The New Conservatives, Part 1 1. President Richard Nixon and “Peace…

QuestionAnswered step-by-stepThe New Conservatives, Part 1 1. President Richard Nixon and “Peace…The New Conservatives, Part 1 1. President Richard Nixon and “Peace with Honor” Richard Nixon won the 1968 elections; he ran for president promising to withdraw American troops from Vietnam. Nixon was a Republican and he also promised to scale back federal spending that the Democrats had allotted for Great Society programs under President Johnson. In 1969 he ordered the withdrawal of 60,000 American troops from Vietnam, with a continued gradual de-escalation up to 1973. Nixon had a special name for this; he called it “Vietnamization” or the increasing of the war effort on the part of South Vietnamese troops not Americans. Despite this gradual de-escalation, during 1970-1973 Nixon ordered ground invasions of Laos, Cambodia, and continued bombings of North Vietnam, where the Ho Chi Minh Trail had starting points. Finally in 1973 the last U.S. soldiers left Vietnam The U.S. military was supposed to have trained the South Vietnamese army so that it could prevent a communist takeover, but in 1975 the North Vietnamese army invaded the South and reunited the whole nation under a communist government. 58,000 Americans had been killed, and something like one million Vietnamese had been killed during the war in Vietnam. 2. Nixon’s Progressive Policies, 1969-1972 After election victory in 1968 Nixon had promised Americans that he would clean up the social scene and cut back on government spending. In one public televised address he stated, “We live in a deeply troubled an profoundly unsettled time…Drugs, crime, campus revolts, racial discord, draft resistance–on every hand we find old standards violated, old values discarded.” Despite his claims that he would dismantleJohnson’s Great Society programs, Nixon had some surprises in store for conservatives. He put his support behind new social security benefits to include more workers and put more money into subsidized housing for the low-income urban centers. Nixon also established the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). One of Nixon’s most notable progressive reforms was his cooperation with Democrats to create the Family Assistance Plan, which would have established a minimal income for impoverished workersto replace welfare assistance and benefits. (Conservatives found the bill to generous, and liberals thought it was inadequate; the bill never made it out of Congress.) Nixon also established a federally mandated 90-day freeze on wages, rents, and prices–not allowing them to increase or decrease for those days–to provide the economy some support for inflation caused during the Vietnam War. Nixon also established a federal trend that his critics called “black capitalism”, in which certain major construction firms and corporations had to set up contract quotas for minority-owned businesses. 3. Nixon at his Peak of Power Despite his liberal policies, Nixon continued to court voters in the South; commentators labeled this Nixon’s “southern strategy”. His strategy seems to have been: to slow school desegregation by, among other things, passing executive orders to prevent busing programs designed to achieve racial balance in school districts. He also replaced Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Earl Warren with Warren E. Burger, who steered the court in a more conservative direction, by ruling against unions, the working class, and against minority plaintiffs in national cases. One major conservative success wasNixon’s victory in the “space race” again the Soviet Union to place a man on the moon. In July of 1969 Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong was the first person to walk on the moon. This was a conservative victory because the lunar program cost taxpayers millions of dollars in research and implementation, and many critics said that Nixon should have been using that money for social programsto help low-income workers. Another major victory was foreign policy with communist China and the Soviet Union. In 1972 Nixon met with China’s leaders–the first time a U.S. president had done so since 1949. That same year he signed SALT I (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) with the Soviets, agreeing to scale back production of nuclear weapons. 4. The Watergate Scandal Nixon was re-elected in 1972. During the election campaign of 1972, Nixon’s administration became embroiled in a scandal that eventually led to his resignation. In June of 1972, five members of his staff were caught trying to break into the headquarters of the Democratic Party in Washington D.C., at the Watergate Hotel. The members of his staff were caught with papers and documents from the Democratic re-election committee, as well as electronic equipment designed to “bug” the office. Nixon won the 1972 elections in November, but over the course of the next two years, reporters and the Senate carried out investigations in the arrests. Nixon initially denied any knowledge of the plot, but reporters from the Washington Post followed a trail of evidence that led back to Nixon. The Senate carried out televised investigative hearings, interviewing members from both parties. The last blow came in 1974 when a member of Nixon’s staff revealed the existence of secret tape recordings of the Oval Office (the president’s office). (It seems Nixon had used a recording system for incoming phone calls that went back to the 1950s when President Dwight D. Eisenhower had it installed…he expanded it to include taped conversations of different rooms in the White House.) In June of 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that the White House had to release the tapes…on them Nixon could be heard discussing his knowledge and approval of the break-ins at the Watergate Hotel. In July of 1974 Congress began the process of impeachment against Nixon, charging him with obstructing the investigation and abusing his power. The next step would probably have been to charge him with crimes (impeachment) and to try to dismiss him from the presidency. In July of 1974, before Congress could actually charge him with crimes, Nixon gave a televised addressed in which he admitted he had made “some errors of judgment” while president, and resigned. 5. Jimmy Carter’s Moderate Approach Nixon’s vice-president, Gerald Ford, took over after Nixon’s resignation. Later in 1974, Ford passed an executive order pardoning Nixon for all offenses. Ford tried to stop inflation for the 2 years he was in office but had little success; several committees of experts were unsuccessful and could not solve the deficient or inflation. In 1976 Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, was elected president. Carter promised the American people, “I will never lie to you.” Although Carter was a Democrat, he called himself a moderate and said he would resist his party’s efforts to create a national healthcare plan. During Carter’s presidency a sort of political fog began to affect middle-class Americans. This can best be explained by the perception that after Watergate, even the president could not be completely trusted. During the 1976 elections, for example, something like 47% of all eligible voters in the U.S. did not even go to the polls. Carter acquired much support from conservative evangelical Christians because he was a born-again member of the Baptist church, and he frequently spoke in public about his faith in God. In 1979 there were more than 50 million evangelical Christians in America who were conservative in a social and economic sense, but also responded to Carter’s frequent appeals to religious morality. Despite his insistence that he was a “moderate” Carter poured millions of federal dollars into subsidized housing or government “projects” for low-incomecitizens in cities and expanded Medicare coverage for more elderly Americans. Carter’s popularity with many Americans changed with the Iran Hostage Affair…what was it? In November of 1979 Iran had an Islamic revolution and took 52 Americans in Tehran hostage, holding them for 444 days. In response Carter’s administration began negotiations through Algeria and froze more than 12 billion dollars in Iranian assets held in American banks. The hostages were eventually freed, with none hurt, in early 1981, just as Ronald Regan was inaugurated as the new president. Reagan was a Republican. It appears that Iran’s leaders deliberately waited until Regan was elected to free the American hostages, thereby adding to the growing unpopularity of Carter by contributing to the idea that Carter had been powerless to help free the hostages. 6. Carter and Latin America One of Carter’s campaign promises had been that he would get tough on communism in Latin America and other emerging-world societies around the globe. During the late 1970s, in places like El Salvador, Mexico, Guatemala, and Argentina, the Carter administration began to discretely give financial and military assistance to anti-communist governments fighting communist insurgencies. In those places, the governments frequently oppressed large segments of the population and justified their excesses by claiming it was necessary to root out communist infiltration. One result was that beginning in the late 1970s and into the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of immigrants with refugee status came into the U.S. from Central and South America. In cities such as Los Angeles and Chicago, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, who had been the majority Latino population, were now competing for labor and other resources with people from El Salvador and Guatemala. The overall result was that immigration to the United States increased during the 1980s while many nations in Latin America underwent massive political, economic, and military instability. 7. Ronald Reagan, 1980-1988 Ronald Reagan had claimed, “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.” Reagan, a former actor and governor of the state of California, won the presidential election of 1980 and served in the White House two terms until 1988. Regan tackled the nation’s economic problems by drastically reducing public spending and increasing tax cuts for businesses and corporations. One economist during this period summarized the government’s approach with these simple words: “A successful economy depends on the proliferation of the rich.” The basic hypothesis was that wealth would trickle from the top down to all levels of society. Another name for this is “supply-side” economics, since those who supply goods and services are receiving the lion’s share of benefits. “Deregulation” was another key term during Reagan’s two terms. This meant replacing some government posts with leaders who did not believe in tying up large amounts of resources micromanaging federal programs. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration were weakened by leaders that Reagan placed who followed this approach. Reagan also placed “deregulatory” leaders in charge of the Justice Department’s anti-trust division. As a result, large corporations and Wall Street brokers were able to go about their business without too much interference. In some sectors of the economy, such as speculating and stock trading, many groups became quite wealthy. But in the long run, the boom in production and the higher value of the American dollar pushed up prices on American goods, making it difficult for foreign investors and even American consumers to pay the asking price for American goods and services. The result was that few foreign companies invested in U.S. markets and basic money-making industries, such as steel, cars, and textiles. Over time, U.S. consumers began buying more foreign goods which were cheaper, from places like China, India, and Pakistan, and less U.S. goods. In 1980 the U.S. still had a trade surplus of $166 billion; by 1987 U.S. companies owed $340 billion to foreign investors. Since WW I the U.S. had been the world’s biggest creditor; by the middle 1980sAmerica was the world’s biggest debtor. Another reason for economic problems during the 1980s was that large segments of the middle class were reaching retirement age by the 1980s. By the time Reagan took office in 1980, there was something like 26 million Americans who had reached retirement age. This became the so-called golden age of the growth of huge retirement communities stretching from Southern California, Texas, Arizona, to Florida. This area became known as the “Sunbelt,” where retirees and communities of politically and financially conservative Americans began to retire. These people were out of the economy now. At the same time, more and more immigrants from Latin America, Asia, and the Caribbean began to form the foundation of large working-class communities in cities…they became key contributors to the American economy.  The New Conservatives, Part 2 8. The Reagan Doctrine?One of the reasons why so many refugees from Latin America came to the U.S. during the 1980s was because of what many political analysts termed “The Reagan Doctrine”. This built to some extent on President Carter’s earlier efforts to expand American influence in Latin America by trying to “contain” communist expansion in the Americas. Early after his inauguration in 1981 Regan declared that the “Vietnam Syndrome” in America was over. After years of being defensive and unsure about intervention around the world, Reagan claimed that now America could confidently intervene anywhere in the world to “roll back” communism. Reagan specifically mentioned the need to roll back communist insurgencies in “Third-world” nations, in Latin America, Asia, and Africa • Afghanistan Beginning in 1981 Reagan began sending money and supplies to anti-communist forces in Afghanistan. Background: In 1979 the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan to secure access to oil reserves in Central Asia. After a rapid campaign in which most of the cities were occupied by the Soviet military, the mountainous countryside became the refuge for anti-communist, Islamic insurgents. These Islamic insurgents were not united; there were many factions (including the Taliban) whose only common plan was to attack the Soviet military whenever the Soviets sent troops into the countryside or into the mountains to hunt down the insurgents. Because the terrain in Afghanistan is quite high (in some cases mountain peaks reach 25,000 feet) the Soviets began relying on helicopters to move troops around the countryside and attack insurgent. Like Vietnam, Afghanistan became a helicopter war. The Soviets also had jet aircraft that could bomb the Islamic insurgents anywhere in the country; both the helicopters and Soviet jets were heavily armored, and it was very difficult to shoot them down with regular anti-aircraft weapons. Reagan gave the CIA the go-ahead to begin supplying the Islamic insurgents with sophisticated heat-seeking missiles to shoot down the Soviet helicopters. The supply of missiles meant that the Soviets went from being the hunters to the hunted; the Islamic insurgents shot down hundreds of aircraft after being trained by the CIA how to shoot the missiles. This quickly turned the tide and by the late 1980s the Soviets were ready to withdraw from Afghanistan, Back in the Soviet Union the war in Afghanistan became very unpopular, and by 1989 14,000 Soviet soldiers had been killed in Afghanistan. Because of the increasingly unpopular war the Soviets decided to leave Afghanistan in 1989. The Islamic insurgents were seen as heroes, and this was a major victory for the United States in the Cold War because the US did not get involved fighting the Soviets directly (i.e., a return to “containment”). Unlike Vietnam, where “containment” had become bloated and distorted, in Afghanistan Reagan and the CIA put US interventionism back on track…there was a sense that America was fighting the good fight again, in the proper manner, with the Reagan Doctrine. • Cuba and El Salvador Besides Afghanistan, the Reagan Doctrine found its clearest expression in Central America, where the US tried to re-establish and expand its historical influence over the Caribbean basin. By the early 1980s Regan viewed Cuba as the major threat to US interest in the area. Regan claimed that all instability in the Caribbean basin stemmed from the “Moscow-Havana” (meaning communist) alliance. Between 1980-1983 the US poured more money into the region than it had during the previous 30 years. The tiny Central American nation of El Salvador became a focus point. El Salvador was a nation with an impoverished economy, with a population of about a million people; its major export was coffee. Since the 1930s a group of wealthy families owned most of the land and coffee production in El Salvador, while the rest of the population mostly worked in the coffee fields. Since the 1960s communist insurgents had tried to make El Salvador a Marxist nation with redistribution of land and other resources. President Carter had started sending money and supplies to El Salvador to assist the government in fighting the communist insurgents, but it was Reagan who began sending large amounts of money as part of his Reagan Doctrine. By 1983 he had sent the government in El Salvador $5 billion in military assistance, mostly money for weapons, helicopters, and training. As the 1980s went on, the government in El Salvador arrested or tortured anyone who they suspected was helping the communist insurgents. The fighting in El Salvador ended in 1990 with a peace treaty between both sides, but by that year more than 1 in every 100 people in El Salvador had been killed, either in fighting between the government and communist forces, or because they were assassinated by either side. By 1985 something like 300,000 people from El Salvador had moved to cities on the West coast, such as Los Angeles, where they became in effect an underclass of refugees. In 1998, 15,000 of these El Salvadorans who had refugee status living in Los Angeles were polled about their desires to return back to El Salvador; 70 percent said they had no plans of ever going back. • Nicaragua and the Iran-Contra Affair Throughout the 1980s the Reagan administration also gave money to a group of fighters in Nicaragua, also in Central America, called “contras”. These were rebels who wanted to overthrow Nicaragua’s government, which was communist. Reagan gave money to train the contras and supply them with weapons to fight communism and establish a democratic regime. The contras tried on several occasions to overthrow Nicaragua’s communist government, but the government had the support of the people (because of sweeping and effective redistribution of land and economic resources). In 1987 a major scandal erupted when members of the press learned that Reagan’s administration had been secretly giving money and weapons to Iran’s government in return for assurances that American hostages in Lebanon would be released. Background: In Lebanon a radical Islamic group with ties to the Iranian government had kidnapped a group of American military personnel as hostages. In violation of an arms embargo against Iran that had been in place since the 1979 hostage crisis, Regan agreed to give arms and money to Iran to help them in a war against Iraq that took place over the course of the 1980s. Iran would meanwhile try to influence the radical Islamists in Lebanon to free the American military personnel. (The Islamists in Lebanon shared many of the views of the leaders in Iran who had organized the kidnapping of American hostages in 1979.) Hence the Unites States was sending military assistance to one its biggest enemies (Iran), in an effort to try to influence the Islamists in Lebanon so that they might free the military personnel. The same funds being paid to Iranian leaders so that they could influence the situation in Iran were also being used to supply the anti-communist “contras” in Nicaragua !! Hence when journalists investigated thisthey found American money being secretly funneled to Iran and to the contras in Nicaragua…the convoluted ties between the USA, Islamists, and contras in Nicaragua became public news. Reagan had promised earlier in the 1980s that the USA was not sending money to “contras” in Nicaragua. This embarrassing situation played out on public television in the US during several Congressional hearings, and several high-ranking military officers promised that Reagan had known nothing about any of it; they received jail time but were later acquitted. When questioned about his involvement Reagan’s infamous response was “I have no recollection of that.” The Iran-Contra Affair raised more questions than it answered, but for many Americans it was another chapter in the story of presidential untrustworthiness going back to the Nixon years. 9. The Collapse of the Soviet Union Meanwhile, big changes were affecting the Soviet Union. In 1985 reform-minded leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, took over as Soviet leader. Gorbachev represented a new generation of Soviet leaders who wanted change in the old communist system because they were tired of repression and government-enforced censorship. Gorbachev encouraged open political discussion and released many political dissidents from prison in the USSR. He encouraged “glastnost” and “perestroika” in Soviet society. Glastnost meant “openness” and transparency for the Soviet government, the press, and society in general. Perestroika meant “restructuring” of the Soviet government to allow more openness. Part of perestroika or the restructuring of the Soviet government meant refocusing government spending. When Gorbachev took over in 19985, 10% of the Soviet economy was devoted to building nuclear weapons, while most Soviet citizens struggled to find even basic consumer goods, like bread and milk…he wanted to change that. Between 1985 and 1988 Gorbachev met with Reagan 4 times to hammer out agreements for mutual de-escalation of nuclear arms production, as well as two-sided on-site inspections of nuclear production facilities. The meetings between the two leaders of the world superpowers signaled an important psychological breakthrough because both countries now seemed ready to talk in much more open terms than ever before…another example of “glastnost”. Gorbachev’s reforms of openness and restructuring back home eventually led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. In March of 1989 the Soviet Union held its first open elections since 1917, and Gorbachev announced he would not use force to stop the elections in all the satellite nations of the USSR in Eastern Europe. In Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and Romania, basically all ofEastern Europe, old Soviet leaders were voted out of power and replaced with new Democratic leaders. The most dramatic election was in East Germany, where the people voted for a new government and for reunification with West Germany in November of 1989. Gorbachev was himself eventually replaced in Russia, but not before he signed a decree officially dissolving the Soviet Union on Christmas Day in 1991. This was a very significant event; for most of the 20th century the USA and the USSR had been locked in a deadly struggle with the threat of nuclear weapons hanging over everyone. That ended in 1991, but on the other hand, the dissolution of the USSR caused massive instability as radical elements fought for control, in places like Slovakia, Croatia, the Ukraine, and Chechnya…we are still dealing with some of this today.                 Do not copy and paste your response from the class notes.   1) Describe in a few sentences how Richard Nixon courted conservative voters in America during the 1960s and 1970s?   2) What was the Watergate Scandal?   3) What was the Reagan Doctrine?   4) How did Glastnost and Perestroika affect the Soviet Union?HistoryUS HistoryHISTORY 1301Share Question