"I thoroughly enjoyed every single chapter of Morning in America! Gil Troy has written a wonderful book: important, full of fresh insights, and fun to read. I especially like how he weaves the cultural phenomena of the time with Reagan's personal qualities and influence, showing how Reagan was affected by the culture around him and how he changed it."--Lesley Stahl, Correspondent, 60 Minutes

"Bravo! Gil Troy's readable, entertaining, and compelling book does a masterful job of capturing the challenges Ronald Reagan and I faced in office. This superb book's original insight into the linkage between politics and culture not only explains what happened during Reagan's presidency and the 1980s, it offers essential insight into the continuing debates about the key challenges facing North Americans today."--The Right Honourable Brian Mulroney, Former Prime Minister of Canada

"Lively and insightful; will equally fascinate admirers and detractors of the Reagan presidency."--David Frum, author of How We Got Here: The 70s--The Decade That Brought You Modern Life

"This fast-paced, consistently readable book successfully combines two difficult tasks. It is at once a first-rate interpretive presidential history and a stimulating exposition of the culture of the 1980s. Troy has given us a sweeping, balanced--and indispensable--account of the Reagan Era."--Alonzo L. Hamby, Ohio University, author of For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s

"This remarkable book is well structured, replete with insight and fresh interpretations, nuanced, and written with verve and passion. Reading it was both thoroughly enjoyable and thoroughly informative."--Bruce Schulman, Boston University, author of The Seventies

"I thoroughly enjoyed every single chapter of Morning in America! Gil Troy has written a wonderful book: important, full of fresh insights, and fun to read. I especially like how he weaves the cultural phenomena of the time with Reagan's personal qualities and influence, showing how Reagan was affected by the culture around him and how he changed it."--Lesley Stahl, Correspondent,60 Minutes

"Bravo! Gil Troy's readable, entertaining, and compelling book does a masterful job of capturing the challenges Ronald Reagan and I faced in office. This superb book's original insight into the linkage between politics and culture not only explains what happened during Reagan's presidency and the 1980s, it offers essential insight into the continuing debates about the key challenges facing North Americans today."--The Right Honourable Brian Mulroney, Former Prime Minister of Canada

"Lively and insightful; will equally fascinate admirers and detractors of the Reagan presidency."--David Frum, author ofHow We Got Here: The 70s--The Decade That Brought You Modern Life

"This fast-paced, consistently readable book successfully combines two difficult tasks. It is at once a first-rate interpretive presidential history and a stimulating exposition of the culture of the 1980s. Troy has given us a sweeping, balanced--and indispensable--account of the Reagan Era."--Alonzo L. Hamby, Ohio University, author of For the Survival of Democracy: Franklin Roosevelt and the World Crisis of the 1930s

"This remarkable book is well structured, replete with insight and fresh interpretations, nuanced, and written with verve and passion. Reading it was both thoroughly enjoyable and thoroughly informative."--Bruce Schulman, Boston University, author ofThe Seventies

Morning in America

How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

CHAPTER 1

1980Cleveland

"There You Go Again!"Defeating Defeatism—and Jimmy Carter

I would like to be president, because I would like to see thiscountry become once again a country where a little six-year-oldgirl can grow up knowing the same freedom that I knewwhen I was six years old, growing up in America.RONALD REAGAN, CAMPAIGN SPEECH, 1976

Even though he was president of the United States, the most powerfulman on earth, Jimmy Carter was nervous. True, he dismissed his opponent,Ronald Reagan, as a lightweight. But three weeks before theNovember 1980 presidential election, the numbers were looking soft.

It had not been an easy twelve months, with the crown prince ofCamelot, Senator Edward Kennedy, challenging Carter for the DemocraticParty nomination, the Iranians kidnapping American diplomats,the Russians invading Afghanistan, the military failing to free thehostages, and special prosecutors investigating brother Billy's lobbyingfor Libya. Besides, American morale was down, and the economy wasplummeting. Inflation and interest rates were soaring—both were inthe double digits.

The presidential debate was taking place in Cleveland, Ohio, a symbolof America's ills. Once Cleveland was one of the Northeast's manyjewels, a glittering gem on that prosperous, productive I-90 necklacecircling the Great Lakes along with Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Toledo,and Chicago. Now "the mistake by the lake," like its sister cities, was asad punchline, another disaster area. "What is the difference betweenCleveland and the Titanic?" wags asked. "Cleveland has a better orchestra."Cleveland suffered all the urban Rust Belt diseases—crime, racialconflict, decaying infrastructure, "deindustrialization," pollution. In 1969the Cuyahoga River, brimming with chemical gunk, burst into flame,epitomizing the Northeast's decline.

The presidency had aged Jimmy Carter. Still healthy at fifty-three,over a decade younger than his Republican rival, Carter jogged, playedtennis, swam, hunted, fished—when he had time. But his face, newlycreased, wore the burdens of office. His brown hair had grayedconsiderably.

Carter looked like a pinched parson in his severe Sunday suit duringhis ninety-minute debate with Ronald Reagan. He occasionally baredhis teeth, but the grimace was nothing like the full-toothed million-wattsmile that defined his Cinderella-like rise to power in 1976. Duringthe debate, straining to appear folksy, he invoked his daughter Amywhen advocating nuclear arms limitations. But Americans were notready to consult a thirteen-year-old girl regarding global strategy. Theperfectionist, usually unflappable president ended his flaccid performanceby thanking "the people of Cleveland and Ohio for being suchhospitable hosts during these last few hours in my life"—his syntaxsuggesting he was facing the executioner, not the electorate.

By contrast, Ronald Reagan triumphed that October night. Afterstumbling early on in Iowa, Reagan had run a smooth primary effort.The general campaign began with some gaffes, as the candidateseemed to endorse creationism, praised Vietnam as a "noble cause"—whichwould sound less controversial a decade later—and suggestedthat trees generate more air pollution than cars. Despite the occasionalprotest sign picturing a tree saying "Stop me before I kill again," Reaganhad shrugged off the errors and plunged ahead.

Reagan was an accomplished showman, a veteran actor who couldnot understand how anyone could master modern politics without ashow business background. Reagan's ease set a winning contrast to thepresident's stiffness. When Carter attacked, Reagan shook his head,kindly, condescendingly, more sad than angry, and dispatched the incumbentpresident by laughing off the criticism, saying, "There you goagain."

Even though many liberals grumbled that Jimmy Carter governedfrom the right, even though many conservatives grumbled that RonaldReagan moderated his views to win, this election offered Americans adramatic choice. It was not just a contrast between Reagan's affabilityand Carter's intensity, between the actor and the engineer. Rather, thetwo candidates had contradictory diagnoses of America's problems—andclashing cures. Jimmy Carter was steeped in 1970s' pessimism—orrealism—deeming America's problems complex, and its resources limited.Still, he trusted government to help Americans overcome. RonaldReagan was the candidate of 1950s' optimism, confident that thepeople who framed the Constitution, settled the West, freed the slaves,industrialized the continent, and crushed the Nazis could solve anyproblem. But Reagan believed that government was part of the problem,not the solution.

"I've learned that only the most complex and difficult tasks come beforeme in the Oval Office. No easy answers are found there—becauseno easy questions come there," Carter said in his acceptance speech inNew York City, itself a symbol of America's age of complexity. To Reagan,such thinking was defeatist and un-American. Reagan "utterly reject[ed]"the view "that the future will be one of sacrifice and fewopportunities." Speaking a month before Carter in Chicago, rootinghimself in America's heartland, and his own all-American, small-townIllinois hometown a short drive away, Reagan proclaimed: "The Americanpeople, the most generous on earth, who created the highest standardof living, are not going to accept the notion that we can onlymake a better world for others by moving backwards ourselves. Thosewho believe we can have no business leading this nation."

Both candidates pitched the campaign as a referendum on the 1970s,and a referendum on the new conservative ideology evolving from theolder, prickly, less user-friendly 1960s' Barry Goldwater take-it-or-leave-it,we-need-extremism-in-defense-of-liberty variety. The winnerof such a clash of opposites would naturally proclaim a broad mandate.And it was not easy to push Ohio and New York, Massachusettsand Minnesota into the Republican column as part of Reagan's forty-four-statesweep. Yet in 1980 the electoral verdict was less clear. Even asRonald Reagan campaigned on the contrasts, even as he promised toreturn Cleveland and other American communities in crisis to a goldenage, even as he forged a potentially revolutionary coalition, this shrewdpolitician and his aides banked on riding an anti-Carter wave into theWhite House.

The 1970s: America Unmoored—and Unhappy

It made sense to build a strategy around rejecting Carter, for Americanswere grouchy in 1980. Too many Americans saw too many Cleveland-likepathologies too close to their own homes. Potential voters seemedunhappy with Carter, Reagan, and the independent maverick, IllinoisCongressman John Anderson. It had been a rough decade. It was notjust the litany of traumas Carter mentioned in his acceptance: "thecivil rights revolution, the bitterness of Vietnam, the shame of Watergate,the twilight peace of nuclear terror." The 1970s was a time ofpolitical drift, international weakness, moral upheaval, and economicdisaster. Carter's "misery index" from 1976, combining inflation andunemployment, nearly doubled in four years from 12.5 to over 20.When the campaign began in September, the annual inflation rate was22.3 percent, the prime rate at 11.25 percent. As the inflation rate, theunemployment rate, and the divorce rate all soared, American confidenceplummeted.

The 1970s should have been a great time for Americans, a timewhen the promise of the 1960s was fulfilled and a "time to heal," inPresident Gerald R. Ford's words, from the previous decade. The civildisorder of the students' revolt had ended. America of the 1970s hadmany new programs, policies, philosophies, and practices to improvelife. The civil rights movement had triumphed. Grassroots action,Supreme Court decisions, and political leadership had dismantled theugly Jim Crow structure oppressing blacks and trapping southerners ina vicious, defensive politics of yesteryear. The Great Society was a factof life, fighting poverty, advancing education, building housing, welcomingimmigrants, protecting the environment. Détente had begun.The United States was negotiating with its formerly unapproachableCommunist adversaries, the Soviet Union and China. Moreover, womenwere empowered, gays galvanized, youth energized. Americans werefreer than ever to express themselves, to follow their destinies, to exploretheir inner selves, to indulge sensual whims. Clothing was looserand more informal, sex more casual and more available, leisure moreubiquitous and more stimulating. Life itself was easier, blessed by a hostof technological and pharmaceutical facilitators, from the pill to the calculator,from the digital clock to the microwave oven.

Instead, a great pall, a spectre of failure, a fear of disaster hauntedAmerican society. Civil rights had degenerated from seemingly clearblack and white issues to a morass of competing choices over busing,housing, jobs, and college admissions. The Great Society was boggeddown in bureaucracy, generating taxes and regulations rather thanguaranteeing social justice. Détente had dissolved into an alphabetsoup of acronyms, with SALT treaties to manage MIRVs and ICBMs,even as the Soviet Union appeared more aggressive than before. Andamid all the leisure, all the liberation, all the toys, all the questing, andall the ESTing, many individuals were worrying, families were imploding,communities were exploding, and the nation seemed adrift.

Individual anxiety mirrored and intensified the sense of communalfailure. It was not just the once almighty dollar's eroding purchasingpower. It was not just the declining sense of political power. Rather,the great liberation movements of the 1960s had left many Americansfeeling unmoored. The process of redefining the roles of husbands andwives, parents and children was wrenching. The sexual revolution, andits noxious partner, the divorce revolution, disrupted countless lives. Inthe 1970s the number of men living alone doubled, as millions of husbandsresponded to Time covers trumpeting divorce and no-fault divorcelaws by breaking up families. "One million American childrenlost their families to divorce in each year of the 1970s," the journalistDavid Frum notes, "but the experts counseled the parents not toworry." Eventually, however, experts left and right would link familydisintegration to jumps in crime, anger, depression, and social dysfunction,with one analyst lamenting the new "moral wilderness filledwith children seeking revenge against older generations who haveseemed to turn their back on them."

The sixties ended messily. America sustained a series of unprecedentedblows in the decade leading up to the 1980 election. So many aspectsof the Vietnam debacle would haunt America: the loss of life; theloss of credibility among generals, politicians, and parents; the loss of aforeign policy consensus; and, eventually, the loss of Vietnam itself. Asthe United States retreated from Vietnam, it endured the oil embargoand the Watergate crisis, culminating in a runaway inflation, and thefirst presidential resignation. Gerald Ford's tenure suffered from his unpopularNixon pardon, South Vietnam's collapse, and clashes aboutbusing, even in the supposedly enlightened North. Pillars of the society,from New York City to Chrysler, flirted with bankruptcy. A host ofeither-or polarizing issues emerged that resisted the American instinctfor compromise. There seemed to be no middle ground on abortion,drug use, busing, or women's liberation. When Americans celebratedtheir nation's bicentennial in 1976, the country was reeling.

The political, economic, diplomatic, military, and social hits werebad enough, but Americans seemed strangely unable to cope withthese challenges. Americans appeared resigned and fed up. Their faithin their government ebbed, as did their faith in their own effectiveness.In 1959, 85 percent of Americans surveyed considered their "politicalinstitutions" the source of their greatest pride in their country. By1973, 66 percent polled were "dissatisfied" with the government. At thesame time, the percent of people who believed that what they thought"doesn't count much anymore" jumped from 37 percent in 1966 to 61percent in 1973. Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry and other Hollywoodmovies caricatured mayors, police chiefs, and bosses of any kind assniveling, bureaucratic, and ineffectual. Many responded by abandoningthe public sphere, following, as the former yippie Jerry Rubin did,a "journey into myself." Others stewed. The bicentennial-year hitmovie Network had Americans shouting out their windows: "I'm madas Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore."

Americans' new combination of resignation and anger threatened thebody politic. "This is the great danger America faces," CongresswomanBarbara Jordan warned at the 1976 Democratic convention, "that wewill cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interestgroups; city against suburb, region against region, individual againstindividual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants." By 1980 a new phrase,NIMBY, represented citizens' response to proposals to build landfills,prisons, sometimes even schools or factories near their homes: "Not inMy Back Yard."

The energy-inflation dynamic illustrated how America's psychic crisisexacerbated substantive challenges. Thanks to the Arab oil embargo,crude oil prices tripled from the fall of 1973 to New Year's Day,1974. As the gas-pump prices soared from thirty cents to over a dollarper gallon, inflation mushroomed. Wholesale prices jumped 14 percentfrom 1973 to 1974, making a 1967 dollar in consumer prices worthsixty-eight cents. The age of the great inflation had arrived.

Surprisingly, Japan, an energy-addicted island with far fewer naturalresources than the United States, did not suffer the same inflation. Theoil shock that hit the United States created ripple effects due to structuraleconomic weaknesses and the crisis of confidence. The economytook longer to recover as Americans struggled with a new curse, stagflation,a one-two punch of unemployment soaring along with inflation.

This same downward spiral overwhelmed many American cities.Fear, frustration, and defeatism exacerbated urban economic and socialproblems, especially in the northern Rust Belt. As factories closedand America lurched from a manufacturing economy to a serviceeconomy, Business Week questioned America's "economic viability."From 1969 to 1979, industries representing seventeen thousand jobs ayear left Cleveland, part of an estimated loss that decade of thirty-twoto thirty-eight million American jobs due to what analysts called the"deindustrialization of America." With steel, chemical, and auto partplants closing, with old houses collapsing, with the infrastructure ofstreets, sewers, bridges, and tunnels crumbling, with the urban budgettanking, with schools deteriorating, and with crime and taxationrising, middle- and upper-middle-class whites began fleeing to thesuburbs, and to the Sun Belt. Cleveland lost 9.6 percent of its populationfrom 1970 to 1973. By 1980 the population of 572,532 was backto 1910 levels.

Along with other cities such as St. Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia, andBaltimore, Cleveland relied on federal grants for over half its revenues.Mismanagement and turf battles compounded the problem. Clevelanddefaulted on fourteen million dollars in notes to local banks, the firstbig city to default since the Depression. The populist antics of DennisKucinich, the thirty-two-year-old "boy mayor," infuriated civic leadersand invited coast-to-coast mockery. "Welcome to the banana republicof Cleveland," one businessman sighed.

The failures resonated in city halls, state houses, and the WhiteHouse. By the 1960s the American presidency had become the keystoneof American political culture. It now became the focal point ofAmerica's rush toward disaster. A litany of aborted presidencies beganwith John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson's prematureretirement in 1969, Richard Nixon's forced resignation in 1974,and Gerald Ford's embarrassing defeat in 1976. "We've been a nationadrift for too long," Jimmy Carter preached in 1976. "We want to havefaith again! We want to be proud again!"

Unfortunately, Carter soon joined this march of failure. Cartersquandered goodwill with his arrogance, amateurism, impulsiveness,and half-measures. He seemed unable to whip inflation, manage theenergy crisis, tame the media, or master foreign affairs. He alienatedliberals by cutting the budget and deregulating the airlines, trucking,and banking; he shocked conservatives by embracing new values,boosting the minimum wage, and chiding cold war allies for humanrights violations. By June 1979 Carter was less popular than eitherJohnson or Ford at their respective nadirs, with a record low of 33 percentapproval. Increasingly, and characteristically for the times, expertswere beginning to question the viability of American democracy andthe presidency.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Morning in America by GIL TROY. Copyright © 2005 Gil Troy. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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