From Vietnam to Present Day The 1970s
The 1970s, or "the Seventies," is not known to have been a glorious time. America's pullout from Vietnam was humiliating, the Supreme Court issued decisions that have been much criticized (like Roe v. Wade), a president (Richard Nixon) resigned amid a scandal, an inept president (Jimmy Carter) won the next election, a nuclear power plant called "Three Mile Island" near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania had a meltdown in 1979 that turned the public against nuclear power, and the rock music was abysmal. Styles like "disco" and "bell-bottom" pants that were popular in the Seventies seem ludicrous today. Sadly, it was the decade when your teacher became a teenager. It was too early for the internet, and too late for some of the marvelous music of the 1960s. In many ways it was a wasted decade between the Sixties and Eighties.
Here are some "highlights", or perhaps "lowlights" would be more accurate, of what happened:
In 1972, in Furman v. Georgia, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the death penalty nationwide until states installed more difficult-to-satisfy requirements before someone is executed. For years no criminals could be executed, due to this ruling. But eventually state laws, with stricter rules, began to impose the death penalty again for the worst crimes.
In 1972, President Nixon formed a reelection committee entitled "Committee to Reelect the President", derisively called "CREEP" by his opponents. The security officer of this committee was later convicted of buglarizing the Democratic headquarters in the Watergate building in D.C. Nixon covered up the investigation, leading to his resignation in 1974 after the Supreme Court ordered him to turn over secret tape recordings, to avoid impeachment.
In 1973, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned due to corruption charges arising from when he was previously Governor of Maryland, and Agnew was replaced by congressman Gerald Ford, who became president in 1974 when Nixon resigned. When Ford became president, he later pardoned Nixon of all crimes, and this made people angry especially since Nixon's aides went to jail.
As the investigation into the Watergate scandal heightened, the "Saturday Night Massacre" in 1973 consisted of then-President Nixon ordering the Attorney General to fire the special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who was investigating Nixon. The Attorney General refused and resigned, and then his successor refused and resigned, and then his second successor (future Judge Robert Bork) fired Cox.
President Gerald Ford signed the Helsinki Accords in 1975, which was ostensibly an attempt to advance "detente" (a softening in the Cold War) and to improve human rights; critics viewed it as a naive agreement to cooperate with the communists.
A "dark horse" candidate, Democrat Jimmy Carter from Georgia, won his Party's nomination for president, and then defeated President Gerald Ford in a close contest in 1976. But Carter was not ready for the job, and anxious to give things away like Santa Claus. He started in 1977 by agreeing to give the Panama Canal to Panama, even though the United States built it, paid for it, and needed it for security reasons. The Senate ratified the treaty after a heated controversy, with conservatives opposing the giveaway, and Panama acquired full ownership of it in 1999. Now communist China runs the Canal under a contract with Panama.
Jimmy Carter arranged a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel in 1978 by promising each over a $1 billion per year in annual gifts from the United States if they complied with the agreement, which required Israel to give up control over some of its territory. This is known as the Camp David Accords and it later earned Carter an award of the Nobel Peace Prize; American taxpayers are still paying the massive bill for this treaty, and many concerned about the future of Israel dislike Carter for his persistent attempts to coerce Israel into giving up land and security.
In 1979, Carter's appeasement and naivete badly embarrassed the United States when the Iran hostage crisis occurred. Carter angered Iranian Muslims by allowing the deposed Shah of Iran to obtain medical treatment in the United States, at the insistence of Henry Kissinger and other globalists. Muslims stormed and captured the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held everyone hostage for more than a year, creating a daily crisis. At one point Carter planned a rescue attempt, but then called it off at the last minute, only to result in the American soldiers crashing and dying in the desert.
Carter had other missteps. Friendly to the communist Soviet Union for years and even negotiating the SALT II arms reduction treaty with it (which the Senate refused to ratify), Carter was then embarrassed when the Soviet Union brutally invaded Afghanistan in 1980. Carter responded weakly by merely boycotting the Summer Olympics in Moscow (and the Soviet Union retaliated four years later by boycotting the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles). Carter also ran the economy into the ground, resulting in unemployment, a stagnant consumer demand for goods, and record-high inflation (the combination of all three was called "stagflation"), and then accusing the American people of having a "national malaise." It is easy to see why Carter lost reelection in 1980.
Debate: Should President Ford have pardoned former President Nixon?