Thesis: Many Americans perceive “the ‘70s” as short politically?

THE CRISIS: Seven Tumultuous Days

TIME magazine, Nov. 5, 1973 [don't know how TIME missed this with their Monday, Nov. 5 issue]

http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,908090,00.html

' . . . public protest against the President unprecedented in its intensity and breadth. Individual Americans demanded Richard Nixon's resignation or impeachment in 275,000 telegrams that overloaded Western Union circuits in Washington. Much of the legal profession, most of organized labor and many key religious leaders joined the assault. Nearly two dozen resolutions to at least begin impeachment proceedings were introduced in the House of Representatives. At the shocked White House, even the President's loyal chief of staff, Alexander Haig, termed the conflagration "a fire storm." . . . ’

' . . . Buckling under the massive pressure, the President once again abandoned a position that he had repeatedly proclaimed as inviolate, dramatically agreeing to yield up his long-guarded tapes. Once again turning about, he announced that a new special prosecutor would be appointed. He seemed almost eager to seize on a new crisis in the Middle East to claim his indispensability and strength, but such was the low state of his credibility that an emotional and unfortunate controversy erupted over whether he had ordered a global alert of all U.S. military units at least in part to divert attention from his own grave problems. . . ’
Nixon might view some of this as piling on behavior. Next question is whether it's justified or not, or excessive
 
Last edited:

youtube: Nixon Disses the Press
(at 35 seconds, this clip splices part of Nixon's answer to Q7 with his answer to Q15)

At a press conference on Friday, Oct. 26, 1973, Dick goes after the press. And some of this will be well received. I mean, pretty much everyone left, right, and center has at least some complaints about the media, many of them very valid complaints.

Some of it won't be well received.

For the whole press conference, please see:

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=4022
Note: President Nixon's thirty-fifth news conference was held at 7:01 p.m. in the East Room at the White House on Friday, October 26, 1973. It was broadcast live on nationwide radio and television.
 
Last edited:
Getting back to the OP, most decades are dominated by issues that cover longer periods of time. The nineties saw the penetration of computers. The next decade saw terrorism in the news. The sixties saw civil rights, the Vietnam War and the draft as dominant issues that lasted years. The seventies, on the other hand, saw a patchwork of shorter term issues. The draft, Vietnam and other carry-overs from the sixties were soon resolved. Then Watergate: the burglary was in 1972, the uproar covered 1973, and by late 1974, Nixon was out of office and a pardon from Ford put the whole issue to rest. A gasoline and energy shortage came on the scene, but Americans did not want to identify with it. Same with inflation. Two nondescript presidents acted very much alike and did not convince the public they had genuine solutions to the problems. Disco music was the fad, but classic rock was still very much in place, and the sudden crash of disco was quickly replaced with "new wave" or "punk." The seventies were remembered as the time the new values of the sixties had settled in, and the more predictable, low-inflation times of the eighties had not yet arrived. The old order of the fifties had been completely replaced by the new order of the eighties, and the changes are identifies by the flamboyant sixties, as opposed to the settle-down seventies.
 
. . The seventies were remembered as the time the new values of the sixties had settled in, . . .
There was a book on the 1970s, probably either

Thomas Hine, The Great Funk: Falling Apart and Coming Together (on a Shag Rug) in the Seventies, or

Bruce Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics

which made the point that in the ‘70s is when you had a guy who might be a car salesman wearing his hair long, open collar, gold chains, and recreationally smoking weed. And things, for the vast majority of people, had never been this free-wheeling in the ‘60s.

Now personally, I can remember being an evangelical Christian in 1977 at age 14 and being scared to death of the drug culture. These days I’m comfortably agnostic and am pretty relaxed about the de-criminalization of marijuana.
 
Yom Kippur War starts Oct. 6, 1973 (lasts about three weeks)

Egypt and Syria launch a duel attack against Israel. Of course we supported Israel as an ally. In addition, the Soviets were arming the Egyptians and Syrians so there also was a proxy cold war aspect. This was when Israel was the scrappy underdog. And not just the longtime military occupied of the West Bank and Golan Heights.

And yes, Arab nations cut production of oil, raise prices, and for a while do an embargo. There’s some complicated part in the middle in which the Saudis try to act as a peace broker and then get pissed off.
 
Last edited:
The "Sixties"
An Age of Hopefulness
part 1: Starting with the Summer of 1960 when it became apparent that we were going to get a young president, Kennedy was 43 and Nixon was 47. And ending with President Kennedy's assassination on Nov. 22, 1963,
part 2: Still the hopefulness, primarily with Civil Rights protests and activism which led to the Civil Rights Act (1964), and the Voting Rights Act (1965), also all the positive aspects of the youth culture, ending August 26-29, 1968, with the violence at the Democratic National Convention, which I believe can be correctly described as a police riot getting worse over multiple days, but many people blame the average guy or gal and blame the students and young people, who certainly were not blameless.
blame the young people and they certainly were not blameless.

Interregnum
Anger and Violence
Also internationally, with protests and coups of various sorts, at least in France and Czechoslovakia, as well as in Canada and Quebec.

The "Seventies"
Politically, the "'70s" variously start in the United States with the end of the draft (July '73), the Yom Kippur war (Oct. 6, '73 + 19 days + a continuing oil embargo and price hike), and/or Nixon's "Saturday Night massacre" (Oct. 20, 1973).
A period of blah and diminished expectations
Along with personal growth and exploration in new religious movements, renewed interest in evangelical Christianity, new and renewed interest in existing forms of meditation, biofeedback (largely new), more widespread experimentation with marijuana as well as more dangerous drugs, new freedom in dress, greater sexual experimentation (at least regarding what people could think about, and admit to themselves!), a greater flowering of civil rights in many directions — Women's rights, Hispanic-American rights, Native-American rights, Gay rights, Lesbian rights, Youth rights, Disabled Americans rights, etc, etc.
Ridiculously, in the beginning of the '70s, it was an issue whether a landlord should lease to a cohabiting couple (I think discussed by Dear Abby and elsewhere in newspapers), and a complete non-issue by the late '70s.
And ending around 1980 with Reagan's optimism (and a long debate about the extent to which his optimism was misplaced!)
 
Last edited:
Actually, I like the idea of an interregnum. Maybe one third of the decades could have that.

Maybe even two-thirds of decades, making it relatively rare for one political "decade" to smoothly flow to another. This might be more true to life.
 
UK in dark over 1973 nuclear alert

BBC, Paul Reynolds, 2 January 2004.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3334155.stm

'In a stinging memorandum, just made public under the 30 year rule, the British Prime Minister Edward Heath virtually accused President Nixon of diverting attention from the Watergate scandal. . . '

' . . . The alert raised US military readiness to Defcon 3 - "defence condition" three [Emphasis added]. . . '

' . . . Brezhnev gave a warning that the Russians might intervene in the fighting between Israel and Egypt, the Israelis by that stage having gained the upper hand after General Ariel Sharon (now Israeli prime minister) had crossed the Suez Canal. . . '

' . . . At 0730, the duty intelligence officer at the Cabinet office learned of the alert from GCHQ (the government's electronic monitoring centre). GCHQ had been told by the Americans on the intelligence network. . . '

' . . . Dr Kissinger has always said that it was justified as it ensured that the Soviets would not act. Recent interviews with Soviet officials indicate that it was a bluff by Brezhnev in the hope that the United States would force the Israelis to stop.'

Regarding the Yom Kippur War, and with the U.S. side going to DEFCON 3, it was plenty serious enough.
 
Top