1970: United States

Politics

As President Richard M. Nixon and his administration began their second year in office, they appeared to be operating on one basic assumption: that there was a great silent majority in the United States which would—and should—dominate national politics in the 1970's. One political columnist saw the typical member of this silent majority as a suburbanite or small-town dweller who was deeply disturbed by high prices and taxes, crime in the streets, political demonstrations and violence, welfare 'handouts,' integration and black militancy, and the changing attitudes of the young toward sex, drugs, established institutions, and authority figures. The silent majority advocated an end to the war in Indochina but did not want to see an American 'defeat.'

The emerging Nixon style in 1970 appeared to be to follow the presumed wishes and alleviate the presumed fears of the silent majority. One reflection of this style may have been the administration's policy on school desegregation. As outlined by President Nixon on March 24, that policy was to seek an end to official and deliberate racial segregation in schools but not to insist on racial integration through such means as forced busing. In line with that policy, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suits against numerous southern school districts in June, and in the fall about 200 districts officially desegregated for the first time — by far the greatest number in any single year since the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark school desegregation decision of 1954. However, in October, the Justice Department argued before the Supreme Court that the U.S. Constitution did not require positive action—such as busing—to end de facto segregation of schools. In fact, the administration appeared to be closing its eyes to a new kind of de facto segregation in the South, caused by the transfer of hundreds of thousands of white students from public schools to all-white private academies. Although the Internal Revenue Service stated that any private school practicing racial discrimination would lose its tax-exempt status, the IRS conducted no investigations but rather accepted schools' statements that they were not discriminating.

Meanwhile, President Nixon continued his efforts to put a 'strict constructionist' (a shorthand term for a political conservative and an advocate of judicial restraint) on the Supreme Court to fill the vacancy created by Justice Abe Fortas' resignation in 1969. A Gallup poll taken in April showed that 49 percent of those surveyed favored putting a conservative on the Court; 27 percent favored a liberal; 24 percent gave no opinion.

On January 19 the president nominated G. Harrold Carswell, a justice on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit and a native of Florida. Senator Richard B. Russell (D, Ga.) praised the nominee as a jurist who would 'follow precedent' and 'lean to the conservative side.' However, Judge Carswell soon came under a barrage of criticism for his allegedly mediocre record on the court of appeals and for his alleged hostility to civil rights causes. On April 8 the Senate rejected the nomination, 51-45. After accusing the Senate of having an anti-South bias (in 1969 it had rejected Judge Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr., of South Carolina), the president nominated Judge Harry A. Blackmun of Minnesota, whom he also described as a strict constructionist. Judge Blackmun, who had been sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, was confirmed on May 12 by a 94-0 vote. His most conservative opinions had been in the area of criminal law.

President Nixon won congressional passage of two major pieces of legislation to combat crime and campus unrest. The president had repeatedly criticized the Democratic-controlled Congress for producing no anticrime legislation in his first 18 months in office; however, as the congressional election drew near, Congress passed the District of Columbia Crime Control Act in July and the Organized Crime Control Act in October. The latter gave the Federal Bureau of Investigation greater power to combat racketeering, established some federal control on the interstate sale of explosives, and authorized the FBI to investigate campus bombings even if not requested to do so by college or university officials. The District of Columbia bill, although applicable only to the nation's capital, was intended to be a model for state anticrime legislation. The bill, strongly criticized by some civil libertarians, authorized broader use of wiretapping, pretrial detention without bail in some cases, and forcible entry by police onto premises they have warrants to search. It also mandated five-year minimum sentences for second offenders committing violent crimes while in possession of a gun.

Southeast Asia.

In the first four months of 1970, the issue of Vietnam simmered beneath the surface. President Nixon's policy of 'Vietnamization,' which permitted a slow but steady withdrawal of U.S. troops, seemed to satisfy the American people's two deep, and sometimes contradictory, feelings—that the war should end and that the country should not 'lose face.'

Then, on April 30, the president ordered thousands of American combat troops into Cambodia to attack Communist strongholds across the border from Vietnam. He insisted that the intervention would end the war more quickly, but many Americans disagreed. Reaction was particularly strong on the nation's college campuses. Hundreds were shut down in May and June in what amounted to almost a national student strike. One campus wracked by trouble was Kent State University in Ohio, where four students were shot to death by national guardsmen during an antiwar demonstration on May 4.

Even within the administration there was some dissent. Secretary of the Interior Walter J. Hickel, hardly considered a liberal, wrote to the president: 'I believe this Administration finds itself, today, embracing a philosophy which appears to lack appropriate concern for the attitude of a great mass of Americans—our young people.' (

In the Senate the reaction was stronger. Amendments were introduced to cut off funds for military operations in Cambodia after June 30 (the Cooper-Church amendment) and to prohibit appropriations for the Vietnam war after December 31, 1971 (the McGovern-Hatfield amendment). Student and citizens' groups organized petition campaigns in support of the amendments, and thousands of amateur lobbyists descended on Washington, D.C.

President Nixon responded to opposition to the Cambodia action by combining a fairly hard line toward the campus disturbances and other demonstrations with efforts to defuse the political criticism. His reaction to the Kent State killings was that 'when dissent turns to violence, it invites tragedy,' and one poll seemed to indicate that the electorate agreed with him. The poll showed that 58 percent of the people surveyed blamed the students for the tragedy at Kent State, and only 11 percent blamed the national guardsmen. On May 26, a few days after 100,000 people, many of them construction workers, demonstrated in New York City in support of U.S. policy toward Southeast Asia (a few days earlier some hard-hats had beaten up antiwar demonstrators in the city), President Nixon met with leaders of New York's construction unions and publicly accepted a hard hat from them.

Meanwhile, in mid-May the president announced that all U.S. troops would be out of Cambodia by the end of June. Nixon supporters in the Senate succeeded in watering down the Cooper-Church amendment and in delaying a vote until June 30, a day after the last U.S. troops had returned to South Vietnam. The amendment was passed in the Senate, but it was killed in the House of Representatives. A vote on the McGovern-Hatfield amendment was delayed until September 1, by which time most of the furor over the Cambodia action had died down, and that amendment was defeated in the Senate. By election day, November 3, the war was a politically insignificant issue in most races.

The campaign.

At stake in the 1970 election were all 435 seats in the House of Representatives, 35 seats in the Senate, 35 governorships, and 45 state legislatures. President Nixon vowed at the outset of the campaign to win Republican control of the Senate, which required a gain of seven seats. About a dozen men were handpicked to challenge vulnerable Democratic senators and were promised substantial financial and technical help from the national Republican Party.

In planning their campaign strategy, the Republicans leaned heavily on a new book, The Real Majority, by Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg, which stressed the point that most of the nation was not black, poor, or young—arguments which bolstered the Nixon administration's silent majority thesis. The Republicans set out to appeal to this unyoung, unblack, unpoor vote, hoping to avoid the usual midterm setback to the president's party and perhaps even to establish the GOP as the new majority party in the United States.

An important figure in implementing the Republican strategy was Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew, who launched a campaign of vitriolic oratory seldom matched in American national politics. He accused the Democrats of 'permissiveness' toward criminals and rioters. The vice-president coined the self-contradictory phrase 'radical-liberal' and used it repeatedly to categorize everyone from bomb-manufacturing Weathermen to Democratic office-seekers. One Republican, Senator Charles E. Goodell of New York, who frequently voted against the administration in Congress, also became a target of Agnew's rhetoric.

In the last few weeks before the election, President Nixon jumped into the campaign with an almost unprecedented commitment of presidential effort and prestige. He toured more than 20 states, exhorting voters to elect senators who would support his programs and speaking out against permissiveness, lawlessness, and pornography. He was heckled during a number of his speeches, and on the Thursday before the election some objects were thrown at his car in San Jose, Calif. Nixon made the most of these incidents, eagerly pointing out the hecklers as the products of permissiveness and urging the members of his audience to answer them by voting Republican.

Some Democratic candidates responded to the Republican campaign by emphasizing their own advocacy of law and order. For example, in Illinois, a state in which Nixon campaigned three times and Agnew twice, Democratic senatorial candidate Adlai E. Stevenson III wore an American flag on his lapel, denounced violence every chance he could, and took onto his campaign staff Thomas A. Foran, the chief prosecutor in the 'Chicago seven' trial.

The dominant theme of many Democratic candidates was that the Republicans had plunged the country into an economic recession. With unemployment and retail prices both rising sharply, the Democrats were hopeful that identification of the Republicans with the financial squeeze would outweigh in the minds of voters any identification of the Democrats with crime or student activism.

One characteristic common to a number of Republican and Democratic campaigns was extensive use of highly sophisticated television advertising. Although Republicans used television more than the Democrats did (they spent five times as much money as the Democrats in the campaign), office-seekers of both parties sought more than ever before to influence voters through 30-second or one-minute paid spots, in which the image of the candidate was strictly controlled.

On election eve each party bought 15 minutes of prime television time. The Republicans broadcast a tape of a Nixon speech in Phoenix, Ariz., in which he reacted to the San Jose incident. Speaking before a cheering partisan audience, the president characterized violent protesters as 'thugs and hoodlums' who gained prominence as a result of 'appeasement.' He said the country had to choose between the 'peace forces' and the 'criminal forces.' The president's speech was followed by a talk by Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine. Sitting alone in the living room of a friend's New England home and speaking slowly and calmly, Muskie criticized the Republicans for implying that Democrats favor violence. 'This is a lie,' he stated, 'and the American people know it is a lie.' The selection of Senator Muskie to deliver the Democrats' message, after an election campaign in which he toured almost every state helping Democratic candidates, strengthened his position as the front-runner for the 1972 Democratic presidential nomination.

Election results.

When the votes were counted, the Republicans seemed to have lost more than they gained. They made a net gain of two Senate seats, falling far short of their goal of seven (although even President Nixon had retreated from that goal as the election drew near); they lost nine seats in the House, a relatively small loss for the president's party in a midterm election; and they dropped a total of 11 governorships to the Democrats. An analysis of the vote in all 435 congressional districts showed that on the average the Democratic vote in each district was 3 percent higher than in 1968.

The election was by no means a disaster for the GOP. The New York senate race was won by Conservative Party candidate James L. Buckley, who had the tacit, if not the official, endorsement of the White House; Buckley won a hard-fought three-way race in which Senator Goodell and the Democratic candidate, Representative Richard L. Ottinger, split the liberal vote. In Tennessee, Representative William E. Brock III (R) unseated an old Nixon nemesis, Senator Albert Gore (D). In Maryland, Republican Representative J. Glenn Beall, Jr., defeated Senator Joseph D. Tydings. Representative Lowell P. Weicker won a Senate seat for the GOP in Connecticut; and in Ohio, where Senator Stephen Young (D) was retiring, Republican Robert Taft, Jr., defeated Howard M. Metzenbaum, a liberal Democrat.

The Democrats also won some important victories. Representative John V. Tunney unseated Senator George Murphy in California, and Stevenson trounced Senator Ralph T. Smith in Illinois. In Florida, where Senator Spessard Holland was retiring, Lawton Chiles held the seat for the Democrats against a strong challenge from Representative William C. Cramer. In Texas, Lloyd M. Bentsen, Jr., who had beaten Senator Ralph W. Yarborough in the Democratic primary, turned back Representative George Bush. Indeed, contrary to the Nixon goal of building a strong Republican Party in the South, the GOP was saved from total defeat in that region only by the results in Tennessee, where it won the governorship as well as the Senate seat.

A raft of incumbent Democratic senators kept their seats in spite of active Nixon-Agnew campaigns in their states. These senators included Harrison A. Williams, Jr., of New Jersey, Frank E. Moss of Utah, Howard W. Cannon of Nevada, Gale W. McGee of Wyoming, Joseph M. Montoya of New Mexico, Vance Hartke of Indiana, and Quentin N. Burdick of North Dakota. In less hard-fought races, Senator Muskie won reelection in Maine, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, a possible 1972 presidential candidate, was returned to the Senate by Massachusetts voters, and Hubert H. Humphrey, the 1968 nominee and another potential contender in 1972, won a Senate seat in Minnesota.

The House races produced some surprises. Several insurgent Democrats unseated entrenched veterans in bitter primary fights and then went on to win in the general election. One of them was Father Robert F. Drinan of Massachusetts, the first Roman Catholic priest to go to Congress in more than 100 years. Another was Parren J. Mitchell of Baltimore, one of three blacks to win seats previously held by whites. A third was Bella S. Abzug, a leader in the women's liberation movement, who had dumped Representative Leonard Farbstein of New York in the Democratic primary. In the general election, insurgent Democrat John F. Seiberling, Jr., ousted veteran Republican congressman William H. Ayres of Ohio, and another youthful liberal, Leslie Aspin, trounced Republican incumbent Henry C. Schaderberg of Wisconsin. One Democratic incumbent to lose in the general election was Representative Allard K. Lowenstein of New York, the founder of the 'dump Johnson' movement in 1968; reapportionment of congressional districts by the Republican-controlled New York state legislature had left Lowenstein with a predominantly Republican constituency.

The biggest surprises probably came in the gubernatorial races. Democrats Milton J. Shapp of Pennsylvania, John J. Gilligan of Ohio, Reubin Askew of Florida, and Patrick J. Lucey of Wisconsin all won formerly Republican governorships in important states. A less surprising result was George C. Wallace's election as governor of Alabama. Democrats captured several state legislatures, including the one in California, and thus won the power to redraw congressional districts in accordance with 1970 census results. Republican Ronald Reagan was reelected governor of California, but his majority fell far below that of 1966, and his national prestige dropped. Another Republican governor, Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York, piled up his largest margin ever in winning a fourth term over Democrat Arthur J. Goldberg, the former Supreme Court justice and UN ambassador.

Postelection developments.

After the election, President Nixon claimed victory, maintaining that, regardless of party affiliation, the administration had won an 'ideological majority' in the Senate. Rumors spread, however, that private evaluations of the election by presidential advisers were more pessimistic. The government departments began working intensively on the budget for fiscal 1972 (July 1, 1971-June 30, 1972), and administration members began talking about seeking an economic growth rate of 8 percent for 1971—a rate which would almost certainly bring down unemployment but which risked stimulating the inflationary pressures the Republicans had pledged to reduce.

The president made a number of personnel changes as he prepared for the second half of his four-year term. Former Texas governor John B. Connally, a Democrat, was nominated to replace David M. Kennedy as secretary of the treasury. George Bush, the unsuccessful GOP Senate candidate in Texas, was nominated as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

President Nixon fired Secretary Hickel, claiming that he and the secretary had lost confidence in each other, and Rogers C. B. Morton, the Republican National Committee chairman, was nominated the head of the Department of the Interior. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a controversial presidential adviser for two years, announced that he would leave the government at the end of 1970. Donald Rumsfeld, director of the Office of Economic Opportunity as well as a White House adviser, left the OEO post to become a full-time counselor to the president.

Congress

The final session of the 91st Congress spanned a year in which a Democratic congressional majority and a Republican president sparred for position in the midterm election of 1970 and attempted to stake out battlegrounds for the presidential election of 1972. But the political confrontations tended to obscure a record of historic actions.

A gauge of the political heat was the total of five bills vetoed by the president before the election. If it seemed that President Nixon had the edge over the Democratic Congress in these conflicts, the opposition gained more than a standoff by defeating, for the second time in a row, his nominee for the Supreme Court. Congress also raised political temperatures with more than 12 weeks of debate over defense issues, much of it with the deeper constitutional significance of attempts to restrict the war-making powers of the president.

Meanwhile, Congress gave 18-year-olds the right to vote, enacted a revolutionary reformation of the cumbersome machinery of the post office, gave the District of Columbia a (nonvoting) delegate in the House of Representatives for the first time, placed a limit on lucrative subsidies being paid to wealthy farmers, and mandated production of a virtually pollution-free automobile by 1976.

However, the Senate may have sidestepped opportunities to make a deeper and longer-lasting imprint by failing to pass two proposed constitutional amendments, one providing for direct election of the president and one guaranteeing equal rights for women.

This year's session began as the previous session had closed—with a conflict kindled by the president's determination to place a Southerner and a strict constructionist on the Supreme Court. On November 21, 1969, the Senate had rejected Judge Clement F. Haynsworth, Jr., of South Carolina. On January 19, President Nixon nominated Judge G. Harrold Carswell of Florida. Although the selection brought on attacks from civil rights advocates, the Senate debate over the nomination centered largely on Carswell's qualifications to sit on the highest court in the land. His opponents charged that the nominee had an undistinguished record as an appeals court judge. His supporters contended that his qualifications were comparable to those of many former and present Supreme Court justices, but their main argument was that it was the president's prerogative to place a man of his own choosing, a man with a compatible legal philosophy, on the Court. In the end, the Senate, for the first time since 1894, rejected the second successive nominee of a president to the Court. The vote was 51-45, with 13 Republicans joining 38 Democrats (four of them from the South) in the opposition.

Even after Nixon's third nominee, Judge Harry A. Blackmun of Minnesota, was unanimously confirmed, the powers of the presidency continued to be an issue in Congress. The next debate was over the president's power to make war. The debate began in May, after President Nixon ordered American troops into Cambodia to attack Vietcong and North Vietnamese base areas and supply dumps. The president said the action was launched under his constitutional authority, as commander in chief of the armed forces, to safeguard the lives of American troops.

Doves in the Senate reacted with outraged speeches, and some said the president was infringing on the constitutional responsibility of Congress to declare war. The opposition was nominally bipartisan, although there were more Democrats than Republicans against the president in the confrontation.

The issue was joined when a provision barring the president from retaining troops in Cambodia after June 30 was proposed as an amendment to a minor military sales bill. Senator John Sherman Cooper (R, Ky.) and Senator Frank Church (D, Idaho) offered the measure. Seven weeks of debate followed. Supporters of the Cooper-Church amendment, as it came to be called, voiced fears of a permanent expansion of the war in Indochina and warned against a commitment to support the new Lon Nol government in Cambodia. The Senate finally adopted the amendment on June 30, but only after it had been so modified by compromises that no one was quite sure what its real legislative meaning was. Subsequently, on July 9, even the watered-down version was rejected by the House, 247-153.

Meanwhile, on June 24, the Senate voted with little fanfare to take back the blanket authority it had ceded to the president in 1964 to 'take all necessary measures' to prevent aggression in Southeast Asia. This authority was granted in what became known as the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which was passed overwhelmingly by Congress after North Vietnamese PT boats allegedly attacked two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin off the Vietnamese coast. The resolution was later cited by President Lyndon B. Johnson as authority for escalating the war. President Nixon, however, voiced no opposition to repeal, claiming as his own authority for operations in Southeast Asia his powers and prerogatives as commander in chief.

Action on the defense front continued in the Senate, with five weeks of debate on a $19.2 billion military procurement bill. Attention focused mainly on funds for the Safeguard antiballistic missile system. In 1969 the defense authorization debate had lasted from July 8 to September 18, with Senate opponents of the ABM failing by one vote to block funds for the first two Safeguard installations. In 1970, in a defense debate lasting from July 23 to September 1, the Senate opposition failed to block expansion of the Safeguard system to two additional installations. During debate, each side took almost the same position. Supporters of Safeguard contended that an antiballistic missile system was needed as leverage in the strategic arms limitation talks with the Soviet Union. Opponents contended that expansion of the Safeguard system would make agreement with the Soviets more difficult to achieve. Before passing the procurement bill, the Senate debated the McGovern-Hatfield amendment calling for withdrawal of all U.S. troops from South Vietnam by December 31, 1971. The measure was defeated, 55-39, in a roll-call vote.

As was the case in 1969, the Senate preoccupation with arms questions delayed much of the work of Congress until late in the session. In fact, so much remained to be done late in the year that, for the first time since 1950, congressmen found it necessary to take a recess for campaigning and return afterward for a 'lame duck' session.

Among the major accomplishments of the session, one historic measure was adopted early—extension of the right to vote to all Americans over the age of 18. The measure, appended to a bill extending the Voting Rights Act of 1965, was subsequently held by the Supreme Court to be constitutionally applicable only to federal elections. As a result of the bill and the Court's ruling, 11 million more Americans are eligible to vote for president, senators, and members of the House of Representatives. Another addition to the 1965 act banned the use of literacy tests in voter registration. The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of this provision.

The next major piece of legislation stemmed largely from a labor dispute—the first nationwide postal strike in the country's history. In 1967 a presidential commission had recommended creation of a government-owned corporation to operate the postal service, and President Nixon had offered in 1969 legislative proposals incorporating the commission's suggestions. The proposals got nowhere and neither did legislation authorizing pay increases for postal workers. In 1970, with the two questions tied together and moving slowly in committee, postal workers' dissatisfaction erupted in a strike that, at its peak on March 21, closed 600 post offices. In New York City, troops were called out to attempt to handle the mountains of accumulated mail. After settlement of the strike with promises of pay increases to be tied to postal reform, the reorganization bill moved forward in Congress, passing the House on June 18 and the Senate on July 1. Besides establishing the postal service as an independent government corporation, the bill placed responsibility for all operation, including determining postal rates, in the hands of an independent commission, and the position of postmaster general was removed from the president's cabinet.

In July, with the midterm elections approaching and with 'crime in the streets' looming as a major political issue, Congress passed the administration-backed crime bill for the District of Columbia. The measure was a sterner one than many Democratic supporters would have voted for at another time. Some liberal Democrats did attack the bill as repressive, and Senator Sam J. Ervin, Jr. (D, N.C.), usually considered a conservative, denounced it as a blueprint for a police state. Final congressional action came in a 54-33 roll-call vote in the Senate, after the House had approved the bill by the overwhelming vote of 332-64. In another attempt to neutralize crime as an issue, Congress passed the Organized Crime Control Act in October.

After passing the District of Columbia crime bill over vehement protests from many in the unrepresented district, Congress enacted a measure more to the liking of the capital's citizens—a bill which for the first time gave the district a delegate, and thus a voice, in the House of Representatives. The measure gave the delegate no vote, but Washington residents nevertheless saw passage of the act as a step toward eventual full representation of its citizens.

Congress also made some historic changes in the House's antiquated procedural rules. Hearings in the Senate had long been open to the public through television broadcasts. In the House the broadcast media were totally barred, and many significant actions were taken behind closed doors without witnesses. In the Senate a member's vote on substantive issues was normally recorded, and the senator was thus accountable to the electorate for his actions. But in the House, on significant changes in bills, the members could act anonymously through the unrecorded teller vote, in which only the vote totals were reported. Only on final action on bills were the members' votes recorded. This year, however, a congressional reorganization bill provided for public disclosure of each member's votes in House committees, for television coverage of hearings in House committees, and for recorded votes on amendments to pending legislation.

Before recessing for the election campaign, the House also passed a bill revising federal farm programs and adopting for the first time a limit on subsidies to individual farmers. Crop subsidies, which are paid to farmers who agree to production controls, had run into millions of dollars annually for individual wealthy farmers. In the Senate, where some members from major farm states faced close elections, final action was postponed until the postelection session, when the measure easily passed. The final bill provided for an annual subsidy limit of $55,000 per farm for each of three basic crops—cotton, wheat, and feed grains.

As Congress returned from the election recess, a number of major issues remained undecided, including a bill limiting campaign spending. Before the recess, Congress had voted to limit, beginning in 1972, the money presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial candidates could spend for television and radio campaign advertising. The measure had been pushed by members of the less affluent Democratic Party, but President Nixon had vetoed the bill. On November 23, in a close vote, the Senate sustained the veto.

Perhaps one of the most important bills passed in the final weeks of the 91st Congress was the measure mandating production of a virtually pollution-free car. The bill gave automobile manufacturers until January 1, 1975, to produce an engine which would emit 90 percent less hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide than the 1970 standard and until January 1, 1976, to reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides. The measure, which authorized one-year extensions of these deadlines, was signed by President Nixon on December 31.

In the postelection session, defense matters and efforts to limit the president's war-making powers again took up a good deal of debating time. Senate liberals succeeded in adding to the $66.6 billion defense appropriations bill a prohibition against using any funds for military support of the Laotian or Cambodian governments. But opponents of that prohibition then added a statement to the effect that nothing in the defense bill was intended to block financial support for efforts forwarding the orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops from Southeast Asia or the release of American prisoners of war. The measure repealing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution finally became law when it was added to a military sales authorization bill.

Another appropriations bill—for transportation—also became embroiled in controversy in the postelection session. On December 3 the Senate voted 52-41 to delete from the bill the $290 million for development of a supersonic transport plane (SST); the House voted to continue SST funding. The impasse was broken only when Congress agreed to continue funding until March 1971 and then reconsider the matter.

On December 2, the Senate passed and sent to the White House a bill giving title to 48,000 acres of federal land in New Mexico to the Taos Pueblo Indians. The land included Blue Lake, a sacred area according to the tribe's religion. President Nixon, who supported the bill, signed it into law.

A measure which had been pending in Congress since the early days of the Nixon administration was the plan to reform the welfare system in the United States, a plan which provided for some assistance to every needy family with children. In April the bill passed the House by a wide margin, but it was bottled up for most of the year in the Senate Finance Committee. In mid-December the committee finally reported out a bill which authorized pretesting of the welfare plan in a few localities and also provided for an increase in Social Security payments and controversial import quotas on textiles and other items. After threats of a filibuster and even of a presidential veto to block overly restrictive import quotas and after much parliamentary maneuvering over the welfare provision, the omnibus bill died with the close of the 91st Congress on January 2, 1971.

The close of the session marked the end of an era in Congress, as Representative John W. McCormack (D, Mass.) retired after 42 years in the House, eight of them as speaker. It was the longest time anyone had held that office. Early in the year Martin Sweig, an aide to McCormack, was indicted for conspiring to use his position on McCormack's staff to exert pressure on government agencies and for perjury. Sweig was convicted on the perjury charge.

Foreign Relations

United States foreign policy in 1970 became trapped between two incompatible objectives—reduction of foreign commitments in favor of domestic priorities and containment of feared Communist expansion.

President Nixon repeated his desire for disengagement without disruption in his State of the Union message in January. As the year neared its end, however, the president's approach to world affairs had not achieved its promise. The course of disengagement had been marked by sudden, unexpected lunges in other directions. Under pressure the president invariably reverted to established policies and established rationales.

Europe.

U.S.-Soviet relations.

President Nixon entered the year hoping to move from a period of confrontation with the Soviet Union to one of negotiation. Still, big-power negotiations seemed less than promising. Washington officials recognized a shift in Soviet style but suspected that negotiation had evolved into a form of confrontation and viewed Soviet diplomacy as being less concerned with compromise than with exploitation of weakness. This assumption of Soviet expansionism placed a clear limitation on the American search for a lower profile.

During the year U.S.-Soviet confrontations centered largely on the arms race and the Middle East, with lesser confrontations occurring over Cuban submarine bases and the status of West Berlin. Round two of the strategic arms limitation talks (SALT) ended in Vienna in August on a note of amity. During succeeding weeks, renewed conflicts in the Middle East, Cuba, and Berlin raised suspicions in both Moscow and Washington regarding the other power's intentions. However, despite the reheating of the cold war, it seemed clear that the two nations had sufficient interest in arms reduction to keep SALT moving forward, and in November the talks resumed in Helsinki. United States officials, searching for a glimpse of Soviet intentions, were disturbed when Kremlin spokesmen at Helsinki focused on weapons not covered in the American proposal offered at Vienna. Endangered by bombers no less than by tactical and strategic nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union demanded a broad interpretation of 'strategic.' Yet the Soviets voiced no serious protests at Helsinki, and as the third session ended in December the negotiators anticipated returning to Vienna in 1971 for a fourth round of talks.

Clearly, in 1970 the era of confrontation in U.S.-Soviet relations did not give way to an era of negotiation; the conflict of interest remained too severe. The Soviets had interests to defend, and the American refusal to accept them as the basis of agreement made them no less real. The Nixon administration viewed the Soviet Union as desirous of gaining the maximum advantage from any negotiations or world crises. Whether the United States could trim its world role without inviting Soviet encroachment was doubtful, but the Nixon administration appeared reluctant to evaluate either the nature and significance of Soviet expansion or its threat to United States security interests.

Changing Europe.

In the view of most European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the existing Western European security system, which placed major responsibility on the United States, had been successful in preventing war for 20 years at relatively little cost. Satisfied with Europe's existing military arrangements, these nations were ready to pursue efforts at East-West diplomacy, especially those aimed at an all-European security conference. The United States opposed such a conference, apparently being primarily concerned about the possibility that any agreement with the Warsaw Pact nations would recognize Soviet control over Eastern Europe, thereby upsetting the European balance which was sustaining the continent's postwar stability. At a NATO ministers meeting held in Rome in May, Great Britain, backed by most of the smaller member states, favored positive proposals for an all-European security conference in response to the repeated invitations of the Warsaw Pact countries. The United States rejected the move.

American opposition to recognition of a divided Europe caused the United States to react with subdued enthusiasm to West German chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik. Brandt's policy of accepting postwar realities and seeking normalization of relations with Eastern Europe produced treaties with the Soviet Union and Poland accepting existing boundaries, renouncing the use of force in the nations' mutual relations, and calling for greater scientific and technical cooperation. In defending his policy of normalization to his Western critics, Brandt noted that no British, French, or American policy was aimed at upsetting the status quo.

European defense.

During 1970, NATO wrestled again with its perennial problems of defense. The maintenance of a costly defense structure, including 315,000 American troops, to protect Europe against a power that had no recognizable interest in waging a European war had, for some, become an unnecessary burden. In the United States, Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield (D, Mont.) continued to urge the reduction of United States forces in Europe under a program which, he estimated, would save the U.S. government US$2 billion a year. President Nixon, however, remained convinced that European security demanded established force levels and even additional strength in some sectors. The president pledged again early in December to keep American forces in Europe and to reduce their numbers only in the event of mutual East-West troop reductions across the continent. Behind that pledge was the new American doctrine that Europe might one day be compelled to fight another conventional war. During December the NATO ministers at Brussels responded to the Nixon promise by agreeing not only to maintain their previous military commitments but also to increase their NATO defense expenditures by $1 billion.

The Nixon doctrine in the Far East.

The Nixon doctrine, from the beginning, focused on Asia, where the Vietnam experience first raised the cry of American overcommitment. However, except in Vietnam, where the slow reduction of United States troops continued unabated, the doctrine was given little reality. This relative failure of the Nixon administration to scale down the United States presence in Asia reflected both Washington's refusal to redefine American interests in terms which would render some possible Communist gains more compatible with U.S. security and the demands of the Asian governments themselves. Some allies had become so dependent on the United States that they completely refused to accept the implications of the Nixon doctrine.

During August, Vice-President Agnew set out for the Far East to reassure the Asian allies that the United States did not intend to abandon them. In Seoul, Agnew promised the South Koreans that the United States would not only maintain sizable forces in Korea but also supply Korea with quantities of weapons, planes, and other equipment. In Bangkok the vice-president assured Thailand's leaders that the Nixon administration would fight congressional efforts to further reduce United States involvement in Southeast Asia. Nevertheless, the United States could not reduce its presence in Asia and fulfill every commitment at the same time. The Nixon doctrine demanded choices which no one really cared to make.

The war in Southeast Asia.

For the Nixon administration, ending the American military involvement in Vietnam had the highest priority. More than any other issue, the war sustained divisions within the United States. If the president wanted out, however, he also wanted out in an orderly fashion that would protect the nation's prestige and the safety of its departing troops. The president made clear his determination to withdraw troops from Vietnam only as the South Vietnamese demonstrated the capacity to defend themselves. Thus, Vietnamization, he maintained, promised containment as well as an American exit with honor. Those who questioned the president's policy doubted that North Vietnam would ever agree to peace on Saigon's terms and argued that, in the absence of a political settlement, Vietnamization meant war rather than peace, with both American and Vietnamese casualties.

Cambodia.

Throughout the early spring of 1970 an unanticipated threat to successful Vietnamization and American withdrawal from Vietnam seemed to lay in the North Vietnamese and Vietcong sanctuaries just over the Cambodian border, some 35 to 50 miles west of Saigon. To complicate matters, the coup in Cambodia in mid-March which replaced Prince Norodom Sihanouk with an anti-Communist military regime had the effect of drawing additional Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops into Cambodia. On April 29 thousands of South Vietnamese troops launched a ground invasion of Cambodia, and on April 30 President Nixon announced that American combat forces were also entering that country. The movement of North Vietnamese men and supplies into Cambodia, he said, gave the United States no choice but 'to go to the heart of the trouble.' The action he had taken, he maintained, was indispensable to the continuing success of the withdrawal program: 'We will not allow American men by the thousands to be killed by an enemy from privileged sanctuaries.' The president may also have sought, through the Cambodian venture, to demonstrate to North Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union that United States policy was not always predictable and that provocation would bring a vigorous, determined response. He may have hoped, thereby, to persuade the North Vietnamese that peace was preferable to resistance. Finally, the president moved to protect American prestige. The United States, he said, dared not behave like a 'pitiful, helpless giant.'

The Cambodian operation began with the expectation that the American forces would discover and destroy a highly centralized command headquarters which controlled much of the enemy action in Vietnam. The advancing troops failed to uncover any command headquarters, but they unearthed massive Vietcong supply centers, more extensive and better stocked than any previously found in the war. According to United States military officials, American troops had captured enough supplies to set back enemy offensive operations six to eight months.

The Paris peace talks.

While strengthening the Vietnamization program, the Cambodian action supposedly embodied a negotiating option—that the relative increase in the power of South Vietnam would encourage North Vietnam to be more cooperative at the Paris peace talks. During July the president opened his new peace offensive by naming retired diplomat David K. E. Bruce chief U.S. negotiator in Paris. Bruce, long skeptical of the Vietnam war, carried a fairly flexible brief to Paris, but on the critical question of the Saigon government's political future Bruce's instructions remained unclear. As if to warn the new negotiator, South Vietnam's president, Nguyen Van Thieu, declared on American national television that his government would never agree to an imposed coalition. At a news conference late in July, President Nixon assured Saigon that the United States would never attempt 'to negotiate an imposed coalition government in South Vietnam.' Therefore, Bruce arrived in Paris circumscribed by the established diplomatic stalemate.

In September the Vietcong negotiator in Paris presented an eight-point plan which offered safety guarantees for all United States and other foreign troops if the United States agreed to withdraw all such forces from Vietnam by June 30, 1971. The Vietcong agreed to open political talks with any Saigon regime which did not include the current president, vice-president, and prime minister of South Vietnam and which favored peace, independence, and neutrality. Bruce found nothing new in the proposal and rejected it.

On October 7, President Nixon attempted to break the logjam in Paris. In a brief televised address, he presented a five-point program which included offers of a cease-fire and an Indochina peace conference. North Vietnam publicly rejected the Nixon formula. What may have consigned that formula to oblivion was the vagueness of his proposal for the creation of a new South Vietnamese government which reflected what the president termed 'the existing relationship of political forces.' President Thieu made his government's position clear in a speech on October 31. He pledged that he would never accept a coalition with the Communists. Thus, there was no progress at the Paris peace talks, and early in December Bruce admitted that the talks presented little hope of success.

With North Vietnam and South Vietnam both intransigent, the Nixon administration pursued its military objectives. On November 21 the United States unleashed a major bombing attack on supply concentrations in the southern part of North Vietnam and also staged a commando raid on a prisoner-of-war camp near Hanoi (accompanied by diversionary air strikes in the area). The commandos found the prison camp empty.

Secretary of Defense Melvin R. Laird initially stated that the bombing attacks were in retaliation for the destruction of an American reconnaissance plane by North Vietnamese antiaircraft batteries. He said destruction of the plane violated a 1968 understanding that, although the United States would stop daily bombing of North Vietnam, it would continue reconnaissance flights. A few days after the raids, however, the secretary appeared to add a second justification for U.S. air attacks on North Vietnam, saying that the United States would retaliate to actions by Hanoi, such as supply buildups near the border, which threatened to increase the level of fighting in South Vietnam.

The Middle East.

Although President Nixon also preferred a low profile in the Middle East, what kept the region in turmoil and sustained the danger of a Soviet-American confrontation were the unresolved issues raised by the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Especially along the Suez and Jordanian frontiers, Arab guns and guerrillas challenged Israeli forward positions through the first half of the year. In retaliation, Israeli jets and armor pounded Egyptian and Jordanian artillery, antiaircraft, and industrial targets. On all fronts Israel maintained military superiority.

Egypt's president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, visited Moscow in January and pleaded for increased Soviet military aid to counter the destructive Israeli attacks. In response, the Soviets shipped quantities of sophisticated SA-3 ground-to-air missiles and also sent the necessary technicians and protective troops. When American negotiator Joseph J. Sisco arrived in the Middle East in April to encourage agreement on a cease-fire, the Soviets had become Israel's central problem. Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan warned that his country's attacks on Soviet installations might lead to an Israeli-Soviet war. Shortly thereafter it became clear that Soviet pilots were flying Egyptian aircraft, and the Middle East conflict reached a new, more dangerous level.

Suddenly in June the air began to clear. Throughout the spring the Nixon administration had threatened to withhold military assistance from Israel until that nation agreed to participate in a cease-fire and in peace negotiations conducted through a United Nations mediator. The American peace plan, as it took form in June, included a 90-day cease-fire, during which Gunnar Jarring of the UN would conduct negotiations, and also included a proposal that both sides honor the November 1967 UN resolution calling for Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab territory and for Arab recognition of Israel's right to exist. Israel, Egypt, and Jordan accepted the American formula as the basis of negotiation, and a final cease-fire agreement came on August 7. However, Syria and Iraq refused to accept the American proposal, and the Palestinian guerrillas made clear their intention to continue their raids against Israeli positions.

Thus, even as Jarring prepared for the formal negotiations, events in the Middle East rendered them precarious. As Palestinian guerrillas continued their heavy commando raids and gunfire crackled across the Jordanian border, Jordan accused Israel of violating the cease-fire. Firing across the Lebanese and Jordanian borders soon became steady. Then, in September the Palestinian commandos, fearful that any negotiated settlement would undermine their efforts to establish a government of their own, undertook several skyjackings to sabotage the peace moves. These skyjackings posed a direct challenge to Jordan's King Hussein and resulted in a bloody confrontation between the Jordanian army and the Palestinian commandos. During September, Syrian tanks entered Jordan to join the struggle against King Hussein, but before the end of the month the Jordanian army emerged victorious.

Israel meanwhile demanded that the Egyptians pull back antiaircraft missiles which they had allegedly moved closer to the Suez Canal after the cease-fire took effect. As evidence of Egyptian violations of the cease-fire mounted, Israeli officials threatened to stop the negotiations until the enemy removed the missiles. Washington refused to share Israel's concern over the missiles but did accuse the Soviets of taking part in the cease-fire violations. The Soviet Union answered that it was not a party to the cease-fire agreement, whose terms the United States had never discussed with the Soviet Union. Apparently, Washington's yearning for a cease-fire had outrun its diplomacy. Meanwhile, after preliminary talks at the UN, which Jarring was compelled to conduct with each delegation separately, Israel broke off negotiations early in September.

Later in the month, Israel's prime minister, Golda Meir, conferred with President Nixon and Secretary of State William P. Rogers in Washington. The president continued to deny the seriousness of the Egyptian-Soviet violations, hoping for resumption of the talks, but he made it clear to the prime minister that future American aid was not contingent upon Israel's return to the negotiations. The 90-day cease-fire was extended in November, and Defense Minister Dayan dropped the rollback of Egyptian missiles as a precondition for resumption of negotiations. Later in November he suggested that a mutual thinning out of forces on both sides of the Suez Canal might create a more relaxed atmosphere for talks. As Arab-Israeli diplomacy continued to falter six months after the initial acceptance of the U.S. cease-fire proposal, it became apparent that the United States had yet to formulate a Middle Eastern policy that would resolve the unanswered questions of Soviet penetration, Israeli security, and Palestinian autonomy. Still, King Hussein's victories over the guerrillas and some decline in anti-American sentiment in Syria and Lebanon, if not in Iraq, had reinstituted a limited amount of American prestige in the Arab world. Even in Egypt, the Soviets were only tolerated, and the Americans were not hated.

Latin America.

Whether the relative quiet in United States—Latin American relations in 1970 reflected Washington's preference for a lower profile or the absence of revolutionary challenges remained unclear. More than in previous years the conflicting trends in Latin American politics and society left the United States no clear role in the area's affairs. That Latin America needed far greater economic progress than it had achieved in the past was clear enough. For some Latin American officials the answer to economic problems continued to lie in United States trade concessions and in larger public and private United States investments in their countries. Much of Latin America, however, looked inward rather than outward for the elements of progress. Some Latin American governments, from the extreme left to the extreme right, identified themselves with the new nationalism, which viewed the overpowering United States presence in Latin America as a danger to the region's interests. In keeping with the new nationalism, the governments of Peru and Bolivia, both military dictatorships, nationalized oil properties owned by oil companies in the United States.

Chile perhaps presented the greatest problem to the United States when a Marxist, Salvador Allende Gossens, was narrowly elected to the Chilean presidency. President Nixon refused to send formal congratulations to Allende on his election but appointed Charles A. Meyer, assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, to attend the inauguration early in November. Allende assured Meyer that Chile intended to remain nonaligned in relation to the big-power blocs, but Chile's progress, he said, called for expropriation of large mining and industrial enterprises with American interests. Allende reopened diplomatic relations with Cuba, and in December he introduced legislation to nationalize, with compensation, the copper industry, in which American companies have substantial holdings.

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