAL DEFENSE EDUCATION ACT. It authorized $1 billion for

education from primary level through university graduate training,

inaugurating a national policy that became permanent thereafter and that

resulted in the spending of huge sums and the transformation of American

public education.

Eisenhower's foreign policy, under Secretary of State John Foster DULLES, was

more nationalist and unilateral than Truman's. American-dominated alliances

ringed the Soviet and Chinese perimeters. Little consultation with Western

European allies preceded major American initiatives, and in consequence the

United States and Western Europe began drifting apart. Persistent recessions

in the American economy hobbled the national growth rate while the Soviet and

Western European economies surged dramatically. An aggressive Nikita

Khrushchev, Soviet premier, trumpeted that communism would bury capitalism

and boasted of Moscow's powerful intercontinental missiles while encouraging

so-called wars of liberation in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.

THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1960: NEW CHALLENGES TO THEAMERICAN SYSTEM

During the 1960s and 1970s cold-war concerns gave way as attention focused on

social and cultural rebellions at home. Involvement in a long and indecisive

war in Asia and scandals that reached into the White House eroded the

confidence of many Americans in their country's values and system of

government. The United States survived such challenges, however, and emerged

from the 1970s subdued but intact.

The Exuberant Kennedy Years

The Democratic senator John F. KENNEDY, asserting that he wanted to "get the

country moving again,"won the presidency in a narrow victory over Vice-

President Richard M. NIXON in 1960. The charismatic Kennedy stimulated a

startling burst of national enthusiasm and aroused high hopes among the young

and the disadvantaged. Within 3 years his Peace Corps (see ACTION) sent about

10,000 Americans (mostly young people) abroad to work in 46 countries.

Kennedy's ALLIANCE FOR PROGRESS proposed a 10-year plan to transform the

economies of the Latin American nations (partially successful, it sunk out of

sight during the Vietnam War). He also proposed massive tariff cuts between

the increasingly protectionist European Common Market and the world at large.

(The so-called Kennedy Round of tariff negotiations concluded in 1967 with

the largest and widest tariff cuts in modern history.) In June 1961, Kennedy

pulled together the disparate, disorganized space effort by giving it a

common goal: placing an American on the moon. Responding enthusiastically,

Congress poured out billions of dollars to finance the project. (After the

APOLLO PROGRAM succeeded, on July 20, 1969, in landing astronauts on the

moon, the space effort remained in motion, if at a reduced pace.)

Kennedy blundered into a major defeat within 3 months of entering the White

House. He kept in motion a plan sponsored by the CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

(CIA) and begun by the Eisenhower administration to land an invasion force in

Cuba, which under Fidel Castro had become a Communist state and a Soviet

state. The BAY OF PIGS INVASION failed, utterly and completely. The force was

quickly smashed when it struggled onto the beaches of the Bay of Pigs in

April 1961. During the succeeding 2 years, Kennedy labored to break the rigid

cold-war relationship with the USSR. In October 1962, however, he discovered

that the Soviets were rapidly building missile emplacements in Cuba.

Surrounding the island with a naval blockade, he induced the Soviets to

desist, and the sites were eventually dismantled. The relieved world

discovered that, when pushed to the crisis point, the two major powers could

stop short of nuclear war. This CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS effectively ended the

cold war.

The atomic bomb now seemed defused, and Moscow seemed ready to negotiate on

crucial issues (perhaps, it was suggested 15 years later, to give the Soviets

time to build a far more powerful armaments system). A new and more relaxed

relationship developed slowly into the U.S.-Soviet DETENTE that emerged in

the late 1960s and persisted through the 1970s. A test-ban treaty, the Moscow

Agreement (see ARMS CONTROL), signed in October 1963 symbolized the opening

of the new relationship. Three of the world's nuclear powers (Great Britain,

the United States, and the USSR--the fourth, France, did not sign) agreed to

end the detonation of atomic explosions in the atmosphere.

In this new environment of security, American culture, long restrained by the

sense of team spirit and conformity that the crises of depression, war, and

cold war had induced, broke loose into multiplying swift changes. People now

began talking excitedly of "doing their own thing." The media were filled

with discussions of the rapidly changing styles of dress and behavior among

the young; of the "new woman" (or the "liberated woman," as she became

known); of new sexual practices and attitudes and new styles of living. The

sense of community faded. Romanticism shaped the new mood, with its emphasis

on instinct and impulse rather than reason, ecstatic release rather than

restraint, individualism and self-gratification rather than group discipline.

Assassination and Cultural Rebellion

The excitement of Kennedy's presidency and his calls to youth to serve the

nation had inspired the young, both black and white. His assassination in

November 1963 shocked and dismayed Americans of all ages, and the

psychological links he had fashioned between "the system" and young people

began to dissolve. His successor, Lyndon B. JOHNSON, later shouldering the

onus of an unpopular war, was unable to build a reservoir of trust among the

young. As the large demographic group that had constituted the "baby boom" of

the post-World War II years reached college age, it became the "wild

generation" of student radicals and "hippies" who rebelled against political

and cultural authority.

Styles of life changed swiftly. Effective oral contraceptives, Playboy

magazine, and crucial Supreme Court decisions helped make the United States,

long one of the world's most prudish nations in sexual matters, one of its

most liberated. The drug culture mushroomed. Communal living groups of

"dropouts" who rejected mass culture received widespread attention. People

more than 30 years old reacted angrily against the flamboyant youth (always a

small minority of the young generation) who flouted traditional standards,

glorified self-indulgence, and scorned discipline.

In the second half of the 1960s this generation gap widened as many of the

young (along with large numbers of older people) questioned U.S. involvement

in Vietnam. Peaceful protests led to violent confrontations, and differences

concerning styles of life blurred with disagreements about the degree of

allegiance that individuals owed to the American system. In 1968 the

assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther KING, Jr., and President Kennedy's

brother Robert F. KENNEDY seemed to confirm suspicions that dark currents of

violence underlay many elements in American society.

Race Relations during the 1960s and 1970s

Race relations was one area with great potential for violence, although many

black leaders stressed nonviolence. Since the mid -1950s, King and others had

been leading disciplined mass protests of black Americans in the South

against segregation, emphasizing appeals to the conscience of the white

majority. The appeals of these leaders and judicial rulings on the illegality

of segregationist practices were vital parts of the Second Reconstruction,

which transformed the role and status of black Americans, energizing every

other cultural movement as well. At the same time, southern white resistance

to the ending of segregation, with its attendant violence, stimulated a

northern-dominated Congress to enact (1957) the first civil rights law since

1875, creating the Commission on Civil Rights and prohibiting interference

with the right to vote (blacks were still massively disenfranchised in many

southern states). A second enactment (1960) provided federal referees to aid

blacks in registering for and voting in federal elections. In 1962, President

Kennedy dispatched troops to force the University of Mississippi (a state

institution) to admit James Meredith, a black student. At the same time, he

forbade racial or religious discrimination in federally financed housing.

Kennedy then asked Congress to enact a law to guarantee equal access to all

public accommodations, forbid discrimination in any state program receiving

federal aid, and outlaw discrimination in employment and voting. After

Kennedy's death, President Johnson prodded Congress into enacting (August

1965) a voting-rights bill that eliminated all qualifying tests for

registration that had as their objective limiting the right to vote to

whites. Thereafter, massive voter registration drives in the South sent the

proportion of registered blacks spurting upward from less than 30 to over 53

percent in 1966.

The civil rights phase of the black revolution had reached its legislative

and judicial summit. Then, from 1964 to 1968, more than a hundred American

cities were swept by RACE RIOTS, which included dynamitings, guerrilla

warfare, and huge conflagrations, as the anger of the northern black

community at its relatively low income, high unemployment, and social

exclusion exploded. At this violent expression of hopelessness the northern

white community drew back rapidly from its reformist stance on the race issue

(the so-called white backlash). In 1968, swinging rightward in its politics,

the nation chose as president Richard M. Nixon, who was not in favor of using

federal power to aid the disadvantaged. Individual advancement, he believed,

had to come by individual effort.

Nonetheless, fundamental changes continued in relations between white and

black. Although the economic disparity in income did not disappear--indeed,

it widened, as unemployment within black ghettos and among black youths

remained at a high level in the 1970s--white-dominated American culture

opened itself significantly toward black people. Entrance requirements for

schools and colleges were changed; hundreds of communities sought to work out

equitable arrangements to end de facto segregation in the schools (usually

with limited success, and to the accompaniment of a white flight to different

school districts); graduate programs searched for black applicants; and

integration in jobs and in the professions expanded. Blacks moved into the

mainstream of the party system, for the voting- rights enactments transformed

national politics. The daily impact of television helped make blacks, seen in

shows and commercial advertisements, seem an integral part of a pluralistic

nation.

Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans were also becoming more prominent in

American life. Reaching the level of 9 million by the 1960s, Spanish-surnamed

Americans had become the second largest ethnic minority; they, too, were

asserting their right to equitable treatment in politics, in culture, and in

economic affairs.

Kennedy-Johnson Legislative Accomplishments

In his first 3 months of office, Kennedy sent 39 messages and letters to

Congress asking for reform legislation--messages dealing with health care,

education, housing and community development, civil rights, transportation,

and many other areas. His narrow margin of victory in 1960, however, had not

seemed a mandate for change, and an entrenched coalition of Republicans and

conservative southern Democrats in Congress had prevented the achievement of

many of Kennedy's legislative goals by the time of his death. Johnson, who in

1964 won an enormous victory over the Republican presidential candidate,

Barry GOLDWATER, and carried on his coattails a large Democratic

congressional majority, proceeded with consummate political skill to enact

this broad program.

Johnson launched his WAR ON POVERTY, which focused on children and young

people, providing them with better education and remedial training, and

Congress created a domestic Peace Corps (VISTA). Huge sums went to the states

for education. MEDICARE was enacted in 1965, providing millions of elderly

Americans a kind of security from the costs of illness that they had never

known before. Following Kennedy's Clean Air Act of 1963, the Water Quality

Act of 1965 broadened the effort to combat pollution. New national parks were

established, and a Wilderness Act to protect primeval regions was passed. The

Economic Development Administration moved into depressed areas, such as

Appalachia. Billions were appropriated for urban redevelopment and public

housing.

At War in Vietnam

The VIETNAM WAR, however, destroyed the Johnson presidency. The United States

had been the protector of South Vietnam since 1954, when the Geneva

Conference had divided Vietnam into a communist North and a pro-Western

South. By 1961 an internal revolution had brought the South Vietnamese regime

to the point of toppling. President Kennedy, deciding that South Vietnam was

salvageable and that he could not allow another communist victory, sent in

15,000 military advisors and large supplies of munitions. By 1964 it was

clear that a collapse was again impending (the CIA warned that the reason was

the regime's harshness and corruption), and Johnson decided to escalate

American involvement. After his electoral victory that year, he began aerial

bombardment of North Vietnam, which persisted almost continuously for 3 years

to no apparent result other than the destruction of large parts of the North

and heavy loss of life. Meanwhile, the world at large (and many Americans)

condemned the U.S. military actions.

In April 1965, Johnson began sending American ground troops to Vietnam, the

total reaching nearly 550,000 in early 1969. (In that year alone, with a

full-scale naval, aerial, and ground war being waged in Vietnam, total

expenditures there reached $100 billion.) Huge regions in the South were laid

waste by American troops in search of hostile forces. Still victory eluded.

Responding to mass public protests that went on year after year and put the

United States in a state of near- insurrection--and in recognition of

fruitless American casualties, which in 1967 passed 100,000--Johnson decided

in March 1968 to halt the bombing of the North and to begin deescalation. At

the same time he announced that he would not run for reelection. From being

an immensely popular president, he had descended to a position as one of the

most hated and reviled occupants of that office.

Foreign Policy under Nixon

When Richard M. Nixon became president in 1969, he profoundly changed U.S.

foreign policy. The new theme was withdrawal from commitments around the

globe. Nixon revived the kind of nationalist, unilateral foreign policy that,

since Theodore Roosevelt, presidents of his political tradition had

preferred. With Henry KISSINGER as an advisor and later as secretary of

state, he began a kind of balance-of-power diplomacy. He preferred to keep

the United States free of lasting commitments (even to former allies) so that

it could move back and forth between the other four power centers--Europe,

the USSR, China, and Japan--and maintain world equilibrium.

Nixon soon announced his "Vietnamization" policy, which meant a slow

withdrawal of American forces and a heavy building up of the South Vietnam

army. Nonetheless, in the 3 years 1969-71, 15,000 more Americans died

fighting in Vietnam. In April 1970, Nixon launched a huge invasion of

Cambodia in a vain attempt to clear out communist "sanctuaries."

Then, most dramatically, he deflected world attention by ending the long

American quarantine of Communist China, visiting Peking in February 1972 for

general discussions on all matters of mutual concern--a move that led to the

establishment (1979) of diplomatic relations. At the same time, he continued

the heavy bombing attacks on North Vietnam that he had reinstituted in late

1971. He brushed aside as "without binding force or effect"the congressional

attempt to halt American fighting in Vietnam by repealing the TONKIN GULF

RESOLUTION of 1964, which had authorized Johnson to begin military

operations. Nixon asserted that as commander in chief he could do anything he

deemed necessary to protect the lives of American troops still in Vietnam.

In May 1972, Nixon became the first American president to consult with Soviet

leaders in Moscow, leaving with major agreements relating to trade,

cooperation in space programs and other fields of technology, cultural

exchanges, and many other areas. He became more popular as prosperity waxed

and as negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris seemed to be bringing

the Vietnam War to a halt. In 1972 the Democrats nominated for the presidency

Sen. George MCGOVERN of South Dakota, a man who for years had advocated

women's rights, black equality, and greater power for the young. With the

nation's increasingly conservative cultural mood and the trend in Vietnam,

Nixon won a massive landslide victory. In January 1973, Nixon announced a

successful end to the Vietnamese negotiations: a cease-fire was established

and an exchange of prisoners provided for.

Watergate

Few presidents could ever have been more confident of a successful second

term than Richard Nixon at this point. But before the year 1973 was out, his

administration had fallen into the gravest scandal in American history. By

March 1974 the stunning events of the WATERGATE crisis and associated

villainies had led to the resignation of more than a dozen high officials--

including the vice-president (for the acceptance of graft)--and the

indictment or conviction of many others. Their criminal acts included

burglary, forgery, illegal wiretapping and electronic surveillance, perjury,

obstruction of justice, bribery, and many other offenses.

These scandalous events had their roots in the long Democratic years

beginning with Roosevelt, when the American presidency had risen in a kind of

solitary majesty to become overwhelmingly the most powerful agency of

government. All that was needed for grave events to occur was the appearance

in the White House of individuals who would put this immense power to its

full use. Lyndon Johnson was such a man, for he was driven by gargantuan

dreams. One result was America's disastrous war in Vietnam. Richard Nixon,

too, believed in the imperial authority of the presidency. He envisioned

politics as an arena in which he represented true Americanism and his critics

the forces of subversion.

At least from 1969, Nixon operated on the principle that, at his direction,

federal officials could violate the law. On June 17, 1972, members of his

Special Investigations Unit (created without congressional authorization)

were arrested while burglarizing the national Democratic party offices in the

Watergate office-and-apartment complex in Washington, D.C.

A frantic effort then began, urged on by the president, to cover up links

between the Watergate burglars and the executive branch. This cover-up

constituted an obstruction of justice, a felony. This fact, however, was kept

hidden through many months of congressional hearings (begun in May 1973) into

the burglaries. Televised, they were watched by multitudes. The American

people learned of millions of dollars jammed into office safes and sluiced

about from hand to hand to finance shady dealings, of elaborate procedures

for covering tracks and destroying papers, and of tapes recording the

president's conversations with his aides.

With Watergate eroding Nixon's prestige, Congress finally halted American

fighting in Indochina by cutting off funds (after Aug. 15, 1973) to finance

the bombing of Cambodia, which had continued after the Vietnam Peace

Agreement. Thus, America's longest war was finally concluded. In November

1973, Congress passed, over the president's veto, the War Powers Act, sharply

limiting the executive's freedom of action in initiating foreign wars. When

Vice-President Spiro T. AGNEW resigned his office on Oct. 10, 1973, Nixon,

with Senate ratification, appointed Gerald R. Ford to replace him.

On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to deliver his Oval Office

tapes to Congress. This order, in turn, led to the revelation that he had

directly approved the cover-up. Informed by Republican congressional leaders

of his certain conviction in forthcoming impeachment proceedings, Richard

Nixon resigned the presidency on Aug. 9, 1974.

The Third Century Begins

As the nation approached its bicentennial anniversary under President Gerald

R. FORD (1974-77), it was reassured that the Constitution had worked: a

president guilty of grave offenses had been made peacefully to leave his

office. The American people had become aware, however, in the Vietnam

conflict, of the limits to their nation's strength and of questions as to the

moral legitimacy of its purposes. They had also learned, in the Watergate

scandal, of the danger of corruption of the republic's democratic values. The

nation's cities were in grave difficulties; its nonwhite peoples still lagged

far behind the whites in income and opportunity; unemployment seemed fixed at

a level of more than 6 percent, which, for minorities and the young,

translated into much higher figures, and inflation threatened to erode the

buying power of everyone in the country.

Most of these problems continued to plague the American nation during the

presidency (1977-81) of Jimmy CARTER, Democrat of Georgia, who defeated Ford

in the 1976 election. Carter brought to the presidency an informality and

sense of piety. He arranged negotiations for an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty

(signed in 1979) and guided the Panama Canal treaty through narrow Senate

approval (1978). Carter also had to deal with shortages of petroleum that

threatened to bring the energy- hungry U.S. economy to a standstill, with

soaring inflation and interest rates, with the taking (1979) of U.S. hostages

by Iranian militants (see IRANIAN HOSTAGE CRISIS), and with an international

crisis precipitated by Soviet intervention (1979) in Afghanistan. His

popularity waned as problems remained unsolved, and in 1980 the voters turned

overwhelmingly to the conservative Republican candidate, Ronald REAGAN.

Robert Kelley

The Reagan Era

The release of the U.S. hostages in Iran on the same day as Reagan's

inauguration launched the new administration on a wave of euphoria. Aided by

a torrent of goodwill following an attempt on his life in March 1981, Reagan

persuaded the Congress to cut government spending for welfare, increase

outlays for defense, reduce taxes, and deregulate private enterprise. His

"supply side" economic policy (dubbed "Reaganomics" by the media) anticipated

that lower taxes and a freer market would stimulate investment and that a

prosperous, expanding economy would increase employment, reduce inflation,

and provide enough government revenue to eliminate future budget deficits.

The "Reagan Revolution," combined with the tight money policies of the

Federal Reserve System, initially dismayed those who hoped for a reversal of

the economic stagnation of the 1970s. Although high interest rates helped cut

inflation from more than 12 percent in 1980 to less than 7 percent in 1982,

unemployment rose from 7 percent to 11 percent--the highest rate since 1940--

and the annual federal deficit soared to $117 billion, almost twice as high

as it had ever been. The United States experienced its worst recession since

the 1930s. Beginning in 1983, however, the economy rebounded sharply. By the

end of 1986, 11 million new jobs had been created, the consumer price index

had dropped from 13.1 percent in 1979 to just 4.1 percent, and the Dow-Jones

average had climbed to an all-time high.

The Reagan recovery did little for rural America or for the declining

industrial regions of the Midwest. In the first half of the 1980s, 8.4

million people joined the ranks of the poor, an increase of 40 percent.

Nearly 33 million Americans--one out of every seven--were reported as living

below the poverty line. But the bulk of middle-class America, buoyed by low

inflation and its own prosperity, gave the president high marks for his

economic program. Conservatives were pleased with his appointments to the

federal bench, his declarations of faith in traditional values, and his proud

patriotism.

In practice, and often in response to congressional pressure, Reagan balanced

his ardent anti-Communist rhetoric with generally restrained foreign-policy

actions. He denounced the USSR as an "evil empire" but ended the embargo on

grain sales to the Soviets imposed by President Carter after the invasion of

Afghanistan. While presiding over the largest peacetime military buildup in

U.S. history, he observed the still- unratified SALT II arms control treaty

negotiated by his predecessor. He sent American troops to Lebanon as part of

a peacekeeping force but withdrew them after 241 marines were killed in a

bomb attack in October 1983.

Only in Central America and the Caribbean did the president's actions match

his rhetoric. To quash a Communist revolt in El Salvador, Reagan committed

military advisors and furnished financial aid to the Salvadoran government.

Determined to oust Nicaragua's pro-Communist Sandinista government, he gave

covert aid to antigovernment rebels--known as the contras--in defiance of a

congressional ban on such aid. In 1983 he used military force to topple a

pro-Cuban regime on the Caribbean island of Grenada.

Reagan and his running mate, George Bush, easily defeated their Democratic

opponents, Walter MONDALE and Geraldine FERRARO, in 1984, but the Democrats

maintained control of Congress and the president offered fewer domestic

initiatives during his second term. Partisan wrangling over what parts of the

budget to cut in order to reduce the staggering federal deficit led to

passage of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act (1985), which mandated automatic,

across-the-board spending cuts over a period of years. The Supreme Court

declared the automatic cuts unconstitutional in 1986, however, and repeated

failure by the president and Congress to agree on budget reductions kept the

deficit at record levels. Disputes over the control of trade policy also

worsened the imbalance of imports over exports, which rose to $161 billion in

1987.

Tax reductions and defense spending, however, kept the economy booming.

Reagan boosted defense spending 35 percent above the 1980 level, and in 1986

he secured congressional approval for a major INCOME TAX reform law that

further cut taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals and also reduced by

6 million the number of poorer taxpayers.

At the end of Reagan's tenure the GOP could boast that his administration had

helped create 16.5 million new jobs, bring down the unemployment rate to a

17-year low, cut double-digit inflation down to about 4 percent, and raise

the gross national product by one-third. Democrats, on the other hand, could

criticize "Reaganomics" for promoting prosperity at the expense of the poor

and the nation's future well-being. The number of people below the poverty

line rose by 8 million, and their lot was made worse by cuts of nearly $50

billion in social-welfare programs. Reductions in subsidized housing from $30

billion in 1981 to $7 billion in 1988 made HOMELESSNESS part of the national

lexicon, and the number of Americans without any health-care insurance rose

to 37 million. By borrowing rather than taxing to rearm, Reagan mortgaged the

financial future. The cost of servicing the national debt rose from 8.9

percent of all federal outlays in 1980 to 14.8 percent in 1989. Moreover,

persistent trade and budget deficits made the country a debtor nation for the

first time since 1914.

During its eight years in office, the administration had a significant impact

on the composition of the federal judiciary. President Reagan appointed three

conservatives to the Supreme Court and elevated conservative William

Rehnquist to the position of chief justice. Overall, he filled about half of

the 700 federal judgeships, most of them with conservative appointees.

A major scandal of Reagan's second term was the IRAN-CONTRA AFFAIR, in which

national security advisor John M. Poindexter, Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North,

and other administration officials were involved in a secret scheme to sell

arms to Iran, diverting some of the proceeds to the contra rebels in

Nicaragua. Investigation of this affair by Congress in 1987 led to the

prosecution of Poindexter and North, and damaged the administration's image.

Ironically, developments in foreign affairs during Ronald Reagan's second

term led this most anti-Communist of presidents into a new, harmonious

relationship with the Soviet Union and to sign the first superpower treaty

that actually reduced nuclear armaments. Soviet leader Mikhail GORBACHEV,

determined to relax tensions with the West, met with Reagan in 1985 and 1986;

in 1987 they signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, and in 1988 a

triumphant Reagan traveled to Moscow for a fourth summit and further arms-

reduction talks.

The Bush Administration

The remarkable reduction in cold-war tensions, combined with the promise of

continued prosperity with no increase in taxes, carried Republicans George

BUSH and Dan QUAYLE to victory over Democratic candidates Michael DUKAKIS and

Lloyd BENTSEN in 1988. Lacking his predecessor's strong personal following

and facing a Democratic-controlled Congress, Bush sought to govern in a more

moderate, middle-of-the-road way than Reagan. The rapid demise of communism

in Eastern Europe in 1989-90 and upheaval in the USSR in 1991 provided him

with an opportunity to lessen international tensions and to reclaim the

primacy of the United States in world affairs. Bush intervened militarily in

Panama in 1989 to overthrow its president, Manuel NORIEGA. In mid-1990,

responding to Iraq's invasion and annexation of Kuwait, he ordered more than

400,000 American troops to the Persian Gulf region to defend Saudi Arabia.

When Iraqi troops refused to withdraw from Kuwait in January 1991, demanded

by Bush in an ultimatum, he authorized a massive bombing, and then ground

assault, on Iraq and its forces in Kuwait, and won a swift victory. (See

PERSIAN GULF WAR.)

Decisive in acting abroad, Bush failed to evolve a domestic program that

adequately addressed a persistent recession starting in 1990. That year,

despite the recession, he and congressional leaders agreed to a deficit-

reduction package that raised federal taxes, thereby breaking his "no new

taxes" 1988 election campaign pledge. He also failed on his promise to be

both "the environment president" and "the education president," and angered

many women by nominating Clarence THOMAS to the Supreme Court and continuing

to support him despite allegations of sexual harassment. Concerned about the

economy and demanding change, many conservative Republicans backed political

columnist Patrick J. Buchanan's effort to contest Bush's renomination while

moderates rallied to the independent candidacy of H. Ross PEROT. Also

focusing on the nation's economic woes and promising change, William

Jefferson "Bill" CLINTON, governor of Arkansas, beat several rivals in the

Democratic primaries and chose as his running mate Tennessee senator Albert

GORE--like Clinton, a baby-boomer, a white Southern Baptist, and a moderate.

Capitalizing on a slumping economy and increasing unemployment, the Clinton-

Gore ticket won 43 percent of the highest voter turnout (55 percent) since

1976 and 370 electoral votes. The Republicans Bush and Quayle tallied just 37

percent of the popular vote and 168 electoral votes, while Perot garnered 19

percent.

The Clinton Administration

Despite the movement into Washington of new people with fresh ideas, the

Clinton administration got off to a slow, unsteady start. Crises in Bosnia,

Haiti, Somalia, and Russia forced the president to focus on the volatile,

multipolar world of the post-cold war era. At the same time, Clinton backed

down from his promise to prohibit discrimination against gays in the military

and reneged on his pledge, for lack of revenue, to cut middle-class taxes.

Defeated by Congress on his proposals to stimulate the economy, Clinton then

won by the narrowest of margins a highly compromised federal budget plan to

reduce the deficit. The president had more success in persuading Congress to

enact family-leave, "motor voter" registration (see VOTER REGISTRATION), and

campaign finance reform bills, to approve the NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE

AGREEMENT, and to consent to his nomination of Ruth Bader GINSBURG to the

Supreme Court. Clinton's future effectiveness and reputation rested largely

on the fate of his plans to reform the health-care system and to provide

effective solutions to the problems of economic insecurity and social

disorder haunting middle-class Americans.

Harvard Sitkoff

Bibliography:

General:

Ahlstrom, Sydney E., A Religious History of the American People (1972);

Banner, Lois W., Women in Modern America, 2d ed. (1984); Barth, Gunther,

Fleeting Moments: Nature and Culture in American History (1990); Blum, John

M., et al., The National Experience: A History of the United States, 7th ed.

(1989); Cohen, Warren I., ed., The Cambridge History of American Foreign

Relations, 4 vols. (1993); Curti, Merle Eugene, The Growth of American

Thought, 3d ed. (1964; repr. 1981); Ferrell, Robert H., American Diplomacy,

3d ed. (1975); Garraty, J. A., The American Nation, 7th ed. (1991);

Heilbroner, R. L., and Singer, Aaron, The Economic Transformation of America:

1600 to Present, 2d ed. (1984); Hofstadter, Richard, The American Political

Tradition and the Men Who Made It, 2d ed. (1973); Huckshorn, R. J., Political

Parties in America, 2d ed. (1983); Morison, S. E., and Commager, H. S., The

Growth of the American Republic, 2 vols., 7th ed. (1980).

To c.1860:

Bailyn, Bernard, The Peopling of British North America (1986); Boorstin,

Daniel Joseph, The Americans: The National Experience (1965; repr. 1985);

Elkins, Stanley, and McKitrick, Eric, The Age of Federalism (1993); Genovese,

Eugene, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974).

From c.1860:

Biles, Roger, A New Deal for the American People (1991); Foner, Eric,

Reconstruction (1988); Higham, John, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of

American Nativism, 1860-1925, 2d ed. (1965; repr. 1988); Hodgson, Godfrey,

America in Our Time (1976); Hofstadter, Richard, The Age of Reform: From

Bryan to F. D. R. (1955); Leffler, Melvin, A Preponderance of Power (1992);

Leuchtenburg, William E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940

(1963); and In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan (1985);

McPherson, James M., Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988); Nevins,

Allan, Ordeal of the Union, 8 vols. (1947-71); Painter, Neil I., Standing at

Armageddon: The United States 1877-1919 (1987); Preston, Daniel, Twentieth

Century United States History (1992); Schlereth, Thomas J., Victorian America

(1988); Schlossstein, Steven, The End of the American Century (1990);

Sitkoff, Harvard, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954-1992 (1993); Wiebe,

R. H., The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (1967; repr. 1980); Winkler, Allan,

Modern America (1991).

See also: AMERICAN ART AND ARCHITECTURE; AMERICAN LITERATURE; AMERICAN MUSIC;

UNITED STATES.

Выполнил:ученик 9 ”Г” класса средней школы № 5 г.Благовещенска

Никифоров Владимир.

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