I became politically aware at a younger age than most people. I took a major interest in the Republican primaries in 1980, when I was just ten years old. By election day, I was eleven. When I hit puberty, I paid more attention to other things, but my interest in politics came back by my mid-20’s. Because of my specific age, I was born into a kind of Golden Age. The Civil Rights Era was over. The Vietnam War was basically over by the time I started school. I remember my father fuming about Ford’s pardon of Nixon, but that’s all I remember of Watergate. While adults remember the late 70s as a time of high inflation, high unemployment, national dishonor, and cultural excess, the children of that era remember it as a time when our big national problems had been resolved. Blacks were equal citizens. The war had been wrong. The press stood up to a tyrannical president and Congress tamed the CIA. As if to verify all of this, radio stations cropped up with a Classic Rock format, telling us that the counterculture had been right all along.
Bob Woodward was part of this. He was a hero. He was a dragon-slayer. If Martin Luther King Jr. had forced the country to live up to the true meaning of its creed, Woodward had forced the president to abide by the Constitution.
Most of this was the illusion of a 10 year old. Pretty soon the head of the CIA would be vice-president, and then president, and then his son would be president. The son would bring Ford’s chief of staff Dick Cheney and his Secretary of Defense Dick Rumsfeld back to DC to undo everything the Church Committee had accomplished in the aftermath of Watergate. Long before that, Reagan would usher in a group of conservatives who shut down the march of black progress and turned black poverty into a wedge issue. The counterculture may have prevailed on the radio, but it took a beating at the ballot box.
And through it all, it began, slowly slowly slowly, to become clear that Bob Woodward is a fraud.
Let’s also remember that the 70s was a time when a (Repub) Supreme Court would order a (Repub) prez to hand his secret tapes over to an investigating Congress. We had a functioning national government that could actually deal with a national crisis in an honorable and responsible way.
It was also the only time in the last 75 years that there was a (slight) questioning of American militarism and even a (slight) feeling of our insane, oppressive militarism being in retreat.
Boy, are those days long gone. Soon they will be memories of so long ago we will wonder if they really happened or if we simply dreamed them.
I’m not old enough to have experienced the 1970s, but this struck me:
I’ve read a lot about how folks who lived through the energy crises of the 1970s excise them from their memories, as if the 1970s weren’t a warning that the energy and environmental basis for our society were in danger. And these twin issues are unarguably the biggest challenge we face today.
The idea that Carter went on national television in an oval office address to denounce materialism, energy overuse, etc. is still amazing to me. What’s more amazing is that I’ve read that during Carter’s term, the nation was split on whether pursuing economic growth was worth pursuing (something like 1/3 pro, 1/3 against, 1/3 unsure).
Because Reagan’s and Thatcher’s flooding of the oil markets helped get growth going again, it seems like everyone was happy to forget that there was a huge problem still looming and a major opportunity lost.
My memory of the 1970’s ‘energy crisis’ was that it was manufactured for political purposes. I’m not saying that it was or was not the case, only that my memory is that was the prevailing belief shortly after the long lines at the pump magically vanished.
My other memory was that the energy crisis of the 70’s was when the auto industry in America missed it’s big chance to change by creating fuel efficient cars, thus allowing Toyota to exploit the opening and begin the big push to buy imported cars.
They did build fuel efficient cars, but they were cheap tinny unreliable crap like the Vega and Pinto. What really sealed their doom were the horrible X-cars of the 1980’s. They caused many people to forever swear off American cars.
The only 1980’s car that I ever owned was a 1983 Buick LeSabre Limited with the 307 Oldsmobile engine (de-bored 350) and T200-4R transmission. The transmission had a bad name, probably because it was also used (to save cost) with the larger 350 Chevy engine which had too much torque for it to handle. I gave it regular service (fluids) and tuned it up myself and had no problems at all for 123,000 miles, finally trading it in a 1993 Buick Roadmaster. It’s only problem was the anemic 140 hp engine. Gas mileage was good for the vehicle size. It was luxurious with every gadget known to Man at that time and utterly reliable. Basically it was the late-70’s redesigned B-body. Those who bought the “economy cars” built by GM are now Toyota/Honda buyers.
I owned a used 72 Toyota for about 5 years. I wish I had kept the manual — it was hilarious, written in some kind of Japanese/English crazytalk mashup. But man that car would run. Basically a tin can on wheels but it never stopped. I put in two clutch plates and a new head gasket, the thing that finally gave out was the body. It rusted out and I could watch the road go by between my legs, until the floor completely rotted out.
Next car was an 81 Impala, which was a piece of shit. A giant boat — you could mount a deck gun on the hood. Its now a cube of metal somewhere in east county. Memories…
The giant boat was my Roadmaster. It was well named because it was perfectly fr Interstate Highways. It chewed up the miles at about 21 mpg at 70 mph with the 8-way leather power seat feeling like a Captain’s chair. But when you turned a corner, it was like putting the helm down.
At 193,000 miles an 12 years, the body was getting a bit rusty. I wanted to clean up the body, switch the suspension to Chevrolet Police suspension, rebuild the engine into a 383 with Dart Sportsman heads and Edelbrock port fuel injection. It would have cost about $10,000 and been a big sports car. But I listened to my wife who said if I spent that the insurance company would never pay off for a loss. GM will never build a car like that again.
Sorry about your 81 Impala. Was it a 305?
I remember both energy crises. The first was during the Arab-Israel War of 1973. They were temporary inconveniences. I had to sit in line in a car with my mother for an hour to get gas. We could only get gas on even-numbered days (or odd-numbered, I forget).
And I don’t mean to suggest that we thought there were no problems in the world. I mean that we were not born into some massive tumultuous political struggle. My brothers, both in 1956 and 1959, both lived through titanic fights in their first decade of life. I did not.
I’m in the age range of your brothers. And I have to say, when I watch those flickering black and white images of LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act and of the marchers getting beaten and firehosed in the south, it just blows my mind that at the very same time, I was peddling around the neighborhood on my bicycle, playing baseball with the other kids and totally oblivious to it all.
I don’t remember the gas lines of the 70’s being a major thing. I remember limits on how much you could buy, and I think we did the odd/even license plate number thing in our area, too.
I was in Virginia (DC Suburbs) from 1973 to 1979. I remember it vividly and the undying hatred that I got for the Oil Sheiks. I was just recounting a story of that time to a friend (older than I) this very morning.
I was unable to buy gas all week. It was Saturday (all stations closed on Saturday) and my wife was bugging me. “We never go anywhere. I want to go to Manassas and shop.” We proceeded down Route 28(?) and my wife, looking at the gas gauge bouncing on ‘E’, said, “Oh. You really are low on gas. What are you going to do?” I said, “I’m going to drive until the car stops, then walk away from it. But when we got to Route 29, it looked like cars were lined up on the shoulder like a gas line! So, I got in line. When I got to the station, the attendant asked how much I wanted. Warily, I asked how much he would sell me, because they were only supposed to sell you three gallons on your license plate odd or even day. He asked if I wanted it filled. I said, “Sure”. It took about 25 gallons which takes a while to pump. I noticed the billboard with absurdly long hours on it. (Most stations sold out in 2-4 hours.) I asked what his new hours were. He answered, “Oh, those are my current hours.” When I asked how often he ran out, he replied, “Oh I never run out.” Then amplified, “If I ever run out while you are here, just wait. I get on the phone and there is a tanker here in half an hour.” Why was this? He charged something like 75 cents for a gallon of supposedly “new gas” while everyone else was price fixed at 54.9 cents for “old gas”. There was plenty of gas at 75 cents.
I still hate those damn Arabs for what they did to us and all because we wouldn’t agree with pushing the Jews into the sea.
It seems to me that the children of the era could indeed have thought all the big national problems had been solved. But many of them reaching adulthood, learned that they didn’t all go away – inequality, energy issues, US militarism, nuclear proliferation. But even though the 1980 election was a lot about energy and Anderson’s independent bid was based in no small measure on that issue, Reagan was the great forgetter. He found ways to make it all seem less urgent to a lot of people.
I’m watching for Bob Woodward’s contract with FoxNews to be announced.
I think that the “threat” was loss of access. If so, it seems this White House can play the same game as previous ones. Some OTOH-OTOH reporters might want to rethink republishing GOP outright lies.
re: the “threat” being loss of access… that’s a very interesting idea.
One could hardly blame him for holding them in contempt as a waste of his time.
At ten, my political “awareness” was limited to “Democrats always get us into wars and Republicans always get us into depressions/recessions,” and Richard Nixon was a crook.
On election night 1968 all I could think was however will we survive four years of Nixon. The short answer is we didn’t. It’s been over four decades of watching both parties dismantle the spirit and the law of that 75% of the people’s Grand Bargain implemented over three decades.
Slowly? My parents were college students in the heart of the 70s and said that even then, Woodward was considered a lightweight while Bernstein was the serious one.
What baffles me is why anyone continues to pick n choose who is less likely a fraud. It is obvious that everyone who puts the spotlight on his/her self should be immediately scrutinized to the fullest.
I remember that the 70’s basically sucked (except for the fact I was young). There was “stagflation” — the economy couldn’t seem to function. There was the threat of nuclear annihilation — we were busy mirving our nukes and so were the Russians. New York city were in full decay mode, with crime and rampant racism everywhere . And disco.
Echh.
Oh well, at least college and grad school were fun.