Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, 1980.

20.
The Seventies: Under Control?

In the early seventies, the system seemed out of control -- it could not hold the loyalty of the public. As early as 1970, according to the University of Michigan's Survey Research Center, "trust in government" was low in every section of the population. And there was a significant difference by class. Of professional people, 40 percent had "low" political trust in the government; of unskilled blue-collar workers, 66 percent had "low" trust.

Public opinion surveys in 1971 -- after seven years of intervention in Vietnam -- showed an unwillingness to come to the aid of other countries, assuming they were attacked by Communist-backed forces. Even for countries allied to the United States in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or Mexico, right on our southern border, there was no majority opinion for intervening with American troops. As for Thailand, if it were under Communist attack, only 12 percent of whites interrogated would send troops, 4 percent of nonwhites would do so.

In the summer of 1972, antiwar people in the Boston area were picketing Honeywell Corporation. The literature they distributed pointed out that Honeywell was producing antipersonnel weapons used in Vietnam, like the deadly cluster bomb that had riddled thousands of Vietnamese civilians with painful, hard-to-extricate pellets. About six hundred ballots were given to the Honeywell employees, asking if they thought that Honeywell should discontinue making these weapons. Of the 231 persons who returned the ballots, 131 said that Honeywell should stop, 88 said it should not. They were invited to make comments. A typical "no" comment: "Honeywell is not responsible for what the Department of Defense does with the goods it buys. ..." A typical "yes" comment: "How may we have pride in our work when the entire basis for this work is immoral?"

The Survey Research Center of the University of Michigan had been posing the question: "Is the government run by a few big interests looking out for themselves?" The answer in 1964 had been "yes" from 26 percent of those polled; by 1972 the answer was "yes" from 53 percent of those polled. An article in the American Political Science Review by Arthur H. Miller, reporting on the extensive polling done by the Survey Research Center, said that the polls showed "widespread, basic discontent and political alienation." He added (political scientists often took on the worries of the Establishment): "What is startling and somewhat alarming is the rapid degree of change in this basic attitude over a period of only six years."

More voters than ever before refused to identify themselves as either Democrats or Republicans. Back in 1940, 20 percent of those polled called themselves "independents." In 1974, 34 percent called themselves "independents."

The courts, the juries, and even judges were not behaving as usual. Juries were acquitting radicals: Angela Davis, an acknowledged Communist, was acquitted by an all-white jury on the West Coast. Black Panthers, whom the government had tried in every way to malign and destroy, were freed by juries in several trials. A judge in western Massachusetts threw out a case against a young activist, Sam Lovejoy, who had toppled a 500-foot tower erected by a utility company trying to set up a nuclear plant. In Washington, D.C., in August 1973, a Superior Court judge refused to sentence six men charged with unlawful entry who had stepped from a White House tour line to protest the bombing of Cambodia.

Undoubtedly, much of this national mood of hostility to government and business came out of the Vietnam war, its 55,000 casualties, its moral shame, its exposure of government lies and atrocities. On top of this came the political disgrace of the Nixon administration in the scandals that came to be known by the one-word label "Watergate," and which led to the historic resignation from the presidency -- the first in American history -- of Richard Nixon in August 1974.

It began during the presidential campaign in June of 1972, when five burglars, carrying wiretapping and photo equipment, were caught in the act of breaking into the offices of the Democratic National Committee, in the Watergate apartment complex of Washington, D.C. One of the five, James McCord, Jr., worked for the Nixon campaign; he was "security" officer for the Committee to Re-elect the President (CREEP). Another of the five had an address book in which was listed the name of E. Howard Hunt, and Hunt's address was listed as the White House. He was assistant to Charles Colson, who was special counsel to President Nixon.

Both McCord and Hunt had worked for many years for the CIA. Hunt had been the CIA man in charge of the invasion of Cuba in 1961, and three of the Watergate burglars were veterans of the invasion. McCord, as CREEP security man, worked for the chief of CREEP, John Mitchell, the Attorney General of the United States.

Thus, due to an unforeseen arrest by police unaware of the high-level connections of the burglars, information was out to the public before anyone could stop it, linking the burglars to important officials in Nixon's campaign committee, to the CIA, and to Nixon's Attorney General. Mitchell denied any connection with the burglary, and Nixon, in a press conference five days after the event, said "the White House has had no involvement whatever in this particular incident."

What followed the next year, after a grand jury in September indicted the Watergate burglars -- plus Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy -- was that, one after another, lesser officials of the Nixon administration, fearing prosecution, began to talk. They gave information in judicial proceedings, to a Senate investigating committee, to the press. They implicated not only John Mitchell, but Robert Haldeman and John Erlichman, Nixon's highest White House aides, and finally Richard Nixon himself -- in not only the Watergate burglaries, but a whole series of illegal actions against political opponents and antiwar activists. Nixon and his aides lied again and again as they tried to cover up their involvement.

These facts came out in the various testimonies:

1. Attorney General John Mitchell controlled a secret fund of $350,000 to $700,000 -- to be used against the Democratic party -- for forging letters, leaking false news items to the press, stealing compaign flies.
2. Gulf Oil Corporation, ITT (International Telephone and Telegraph), American Airlines, and other huge American corporations had made illegal contributions, running into millions of dollars, to the Nixon campaign.
3. In September of 1971, shortly after the New York Times printed Daniel Ellsberg's copies of the top-secret Pentagon Papers, the administration planned and carried out -- Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy themselves doing it -- the burglary of the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, looking for Ellsberg's records.
4. After the Watergate burglars were caught, Nixon secretly pledged to give them executive clemency if they were imprisoned, and suggested that up to a million dollars be given them to keep them quiet. In fact, $450,000 was given to them, on Erlichman's orders.
5. Nixon's nominee for head of the FBI (J. Edgar Hoover had recently died), L. Patrick Gray, revealed that he had turned over the FBI records on its investigation of the Watergate burglary to Nixon's legal assistant, John Dean, and that Attorney General Richard Kleindienst (Mitchell had just resigned, saying he wanted to pursue his private life) had ordered him not to discuss Watergate with the Senate Judiciary Committee.
6. Two former members of Nixon's cabinet -- John Mitchell and Maurice Stans -- were charged with taking $250,000 from a financier named Robert Vesco in return for his help with a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Vesco's activities.
7. It turned out that certain material had disappeared from FBI files -- material from a series of illegal wiretaps ordered by Henry Kissinger, placed on the telephones of four journalists and thirteen government officials -- and was in the White House safe of Nixon's adviser John Erlichman.
8. One of the Watergate burglars, Bernard Barker, told the Senate committee that he had also been involved in a plan to physically attack Daniel Ellsberg while Ellsberg spoke at an antiwar rally in Washington.
9. A deputy director of the CIA testified that Haldeman and Erlichman told him it was Nixon's wish that the CIA tell the FBI not to pursue its investigation beyond the Watergate burglary.
10. Almost by accident, a witness told the Senate committee that President Nixon had tapes of all personal conversations and phone conversations at the White House. Nixon at first refused to turn over the tapes, and when he finally did, they had been tampered with: eighteen and a half minutes of one tape had been erased.
11. In the midst of all this, Nixon's Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, was indicted in Maryland for receiving bribes from Maryland contractors in return for political favors, and resigned from the vice-presidency in October 1973. Nixon appointed Congressman Gerald Ford to take Agnew's place.
12. Over $10 million in government money had been used by Nixon on his private homes in San Clemente and Key Biscayne on grounds of "security," and he had illegally taken -- with the aid of a bit of forgery -- a $576,000 tax deduction for some of his papers.
13. It was disclosed that for over a year in 1969-1970 the U.S. had engaged in a secret, massive bombing of Cambodia, which it kept from the American public and even from Congress.

It was a swift and sudden fall. In the November 1972 presidential election, Nixon and Agnew had won 60 percent of the popular vote and carried every state except Massachusetts, defeating an antiwar candidate, Senator George McGovern. By June of 1973 a Gallup poll showed 67 percent of those polled thought Nixon was involved in the Watergate break-in or lied to cover up.

By the fall of 1973 eight different resolutions had been introduced in the House of Representatives for the impeachment of President Nixon. The following year a House committee drew up a bill of impeachment to present it to a full House. Nixon's advisers told him it would pass the House by the required majority and then the Senate would vote the necessary two-thirds majority to remove him from office. On August 8, 1974, Nixon resigned.

Six months before Nixon resigned, the business magazine Dun's Review reported a poll of three hundred corporation executives. Almost all had voted for Nixon in 1972, but now a majority said he should resign. "Right now, 90% of Wall Street would cheer if Nixon resigns," said a vice-president of Merrill Lynch Government Securities. When he did, there was relief in all sectors of the Establishment.

Gerald Ford, taking Nixon's office, said: "Our long national nightmare is over." Newspapers, whether they had been for or against Nixon, liberal or conservative, celebrated the successful, peaceful culmination of the Watergate crisis. "The system is working," said a long-time strong critic of the Vietnam war, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis. The two journalists who had much to do with investigating and exposing Nixon, Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, wrote that with Nixon's departure, there might be "restoration." All of this was in a mood of relief, of gratitude.

No respectable American newspaper said what was said by Claude Julien, editor of Le Monde Diplomatique in September 1974. "The elimination of Mr. Richard Nixon leaves intact all the mechanisms and all the false values which permitted the Watergate scandal." Julien noted that Nixon's Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, would remain at his post -- in other words, that Nixon's foreign policy would continue. "That is to say," Julien wrote, "that Washington will continue to support General Pinochet in Chile, General Geisel in Brazil, General Stroessner in Paraguay, etc. . . ."

Months after Julien wrote this, it was disclosed that top Democratic and Republican leaders in the House of Representatives had given secret assurance to Nixon that if he resigned they would not support criminal proceedings against him. One of them, the ranking Republican of the Judiciary Committee, said: "We had all been shuddering about what two weeks of televised floor debates on impeachment would do, how it would tear the country apart and affect foreign policy." The New York Times's articles that reported on Wall Street's hope for Nixon's resignation quoted one Wall Street financier as saying that if Nixon resigned: "What we will have is the same play with different players."

When Gerald Ford, a conservative Republican who had supported all of Nixon's policies, was nominated for President, a liberal Senator from California, Alan Cranston, spoke for him on the floor, saying he had polled many people, Republicans and Democrats, and found "an almost startling consensus of conciliation that is developing around him." When Nixon resigned and Ford became President, the New York Times said: "Out of the despair of Watergate has come an inspiring new demonstration of the uniqueness and strength of the American democracy." A few days later the Times wrote happily that the "peaceful transfer of power" brought "a cleansing sense of relief to the American people."

In the charges brought by the House Committee on Impeachment against Nixon, it seemed clear that the committee did not want to emphasize those elements in his behavior which were found in other Presidents and which might be repeated in the future. It stayed clear of Nixon's dealings with powerful corporations; it did not mention the bombing of Cambodia. It concentrated on things peculiar to Nixon, not on fundamental policies continuous among American Presidents, at home and abroad.

The word was out: get rid of Nixon, but keep the system. Theodore Sorensen, who had been an adviser to President Kennedy, wrote at the time of Watergate: "The underlying causes of the gross misconduct in our law-enforcement system now being revealed are largely personal, not institutional. Some structural changes are needed. All the rotten apples should be thrown out. But save the barrel."

Indeed, the barrel was saved. Nixon's foreign policy remained. The government's connections to corporate interests remained. Ford's closest friends in Washington were corporate lobbyists. Alexander Haig, who had been one of Nixon's closest advisers, who had helped in "processing" the tapes before turning them over to the public, and who gave the public misinformation about the tapes, was appointed by President Ford to be head of the armed forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. One of Ford's first acts was to pardon Nixon, thus saving him from possible criminal proceedings and allowing him to retire with a huge pension in California.

The Establishment had cleansed itself of members of the club who had broken the rules -- but it took some pains not to treat them too harshly. Those few who received jail sentences got short terms, were sent to the most easygoing federal institutions available, and were given special privileges not given to ordinary prisoners. Richard Kleindienst pleaded guilty; he got a $100 fine and one month in jail, which was suspended.

That Nixon would go, but that the power of the President to do anything he wanted in the name of "national security" would stay -- this was underscored by a Supreme Court decision in July 1974. The Court said Nixon had to turn over his White House tapes to the special Watergate prosecutor. But at the same time it affirmed "the confidentiality of Presidential communications," which it could not uphold in Nixon's case, but which remained as a general principle when the President made a "claim of need to protect military, diplomatic or sensitive national security secrets."

The televised Senate Committee hearings on Watergate stopped suddenly before the subject of corporate connections was reached. It was typical of the selective coverage of important events by the television industry, bizarre shenanigans like the Watergate burglary were given full treatment, while instances of ongoing practice -- the My Lai massacre, the secret bombing of Cambodia, the work of the FBI and CIA -- were given the most fleeting attention. Dirty tricks against the Socialist Workers party, the Black Panthers, other radical groups, had to be searched for in a few newspapers. The whole nation heard the details of the quick break-in at the Watergate apartment; there was never a similar television hearing on the long-term break-in in Vietnam.

In the trial of John Mitchell and Maurice Stans for obstruction of justice in impeding a Securities and Exchange Commission investigation of Robert Vesco (a contributor to Nixon), George Bradford Cook, former general counsel of the SEC, testified that on November 13, 1972, he crouched in a Texas rice field while on a goose hunt with Maurice Stans, and told him he wanted to be chairman of the SEC. For this, he would cut out a critical paragraph in the SEC charges against Vesco that referred to Vesco's $200,000 secret contribution to the Nixon campaign.

Corporate influence on the White House is a permanent fact of the American system. Most of it is wise enough to stay within the law; under Nixon they took chances. An executive in the meatpacking industry said during the Watergate events that he had been approached by a Nixon campaign official and told that while a $25,000 contribution would be appreciated, "for $50,000 you get to talk to the President."

Many of these corporations gave money to both sides, so that whichever won they would have friends in the administration. Chrysler Corporation urged its executives to "support the party and candidate of their choice," and then collected the checks from them and delivered the checks to Republican or Democratic campaign committees.

International Telephone and Telegraph was an old hand at giving money on both sides. In 1960 it had made illegal contributions to Bobby Baker, who worked with Democratic Senators, including Lyndon Johnson. A senior vice-president of ITT was quoted by one of his assistants as saying the board of directors "have it set up to 'butter' both sides so we'll be in good position whoever wins." And in 1970, an ITT director, John McCone, who also had been head of the CIA, told Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State, and Richard Helms, CIA director, that ITT was willing to give $1 million to help the U.S. government in its plans to overthrow the Allende government in Chile.

In 1971 ITT planned to take over the $1 1/2 billion Hartford Fire Insurance Company -- the largest merger in corporate history. The antitrust division of the Justice Department moved to prosecute ITT for violating the antitrust laws. However, the prosecution did not take place and ITT was allowed to merge with Hartford. It was all settled out of court, in a secret arrangement in which ITT agreed to donate $400,000 to the Republican party. It seemed that Richard Kleindienst, deputy Attorney General, had six meetings with an ITT director named Felix Rohatyn, and then brought in the head of the antitrust division, Richard McLaren, who was persuaded by Rohatyn that to stop the merger would cause a "hardship" for ITT stockholders. McLaren agreed. He was later appointed a federal judge.

One of the items not mentioned in the impeachment charges and never televised in the Senate hearings was the way the government cooperated with the milk industry. In early 1971 the Secretary of Agriculture announced the government would not increase its price supports for milk -- the regular subsidy to the big milk producers. Then the Associated Milk Producers began giving money to the Nixon campaign, met in the White House with Nixon and the Secretary of Agriculture, gave more money, and the secretary announced that "new analysis" made it necessary to raise milk price supports from $4.66 to $4.93 a hundredweight. More contributions were made, until the total exceeded $400,000. The price increases added $500 million to the profits of dairy farmers (mostly big corporations) at the expense of consumers.

Whether Nixon or Ford or any Republican or Democrat was President, the system would work pretty much the same way. A Senate subcommittee investigating multinational corporations revealed a document (given passing mention in a few newspapers) in which oil company economists discussed holding back production of oil to keep prices up. ARAMCO -- the Arabian-American Oil Corporation, 75 percent of whose stock was held by American oil companies and 25 percent by Saudi Arabia -- had made $1 profit on a barrel of oil in 1973. In 1974 it was making $4.50. None of this would be affected by who was President.

Even in the most diligent of investigations in the Watergate affair, that of Archibald Cox, a special prosecutor later fired by Nixon, the corporations got off easy. American Airlines, which admitted making illegal contributions to the Nixon campaign, was fined $5,000; Goodyear was fined $5,000; 3M Corporation was fined $3,000. A Goodyear official was fined $1,000; a 3M official was fined $500. The New York Times (October 20, 1973) reported:

Mr. Cox charged them only with the misdemeanor of making illegal contributions. The misdemeanor, under the law, involved "nonwillful" contributions. The felony count, involving willful contributions, is punishable by a fine of $10,000 and/or a two-year jail term; the misdemeanor by a $1000 fine and/or a one-year jail term.

Asked at the courthouse here how the two executives -- who had admitted making the payments -- could be charged with making non-willing contributions, Mr. McBride [Cox's staff] replied: "That's a legal question which frankly baffles me as well."

With Gerald Ford in office, the long continuity in American policy was maintained. He continued Nixon's policy of aid to the Saigon regime, apparently still hoping that the Thieu government would remain stable. The head of a congressional committee, John Calkins, visiting South Vietnam just around the time of Nixon's fall from office, reported:

The South Vietnamese Army shows every sign of being an effective and spirited security force. . . .

Oil exploration will begin very soon. Tourism can be encouraged by continued security of scenic and historic areas and by the erection of a new Hyatt Hotel. . . .

South Vietnam needs foreign investment to finance these and other developments. . . . She has a large labor pool of talented, industrious people whose cost of labor is far less than Hong Kong, Singapore, or even Korea or Taiwan. . . .

I also feel there is much profit to be made there. The combination of serving both God and Mammon had proved attractive to Americans and others in the past. . . . Vietnam can be the next "take off" capitalistic showplace in Asia.

In the spring of 1975, everything that radical critics of American policy in Vietnam had been saying -- that without American troops, the Saigon government's lack of popular support would be revealed -- came true. An offensive by North Vietnamese troops, left in the South by terms of the 1973 truce, swept through town after town.

Ford continued to be optimistic. He was the last of a long line of government officials and journalists who promised victory. (Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, February 19, 1963: "Victory is in sight." General William Westmoreland, November 15, 1967: "I have never been more encouraged in my four years in Vietnam." Columnist Joseph Alsop, November 1, 1972: "Hanoi has accepted near-total defeat.") On April 16, 1975, Ford said: "I am absolutely convinced if Congress made available $722 million in military assistance by the time I asked -- or sometime shortly thereafter -- the South Vietnamese could stabilize the military situation in Vietnam today."

Two weeks later, April 29, 1975, the North Vietnamese moved into Saigon, and the war was over.

Most of the Establishment had already -- despite Ford and a few stalwarts -- given up on Vietnam. What they worried about was the readiness of the American public now to support other military actions overseas. There were trouble signs in the months before the defeat in Vietnam.

In early 1975 Senator John C. Culver of Iowa was unhappy that Americans would not fight for Korea: "He said that Vietnam had taken a mighty toll on the national will of the American people." Shortly before that, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, speaking to the Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies, was reported as being "generally gloomy," saying that "the world no longer regarded American military power as awesome."

In March 1975 a Catholic organization, making a survey of American attitudes on abortion, learned other things. To the statement: "The people running this country (government, political, church and civic leaders) don't tell us the truth," more than 83 percent agreed.

New York Times international correspondent C. L. Sulzberger, a consistent supporter of government cold-war foreign policy, wrote in a troubled mood in early 1975 from Ankara, Turkey, that "the glow has worn off from the era of the Truman Doctrine" (when military aid was given to Greece and Turkey). He added: "And one cannot say that the bleak outlook here is balanced by any brilliant United States successes in Greece, where a vast mob recently battered the United States Embassy." He concluded, "There must be something seriously wrong with the way we present ourselves these days." The problem, according to Sulzberger, was not the United States' behavior, but the way this behavior was presented to the world.

It was a few months after these reports, in April of 1975, that Secretary of State Kissinger, invited to be commencement speaker at the University of Michigan, was faced with petitions protesting the invitation, because of Kissinger's role in the Vietnam war. Also a counter-commencement program was planned. He withdrew. It was a low time for the administration. Vietnam was "lost" (the very word supposed it was ours to lose). Kissinger was quoted that April (by Washington Post columnist Tom Braden): "The U.S. must carry out some act somewhere in the world which shows its determination to continue to be a world power."

The following month came the Mayaguez affair.

The Mayaguez was an American cargo ship sailing from South Vietnam to Thailand in mid-May 1975, just three weeks after the victory of the revolutionary forces in Vietnam. When it came close to an island in Cambodia, where a revolutionary regime had just taken power, the ship was stopped by the Cambodians, taken to a port at a nearby island, and the crew removed to the mainland. The crew later described their treatment as courteous: "A man who spoke English greeted us with a handshake and welcomed us to Cambodia." The press reported: "Captain Miller and his men all say they were never abused by their captors. There were even accounts of kind treatment -- of Cambodian soldiers feeding them first and eating what the Americans left, of the soldiers giving the seamen the mattresses off their beds." But the Cambodians did ask the crew about spying and the CIA.

President Ford sent a message to the Cambodian government to release the ship and crew, and when thirty-six hours had elapsed and there was no response (the message had been given to the Chinese liaison mission in Washington, but was returned the next day, "ostensibly undelivered," one press account said), he began military operations -- U.S. planes bombed Cambodian ships. They strafed the very boat that was taking the American sailors to the mainland.

The men had been detained on a Monday morning. On Wednesday evening the Cambodians released them -- putting them on a fishing boat headed for the American fleet. That afternoon, knowing the seamen had been taken off Tang Island, Ford nevertheless ordered a marine assault on Tang Island. That assault began about 7:15 Wednesday evening, but an hour earlier the crewmen were already headed back to the American fleet. About 7:00 p.m. the release had been announced on the radio in Bangkok. Indeed, the boat carrying the returned crewmen was spotted by a U.S. reconnaissance plane that signaled them

Not mentioned in any press account at the time or in any government statement was a fact that emerged in October 1976 when the General Accounting Office made a report on the Mayaguez affair: the U.S. had received a message from a Chinese diplomat saying China was using its influence with Cambodia on the ship "and expected it to be released soon." This message was received fourteen hours before the marine assault began.

No American soldier was hurt by the Cambodians. The marines invading Tang Island, however, met unexpectedly tough resistance, and of two hundred invaders, one-third were soon dead or wounded (this exceeded the casualty rate in the World War II invasion of Iwo Jima). Five of eleven helicopters in the invasion force were blown up or disabled. Also, twenty-three Americans were killed in a helicopter crash over Thailand on their way to participate in the action, a fact the government tried to keep secret. All together, forty-one Americans were killed in the military actions ordered by Ford. There were thirty-nine sailors on the Mayaguez. Why the rush to bomb, strafe, attack? Why, even after the ship and crew were recovered, did Ford order American planes to bomb the Cambodian mainland, with untold Cambodian casualties? What could justify such a combination of moral blindness and military bungling?

The answer to this came soon: It was necessary to show the world that giant America, defeated by tiny Vietnam, was still powerful and resolute. The New York Times reported on May 16, 1975:

Administration officials, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger were said to have been eager to find some dramatic means of underscoring President Ford's stated intention to "maintain our leadership on a world-wide basis." The occasion came with the capture of the vessel. . . . Administration officials . . . made it clear that they welcomed the opportunity. . . .

Another press dispatch from Washington, in the midst of the Mayaguez events, said: "High-ranking sources familiar with military strategy and planning said privately that the seizure of the vessel might provide the test of American determination in Southeast Asia that, they asserted, the U.S. had been seeking since the collapse of allied , governments in South Vietnam and Cambodia."

Columnist James Reston wrote: "In fact, the Administration almost seems grateful for the opportunity to demonstrate that the President can act quickly. . . . Officials here have been bridling over a host of silly taunts about the American 'paper tiger' and hope the Marines have answered the charge."

It was not surprising that Secretary of Defense Schlesinger called it a "very successful operation," done "for purposes that were necessary for the well-being of this society." But why would the prestigious Times columnist James Reston, a strong critic of Nixon and Watergate, call the Mayaguez operation "melodramatic and successful"? And why would the New York Times, which had criticized the Vietnam war, talk about the "admirable efficiency" of the operation?

What seemed to be happening was that the Establishment -- Republicans, Democrats, newspapers, television -- was closing ranks behind Ford and Kissinger, and behind the idea that American authority must be asserted everywhere in the world.

Congress at this time behaved much as it had done in the early years of the Vietnam war, like a flock of sheep. Back in 1973, in a mood of fatigue and disgust with the Vietnam war, Congress had passed a War Powers Act that required the President, before taking military action, to consult with Congress. In the Mayaguez affair, Ford had ignored this -- he had several aides make phone calls to eighteen Congressmen to inform them that military action was under way. But, as I. F. Stone said (he was the maverick journalist who published the anti-Establishment I. F. Stone's Weekly), "Congress raped as easily as it did in the Tonkin Gulf affair." Congressman Robert Dnnan of Massachusetts was an exception. Senator McGovern, Nixon's presidential opponent in 1976 and long-time antiwar critic, opposed the action. So did Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin. Senator Edward Brooke raised questions. Senator Edward Kennedy did not speak out, nor did other Senators who during the Vietnam war had influenced Congress to ban further military action in Indochina but now said their own legislation did not apply.

Secretary of State Kissinger would say: "We are forced into this." When Kissinger was asked why the U.S. was risking the lives of the Mayaguez seamen by firing on ships in the area without knowing where they were, he called it a "necessary risk."

Kissinger also said the incident "ought to make clear that there are limits beyond which the United States cannot be pushed, that the United States is prepared to defend those interests, and that it can get public support and congressional support for these actions."

Indeed, Congressmen, Democrats as well as Republicans, who had been critical of the Vietnam war now seemed anxious to pull things together in a unified show of strength to the rest of the world. A week before the Mayaguez affair (two weeks before Saigon fell), fifty-six Congressmen had signed a statement saying: "Let no nation read the events in Indochina as the failure of the American will." One of them was a black Congressman from Georgia, Andrew Young.

It was a complex process of consolidation that the system undertook in 1975. It included old-type military actions, like the Mayaguez affair, to assert authority in the world and at home. There was also a need to satisfy a disillusioned public that the system was criticizing and correcting itself. The standard way was to conduct publicized investigations that found specific culprits but left the system intact. Watergate had made both the FBI and the CIA look bad -- breaking the laws they were sworn to uphold, cooperating with Nixon in his burglary jobs and illegal wiretapping. In 1975, congressional committees in the House and Senate began investigations of the FBI and CIA.

The CIA inquiry disclosed that the CIA had gone beyond its original mission of gathering intelligence and was conducting secret operations of all kinds. For instance, back in the 1950s, it had administered the drug LSD to unsuspecting Americans to test its effects: one American scientist, given such a dose by a CIA agent, leaped from a New York hotel window to his death in the 1950s.

The CIA had also been involved in assassination plots against Castro of Cuba and other heads of state. It had introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971, bringing disease and then slaughter to 500,000 pigs. A CIA operative told a reporter he delivered the virus from an army base in the Canal Zone to anti-Castro Cubans.

It was also learned from the investigation that the CIA -- with the collusion of a secret Committee of Forty headed by Henry Kissinger -- had worked to "destabilize" the Chilean government headed by Salvadore Allende, a Marxist who had been elected president in one of the rare free elections in Latin America. ITT, with large interests in Cuba, played a part in this operation. When in 1974 the American ambassador to Chile, David Popper, suggested to the Chilean junta (which, with U.S. aid, had overthrown Allende) that they were violating human rights, he was rebuked by Kissinger, who sent word: "Tell Popper to cut out the political science lectures."

The investigation of the FBI disclosed many years of illegal actions to disrupt and destroy radical groups and left-wing groups of all kinds. The FBI had sent forged letters, engaged in burglaries (it admitted to ninety-two between 1960 and 1966), opened mail illegally, and, in the case of Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, seems to have conspired in murder.

Valuable information came out of the investigations, but it was just enough, and in just the right way -- moderate press coverage, little television coverage, thick books of reports with limited readership -- to give the impression of an honest society correcting itself.

The investigations themselves revealed the limits of government willingness to probe into such activities. The Church Committee, set up by the Senate, conducted its investigations with the cooperation of the agencies being investigated and, indeed, submitted its findings on the CIA to the CIA to see if there was material that the Agency wanted omitted. Thus, while there was much valuable material in the report, there is no way of knowing how much more there was -- the final report was a compromise between committee diligence and CIA caution.

The Pike Committee, set up in the House of Representatives, made no such agreement with the CIA or FBI, and when it issued its final report, the same House that had authorized its investigation voted to keep the report secret. When the report was leaked via a CBS newscaster, Daniel Schorr, to the Village Voice in New York, it was never printed by the important newspapers in the country -- the Times, the Washington Post, or others. Schorr was suspended by CBS. It was another instance of cooperation between the mass media and the government in instances of "national security."

The Church Committee, in its report of CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and other foreign leaders, revealed an interesting point of view. The committee seemed to look on the killing of a head of state as an unpardonable violation of some gentlemen's agreement among statesmen, much more deplorable than military interventions that killed ordinary people. The Committee wrote, in the introduction to its assassination report:

Once methods of coercion and violence are chosen, the probability of loss of life is always present. There is, however, a significant difference between a cold-blooded, targeted, intentional killing of an individual foreign leader and other forms of intervening in the affairs of foreign nations.

The Church Committee uncovered CIA operations to secretly influence the minds of Americans:

The CIA is now using several hundred American academics (administrators, faculty members, graduate students engaged in teaching) who, in addition to providing leads and, on occasion, making introductions for intelligence purposes, write books and other material to be used for propaganda purposes abroad. . . . These academics are located in over 100 American colleges, universities and related institutions. At the majority of institutions, no one other than the individual concerned is aware of the CIA link. At the others, at least one university official is aware of the operational use of academics on his campus. . . . The CIA considers these operational relationships within the U.S. academic community as perhaps its most sensitive domestic area and has strict controls governing these operations. . . .

In 1961 the chief of the CIA's Covert Action Staff wrote that books were "the most important weapon of strategic propaganda." The Church Committee found that more than a thousand books were produced, subsidized, or sponsored by the CIA before the end of 1967.

When Kissinger testified before the Church Committee about the bombing of Laos, orchestrated by the CIA as a secret activity, he said: "I do not believe in retrospect that it was a good national policy to have the CIA conduct the war in Laos. I think we should have found some other way of doing it." There was no indication that anyone on the Committee challenged this idea -- that what was done should have been done, but by another method.

Thus, in 1974-1975, the system was acting to purge the country of its rascals and restore it to a healthy, or at least to an acceptable, state. The resignation of Nixon, the succession of Ford, the exposure of bad deeds by the FBI and CIA -- all aimed to regain the badly damaged confidence of the American people. However, even with these strenuous efforts, there were still many signs in the American public of suspicion, even hostility, to the leaders of government, military, big business.

Two months after the end of the Vietnam war, only 20 percent of Americans polled thought the collapse of the Saigon government was a threat to United States security.

June 14, 1975, was Flag Day, and President Gerald Ford spoke at Fort Benning, Georgia, where the army staged a march symbolizing its involvement in thirteen wars. Ford commented that he was glad to see so many flags, but a reporter covering the event wrote: "Actually, there were few American flags to be seen near the President's reviewing stand. One, held aloft by demonstrators, bore an inked-in inscription saying, 'No more genocide in our name.' It was torn down by spectators as their neighbors applauded."

That July the Lou Harris poll, looking at the public's confidence in the government from 1966 to 1975, reported that confidence in the military during that period had dropped from 62 percent to 29 percent, in business from 55 percent to 18 percent, in both President and Congress from 42 percent to 13 percent. Shortly after that, another Harris poll reported "65% of Americans oppose military aid abroad because they feel it allows dictatorships to maintain control over their population."

Perhaps much of the general dissatisfaction was due to the economic state of most Americans. Inflation and unemployment had been rising steadily since 1973, which was the year when, according to a Harris poll, the number of Americans feeling "alienated" and "disaffected" with the general state of the country climbed (from 29 percent in 1966) to over 50 percent. After Ford succeeded Nixon, the percentage of "alienated" was 55 percent. The survey showed that people were troubled most of all by inflation.

In the fall of 1975 a New York Times survey of 1,559 persons, and interviews with sixty families in twelve cities, showed "a substantial decline in optimism about the future." The Times reported:

Inflation, the apparent inability of the country to solve its economic problems, and a foreboding that the energy crisis will mean a permanent step backward for the nation's standard of living have made inroads into Americans' confidence, expectations, and aspirations. . . .

Pessimism about the future is particularly acute among those who earn less than $7000 annually, but it is also high within families whose annual incomes range from $10,000 to $15,000. . . .

There is also concern that ... no longer will hard work and a conscientious effort to save money bring them a nice home in the suburbs. . . .

Even higher-income people, the survey found, "are not as optimistic now as they were in past years, indicating that discontent is moving up from the lower middle-income to higher economic levels."

Around the same time, that fall of 1975, public opinion analysts testifying before a congressional committee reported, according to the New York Times, "that public confidence in the Government and in the country's economic future is probably lower than it has ever been since they began to measure such things scientifically."

Government statistics suggested the reasons. The Census Bureau reported that from 1974 to 1975 the number of Americans "legally" poor (that is, below an income of $5,500) had risen 10 percent and was now 25.9 million people. Also, the unemployment rate, which had been 5.6 percent in 1974, had risen to 8.3 percent in 1975, and the number of people who exhausted their unemployment benefits increased from 2 million in 1974 to 4.3 million in 1975.

Government figures, however, generally underestimated the amount of poverty, set the "legally" poor level too low, and underestimated the amount of unemployment. For instance, if 16.6 percent of the population averaged six months of unemployment during 1975, or 33.2 percent averaged three months of unemployment, the "average annual figure" given by the government was 8.3 percent, which sounded better.

In the year 1976, with a presidential election approaching, there was worry in the Establishment about the public's faith in the system. William Simon. Secretary of the Treasury under both Nixon and Ford (before then an investment banker earning over $2 million a year), spoke in the fall of 1976 to a Business Council meeting in Hot Springs, Virginia. He said that when "so much of the world is lurching towards socialism or totalitarianism" it was urgent to make the American business system understood, because "private enterprise is losing by default -- in many of our schools, in much of the communications media, and in a growing portion of the public consciousness." His speech could well be taken to represent the thinking of the American corporate elite:

Vietnam, Watergate, student unrest, shifting moral codes, the worst recession in a generation, and a number of other jarring cultural shocks have all combined to create a new climate of questions and doubt. . . . It all adds up to a general malaise, a society-wide crisis of institutional confidence. . . .

Too often, Simon said, Americans "have been taught to distrust the very word profit and the profit motive that makes our prosperity possible, to somehow feel this system, that has done more to alleviate human suffering and privation than any other, is somehow cynical, selfish, and amoral." We must, Simon said, "get across the human side of capitalism."

As the United States prepared in 1976 to celebrate the bicentennial of the Declaration of Independence, a group of intellectuals and political leaders from Japan, the United States, and Western Europe, organized into "The Trilateral Commission," issued a report. It was entitled "The Governability of Democracies." Samuel Huntington, a political science professor at Harvard University and long-time consultant to the White House on the war in Vietnam, wrote the part of the report that dealt with the United States. He called it "The Democratic Distemper" and identified the problem he was about to discuss: "The 1960's witnessed a dramatic upsurge of democratic fervor in America." In the sixties, Huntington wrote, there was a huge growth of citizen participation "in the forms of marches, demonstrations, protest movements, and 'cause' organizations." There were also "markedly higher levels of self-consciousness on the part of blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students and women, all of whom became mobilized and organized in new ways. . . ." There was a "marked expansion of white-collar unionism," and all this added up to "a reassertion of equality as a goal in social, economic and political life."

Huntington pointed to the signs of decreasing government authority: The great demands in the sixties for equality had transformed the federal budget. In 1960 foreign affairs spending was 53.7 percent of the budget, and social spending was 22.3 percent. By 1974 foreign affairs took 33 percent and social spending 31 percent. This seemed to reflect a change in public mood: In 1960 only 18 percent of the public said the government was spending too much on defense, but in 1969 this jumped to 52 percent.

Huntington was troubled by what he saw:

The essence of the democratic surge of the 1960's was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private. In one form or another, this challenge manifested itself in the family, the university, business, public and private associations, politics, the governmental bureaucracy, and the military services. People no longer felt the same obligation to obey those whom they had previously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, expertise, character, or talents.

All this, he said, "produced problems for the governability of democracy in the 1970's. . . ."

Critical in all this was the decline in the authority of the President. And:

To the extent that the United States was governed by anyone during the decades after World War II, it was governed by the President acting with the support and cooperation of key individuals and groups in the executive office, the federal bureaucracy, Congress, and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private sector's "Establishment."

This was probably the frankest statement ever made by an Establishment adviser.

Huntington further said that the President, to win the election, needed the support of a broad coalition of people. However: "The day after his election, the size of his majority is almost -- if not entirely -- irrelevant to his ability to govern the country. What counts then is his ability to mobilize support from the leaders of key institutions in a society and government. . . . This coalition must include key people in Congress, the executive branch, and the private-sector 'Establishment.' " He gave examples:

Truman made a point of bringing a substantial number of non-partisan soldiers, Republican bankers, and Wall Street lawyers into his Administration. He went to the existing sources of power in the country to get help he needed in ruling the country. Eisenhower in part inherited this coalition and was in part almost its creation. . . . Kennedy attempted to recreate a somewhat similar structure of alliances.

What worried Huntington was the loss in governmental authority. For instance, the opposition to Vietnam had brought the abolition of the draft. "The question necessarily arises, however, whether if a new threat to security should materialize in the future (as it inevitably will at some point), the government will possess the authority to command the resources, as well as the sacrifices, which are necessary to meet that threat."

Huntington saw the possible end of that quarter century when "the United States was the hegemonic power in a system of world order." His conclusion was that there had developed "an excess of democracy," and he suggested "desirable limits to the extension of political democracy."

Huntington was reporting all this to an organization that was very important to the future of the United States. The Trilateral Commission was organized in early 1973 by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Rockefeller was an official of the Chase Manhattan Bank and a powerful financial figure in the United States and the world; Brzezinski, a Columbia University professor, specialized in international relations and was a consultant to the State Department. As reported in the Far Eastern Economic Review (March 25, 1977) by Robert Manning:

The initiative for the Commission came entirely from Rockefeller. According to George Franklin, the Commission's executive secretary, Rockefeller "was getting worried about the deteriorating relations between the United States, Europe and Japan." Franklin explained that Rockefeller began to present his ideas to another elite fraternity: ". . . at the Bilderberg Group -- a very distinguished Anglo-American group which has been meeting for a long time -- Mike Blumenthal said he thought things were in a very serious condition in the world and couldn't some kind of private group do more about it? . . . So then David again made his proposal . . ." Then Brzezinski, a close friend of Rockefeller's, carried the Rockefeller-funded ball and organized the Commission.

It seems probable that the "very serious condition" mentioned as the reason for the Trilateral Commission was the need for greater unity among Japan, Western Europe, and the United States in the face of a much more complicated threat to tri-continental capitalism than a monolithic Communism: revolutionary movements in the Third World. These movements had directions of their own.

The Trilateral Commission wanted also to deal with another situation. Back in 1967, George Ball, who had been Undersecretary of State for economic affairs in the Kennedy administration and who was director of Lehman Brothers, a large investment banking firm, told members of the International Chamber of Commerce:

In these twenty postwar years, we have come to recognize in action, though not always in words, that the political boundaries of nation-states are too narrow and constricted to define the scope and activities of modern business

To show the growth of international economics for United States corporations, one would only have to note the situation in banking. In 1960 there were eight United States banks with foreign branches; in 1974 there were 129. The assets of these overseas branches amounted to $3.5 billion in 1960, $155 billion in 1974.

The Trilateral Commission apparently saw itself as helping to create the necessary international links for the new multinational economy. Its members came from the highest circles of politics, business, and the media in Western Europe, Japan, and the United States. They were from Chase Manhattan, Lehman Brothers, Bank of America, Banque de Paris, Lloyd's of London, Bank of Tokyo, etc. Oil, steel, auto, aeronautic, and electric industries were represented. Other members were from Time magazine, the Washington Post, the Columbia Broadcasting System, Die Zeit, the Japan Times, The Economist of London, and more.

1976 was not only a presidential election year -- it was the much-anticipated year of the bicentennial celebration, and it was filled with much-publicized events all over the country. The great effort that went into the celebration suggests that it was seen as a way of restoring American patriotism, invoking the symbols of history to unite people and government and put aside the protest mood of the recent past.

But there did not seem to be great enthusiasm for it. When the 200th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party was celebrated in Boston, an enormous crowd turned out, not for the official celebration, but for the "People's Bi-Centennial" countercelebration, where packages marked "Gulf Oil" and "Exxon" were dumped into the Boston Harbor, to symbolize opposition to corporate power in America.

A similar intent, to restore legitimacy to the government, was represented in the 1976 elections. Americans were taught, from grade school up, that voting for the President was the supreme act of participation in democracy. Elections gave Americans a feeling that the government was theirs and they were the government. A dramatic change had taken place, however, in attitudes on voting. Surveys showed that the statement: "Voting is the only way that people like me can have any say about how the government runs things," which was once approved by 79 percent of people in their twenties, by 1968 was getting approval from 37 percent.

This diminished faith in voting showed up in the presidential election of 1976. In 1960, 36.6 percent of all Americans eligible to vote did not vote. (There were millions not eligible because they did not meet national residency requirements for citizenship or local residency requirements, or had lost their right to vote by spending time in prison.) In 1976 the percentage of nonvoters rose to 46.7 percent. About 15 million Americans had dropped out of the electoral system and, as in previous elections, those who didn't go to vote were mostly poor, blue-collar workers, with little education, under thirty.

Even those who did vote did not seem to vote with enthusiasm for the political process they were engaging in. Fifty-five percent of the voters in a CBS News and New York Times survey said that public officials did not care about people like them. A journalist interviewing middle-class residents of Dobbs Ferry, New York, just before the election received these comments: From a restaurant proprietor, "This is the first Presidential election I've seen where people are not interested." From a plumber, "The President of the United States isn't going to solve our problems. The problems are too big." From a teacher, "There's a very strong feeling of disillusionment. You get the old thought that all politicians are corrupt. It's stronger than I've ever seen it before." Those interviewed saw the major problems as high taxes and unemployment.

The Democratic candidate for President in 1976, Jimmy Carter, was a member of the Trilateral Commission. The Far Eastern Economic Review article, based apparently on talks with members of the Trilateral Commission and Carter's staff, said:

There is much evidence to suggest that Carter's ambition [he announced his candidacy in 1972] coincided with similar thought by strategists in and around the Commission, most of whom are liberal Democrats. This is based on the theory that the Watergate-plagued Republican Party was a sure loser for 1976. . . . Peter Bourne, Carter's former deputy campaign chief, has said: "David [Rockefeller] and Zbig [Brzezinski] had both agreed that Carter was the ideal politician to build on."

Carter's job as President, from the point of view of the Establishment, was to halt the rushing disappointment of the American people with the government, with the economic system, with disastrous military ventures abroad. In his campaign, he tried to speak to the disillusioned and angry. His strongest appeal was to blacks, whose rebellion in the late sixties was the most frightening challenge to authority since the labor and unemployed upsurges in the thirties. He was a southern white, former governor of Georgia, whose liberal views on the race question were especially welcome to blacks, and whose promises to include them in government contrasted sharply with Gerald Ford's poor record on racial equality during his long years in Congress.

His appeal was "populist" -- that is, he appealed to various elements of American society who saw themselves beleaguered by the powerful and wealthy. Although he himself was a millionaire peanut grower, he presented himself as an ordinary American farmer. Although he had been a supporter of Vietnam until its end, he presented himself as a sympathizer with those who had been against the war, and he appealed to many of the young rebels of the sixties by his promise to cut the military budget. In a much-publicized speech to lawyers, he spoke out against the use of the law to protect the rich. He appointed a black woman, Patricia Harris, as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and a black civil rights veteran, Andrew Young, as ambassador to the United Nations. He gave the job of heading the domestic youth service corps to a young former antiwar activist, Sam Brown.

His most crucial appointments, however, followed Huntington' prescription in his Trilateral Report for how a President should behave the day after election. Indeed, the number of Trilateral Commission members appointed to important posts in the Carter administration was startling. Brzezinski became his National Security Adviser. Cyrus Vance became Secretary of State; he was a member of the board of directors of IBM, Pan American World Airways, and the New York Times, a trustee of Yale University and the Rockefeller Foundation, a former Secretary of the Army and Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam war. His appointment had the enthusiastic approval of his predecessor, Henry Kissinger.

Carter's director of the budget was a wealthy Georgia banker named Bert Lance. Both were presented to the public at the same time, and a reporter commented:

At Mr. Carter's news conference, Mr. Lance came across as an amiable, self-confident Georgia banker with a gregarious affability of a Southern politician, and Mr. Vance as an experienced lawyer-diplomat with the discreet reserve of a man accustomed to the ways of Yale, Wall Street and the Eastern Establishment.

Vance was a member of the Trilateral Commission. Lance was not.

Walter Mondale, the new Vice-President, was a member of the Trilateral Commission. So were Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young, Secretary of the Treasury Michael Blumenthal, and Secretary of Defense Harold Brown. (Brown, according to the Pentagon Papers, had, during the Vietnam war, in the spring of 1968, "envisaged the elimination of virtually all the constraints under which the bombing then operated.") Carter's appointments as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for International Economic Affairs, Undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs, and Assistant for East Asian and Pacific affairs were all members of the Commission. He appointed Admiral Stansfield Turner as head of the CIA, another Trilateral man, and as one of Turner's three deputies a Harvard professor, Robert Bowie, also Trilateral.

All these postelectoral actions were a sharp contrast to the promises and expectations of the campaign, but the consensus of support from both conservatives and liberals suggested the urgent need for the Establishment to try to re-create around Carter the much-damaged national unity. A financial writer wrote not long after Carter's election: "So far, Mr. Carter's actions, commentary, and particularly, his Cabinet appointments have been highly reassuring to the business community." A well-known eastern banker was quoted in the same article as saying: "I don't think Mr. Carter has made a false move since he was elected."

Carter appointed a former Secretary of Defense under Nixon, James Schlesinger, as his Secretary of Energy. Schlesinger was a strong proponent of nuclear energy. His record as Secretary of Defense was described by a member of the Washington press corps:

As Secretary of Defense, Mr. Schlesinger, who looks upon the cold war as a proud chapter in American history, demonstrated an almost missionary drive in seeking to reverse a downward trend in the defense budget. He became spokesman for the concept that a limited nuclear war is possible, with each side attacking the military forces of the other.

Carter's Attorney General, Griffin Bell, was a member of one of the most powerful law firms in Atlanta, King and Spalding, which represented Coca-Cola, and other wealthy corporations. Journalist and veteran Washington correspondent Tom Wicker wrote after Carter had announced his major appointments: "The available evidence is that Mr. Carter so far is opting for Wall Street's confidence."

Carter was attempting to do what previous liberal Democratic administrations had done -- for example, Roosevelt and Truman -- to please the nation's corporate and military establishment while retaining support from a large section of the people who were the victims of corporate and military policy. The question was whether, in the new condition of the seventies, this could be done successfully.

Carter's election was due in some part to the feeling that the nation must remove itself from the Watergate crowd and the Watergate mentality. Ford had pardoned Nixon. Now, Carter's administration, faced with the fact that a former head of the CIA, Richard Helms, had lied to a Senate committee about CIA operations in Chile, made a deal with Helms which allowed him to plead guilty on two misdemeanor counts and escape prison. The Carter administration seemed reluctant, despite the damaging information on the CIA brought out in congressional hearings, to make any essential changes in the activities of the CIA. The American Civil Liberties Union commented on Carter's first year in office:

In the face of opposition from the intelligence agencies, the President has not fulfilled his campaign promises to curb abuses of civil liberties in the name of national security. Indeed, the Administration has advocated more secrecy.

Carter did initiate more sophisticated policies toward other countries in the world that oppressed their own people. He used Ambassador Andrew Young to build up good will for the United States among the black African nations, urged that South Africa liberalize its policies toward blacks. A peaceful settlement in South Africa was necessary strategically. South Africa was used for radar tracking systems. It had important U.S. corporate investments, and it was a critical source of needed raw materials (diamonds especially). Therefore, what the United States needed was a stable government in South Africa; the continued oppression of blacks might create civil war.

The same approach was used in other countries -- combining practical strategic needs with the advancement of civil rights. But because the chief motivation was practicality, not humanity, there was a tendency toward token changes -- as in Chile's release of a few prisoners. One of Carter's most publicized stands in foreign policy was his concern for "human rights" all over the world. And during his presidential campaign he proposed that American aid be withheld from "countries that consistently violate human rights." But when Congressman Herman Badillo introduced in Congress a proposal that required the U.S. representatives to the World Bank and other international financial institutions to vote against loans to countries that systematically violated essential rights, by the use of torture or imprisonment without trial, Carter sent a personal letter to every Congressman urging the defeat of this amendment. It won a voice vote in the House, but lost in the Senate.

Carter was continuing the old hypocrisy. The U.S. was supporting, all over the world, regimes that engaged in imprisonment of dissenters, torture, and mass murder: in Chile, in Iran, in Nicaragua, and in Indonesia, where the inhabitants of Timor were being annihilated in a campaign bordering on genocide.

The New Republic magazine, on the liberal side of the Establishment, commented approvingly on the Carter policies: ". . . American foreign policy in the next four years will essentially extend the philosophies developed . . . in the Nixon-Ford years. This is not at all a negative prospect. . . . There should be continuity. It is part of history. . . ."

Carter had presented himself as a friend of the movement against the war, but in fact had advocated aid to the Saigon government right up to the spring of 1975, just before it fell. When Nixon mined Haiphong harbor and resumed bombing of North Vietnam in the spring of 1975, Carter urged that "we give President Nixon our backing and support -- whether or not we agree with specific decisions." Once elected, Carter declined to give aid to Vietnam for reconstruction, despite the fact that the land had been devastated by American bombing. Asked about this at a press conference, Carter replied that there was no special obligation on the United States to do this because "the destruction was mutual."

Considering that the United States had crossed half the globe with an enormous fleet of bombers and 2 million soldiers, and after eight years left a tiny nation with over a million dead and its land in ruins, this was an astounding statement. It forecast the direction of the American government's policy in the post-Vietnam period.

One Establishment intention, perhaps, was that future generations see the war not as the Defense Department itself had described it in the Pentagon Papers -- as a ruthless attack on civilian populations for strategic military and economic interests -- but as an unfortunate error. Noam Chomsky, one of the leading antiwar intellectuals during the Vietnam period, looked in mid-1978 at how the history of the Vietnam war was being presented by newspapers and magazines and the "intellectual elite" in the U.S., and wrote that they were "destroying the historical record and supplanting it with a more comfortable story, transferring the moral onus of American aggression to its victims, reducing 'lessons' of the war to the socially neutral categories of error, ignorance, and cost. . . ."

The Carter administration clearly was trying to end the disillusionment of the American people after the Vietnam war by following foreign policies more palatable, less obviously aggressive. Hence, the emphasis on "human rights," the pressure on South Africa and Chile to liberalize their policies. But on close examination, these more liberal policies were designed to leave intact the power and influence of American military and American business in the world.

The renegotiation of the Panama Canal treaty with the tiny Central American republic of Panama was an example. Back in 1903 the United States had engineered a revolution against Colombia, set up the new Panama republic, and dictated a treaty giving the United States military bases, control of the Panama Canal, and sovereignty "in perpetuity." As the New York Times commented, when the Carter administration began renegotiating the treaty: "We stole it, and removed the incriminating evidence from our history books."

The canal was a pure example of American imperialism. It saved American companies $1.5 billion a year in delivery costs, and the United States collected $150 million a year in tolls, out of which it paid the Panama government $2.3 million dollars, while maintaining fourteen military bases in the area.

By 1977 the canal had lost military importance. It could not accommodate large tankers or aircraft carriers And there had been repeated riots in Panama by nationalists demanding that the United States get out. It was the time, therefore, for a new treaty, which, as the Times said, could "remove a major irritant in relations with several neighbors, improve the climate for investment throughout the Caribbean, and reduce the risks of sabotage. . . ." The Council of the Americas, an organization representing 220 U S corporations with interests in Latin America, favored a new treaty. So the Carter administration negotiated one, which called for a gradual removal of U.S. bases (which could easily be relocated elsewhere in the area) and turned over the canal's legal ownership to Panama after a period. The treaty also contained vague language which could be the basis for American military intervention under certain conditions.

Whatever Carter's sophistication in foreign policy, certain fundamentals operated in the late sixties and the seventies. American corporations were active all over the world on a scale never seen before. There were, by the early seventies, about three hundred U S corporations, including the seven largest banks, which earned 40 percent of their net profits outside the United States. They were called "multinationals," but actually, of 1,851 top executives in these companies, it turned out that 98.4 percent were Americans They were growing at twice and three times the rate of the American economy, and as a group they constituted the third-largest economy in the world, next to the United States and the Soviet Union.

Oil corporations remained powerful in their effect on American foreign policy, and Carter gave no sign of diminishing their power. A government oil economist of many years, John Blair (The Control of Oil), showed in detail how the "Seven Sisters" -- Exxon, Mobil, So-Cal, Texaco, Gulf, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum -- controlled the supply and marketing of oil in ways that were against the public interest. With the cooperation of national and local governments, the Seven Sisters had followed policies which quickly depleted the American oil supply and forced U.S. dependence on Middle East oil. Much of the blame for increased oil prices after 1973 had been put on the Arab oil countries, but the corporations raised prices far beyond what was necessary, and the consumers, were, as usual, the victims

It had been U.S. government policy, since 1969, through the establishment of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, to ensure the multinationals at low rates against the loss of their properties through revolution or war

The relationship of these global corporations with the poorer countries was an exploiting one, it was clear from U.S. Department of Commerce figures. Whereas U.S. corporations in Europe between 1950 and 1965 invested $8.1 billion and made $5.5 billion in profits, in Latin America they invested $3.8 billion and made $11.3 billion in profits, and in Africa they invested $5.2 billion and made $14.3 billion in profits.

It was the classical imperial situation, where the places with natural wealth became victims of more powerful nations whose power depended on that seized wealth. American corporations depended on the poorer countries for 100 percent of their diamonds, coffee, platinum, mercury, natural rubber, and cobalt. They got 98 percent of their manganese from abroad, 90 percent of their chrome and aluminum. And 20 to 40 percent of certain imports (platinum, mercury, cobalt, chrome, manganese) came from Africa.

The rearrangement of foreign policy after Vietnam, to advance the same interests, but with different tactics, was begun under Ford and continued under Carter. With the Vietnam bases gone, the United States quickly acquired from Bntain one of her old colonial possessions in the middle of the Indian Ocean, a little island called Diego Garcia. The island was in an area rich in tin, jute, tea, copper, cobalt, manganese, uranium, and gold, and near the oil fields of the Middle East. The people on that island had been engaged mostly in growing coconuts. This now had to stop as barracks were built, an airfield constructed, a channel dug into the bay big enough for aircraft carriers to come in. The coconut workers were resettled on another island.

Another post-Vietnam necessity was to maintain a huge military presence in other Pacific bases: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines -- 286 warships, 2,100 planes, and 265,000 sailors and marines, the largest maritime military forces in history The United States still had over a thousand military bases throughout the world

Another continuing policy was the training of foreign military officers. The Army had a "School of the Americas" in the Canal Zone, from which 29,000 military leaders in Latin America had graduated since 1949. In 1973, 170 graduates were heads of state, cabinet ministers, commanding generals, or directors of intelligence. Six of those graduates were in the Chilean military junta that overthrew the Allende government. The American commandant of the school told a reporter "We keep in touch with our graduates and they keep in touch with us."

And yet the United States cultivated a reputation of being generous with its riches. Indeed, it had often given aid to disaster victims This aid, however, often depended on political loyalty or on meeting cold business demands. In one six-year drought in West Africa, 100,000 Africans died of starvation. A report by the Carnegie Endowment said the Agency for International Development (AID) of the United States had been inefficient and neglectful in giving aid to nomads in the Sahel area of West Africa, an area covering six countries. The response of AID was that those countries had "no close historical, economic, or political ties to the United States." In the summer of 1974, countless died of starvation in Bangladesh (once part of India) because neither U.S. banks nor the U.S. government would give credit to buy grain waiting to be loaded on ships.

In early 1975 the press carried a dispatch from Washington: "Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger has formally initiated a policy of selecting for cutbacks in American aid those nations that have sided against the U.S. in votes in the United Nations. In some cases, the cutbacks involve food and humanitarian relief."

Most aid was openly military. The Military Assistance Program gave $55 billion to seventy-one countries since World War II. As Senator Alan Cranston told the Foreign Relations Committee after a study: "This aid was intended to help them defend themselves against aggression. But many of the governments have used American money and American-supplied weapons to terrorize and subjugate their own people." What was remarkable was that Americans were beginning to understand this. By 1975, public opinion polls showed that "65 percent of Americans oppose military aid abroad because they feel it allows dictatorships to maintain control over their population."

Congress began to phase out the Military Assistance Program, but it was replaced by the direct sale of arms to the same countries. Whereas in 1969 the United States had exported $1.7 billion in arms, by 1975 the figure was up to $9.5 billion. The Carter administration promised to end the sale of arms to repressive regimes, but when it took office the bulk of the sales continued.

Like his predecessors, Carter was not totally dependent on congressional appropriations of funds for military ventures overseas. There had long been enough statutes on the books to give American Presidents plenty of leeway. Back in 1973, Elliot Richardson, as Secretary of Defense, told the Senate Appropriations Committee that even if it refused to give the $500 million the Pentagon was asking to continue bombing Cambodia, "We can find the money to do it anyway. . . . We could invoke section 3732 authority." This was a statute for the "feed and forage" of troops passed back in 1799 and still alive.

What the Carter administration might change in U.S. foreign policy, it seemed, was not its basic aim of protecting corporate profits, military power, and political influence on the world -- but perhaps (with Vietnam a sobering lesson) a smaller emphasis on overt military aggression. A Brookings Institution report of January 1977 showed that after World War II, up to and including the Mayaguez incident, the United States had deployed its military forces abroad for political impact on 215 occasions. For instance, when a right-wing coup took place in Brazil in 1964 against a left-wing government, a U.S. naval task force was positioned off the Brazilian coast to support the coup. The study found thirty-three instances in which nuclear forces were deployed for political effect, the latest being during the 1973 war in the Middle East, when American forces were put on a worldwide nuclear alert.

Meanwhile, the education of Americans did not enlighten them much about the sources of U.S. foreign policy. Most college courses on American foreign policy were taught from the standpoint of government policy, looking at strategic problems and alternatives from a government point of view; there was little education on the strategies citizens might use to oppose official policy. Courses on foreign policy generally did not emphasize corporate economic interests. A study in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1972 by Dennis Ray (not widely distributed) concluded:

The influence of corporations on the foreign policy process . . . remains clouded in mystery. My search through the respectable literature on international relations and U.S. foreign policy shows that less than 5 percent of some 200 books granted even passing attention to the role of corporations in American foreign relations.

Ray found that the most widely used textbooks ignored the fact that "foreign policy decision-makers are heavily recruited from large corporations, investment houses, and law firms."

Indeed, there was a well-financed, well-organized effort to influence teachers, on behalf of the government. A series of National Security Programs, by 1976, had reached hundreds of teachers who attended summer seminars and conferences. There they listened to lectures by pro-government academicians and West Point instructors. About a thousand faculty members from four hundred institutions had attended two-day seminars, and this led to eighty-seven colleges and universities giving their own regular courses in "national security."

Was all this rejuvenation of the "national security" slogan a way of building support for large arms budgets? Jimmy Carter, running for election, had told the Democratic Platform Committee: "Without endangering the defense of our nation or commitments to our allies, we can reduce present defense expenditures by about 5 to 7 billion dollars annually." But his first budget in January 1978 proposed not a decrease but an increase of $10 billion in the arms budget. He justified this by saying Ford would have raised it even more. And the administration had just announced that the Department of Agriculture would save $25 million a year by no longer giving free second helpings of milk to 1.4 million needy schoolchildren who got free meals in school.

If Carter's job was to restore faith in the system, here was his greatest failure -- solving the economic problems of the people. The price of food and the necessities of life continued to rise faster than wages were rising. Unemployment remained officially at 6 or 8 percent -- unofficially, the rates were higher. For certain key groups in the population -- young pedple, and especially young black people -- the unemployment rate was 20 percent or 30 percent.

By 1978 it was clear that blacks in the United States, the group most in support of Carter for President, and without whose support he could not have been elected, were bitterly disappointed with his policies. He opposed federal aid to poor people who needed abortions, and when it was pointed out to him that this was unfair, because rich women could get abortions with ease, he replied: "Well, as you know, there are many things in life that are not fair, that wealthy people can afford and poor people cannot."

In early 1978 a survey of public opinion by CBS News and the New York Times showed that 50 percent of those polled considered themselves worse off economically than a year ago or were in some way dissatisfied with their personal economic situation. "Not surprisingly, the sharpest increases in disapproval of the President's handling of the economy have come among blacks, the elderly, and low-income groups."

Only 43 percent of those polled accepted Carter's view that the energy shortage was serious. More people -- almost 50 percent -- believed that the people were "just being told" there was a shortage so that oil and gas companies could charge higher prices. Indeed, it was part of Carter's energy plan to end price regulation of natural gas for the consumer. The largest producer of natural gas was Exxon Corporation, and the largest blocks of private stock in Exxon were owned by the Rockefeller family.

Early in Carter's administration congressional investigators charged that Texaco Oil Corporation was withholding from production over 500 billion cubic feet of natural gas in two fields off the coast of Louisiana. That gas could have been used, they said, during the severe gas shortages of the winter, but Texaco did not pump this gas because of a "desire to maximize its profits," according to John Galloway of the House Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee.

In April of 1977 the Federal Energy Administration found that Gulf Oil Corporation had overstated by $79.1 million its costs for crude oil obtained from foreign affiliates. It then passed on these false costs to consumers. In the summer of 1978 the administration announced that a "compromise" had been made with Gulf Oil in which Gulf agreed to pay back $42.2 million. Gulf informed its stockholders that "the payments will not affect earnings since adequate provision was made in prior years."

The lawyer for the Energy Department who worked out the compromise with Gulf said it had been done to avoid a lengthy and costly lawsuit. Would the lawsuit have cost the $36.9 million dropped in the compromise? Would the government have considered letting off a bank robber without a jail term in return for half the loot? The settlement was a perfect example of what Carter had told a meeting of lawyers during his presidential campaign -- that the law was on the side of the rich.

The facts on the unequal distribution of wealth in America were clearly not going to be affected by Carter's policies, any more than they had been affected by previous "reform" administrators. According to Andrew Zimbalist, an American economist writing in Le Monde Diplomatique in 1977, the top 10 percent of the American population had an income thirty times that of the bottom tenth; the top 1 percent of the nation owned 33 percent of the wealth. The richest 5 percent owned 83 percent of the personally owned corporate stock. The one hundred largest corporations (despite the graduated income tax that misled people into thinking the very rich paid 60 to 70 percent in taxes) paid an average of 26.9 percent in taxes, and the leading oil companies paid 5.8 percent in taxes (these are Internal Revenue Service figures for 1974). Indeed, 244 individuals who earned over $200,000 paid no taxes. (Jimmy Carter paid no income tax for 1976 but gave $6,000 to the Treasury to show his good will.)

Poverty in the cities was much more important than ever before in American history. Fifty years before, 24 percent of Americans lived on farms; now the figure was 4 percent. The cities were bursting with people, many of them black and many of them unemployed. The U.S. News and World Report in December 1977 reported that, while the general unemployment rate was 7 percent, for blacks it was 15 percent; for white teenagers it was also 15 percent; and for black teenagers it was 40 percent. Its headline read: young blacks out OF WORK -- TIME BOMB FOR U.S.

The figures on unemployment and income were matters of life and death. It was found in mid-1977, in a study of death certificates published in the New England Journal of Medicine, that the death rate in that area of Boston where most black and Hispanic people lived was 50 percent higher than in the Newton-Wellesley-Weston white suburban neighborhoods.

Not only in the North but also in the South, poverty -- after New Deal, Fair Deal, New Frontier, and Great Society -- was still deeply entrenched. There were 10 million poor people in the South, the Southern Regional Council reported, two-thirds of those not reached by any form of public welfare assistance.

The President's attempts at post-Vietnam, post-Watergate restoration of faith were not succeeding. True, there was no national movement of protest or rebellion in the mid-seventies comparable with the black protest movement, the antiwar movement, the women's movement. And because there was no visible central movement, the press was full of articles with the theme "The movement is dead." However, if one looked just a bit below the surface, there was massive evidence that the country was not firmly back in the hands of the Establishment, indeed, that people were on the move organizing. And if one looked deeper still, at the economy and its effect on people's lives, there was a huge potential for revolt.

The CIO, which had engaged in the militant strikes of the thirties and the organization of millions of workers in mass production industries, was now comfortably joined with the AFL and served as a control against labor rebellion. But, in the seventies, it faced wildcat strikes all over the country, and rank-and-file insurgencies against established leadership. A long and bitter strike in 1973 of coal miners in Harlan County was part of a rank-and-file movement against the entrenched leaders of the United Mine Workers. In the powerful unions of steel workers and teamsters there were rank-and-file rebellions. No settlement seemed secure. The strikes went on. For instance, in McCreary County, Kentucky, in 1977 a small strike of 160 miners, beset with beatings and arrests, lasted fifteen months. In this, as in Harlan County and many other strikes, women played an important part.

There was a new surge in organizing that 80 percent of the labor force which was unorganized. Women and white-collar workers became the focal point of the new organizing. Teachers and public service workers of all kinds -- garbage collectors, fire fighters, police, postal workers -- went out on strike. On the campuses, the organization of teachers' unions and secretaries' unions replaced the old issues of the sixties, as bread-and-butter problems became the center of attention instead of war. While striking miners were going to jail in a small town in Kentucky, teachers were going to jail in Franklin, a small town in Massachusetts.

The mass movements of the sixties had disbanded, but they left behind, all over the country, hundreds of thousands of people who were forming into small local groups and battling on a hundred issues, in different ways, for health, safety, peace, equality, and economic justice. Many of them were veterans of the movements of the sixties; many others were young people new to social action. Altogether they constituted a formidable nationwide movement, not unified in structure but sharing a common purpose, to protest against Establishment policies, to work for new ways of living.

In small towns and obscure places that had never seen such things before, there were tenants' organizations, antiutility committees, environmental groups, food cooperatives, work cooperatives, communal housing situations, lawyers' collectives, doctors' collectives, community newspapers. Homosexual men and women were organized into Gay Rights groups, women into women's groups, Chicanos and Puerto Ricans, blacks and Native Americans into their own groups, and sometimes combinations of these into cross-cultural groups.

For instance, in the area of Hampshire County in Western Massachusetts -- the scene long ago of Shays' Rebellion -- there was a community newspaper called Outfront, which in its March 1976 issue reported on an array of activities typical of what was happening in every section of the country in the mid-seventies. Tenants in a government-subsidized housing project were organizing against a rent increase, seventy-five people were protesting sexually discriminatory hiring practices at a local bar-restaurant-inn, eighty students were undertaking an educational campaign to replace the environmentally destructive metal cans with bottles. The Hampshire County Employed-Unemployed Council, an alliance of workers, welfare recipients, and students, was holding a dinner. There was a campaign for rent control in Amherst, a report on a national "Hard Times" conference of two thousand people in Chicago. A women's health care collective was opening. Outfront had articles on women's rights, job safety, the Native American movement, repression in Puerto Rico, and other subjects. It printed a list of fifteen work, food, and other cooperatives, fourteen black, Native American, Asian-American, and Third World cultural and political groups, five women's groups, six gay groups, three war veterans' organizations, six tenants' groups, seventeen media groups -- radio stations, newspapers, film cooperatives -- six day-care groups, three health services, and four labor organizing groups. And there was a full page of "People's Poetry."

This could be duplicated a hundred times around the country. There had not been anything like such extensive local organization in the turbulent sixties. A young graduate of M.I.T. decided, in the early seventies, to gather and publish a directory of anti-Establishment organizations of all kinds, all over the country. His list, published under the title Alternate America, had over five thousand groups, and kept growing.

In 1973, in Boston -- a city with a very high proportion of women clerical workers, in universities, hospitals, insurance companies -- a group of women formed an organization called "9 to 5." It was set up to improve working conditions for women and "to win rights and respect for all women." It organized women workers, negotiated with and put pressure on employers, picketed and demonstrated, brought women together to give them a feeling of support and strength.

As schools opened in the fall of 1978, teachers were on strike in all areas of the country and picket lines were formed outside schools in Cleveland, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Seattle, and other places. The usually cautious television news commentator Walter Cronkite called it "the most stunning action by unaffiliated and uncoordinated labor groups in the nation's recent history." Inflation was hurting; the teachers were demanding wage raises to meet the rise in the cost of living. The president of a teachers' group in Yonkers, New York, said: "It's really something to see all these actions. Our biggest problem used to be that teachers thought they were too good to strike . . . they thought they were artists or professionals. Now, it seems they're ready to join the labor movement."

Not just teachers, but public employees of all sorts -- those considered most loyal to government, like firemen and policemen -- were defying legislatures, courts, mayors, and demanding improvement in their wages and working conditions. In 1978, firemen and police in Anderson, Indiana, put their forces together in a strike that left the city prostrate. In San Antonio, Texas, sanitation workers fought against police used to break their strike. But the traditional use of police to break strikes was running into a phenomenon new in American history -- the widespread refusal of police to work under conditions dictated by higher authority, the strikes of policemen all over the country, almost all of them for the first time, as in Memphis, Tennessee.

As usual in American history, the millionaire press ignored the local actions going on in a thousand places all over the country, actions that showed people alive, organizing, resisting, trying in small but portentous ways to better their lives by cooperating. For instance, in the mid-seventies, a native of Maine named Russ Christensen, a paratrooper during the Korean war who then went to law school and spent time in Latin America, returned to Maine to give legal help to low-income people, read about Marxism and socialism, and helped form a Maine Woodsmen's Association. The state of Maine is dominated by the paper corporations, and the MWA was the first organization of the men who cut and hauled trees for these companies.

A thousand paper workers joined the Association, they went on strike in 1975, their strike was broken by a court injunction, but the organization was established as a spokesman for the united woodworkers of Maine. Christensen and others were setting up cheap legal service programs and working out ways of cooperatively owning land and housing. He declared himself a socialist, and thought that socialists should run candidates for office as well as doing grass-roots organizing.

When eight women who worked for a bank in the small town of Wilmar, Minnesota, saw a male employee hired who knew less than they did and got twice the pay, they protested, organized, and finally went out on strike in late 1977. They found themselves picketing through the cold Minnesota winter, wearing snowmobile suits, scarves wound around their faces, and heavy boots. It was a small strike, but it was the first bank strike in the history of the state, and a sign of what was beginning to happen across the country in the joining of women's rights to labor struggle.

In the early part of the century, men and women died by the thousands through sickness and accidents resulting from industrial conditions, and mostly without public notice. In the 1970s, working people were beginning to get aroused over the increasing evidence of deadly disease resulting from work situations. It was a condition that could happen under any system of modern technology, but where there was a powerful drive for profit overriding concern for human welfare, as in a capitalist system, the dangers were multiplied, and the remedies more difficult to achieve. In various parts of the United States, both unions and unorganized groups of workers began to campaign to get safer working conditions.

In a small town (Conshohocken) in Pennsylvania in 1978, workers at Lee Tire Company demanded to know exactly what kind of chemicals they were working with, because the labels on the chemical drums had been replaced with code designations which only the employers knew. A similar demand was made by an Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union local at a printing ink company in Minneapolis. In the first instance, the workers' demands were rejected by an arbitrator. In the second, they won in an appeal to the National Labor Relations Board.

Two construction workers at the First National City Bank in Boston, brothers named Leary, discovered in the summer of 1978 that asbestos fibers were coming out of some of the beams in the building. It had recently been discovered that asbestos fibers, inhaled by shipyard workers and other people in construction, caused cancerlike, fatal diseases, often thirty years after inhalation. Hundreds of people worked in that building. When the Leary brothers protested and asked for protective equipment, they were fired. But they publicized what they had found and took their case into the courts. It was another instance of small-scale resistance cropping up in unexpected places.

As the newspapers concentrated on the election campaign of 1976 and the bicentennial events of that year, organizing was going on all over the country, unreported in the press, on the radio or television. Some examples: a farm workers' association in Binghamton, New York; a farm workers' service center in Alamo, Texas; a tenants' union in Madison, Wisconsin, and another in St. Petersburg, Florida (these among hundreds of tenant organizations newly organized in the country). There was a Women's Health Project in Somerville, Massachusetts; a Chicano organizing group in San Juan, Texas; a Legal Defense Committee in Keshena, Wisconsin; a GI organizing project in San Diego, California; a Black Military Resistance League in Norfolk, Virginia; the Fort Bragg GI union in Spring Lake, North Carolina.

Prison support groups were formed in Kansas City, Missouri; Seattle, Washington; St. Louis, Missouri, and dozens of other places. There were alternate newspapers by the hundreds all over the country, and new collectives formed to use audiovisual techniques in organizing people. There were "people's bookstores" in Los Angeles, in Harlem, in Washington, D.C., in small towns in Oregon. Women's groups around the country were increasing too fast to be counted.

Some of the sixties' activists became involved in the seventies in local government -- a few were elected mayors of small towns, others to local posts of various kinds. In 1975, they formed a Conference on Alternative State and Local Public Policies, which met annually to exchange experiences and ideas on how to achieve social change within the system. In Eugene, Oregon, a radical became local tax assessor and began to worry the corporations. In California, Tom Hayden, a radical activist of the sixties, ran for U.S. Senator on a program of "Economic Democracy" (he lost, but got over a million votes). When a meeting took place in California in early 1978 to discuss "alternative public policy," more than eight hundred people came.

There was vigorous debate among the new groups on whether radical political energy was best expended inside the political system, through the voting mechanism, or outside it, in protest groups and parallel organizations. But while the debate went on, more and more people were doing both.

With the Vietnam war over, some of the veterans of the antiwar movement took up the battle against the militarization of America and the world arms race. What drove them to action was symbolized in the comments of an air force captain at Whitman Air Force Base in Missouri. He was a launch officer for the Minuteman III, which could wipe out three large cities with its new missile-carrying multiple warheads. The captain told an interviewer: "The fact is, it is possible for 4 officers in a Minuteman Squadron to launch and start World War III without authorization from anyone. . . . Naturally, this would be illegal, but who would be around to punish them?"

In Baltimore, Catholic veterans of jails and demonstrations in the sixties set up a center called Jonah House. From there they went regularly to the Pentagon in Washington, to carry on small but dramatic guerrilla-theater actions against the arms race. They kept being arrested, but, through a small publication, Year One, their story got out to people all over the country.

Daniel Berrigan, priest, poet, prisoner of the Vietnam era, was arrested for demonstrating at the Pentagon, and he asked the judge to go into the files of the Department of Defense to see if indeed the protesters were not telling the truth, that "the greatest crime in the history of humanity is being planned there; a conspiracy to hiroshimize- every city of the world, to pulverize and vaporize all flesh and bones, to declare the human adventure a cul de sac, all history null and void."

Berrigan asked the judge to look at the evidence in the Pentagon:

And your discovery of evidence, your judicial protest, would sound like the crack of doom. You would be heard, when we are not heard. You would reveal a great crime. You would save lives. You would also restore a degraded judiciary. . . .

You give the nod to murder when the commanders may, again and again, hand us over to you, knowing their enterprise is secure and ours, to say the least, in jeopardy.

You give the nod to murder by honoring the presumption of American authority; the presumption of innocence in high crime, and presumption of guilt in civil disobedience.

You give the nod to murder finally, by sticking to the letter of the law. The letter of this law, quite literally, kills. It will kill you, as it will kill all those who bow to it, countenance it, obey it. It will sweep you into an awesome conspiracy, will add your name to the blueprint of the mad engineers; a blueprint now being drawn up in our judicial district. The blueprint is marked "Last Day."

The antiwar movement was not quite dead, even in the absence of a visible war. An organization called Mobilization for Survival was formed, and branches sprang up around the country to draw attention to the threat of the arms race, of nuclear war, of militarization of the country and neglect of human life. In 1978, twenty thousand people gathered at the United Nations to protest the squandering of human resources and the immense danger of the arms race.

A general worry was developing over the proliferation of nuclear energy plants around the country. The plants were set up, the official word was, to meet the energy shortage. But there were questions about the extent to which the shortage was artificial, created by the corporate energy interests, and how much profit was behind the enthusiasm for nuclear plants. There had been accidents at such plants, so far small, but ominous. And, despite strenuous efforts, no scientific team had been able to come up with a sure solution for the disposal of the wastes from these plants, which were horrifying in their effects. Plutonium, of which microscopic amounts could be deadly to great numbers of people, left poisonous wastes alive for 250,000 years.

Protests multiplied. In 1977, at a nuclear plant in Seabrook, New Hampshire, two thousand well-organized protesters occupied the site. Fourteen hundred were arrested, and the news went around the world. The following year, sixteen thousand people demonstrated at the same site. Other plants around the country were picketed and became the scenes of protest actions. After a serious and frightening accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in mid-Pennsylvania, there was a wave of fear throughout the country, and an antinuclear rally in Washington drew 100,000 people. Clearly there was more to come in the struggle over nuclear plants.

But what did all this add up to? There was no national movement comparable to those of the thirties and the sixties. It was a time when the Establishment was drawing on all its resources to restore the system, enough to keep the country quiet and obedient. And yet, there were thousands of seeds and shoots of rebellion all around. Was it all an endless cycle of control and rebellion and more control and more rebellion -- or was something changing? In the past, aggrieved groups had been set against one another, preventing thai unity which was necessary to combat the power of the elite. Was there a new possibility, now, for such unity?

There may have been a clue -- when the priest said to the judge, about the arms race: "It will kill you too."

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Bibliography for Chapter 20

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