The Great American Story: Rise and Fall

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Welcome to the Hillsdale College online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.

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And I'm Juan Davalos. We are back with the great American story, Land of Hope. We're looking at lectures 22 and 23,

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rise and fall, parts one and two. So we get in sequence the presidencies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon with the domestic issues, including the Great Society and foreign policy, most notably Vietnam.

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Yeah, this is a very tumultuous time in American history. A lot of violence. This is the period in which MLK is killed, Robert Kennedy, then the Watergate problem, the problems, stagflation. A lot of problems in American history that will be covered by Dr. Maclay in these two lectures.

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We also come to the probably furthest reach of the grand progressive vision with Johnson's Great Society, which followed up the New Deal and creates an inflection point in which Americans are going to test whether they wish to continue moving towards these grand government projects or look to reset and move in either a new direction or back towards the principles of the founding.

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If you're enjoying this course, I encourage you to go to Hillsdale Edu course, that's Hillsdale. Edu Course, and enroll in. You'll be able to watch the video lectures as well as access all of the additional resources that we have, including study guides and additional readings, as well as Dr. Maclay's book that follows the course as well.

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Now let's turn to Dr. Maclay for lectures 22 and 23 of the great American story, Land of Hope, Rise and Fall, parts one and two.

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Hello and welcome back to this lecture entitled Rise and Fall. Lyndon Johnson was a peculiar, complicated man and a complicated follower after Kennedy's administration. But one of the things that clearly motivated him was that he wanted to exceed Kennedy. He wanted to be even more of a reformer. He wanted to have an even more ambitious program, both of domestic policy and foreign policy. So he gave a speech at Ohio University, then later at the University of Michigan, announcing his plans for what he called the Great Society. A society, as he said, well, where no child will go unfed, no youngster will go unschooled. A society that would remake the cities, preserve the nation's natural beauty, and countless other things. How was he going to do all of these things at once? Well, one of the things he had to do first was get himself elected in his own right. And this he managed to do by a walloping margin, the popular vote margin that was actually the widest in American history to this point, 61.1% of the vote. Running against the hapless Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, the results in the Electoral College were a little less overwhelming. And there's actually an interesting point about that Electoral College total that I want to make in a moment. But Johnson felt he had an enormous mandate and intended to make use of use of that mandate by introducing to the 89th Congress an overwhelming agenda of legislation. And he, as a master of the legislative process, having been Majority Leader in the Senate for some time, was just the man to oversee that. The point I wanted to make about the Electoral College is that in fact, Goldwater got 47 of the 52 electoral votes that Goldwater received came from the Deep South. Why is that important? Because the Deep south had never given its electoral votes to a Republican before. The south had been the Solid south since the Civil War, solidly Democratic. So this was an indicative of. In fact, Johnson was running for office as a Southerner. So it makes it all the more surprising. This is indicative of the fact that the south was in the process of changing its electoral partisan affiliation, or at least a suggestion that that might be happening and that there might be good news ahead for Republicans coming out of the south, which had shut them out for the entire history of the Republican Party. There were other constellations of this otherwise humiliating defeat. One thing that came out of it was a clear conservative movement within the Republican Party that had never been as strong and then didn't dissipate just because of Goldwater's electoral defeat. And in fact, it would soon produce a conservative star in the person of Ronald Reagan and more on him in a little while. So the 89th Congress settles in, and Johnson has a whole quiver of proposals to bring forward. It's an endless list, seemingly. I'll read some of it to you. The expansion of the Federal Food Stamp Program, creation of the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts. Medicare health insurance for the elderly. That's a big one. Medicaid funding for the poor. The elementary and Secondary Education act, the Higher Education Act. This is the federal government moving briskly into the area of education, which had been formerly a state and local responsibility. The Immigration act, which abandoned discriminatory quotas based on national origins. The Child Nutrition act, funding for mass transit, public housing, rent subsidies. Two new cabinet departments, Transportation and Housing, and for good measure, the Highway Beautification Act. Very importantly, there was the Voting Rights act of 1965, which followed upon the Civil Rights act, passed in 1964 before the election and removing obstacles to African Americans ability to register and vote in Southern elections where they'd been effectively disfranchised. More than 250,000 new voters had been registered on the list by the end of 1965. So the effect was immediate and profound. But what about these other programs? How effective was the Great Society? The jury's still out on this. This is actually a point where you could get almost any gathering of political junkies to argue about. I'll present a few data points in its favor, in the favor of the great societies. The fact that the nation's poverty rate dropped from 22% to 13% between 1963 and 1970, that somewhat overlaps the period in question, but it's a reasonable and useful measure. The drop in the African American poverty rate was even greater. On the other side of the ledger, the war on poverty in general was not very successful. Medicare was a program that addressed the health needs of the elderly, but enormous cost. It did not contain costs. It greatly expanded them. And we're living with the results of that today. Welfare programs addressed the needs of the poor, but did so in ways that fostered dependency and promoted promoted dependence on cash supports and not on moving people into productive work, moving them back into the economy. Indeed, in some cases the program of aid for Families with Dependent children. The net effect was to weaken families by disincentivizing marriage and family intactness. That was a development that would have especially disastrous effects in minority families in inner city settings. In general, the gap between the Great Society's promises and its results was considerable. And that was a gap that fueled skepticism, particularly among conservatives and Republicans, about the efficacy of the whole. The Great Society also suffered from unfortunate timing in two respects. It came at precisely the moment when the civil rights movement, which had enjoyed a period of extraordinary dignity and respectfulness of national institutions and of the national heritage and the precepts of the great national documents, changing its tone, losing its unity as well as its commitment to dignified nonviolence. In August of 1965, riots broke out in the Watts section of Los Angeles, lasting for six days of highly destructive rioting in that predominantly African American neighborhood. And other similar urban riots followed in many northern cities. Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Arizona, omaha, Newark, Washington, D.C. baltimore. This epidemic of riots, of urban riots, represented, among many other things, a repudiation of Martin Luther King's strategy of emphasizing nonviolence and weakened the cause of nonviolent resistance, weakened the cause of civil rights more generally, in the minds at least, of some Americans. The other impediment to the success of the Great Society was the steadily escalating American commitment in Southeast Asia and a steadily deteriorating situation. Again, we don't have time to go into all the details except to say that long standing support for the South Vietnamese government from the United States was seeming increasingly an investment that was ill placed. Finally, an incident in the Gulf of Tonkin where three North Vietnamese torpedo boats had fired on an American destroyer. Johnson used this incident as a pretext, as a basis for receiving an open ended authorization from Congress to use whatever measures he deemed necessary to guard American interests and to take all necessary steps, including that of armed force to assist the non communist states of Southeast Asia. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution was regarded by critics as a blank check and not without reason. A blank check to prosecute a war in Vietnam without limit. And that is what Johnson went on to do. Again, more detail in the book. But by the end of 1965, there were already almost 200,000American troops in Vietnam. This is just a little less than a year into Johnson's second, his first full term in office. And by 1969 that number would reach an astonishing 542,000 troops. One in four of those serving in Vietnam had been drafted. Often young men barely out of high school, lifted out of their hometowns to fight in a war that many Americans could not understand. Why did Johnson put such value on this tiny nation, this tiny nation that was marked by instability and corruption in its governance? Well, the thinking of Johnson had been shaped by the doctrine of containment that had been developed since the late forties, since the United States had pledged to resist the expansion of communism everywhere. Certainly Vietnam should be included in that. That the view was that the fall of Vietnam, of South Vietnam, would be the first step in a communization of all of Southeast Asia. That countries like Thailand and Burma would, quote, fall like dominoes, one after the other. But the same problem with the containment theory that arose in the MacArthur era, the one that MacArthur had identified in arguing unpopularly with his commander in chief that there was no substitute for victory, also applied in the case of Vietnam. Despite the overwhelming superiority of American forces in men and materiel, political considerations dictated the war had to be fought in a highly limited way, not an all out war, because it was essential to keep the Soviets and Chinese from intervening. So the doctrine of limited war became the regnant doctrine in the conduct of the Vietnam War. The problems with such an approach are, I think, fairly obvious and should have been obvious at the time. When one telegraphs to the enemy that there always are limits beyond which one will not go, the determination of A combatant who lacked the will to win could always be overcome by the determination of an enemy who lacked the will to surrender. This is particularly true in a democratic society like the United States, where popular support for the actions of government, particularly in wartime, is indispensable. It can only be sustained without that popular support for a very finite length of time. In this case, really, for the first time in American history, the carnage of the war, of the conflict, and the cost in human lives and human woundings and bleeding was visible on television in real time, up close and personal. And many viewers were appalled by what they saw. Steady diet of these images started to wear away at the American commitment to continue on in the fight. And it didn't help that many of the administration's claims of progress in the war were often found to be exaggerated or even false, certainly based on faulty data. So there's a growing anti war sentiment in the country. An anti war sentiment that, along with the unhappiness about the difficulty of addressing racial inequalities, led to a more general disaffection with the country, to the rise of radical movements like the Students for Democratic Society on college campuses and, and other such forms of opposition to the establishment. The emergence of a counterculture, which was an apolitical form of resistance that showed itself in a variety of ways, including alternative lifestyles, alternative approaches to sexuality, long hair rock music, the use of mind altering drugs, and so on and so forth. Interestingly, although a product of American affluence, it was critical of American materialism and of pinched middle class life and middle class ambitions. In a strange way, it had a spiritual side to it too, that strangely recalled some of the remarks that Eisenhower made in his Farewell Address. This notion, that of the devotion to innovation and progress and change and the accumulation of wealth, was not a sufficient and adequate end for human life. The concerns about Johnson and the war crystallized finally into political opposition in the form of opposition to his renomination for the presidency. Eugene McCarthy, senator from Minnesota, ran against Johnson and astonishingly, shockingly, in the New Hampshire primary early in 1968, very nearly beat him. The margin of the vote was 48% for Johnson to 42% for McCarthy, which was far, far too much for an incumbent President running for renomination in his own party. A President who had an unparalleled record of legislative accomplishments, including all of the legislation I listed that went to make up the Great Society, something had gone terribly, terribly wrong. Johnson was so rattled by this and by other forms of opposition that he made the choice in March of 1968 that he would not run for reelection. How the mighty had fallen. He'd gone from the largest electoral margin in American history in the popular vote to deciding that he could not even contend for the renomination of his own party. And as if that weren't enough, there was another wave of violence and assassinations. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, where he'd come to organize a sanitary workers strike. This was shocking. So too was the shocking effect of, a few months later, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, who had announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination and seemed very likely in the end to have gotten it, had he lived to contend for it. So this wave of assassinations, of violence, the urban violence, and all leading up to a real calamity for the democratic party. Their national convention in Chicago in 1968, in which Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's vice president, was nominated for the office of presidency. But his nomination was contested by youthful protesters who swarmed the streets of Chicago and created a riot, clashing often with the Chicago police. And all of that, of course, was televised as well.

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And the chair declares that vice president Hubert Humphrey is the Democratic president candidate

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of the United States. A debacle for the Democratic party. It would have taken a miracle for Humphrey to be elected. Meanwhile, the republicans had turned back to Richard Nixon. A new and improved Richard Nixon, hand rested and ready, as they said, who had a fresh image and also offered something the nation very badly wanted, which was an honorable peace and withdrawal from Vietnam. He didn't want to present himself as a candidate who would turn tail and run. Peace with honor was his slogan, and it was a winning slogan for him. He didn't win by an overwhelming margin, but he won the election easily. And a certain portion of the vote went to the third party candidacy of George Wallace, who had attracted democratic and Republican voters who were upset with the positions of the mainstream parties. So most of those voters would have almost certainly gone to Nixon if they had not had the Wallace alternative. So Richard Nixon becomes president after a time in the wilderness.

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Hi there, it's Bill Gray from Hillsdale College. Before you skip ahead, can I ask you a quick favor? Next year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. 250 years that the greatest country in human history, the United States of America, has been dedicated to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But to secure these rights, we need an education that helps citizens to be self governing, from kindergarteners to lifelong learners. We need more people to understand the principles of liberty than make America Great. In fact, we are seeking to educate millions and millions more through efforts like the podcast you're listening to right now. Hillsdale College has been expanding its educational outreach through free online courses, free issues of imprimis, free help for K12 schools all across America, and yes, free podcasts like this one. However, these efforts are not without cost and Hillsdale College is a non profit institution that doesn't take a single penny from the taxpayer, not one penny, to remain proudly independent. So your tax deductible gift before December 31st can help us make a difference. With your generous gift, you'll support our work to reach and teach millions the principles that make our country free and prosperous. You'll be making a real difference for liberty in America. Please make your tax deductible gift of $25, $50 or even $100 today by visiting Hillsdale. Edu Cy. That's Hillsdale. Edu Cye. Thank you for standing with us. Now back to the show.

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Of all the presidents of the 20th century, Richard Nixon is probably the hardest to assess and the one about which opinion is still most unsettled. Nixon himself predicted that that would be the case. He is a lot like Truman in the sense that he left office reviled by many with very low approval ratings. He's like Truman in other respects that I'll come to in a moment. Like Johnson, he didn't have any of the charm or charisma of a figure like John Kennedy or fdr, and he suffered from it. He was an unloved leader who seemed almost uncomfortable in his own skin and who was made fun of for his rather odd lurching gestures and his awkwardness in his speech patterns. But with the fullness of time, we're able to see ways in which Nixon actually was a very effective president who who deserves a significant reappraisal. He was born in a lower class, lower middle class Quaker family in California, Southern California. His father was A grocer, struggled economically. Nixon had to work very hard as a young man, both going to school and getting up early in the morning to work in his father's grocery. And this hard school experience for him fueled his ambition, his drive and truth be told, his sense of resentment towards those who had it easier, who were more entitled. Conrad Black, his biographer, I think his best biographer, says even when he achieved positions too exalted for general attention to the less fortunate, his heart and his thoughts were always for those who had little, who struggled, who had been shortchanged. He identified with them. There's a little bit of Lyndon Johnson in that statement too. Nixon went to law school at Duke, practiced law, served in the Navy during the Second World War, came back to California and got involved in politics. Made a name for himself as a hardball anti communist politician. Rose through the ranks of the party. Eventually, of course, became Vice president under Eisenhower's two terms, but had a disappointing defeat in 1960 to Kennedy and then an even more disappointing defeat running for Governor of California. It seemed after that defeat, that latter defeat, that his career was over. But in 1968, he had come back. He had risen from the ashes and become the President of the United States. Reached the pinnacle of his political ambition. But he had a very hard road ahead of him. He had to figure out a way to wind down the Vietnam War in an honorable way. The solution that he settled upon was the policy he called Vietnamization, which was to draw down forces in the same proportion that the United States was able to train South Vietnamese army members to take their places. And it worked. To that end, there was a systematic drawdown to the point that by the end of 1972, just as he's finishing his first term and about to begin his second term, the total number of American personnel in Vietnam was fewer than 25,000. That's beginning with approximately 550,000 soldiers in Vietnam. So pretty amazing feat. Meanwhile, he achieved a settlement on the diplomatic front, which he addressed himself to with equal energy and with the help of his brilliant and suave German born Secretary of State. Started out as National Security Adviser, eventually became Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Kissinger conducted secret meetings with the North Vietnamese. Eventually these meetings became public. The Paris peace accords of 1973 allowed the United States finally to withdraw its troops and to get back prisoners of war. It had some flaws, which I talk about a little in the book, but still it represented Nixon's fundamental goal, the achievement of his fundamental goal. The last American combat troops left Vietnam on March 29, 1973. Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese negotiator, were awarded the 1973 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. The ceasefire, as I explained in the book, seemed unlikely to hold. But that was a problem for another day. But that was not all that Nixon was able to achieve diplomatically. He was a master diplomatist. He made a breakthrough that almost nobody else could have made, and that is the consensus of even his most bitter enemies. He capitalized on the growing rift between the Soviet Union and China, Sino Soviet split, as it was called, and used that split to play his communist opposition off against one another. Nixon opened secret talks with the Chinese and then in 1971 made the stunning announcement that he would go to China himself and meet with Chinese officials in the following February. This was a stunning announcement. Nixon was known to be and despised by many to be an ardent Cold Warrior, an ardent opponent of Communism. For Nixon, of all people, to open relations with the Red Chinese, as the Chinese Communists were called, was a stunning gesture. And he brought a whole battalion of press with him to record this highly choreographed but nevertheless very effective path breaking event. Nixon followed up by a similar visit to Moscow. Having gotten the attention of the Russians about his improving relations with China, he used that as leverage to improve relations with the Russians. This grand playing off of communist enemies worked. It's rightly been said that only a president with Nixon's conservative credentials could have managed this. But there's more to it than that. There was a kind of diplomatic philosophy involved. Nixon and Kissinger were exponents of what's called realism in political theory, foreign policy theory, and their position involved some moving away from the containment doctrine and a reversal of Kennedy's exuberant world spanning ambition in which he promised to pay any price, bear any burden, etc. Nixon disagreed with that. The United States could not be the world's policeman. It could not, to quote him, undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world. The Nixon Doctrine, which undertook a philosophy that explained Vietnamization and other aspects of his foreign policy, said the United States would continue to assist in the support of allied nations, but not to the extent of committing its own military forces. The deciding factor in any foreign policy decision was what was in the national interest of the United States. Our interests, he said, must shape our commitments rather than the other way around. The effort to improve relations with the Soviet Union and China was not occasioned by an idealistic effort to achieve universal brotherhood. It flowed from that view, from a view of what was in the national interest. On the domestic front, Nixon was not nearly as effective. He, he had less of a settled philosophy. He often lurched from left to right in economic policy. In a period in which because of oil shocks and other disturbances to the price system and the economy, he was found it very difficult to control inflation. Finally, in 1971, in an act of utter desperation, he abandoned the free market entirely and imposed wage and price controls on the economy. Something he previously vowed he would never do. And it was certainly beyond the pale for any conservative or any Republican for that matter. It didn't work, it didn't have the effect long term of curbing inflation. In fact, the economy sank into what became known as stagflation, an ugly term for an ugly phenomenon, economic stagnation accompanied by inflation. It had been thought by economists that you couldn't have the two things at once. That low economic growth and inflation were mutually inconsistent with one another. Well, Nixon showed them that it wasn't and not that he meant to. So economic conditions were very poor in Nixon's administration. He didn't enjoy the same success on the domestic front that he did in foreign policy. However, when he came up for reelection in 1972, he won a resounding victory over George McGovern, the anti war Democratic candidate, gaining 60.8% of the popular vote, very nearly Johnsonian margins. In fact, he won by more in the electoral college than Johnson had won by. McGovern only got 17 electoral votes compared to 520 for Nixon. The party realignment that I described a moment ago clearly seemed to be taking shape. That the Sun Belt states, the southern states, deep south states that had gone for Goldwater, were continuing in a Republican. So that shift seemed to be becoming more permanent. Unfortunately for Nixon and for the country, his penchant for hardball politics got the better of him. And during the campaign it was intimated by McGovern and others that Nixon's campaign had used dirty tricks, I.e. planting forged documents, allegations of adulteries and things like that to attributed to opponents as a way of discrediting them. This was mostly brushed off. But there was one incident that didn't go away. There was a break in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office complex in Washington. And five men were caught using bugging devices to try to gain information from the Democratic National Committee headquarters. It turned out that one of the men, one of the burglars, James McCord, had ties to Nixon's reelection campaign. And this led to a lengthy investigation, the details of which we don't have time to go into, but revealing not just the very real possibility that high up people in the Nixon campaign were aware of these activities and were willing to pay hush money to cover up that knowledge that that information, but that there might have been other more disturbing abuses of power within the White House, including the use of federal agencies like the FBI, the CIA and so on, or the Internal Revenue Service to harass or derail political opponents. In the course of the investigations, it came to light that the White House had used a taping system in which all of the President's conversations with both in person communications and telephone communications had been recorded and that the taping of these conversations was available. A fight ensued in which the White House fought bitterly, having to turn over the tapes. Eventually lost that fight. And rather than endure the humiliation of impeachment and removal from office that seemed very likely to come, Nixon chose instead the path of resignation and resigned the office of the presidency on August 9, 1974, the only American president so far to have done this.

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America needs a full time president and a full time Congress, particularly at this time, with problems we face at home and abroad, to continue to fight through the months ahead. For my personal vindication would almost totally absorb the time and attention of both the President and the Congress in a period when our entire focus should be on the great issue of peace abroad and prosperity without inflation at home. Therefore, I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as President at that hour in this office.

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It was a very sad ending for a promising presidency. Nixon certainly had his detractors. Much of the press, the Washington Post and other major newspapers felt this way about him. It was occasion for reflection about what had become of the American presidency. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Who had been an advisor to John F. Kennedy and was hardly a neutral party, nevertheless wrote a thoughtful book called the Imperial Presidency, in which he argued. This was actually published in 1973 before Nixon left office. But he argued the American presidency had exceeded the mandate that was set for it by the Constitution, by the framers of the Constitution. It was like a metastasizing cancer. And that it was important to rein in the presidency, restore the structure of constitutional democracy, and remove from American presidents the temptation to engage in global interventions, or what he called messianic globalism. This was, I think, in many ways a valid point, one that spoke to concerns of the moment. It actually spoke as much to the rhetoric of John F. Kennedy, John F. Kennedy's inaugural address, as it did to Lyndon Johnson and maybe less to Richard Nixon. But still the point about the growth in the presidency was a valid one. There was another school of thought that arose, not unrelated, but different, and that was that perhaps the presidency had become too daunting a task for any one man. Other observers worried that Nixon's resignation might have left the presidency permanently diminished in something like the way that the Andrew Johnson presidency had done. So there were worries on all sides about the future of the American presidency. Fortunately for the nation, his successor, his vice president, Gerald Ford, former congressman from Michigan who had not been elected to the vice president presidency, was a modest, humble, unassuming man. He said, I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln. And his demeanor did much to heal the country, to settle it down, and to regain a sense of composure and optimism. However, there were things going on all around him that were grievous and depressing with regard to their portents for the future of the country.

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Therefore, I feel it is my first duty to make an unprecedented compact with my countrymen. Not an inaugural address, not a fireside chat, not a campaign speech, just a little straight talk among friends. And I intended to be the first of many. I am acutely aware that you have not elected me as your president by your ballots. So I ask you to confirm me as your President with your prayers and I hope.

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One way that the price of Watergate ended up being paid was in the loss of South Vietnam. The Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress had swelled in response to the Watergate mess and to the continued stagflation in the by elections of 1974. The Democrats picked up a whopping 49 seats and they were in no mood to accommodate Republicans in the White House, even nice guys like Gerald Ford. 1974. The South Vietnamese government was under intense attack from communist forces desperately in need of American aid. But Congress refused to give the requested aid. A request of 2.8 billion in fiscal 73 to 300 million in 75. Once the aid had been cut, it took the North Vietnamese only 55 days to finish off the South Vietnamese and reunify the country under communist rule. In other words, the Vietnam effort had failed completely and miserably. At the same time, the US supported government in Cambodia was overthrown by communists and a particularly virulent Maoist influenced faction led by by Pol Pot, which proceeded to massacre a million of its people in an effort to eliminate Western influences. The result was a flood of refugees, many coming to the United States, leaving these devastated lands. It was a dark time for America's standing in the world and American Morale at home was at rock bottom. The fall election of 1976 presented a somewhat more hopeful aspect coming out of these bitter disappointments. One candidate that caught the eye of many Americans and received the Democratic nomination was the former governor of Georgia, peanut farmer, Naval officer Jimmy Carter. Jimmy Carter was a man of simplicity, of evangelical faith, which he avowed quite openly. He was probably the most openly religious candidate since William Jennings Bryan. And he was a moderate, a liberal really on race, so that he could attract both white and black Southern votes and maybe get those states back from the Republicans. Carter won the election. It was a close election, probably closer than Ford had any right to hope that it would be. But a narrow victory for Carter. And Carter set out very self consciously to repeal the imperial presidency. He'd been affected by Schlesinger's book, although Schlesinger was a non supporter of Carter, to put it mildly. Carter insisted on carrying his own luggage. He mimicked Thomas Jefferson, who walked up Pennsylvania Avenue after his inauguration to the White House. So did Carter, holding hands with his wife Roslyn Carter. It was an immensely affecting gesture at the time. But over a period of time Carter's penchant for gestures began to wear on the public and large scale initiatives that weren't amenable to gesturing seemed to escape him. He took on the problem of energy policy, which was in the 70s job one on the domestic front for any American president. But he failed completely by trying to marshal the public to believe that his energy policy was, as he put it, the moral equivalent of war. A very tried and true Democratic party trope. Carter had failed utterly, in fact failed far worse than Nixon and Ford had in controlling inflation, which rose from an already high 5.2% when he took office to a terrifying 14.76% in March of 1980, the year he had to run for reelection. Unemployment was around 8% but stayed stuck there without improving. The combination of the two, sometimes called the misery index, was at an all time high. But Carter's final undoing came in foreign policy from Iran. The Iranians had resented American meddling in Iranian affairs, going all the way back to the 1950s when Jimmy Carter allowed the cancer rid Shah of Iran, who was very much an ally of the United States, but roundly disliked by his people. When he allowed him to come to the United States for medical treatment, this produced a galvanic reaction. The Shah had already been deposed by a revolution led by Shiite Muslim clerics and they orchestrated a response to this action of letting the Shah into the United States. For medical treatment, the seizure of the United States Embassy, that was a gesture too. And it proved to be a gesture of long standing and hemorrhaging impact on Carter. Day after day, for 444 days, television crews filmed the American hostages in the embassy in Iran and harped on it. And with every Nightline television show, Carter's image, Carter's standing with the public dropped a little bit more. A steady erosion of his credibility as a leader. He tried a number of things to turn the situation around. He tried economic sanctions, he tried military action, a commando raid which failed miserably. Nothing seemed to work. Then, on top of everything else, in 1979, December, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, which was a slap in the face to Carter's accommodationist policies towards the Soviet Union. He had come into his administration indicating he would be much more soft and generous and dove like with the Soviets. For this he gets the thanks of a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. All of these things led to a, well, a last minute turn toward hawkish policy on Carter's part. But it came too late. Speculation began to rise that maybe Carter was not up to the job, maybe somebody else needed to be found. And political science began to think, well, maybe the problem was not Carter. Maybe the problem was the presidency itself. Maybe the presidency was an impossible office, or maybe we just had the wrong kinds of leaders. James McGregor Burns, political scientist, wrote a book called Leadership, which was clearly directed at the moment, at that moment of the 1970s and the flailing of American leadership as several successive leaders. Really you could go all the way back to Kennedy, but certainly Johnson left office as a failure. Nixon left office as a failure. Ford left office as a failure. Carter was about to leave office as a failure. What had gone wrong that we had this series of failed presidencies? Burns said, the problem is we need a transformational leader. There are two kinds of presidents. There are transactional ones who work within the system, within the bounds of the available options, and transforming ones who create new options, who boldly go where no policy at least recently has gone before. And he said it was time for a transforming leader rather than another transactional leader. It was a call for a different kind of Democratic politician, perhaps one in the vein of Franklin Roosevelt or the late Robert Kennedy. Burns actually got his wish, except that the candidate in question was not a Democratic candidate. It would be the Republican Ronald Reagan. More about that in our next lecture. Thank you.

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