Disco Days: a Social History of the 1970'S

By Richard T. Stanley

By 1972, President Richard Nixon had reached the heights of political power and popularity, only to self-destruct due to his role in a third-rate burglary called Watergate. Nixon resigned in disgrace, and, for the first time in history, Americans came to be led by an unelected President and Vice President -- Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller. But Americans had much more on their minds than mere politics -- movies, TV, sports, earning a living, etc. Hollywood motion pictures, including The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars, captured their imaginations, while weekly TV shows such as All in the Family and Happy Days made them laugh, and Monday Night Football kept their competitive juices flowing.

To no ones surprise, UCLA continued to win NCAA basketball championships, and such schools as Alabama, Arkansas, Michigan, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, Penn State, Texas, and USC remained dominant on the gridiron. And professional sports, thanks to such super-stars as BIllie Jean King, Kareem Abul-Jabbar, Henry Aaron, Jack Nicklaus, Muhammad Ali, Al Unser, and Terry Bradshaw, became more popular than ever. But who could have predicted at the beginning of the decade that a young high school dropout named John Travolta and a band called the Bees Gees would become the kings of Disco Dancing? Or that a peanut farmer from Georgia would be elected President during our Bicentennial Year?

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jun 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781491767962

Richard T. Stanley

Dr. Stanley earned masters’ degrees from Long Beach State and Whittier College and an Ed.D. from Pepperdine University. He taught American History and Government at the high school and adult school levels before becoming a high school administrator. He recently retired after many years as a successful adult school principal. Dr. Stanley has authored nine books on history and politics, and has also taught at the university level.

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DISCO DAYS:

A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE 1970’S

RICHARD T. STANLEY

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DISCO DAYS: A SOCIAL HISTORY OF THE 1970’S

Copyright © 2015 Richard T. Stanley.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4917-6795-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4917-6796-2 (e)

iUniverse rev. date: 06/16/2015

Contents

Dedication

Preface

Chapter One The Triumph and Tragedy of Richard Nixon

Chapter Two Hollywood and the Movies

Chapter Three The Television Industry

Chapter Four College and Professional Sports

Chapter Five Birds of a Feather Flock Together

Chapter Six School Reforms

Chapter Seven Modern Business: Success and Scandal

Chapter Eight The Peanut Farmer from Plains

Chapter Nine Popular Music

Chapter Ten Literature – Fact, Theory, and Fiction

Epilogue

Bibliography

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my grandson

Ryan Thomas Stanley

Preface

This book is the third volume I have written in remembrance of the America of my youth. I hope you enjoy reading it. I certainly enjoyed writing it. Like my two preceding books in this series, The Eisenhower Years and The Psychedelic Sixties, it has been a labor of love.

I have long believed that historical accounts of the past should be more than a mere record of political and military campaigns, accomplishments, and failures, followed by summary conclusions, or so-called lessons. While certainly important in their own right – especially when attempting to avoid repeating past failures – political and military events recollected in isolation, outside the context of the existing broader society, fail to provide a more comprehensive picture of what was really happening to most people at that particular time and place. For example, would our current understanding of what it was like to live in the United States during the so-called Roaring Twenties of the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations be nearly as vivid and complete without such works as Frederick Lewis Allen’s classic, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920’s? Or the once-highly popular novels by the 1920’s favorite contemporary social critic, Sinclair Lewis? I think not.

In The Eisenhower Years: A Social History of the 1950’s, I claim that America’s Fabulous Fifties (especially 1953 through 1959) are truly times worth studying. The Eisenhower Years produced amazing contributions to our American culture– and to other cultures around the world. In so many ways, Americans innovated, and the world imitated – from Elvis Presley and rock ‘n’ roll to the Salk anti-polio vaccine. America’s contributions to the world included motion pictures and the Broadway stage; radio and television; amateur and professional sports; jazz, the blues, country-and-Western music, traditional ballads and popular songs, and rock ‘n’ roll; domestic and international business and trade; public and private educational opportunities; and a rich and varied literature.

The Eisenhower Years – including TV dinners, skating waitresses, hairy wrestlers, and rock ‘n’ roll – were not the cultural desert days some critics may wish us to believe. Quite the contrary, the Fabulous Fifties – warts and all – was an extremely rich and creative decade. America’s exuberance in so many areas of the arts and everyday life was omnipresent. As for political and military achievements, President Eisenhower kept us safely out of war, and was wise enough to stay out of the way of America’s artists and entrepreneurs. As a result, the Eisenhower Years should forever be remembered as those Happy Days.

My second book, The Psychedelic Sixties: A Social History of the United States, 1960-69, represents a decade during which I was personally involved in a wide variety of occupations, including college student, restaurant worker, army reservist, department store assistant manager, and ultimately, high school civics teacher, activities director, and tennis coach. I was fortunate enough to be one of many Americans who managed to not only survive, but thrive during those turbulent years of the Psychedelic Sixties.

When the decade of the 1960’s began, I was a nineteen-year-old history major at Long Beach State College (soon to be renamed California State University at Long Beach). During my sophomore year, I neither knew, nor was I aware of any clever pundits who even came close to predicting the radical cultural shifts, the bloody race riots in the North and far West, the anti-Vietnam War protests, including sit-ins and draft card and flag burnings on university campuses across the land, the rampant drug usage, and the many other examples of social mayhem, such as free love and bralessness, that would soon rock American society and change us forever. Who in 1960 knew that the Eisenhower Years of America’s Happy Days, steady-as-you-go, conformist mentality would soon morph into the helter-skelter crazy quilt of idealism, radical thought, and antiestablishment behavior that may best be described as the Psychedelic Sixties? As late as the Presidential Election of 1964, who knew that Lyndon Johnson’s so-called Great Society would soon topple as a result of our enormous losses in blood, trust, and treasure? In this case, Richard Nixon did, and he was actively lurking in the wings.

This book, Disco Days: A Social History of the 1970’s, begins, in Chapter One at least, like a Greek tragedy. First elected in 1968, President Richard Nixon went on to reach the pinnacle of political power and public popularity, only to fall prey to his own private paranoia regarding his enemies – both real and imagined. Had Nixon simply relied on the merits of his many talents and abilities without resorting to criminal activities and dirty tricks to win reelection, he may have been remembered to this day as one of our greatest Presidents rather than as the only Chief Executive in our history to resign in disgrace. The tragedy of Richard Nixon may be summarized by one simple sentence: He was his own worst enemy.

Just as the Psychedelic Sixties cannot be simply defined as a decade dominated by the use of mind-altering drugs, calling the decade of the 1970’s Disco Days does not mean that America during the 1970’s was a society totally dominated by the combination of a particular style of music and dancing. Nevertheless, just as many Americans to this day still associate the 1920’s with a dance craze known as The Charleston, those of us who were young adults during the 1970’s have many fond memories of our Disco Days. Disco Days is simply a nostalgic label I have chosen to describe an otherwise highly complex and often enlightened (and, at times, very troubling) decade in our nation’s history.

As the population of the United States grew from 151,325,796 in 1950 to 179,323,175 in 1960, and from 203,211,926 in 1970 to 226,545,805 in 1980, so too did the sheer volume of its inhabitants’ activities and accomplishments. Therefore, while I have sought to maintain a rather consistent degree of brevity in each successive volume I have produced in this series of books covering three decades of my youth, my Eisenhower Years is skinner than The Psychedelic Sixties, and my Disco Days is the fattest of the three. Why? The more Americans, the more to write about.

Politically, the decade of the 1970’s was a time of firsts, including:

• First Vice President to resign in disgrace (Spiro Agnew).

• First President to resign in disgrace (Richard Nixon).

• First administration with an unelected President (Gerald Ford) and Vice President (Nelson Rockefeller).

• First President from the Deep South since the Civil War (Jimmy Carter).

• First President born in a hospital (Jimmy Carter).

Militarily, the decade of the 1970’s was marked by the culmination of the unpopular war in Vietnam, the eventual fall of Saigon, and the Iran Hostage Crisis.

Socially, the decade of the 1970’s witnessed many changes in the attitudes, habits, and mores of most Americans. Such changes included advances in the racial integration of both Blacks and Hispanics, plus a huge influx of Asian immigrants, the sudden popularity of new synthetic double-knit fibers used to make shirts, coats, and pants for both sexes, wide-spread school reforms (especially in the training of teachers through professional development programs), a highly noticeable relaxation of censorship in motion pictures and television, and a growing emphasis on the importance of college degrees as prerequisites for employment and advancement. Manufacturing, once the business of corporate America, was increasingly being outsourced to underdeveloped countries with plentiful supplies of cheap labor. As a result, made in USA labels were rapidly disappearing from a wide variety of consumer goods. Fewer and fewer farm families continued to produce more and more food for America and the world. Following the 1960’s invasion by The Beatles, English-born musicians continued to strike it rich in America. And popular works of fiction, from Love Story to Jaws, continued to appeal to Americans by the millions. And what red-blooded American boy or girl, young or old, failed to fall in love during the 1970’s with a cartoon strip called Peanuts?

Chapter One

The Triumph and Tragedy of Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon was inaugurated as the 37th President of the United States on Monday, January 20, 1969. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes of past political defeats – his narrow loss to JFK in the Presidential Election of 1960, and his far more crushing defeat in the California Gubernatorial Election of 1962 to Pat Brown – Richard Nixon had finally won his ever-elusive grand prize: the White House.

Political pundits and plain folks generally agreed that Richard Nixon, the Fighting Quaker from Whittier, California, won the Election of 1968 due to the support of the so-called Silent Majority of Americans who had become increasingly disgusted with the social and political upheaval of the Psychedelic Sixties. Richard The Lion-hearted Nixon was viewed by many Americans as the ideal dragon slayer – just the right man to curb the moral excesses of the Psychedelic Sixties, achieve peace with honor in Vietnam, and restore law and order to America’s strife-torn cities. Many Americans feared that, without strong new leadership, the helter-skelter Hippie lifestyle featuring LSD and other mind-altering drugs would continue to spread. Still others feared that the Sexual Revolution that seemed to threaten the sanctity of nearly every home, especially after the introduction of a popular new contraceptive for women called the pill, would lower morals and damage families. A Moral Majority was beginning to actively support conservative candidates, including Richard Nixon. The growing Black Nationalist Movement, which appeared to incite bloody race riots in America’s inner-cities, was also a prominent concern of voters. And to be sure, continuing violent protests against the unpopular war in Vietnam, and similar student protests on our nation’s college and university campuses involving Students’ Rights, unsettled many American voters from coast to coast.

Richard Nixon’s inauguration signified the peaceful transfer of political power from a visibly tired Lyndon Johnson and his overly-zealous Great Society to the newly-sworn President’s optimistic New Federalism. To the nation, Nixon offered the hope of leading his fellow Americans into a more normal, law and order future. Personally, Nixon’s inauguration marked the triumphant fulfillment of his boyhood dream of becoming President of the United States, so narrowly denied him in 1960. If at first you don’t succeed . …

As a young boy, Richard Nixon shared his mother Hanna’s devotion to the memory of Honest Abe Lincoln, and he often delighted in reciting the last lines of the popular American poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life:

"Lives of great men oft’ remind us, we can make our lives sublime, and departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sands of time."¹

Since childhood, Richard Nixon was obsessed by his desire to one day leave his footprints on the sands of time. Imagine the inner joy and sense of relief he must have felt as he faced the Chief Justice of the United States Earl Warren in front of tens of thousands of his fellow Americans and millions more watching on live television, placed his left hand on the Nixon family Bible, raised his right hand, and repeated after Justice Warren, I, Richard Milhous Nixon, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God. Who knew at that moment of personal and political triumph that an American tragedy would soon begin to slowly unfold? Who could have foreseen that this descendant of humble, God-fearing, and solid Quaker stock, with his outstanding talents and abilities, and his self-affirmed moral compass, would soon establish an Imperial Presidency and proceed to violate his solemn oath to uphold the constitutional rights of others?

Richard Nixon’s triumph was his public ascendency to the office of president and the many lasting accomplishments he achieved soon after taking office; his tragedy was the paranoia he often demonstrated away from the public spotlight which ultimately led to his forced resignation and disgrace.

Perhaps, while Richard Nixon was a young man on the way up, he may have been better served had he paid less attention to his favorite lines penned by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and more to a poetic description of the ultimate futility of the arrogant exercise of power by Longfellow’s English contemporary, Percy Bysshe Shelley:

"I met a traveler from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings;

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

On the day of Richard Nixon’s inauguration, The Watergate was simply the name of a posh and trendy hotel and office complex on the edge of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. By the time Nixon resigned the office of president some five years later under enormous pressure, Watergate had become synonymous with scandal involving burglary and obstruction of justice. Instead of leaving major footprints on the sands of time as one of America’s great Presidents, he will be remembered in historical footnotes as the only President to ever be forced to resign. Not exactly the epitaph Richard Nixon labored for and dreamt of.

But, to give the devil his due, President Richard Nixon, beginning with his First Inaugural Address, began his administration on a highly positive note. Before the assembled multitude that day, with millions more watching on live television, he began to speak for all to hear:

Senator Dirksen, Mr. Chief Justice, Mr. Vice President, President Johnson, Vice President Humphrey, my fellow Americans – and my fellow citizens of the world community:

I ask you to share with me today the majesty of this moment. In the orderly transfer of power, we celebrate the unity that keeps us free.

Each moment in history is a fleeting time, precious and unique. But some stand out as moments of beginning, in which courses are set that shape decades or centuries.

This can be such a moment.

Forces now are converging that make possible, for the first time, the hope that many of man’s deepest aspirations can at last be realized. The spiraling pace of change allows us to contemplate, within our own lifetime, advances that once would have taken centuries.

In throwing wide the horizons of space, we have discovered new horizons on earth.

For the first time, because the people of the world want peace, and the leaders of the world are afraid of war, the times are on the side of peace.

* * * * * * * *

The greatest honor history can bestow is the title of peacemaker. This honor now beckons America – the chance to help lead the world at last out of the valley of turmoil, and onto that high ground of peace that man had dreamed of since the dawn of civilization.

If we succeed, generations to come will say of us now living that we mastered our moment, that we helped make the world safe for mankind.

This is our summons to greatness.

I believe the American people are ready to answer this call.

* * * * * * * *

No people has ever been so close to the achievement of a just and abundant society, or so possessed of the will to achieve it. Because our strengths are so great, we can afford to appraise our weaknesses with candor and to approach them with hope.

Standing in this same place a third of a century ago, Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed a Nation ravaged by depression and gripped in fear. He could say in surveying the Nation’s troubles: They concern, thank God, only material things.

Our crisis today is the reverse. We have found ourselves rich in goods, but ragged in spirit; reaching with magnificent precision for the moon, but falling into raucous discord on earth.

We are caught in war, wanting peace. We are torn by division, wanting unity. We see around us empty lives, wanting fulfillment. We see tasks that need doing, waiting for hands to do them.

To a crisis of the spirit, we need an answer of the spirit.

To find that answer, we need only look within ourselves.

When we listen to the better angels of our nature, we find that they celebrate the simple things, the basic things – such as goodness, decency, love, kindness.

Greatness comes in simple trappings. The simple things are the ones most needed today if we are to surmount what divides us, and cement what unites us. To lower our voices would be a simple thing.

In these difficult years, America suffered from a fever of words; from inflated rhetoric that promises more than it can deliver; from angry rhetoric that fans discontents into hatreds; from bombastic rhetoric that postures instead of persuading.

* * * * * * * *

For all of our people, we will set as our goal the decent order that makes progress possible and our lives secure. As we reach toward our hopes, our task is to build on what has gone before – not turning away from the old, but turning toward the new.

* * * * * * * *

We shall plan now for the day when our wealth can be transferred from the destruction of war abroad to the urgent needs of our people at home.

The American dream does not come to those who fall asleep. But we are approaching the limits of what government alone can do. Our greatest need now is to reach beyond government, and to enlist the legions of the concerned and the committed.

* * * * * * * *

The essence of freedom is that each of us shares in the shaping of our own destiny.

* * * * * * * *

We seek an open world – open to ideas, open to the exchange of goods and people – a world in which no people, great or small, will live in angry isolation. We cannot expect to make everyone our friend, but we can try to make no one our enemy.

* * * * * * * *

As the Apollo astronauts flew over the moon’s gray surface on Christmas Eve, they spoke to us of the beauty of earth – and in that voice so clear across the lunar distance, we heard them invoke God’s blessing on its goodness.

In that moment, their view from the moon moved poet Archibald MacLeish to write:

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold – brothers who know now they are truly brothers.

* * * * * * * *

We have endured a long night of the American spirit. But as our eyes catch the dimness of the first rays of dawn, let us not curse the remaining dark. Let us gather the light.

Our destiny offers, not the cup of despair, but the chalice of opportunity. So let us seize it, not in fear, but in gladness – and, riders on the earth together, let us go forward, firm in our faith; steadfast in our purpose, cautious of the dangers; but sustained by our confidence in the will of God and the promise of man.

Richard Nixon was at his public best on inauguration day. He had always loved being the center of attention in front of audiences, even when he was a young student actor in school plays at Whittier High School long ago. The exact opposite in political style of his predecessor in the Oval Office, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon loved being on stage; Johnson dreaded making formal public speeches before large audiences. LBJ dearly loved persuading small groups to his point of view, and he usually dominated one-on-one encounters; Nixon avoided small, intimate groups and one-on-one chats (except with a chosen few friends and confidants) like the plague. The public Nixon was frequently seen on TV, always in suit and tie, addressing heads of state, making foreign policy pronouncements, signing significant legislation into law, or otherwise acting presidential. By comparison, President Johnson – a master of back room negotiations and individual persuasion – often appeared as if he was a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming motor vehicle on a highway late at night once the bright lights above the television cameras came on.

Both Nixon and Johnson, however, had several traits in common: A strong love of country, fierce ambition, and a willingness to bend the rules to achieve their political goals. Richard Nixon’s rise to power was meteoric: From Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy in 1944 at the age of 31, to his election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1946 at the age of 33, to becoming California’s junior member of the U.S. Senate in 1950 at age 37, and as Vice President of the United States in 1952 at age 39. Richard Nixon had become the young rising star of the Republican Party. Soon, Nixon’s ultimate goal of becoming President of the United States following the departure of his boss, Dwight Eisenhower, was about as much of a secret to the average American as Christmas. For example, following President Eisenhower’s heart attack in 1955, one of the nation’s most popular sick jokes had Ike’s ambitious Vice President, Richard Nixon, greeting him at the entrance to the White House following Ike’s return from the hospital by saying, "We’re all glad to have you back home, Mr. President. Can I race you up the stairs?"

The White House usually reflects the personality of its chief occupant. Richard Nixon’s tenure there proved no exception. Richard Nixon was born during the same year (1913) that Woodrow Wilson first occupied the White House. President Wilson, lacking a warm personality, and a loner by nature, maintained the most secretive, closed White House in the history of the Republic. Following his simple inauguration in 1921, the fun-loving and out-going Warren Harding and his wife, The Duchess, pulled back the White House drapes and opened its doors and invited the public inside. Nixon, a Republican, was personality-wise much more like the Democrat Wilson than the Republican Harding. Both Wilson and Nixon conducted their administrations in an imperial manner – with certain arrogance – as if they wished to distance themselves from governors, senators, and foreign ambassadors, as well as just plain folks. During the age of television, Richard Nixon dared not pull the drapes of the White House shut and lock the doors to bar dignitaries and the public from entering, but he did often manage to escape the Oval Office for the solitude of his second, private office in the nearby Old Executive Office Building for quiet work, a few martinis, or a simple nap. Wherever he was, unless the TV lights were on, Nixon – especially after a few martinis – could fly into a rage whenever he was contradicted or questioned.²

Upon ascending to the Presidency, Richard Nixon quickly established certain protocols for his Imperial Administration to shield him from the public, especially the troublemakers. To see the President, one must first get past H.R. Bob Haldeman, the White House Chief of Staff (or, as Nixon named him, his son-of-a-bitch). Good luck! Those fortunate enough to be referred by Haldeman to someone close to the President met with John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs, or Charles Colson, Special Counsel to the President.

Foreign affairs was where President Nixon wished to shine as America’s leader who got the big picture correctly. Nixon the realist. For ceremonial functions, including hobnobbing with foreign ambassadors and their staff, Secretary of State William P. Rogers was Nixon’s man. Nixon hated formal ceremonies, polite chit-chat, and mixing with the diplomatic corps. To him, such formalities were a waste of time and energy. He much preferred a less formal, and certainly more secretive approach to conducting foreign policy. Enter Henry Kissinger, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. (Kissinger replaced Rogers as Secretary of State following Nixon’s reelection in 1972).

William P. Rogers may have been Richard Nixon’s Secretary of State, but foreign policy during Nixon’s White House years was primarily formulated and carried out by his loyal, trusted, and brilliant Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was born in Germany in 1923 near Nuremberg in Bavaria, site of the famous Nazi war-crimes trials following World War II. Henry Kissinger was fifteen when his parents brought him to the United States in 1938, as Adolf Hitler’s stranglehold over Germany was rapidly tightening following one bloodless diplomatic conquest after another. Bismarck would have been favorably impressed by Hitler’s bloodless acquisition of the Rhineland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia; certainly, young Henry, the teenager with the thick German accent and keen intelligence, paid close attention to Hitler’s bold conquest (and his later blunders) in Europe. Receiving his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1954, Dr. Kissinger began teaching government classes at his alma mater. Soon, utilizing expertise in European affairs and geopolitical strategy, Dr. Kissinger also served as a part-time consultant on foreign affairs to Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.

Richard Nixon considered himself to be a realist on foreign policy; so too Kissinger. Simply put, the two hit it off. Foreign policy was President Nixon’s first love, and together, he and Dr. Kissinger guided America’s foreign policy full-time from 1969 through early 1974 as if they were joined at the hip. Nixon and Kissinger both loved secrecy. Both believed that reality trumped morality when it came to foreign policy decisions. According to Kissinger, America’s foreign policy should be based on our national interest, not human rights, or the spread of democracy. Protecting human rights and promoting the spread of democracy may seem the righteous path to take, but that idealistic road can too often prove to be an unwise and unnecessarily dangerous and bloody road to travel in a messy, less than moral world. It was Kissinger, with Nixon’s blessing, who actively pursued détente with the Russians, normalized relations with Red China, and finalized America’s secret agreements with the North Vietnamese.³

The general consensus among the American public during the Nixon Administration was that only a conservative Republican President could get away with consorting with America’s mortal enemies – the Soviets, the Communist Chinese, and the Vietcong – and be praised for doing a good job. It was generally assumed that, if a liberal Democrat had occupied the White House at that time and had made such overtures to America’s enemies, he would surely have been labeled a Communist. So too Kissinger. Instead, Nixon was reelected in a landslide in 1972, and Dr. Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his part in negotiating an end to the Vietnam War in 1973.

In truth, however, not all Americans, and especially many conservatives, were thrilled with Nixon’s and Kissinger’s abandonment of America’s centuries-old tradition of conducting foreign policy based on democratic ideals. Hence, another reason for the label, The Imperial Presidency. Why? Since the days of Benjamin Franklin, who cleverly extracted money and military support from the French nobility while publicly spreading America’s democratic ideals that soon led to the French Revolution, to Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points during World War I and Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms in World War II, American foreign policy has been idealistic. America’s Monroe Doctrine, President’s Polk’s Manifest Destiny, Harry Truman’s Marshall Plan, and Ronald Reagan’s call in Berlin to "Tear down that wall!" each linked America’s national interest to a moral crusade. Not so, Kissinger and Nixon. For Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, when it came to deciding what was in America’s best interest strategically, reality always trumped morality.

On the lighter side, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger had several things in common, including their amazing dexterity as diplomats and their affinity for wine, women, and song. Henry Kissinger became the lone national celebrity in an otherwise Gloomy Gus Nixon Administration. Frequently seen in public with this New York actress or that Hollywood star, his pictures were in all the tabloids and fan magazines, making him by far the most famous and recognizable National Security Advisor in American history, and America’s most mysterious, yet well-known intellectual. But let there be no doubt that the power behind Kissinger was the manipulative and secretive Tricky Dick.

Just when people may have thought they had Richard Nixon figured out, Tricky Dick would throw them a curve-ball. Known for his preference for foreign affairs, who could have predicted that it was he, Richard Nixon, who proposed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency on July 9, 1970? A lasting positive. But Tricky Dick was more prone to the negative when confronting his supposed enemies. Nixon, a sworn officer of the court, held little regard for the Fourth Amendment’s Constitutional guarantee against unreasonable searches of American citizens. To Nixon, there were no limits to the covert operations he, as President, could order to be carried out. Somehow – call it obsession with power or simply blind arrogance – Nixon refused to recognize the fundamental difference between a democracy and a dictatorship. Simply put in Civics 101 terms, in a democracy, no one is above the law; in a dictatorship, the leader and his henchmen are. The latter best describes Nixon and his Special Investigations Unit, more infamously known as The Plumbers. Their job? To stop government leaks." How? By any means necessary, including dirty tricks. Did they have an office? Room 16 of the Old Executive Office Building. Who was in charge of The Plumbers? Both E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, under the general supervision of John Ehrlichman. Eventually, all three would become leading characters in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s Pulitzer Prize winning exposé, All the President’s Men. But, during much of Richard Nixon’s first term, they were just Plumbers.⁴

Richard Nixon did not invent dirty tricks. In the first primary campaign of his political career in 1946, when he was running for Congress, Democrat operatives posing as Nixon volunteers managed to walk away from his tiny Whittier campaign office with his entire supply of campaign literature after gaining his trusting wife’s permission to do so. They had convinced Pat Nixon, who was acting as his only secretary (without pay) that they would distribute her husband’s fliers throughout the surrounding neighborhoods. Once outside, they threw them in the trash and disappeared. Nixon never forgot. From then on, Nixon’s modus operandi towards political opponents and other enemies was, Do unto them BEFORE they can do unto you: Better yet, "Crush them!" Given the power of the Presidency, Nixon, under the guise of his Committee to Reelect the President (CREEP), attempted to do just that: Crush them!

With Richard Nixon’s full knowledge and support, the Plumbers unit investigated news leaks harmful to the President, such as the unauthorized release of the Pentagon Papers, by breaking and entering (e.g., the illegal search of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office in Los Angeles on September 3, 1971), while members of the Committee to Reelect the President, under the direct supervision of its Security Coordinator, James McCord, Jr., burglarized the Democratic National Headquarters in Washington, D.C., at The Watergate office and apartment complex on the banks of the Potomac on June 17, 1972. At The Watergate, a night watchman spotted the burglars, and quickly notified the D.C. Police. All five were arrested. As chronicled in All the President’s Men, and later, in The Final Days, these and other illegal activities were painstakingly traced all the way back to President Nixon, his former Attorney General John Mitchell, and other key members of his White House staff.⁵

Early in his administration, Richard Nixon established an enemies list and attempted to use the FBI and the CIA to aid him in compiling information on his political opponents and famous anti-war protesters, including Hollywood