Table Of ContentTHE TIMES OF THE SEVENTIES
The Culture, Politics and Personalities that Shaped the
Decade
Edited by Clyde Haberman
Contents
Introduction
National
International
Business
New York
Science, Technology and Health
Life & Style
Arts & Entertainment
Sports
Index
Introduction
A soldier coming home to New York in early 1970 after 16 months of overseas
duty felt as if he had entered a strange land. Sixteen months is not a long time,
yet in that stretch the world seemed to have somehow tilted 15 degrees,
rendering it all but unrecognizable. People even looked different. Many men
suddenly wore their hair long. They sported beards and mustaches. They wore
wildly colored clothes. Sure, long hair and psychedelic outfits had been part of
the scene for a while. But those fashions were largely the province of political
radicals and kids referred to, not always kindly, as hippies. Now, stockbrokers
and insurance agents went around like that. “There’s something happening
here,” ran the lyrics of a popular Buffalo Springfield song. That there was. The
returning soldier sensed that this decade, still in its infancy, would usher in a
thorough break from much of the past.
The Sixties, for all its acclaim, did not begin as a true departure from the
Fifties, notwithstanding the election of a young president; what most people call
the Sixties, meaning an era of turmoil and rebellion, did not really begin until
1964 or 1965. But the Seventies lost no time asserting itself as a decade when
many of the old verities no longer applied. Clothes and facial hair were one
indication. They were also the least of it. In May 1970, students at an Ohio
school unfamiliar to most Americans, Kent State University, staged several days
of demonstrations denouncing the Nixon administration’s expansion of the
seemingly endless Vietnam War into Cambodia. The protests were rowdy at
times. There was vandalism and rock-throwing. But nothing prepared the
students, or the rest of the nation, for what would happen on May 4. After
crowds of unarmed demonstrators ignored orders to disperse, Ohio National
Guardsmen opened fire. They killed four students and wounded nine others, one
of whom was permanently paralyzed. There would be investigations and endless
recriminations. But there was no escaping a fundamental, haunting reality of the
new decade: What did it say about a country when those who were in charge
would shoot their children for doing little more than speaking up?
Mutual trust between the governors and the governed, an essential component
of a democracy, had broken down. It would be thus through much of the decade.
At the dawn of the 1960s, most Americans believed their government to be
honorable and truthful. Not so at the dawn of the 1970s. More and more, people
felt they could no longer accept on faith what their leaders said. That returning
soldier, for example, went back to his old job as a newspaper reporter in New
York. It fell to him in September 1971 to write about inmates at the maximum
security prison in Attica, N.Y., who rioted, took prison employees hostage and
then turned the chaos into an extraordinary rebellion stretching across four days.
It ended with dozens of inmates and their hostages being killed when state
policemen stormed the rebels, firing indiscriminately as they retook control. The
authorities insisted that the troopers moved in only after the insurrectionists had
begun slashing hostages’ throats, even castrating one of them. A day later,
autopsies showed that not a single hostage had been killed by the inmates. No
one had been castrated. The troopers did all the killing. The young reporter could
not shake off a question that would stay with him and with many others forever:
If officials could lie so blatantly about something like that, when the falsehoods
could be scientifically discredited in short order, was there anything they said
that could be taken at face value? All too often in the ’70s, the answer was no. It
was an era when doubting authority became, for many, a default position.
This was the decade of the Pentagon Papers, a government history that fell
into The New York Times’s hands and traced a trail of deceit that had drawn the
United States ever deeper into an unpopular war in Vietnam. It was the decade
of slain Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, when the self-absorbed, tone-
deaf head of the International Olympic Committee publicly fretted not about the
deaths but about the inconvenience they created for his precious Games. It was
the decade of oil embargoes and soaring gasoline prices, with many in the West
convinced they were being taken for a ride by OPEC and Big Oil. It was the
decade when the mad-dog Khmer Rouge took control in Cambodia and
slaughtered two million or more of their countrymen in a genocidal frenzy. And
it was, to be sure, the decade of Watergate, the catchall word for an assortment
of government misdeeds, lies and cover-ups that forced a president to resign and
left little doubt that Americans could not take for granted that those who led
them were men of honor.
Not that it was all bleakness. Hardly. Medical breakthroughs and new
technologies, like computers that grew in use, made life better. There were
glorious improvements in the food people ate, daring writing in the movies and
television shows they watched, exciting new records set by the athletes they
cheered. But an abiding cynicism took root, one captured well by the decade’s
“Godfather” films, widely regarded as among the greatest of all time. Though set
in the 1940s and ’50s, they offered insights into latter-day corruption in
government and business, as much as in organized crime. Michael Corleone, son
of the supreme mob boss, says to the woman he would marry, “My father is no
different than any powerful man, any man with power, like a president or
senator.”
“Do you know how naïve you sound, Michael?” she says. “Presidents and
senators don’t have men killed.”’
“Oh,” he replies. “Who’s being naïve, Kay?”
As the 1970s wore on, Americans lost whatever innocence they still had
about the questionable ways in which power was often exercised. But they also
resigned themselves to life as it was. That weariness was captured in another
’70s movie set in an earlier era, a brilliant work about a private eye in 1930s Los
Angeles who stumbles upon deeply embedded corruption. He is forced to accept
his helplessness in changing things when a colleague says to him, “Forget it,
Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
National
In many ways, the seventies took a back seat to its more celebrated cousin, the
sixties. But what many Americans think of as part of the tumultuous sixties in
fact reached fulfillment in the seventies. From the decade’s start, the wheels
seemed about to come off the wagon.
View of the large crowd with a sympathetic banner that had gathered in front of the State House at
Boston Common to protest the Kent State University shootings, 1970.
This was what 1970 alone looked like in the United States:
Five defendants in the so-called Chicago Seven trial were found guilty of
seeking to promote a riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in
Chicago. An Army lieutenant, William L. Calley Jr., was found guilty of war
crimes: the premeditated murder of 22 civilians at My Lai, South Vietnam. A
band of radical leftists known as the Weather Underground resorted to
bombings, though often incompetently and self-destructively. National
Guardsmen in Ohio fired on student protesters at Kent State University, killing
four of them.
Law enforcement personnel wearing gas masks wait to storm hostage-holding prisoners during the
Attica riots.
Matters did not then improve. In 1971, inmates at Attica state prison in
upstate New York staged a full-throated rebellion to protest shoddy conditions
and demeaning rules. By the time the uprising was put down four days later, 43
inmates and prison employees they had taken hostage were killed, nearly all by
state troopers who went in with guns blazing on orders from Gov. Nelson A.
Rockefeller. It was one of the bloodiest one-day encounters between Americans
since the Civil War.
Nor did political assassination, which in part defined the 1960’s, show signs
of fading. George Wallace, Alabama’s segregationist governor, was shot and left
paralyzed in 1972 while campaigning for president outside Washington. Twice
in 1975, unhinged women in California shot at President Gerald R. Ford, but
missed. Three years later, a San Francisco politician, Dan White, flipped out,
drew a revolver and killed Mayor George Moscone and then Harvey Milk, the
city’s first openly gay elected official.
But if anything could be said to define the ’70s in America, it was not
political killing so much as political corruption. It reached spectacular levels.
In 1971, The New York Times published documents that came to be called
the Pentagon Papers, a history tracing the mendacity and misjudgments that led
America into the Vietnam War. President Richard M. Nixon tried to suppress its
publication on dubious national-security grounds, but the Supreme Court
rejected his arguments and affirmed a newspaper’s right to publish in the face of
government attempts to impose “prior restraint.”
Gerald Ford being sworn-in by Chief Justice Warren Burger, with wife Betty between them, hours
after President Nixon resigned.
