The Can't-Do Mentality

By Richard Lacayo

The quintessential image of World War II was the flag raising at Iwo Jima. For Vietnam, it was a helicopter scrambling off the U.S. embassy roof in Saigon. Apocalypse Then: the chaotic endgame of the Vietnam War fatally charged the atmosphere of the 1970s, a decade in which America discovered limits to its power and wealth. For a nation long accustomed to expansion--material, geographic and psychological--this was something new and unwelcome. Only the Great Depression--an apt name--had presented a comparable challenge to national optimism, and that was followed by the reassuring wartime victory and postwar boom. In the '70s that boom gave way to a different explosion--in oil prices, interest rates and inflation. OPEC would prove to have powers that NATO could only dream of. Even the environmental movement would sound a warning: air and water, the fundamentals of life, were in limited supply. Though that mood receded in the '80s, traces of it linger in the new skepticism about large government undertakings, whether that means health-care reform or unilateral action in the gulf.

In short, in the '70s America down-sized its expectations. Out with Pax Americana. In with the Vietnam Syndrome. Out with the Cadillac. In with the Toyota. But first, out with the President, via Watergate: nearly two years spent sifting through the rubble of Richard Nixon. Whatever hopes of a clean start were raised by Gerald Ford collapsed under the Nixon pardon and an economic crisis as impervious to Ford's WHIP INFLATION NOW buttons as it had been to Nixon's wage-and-price controls.

It was Jimmy Carter's greatest asset that he was a new face; he offered the promise of accountability in Washington and an end to Henry Kissinger's secretive realpolitik abroad. He got mixed results at home. So in the same way that Nixon found a legacy in his opening to China, Carter turned to the Panama Canal treaties and the Camp David peace accords. Both were milestones typical of the era. In one, the U.S. agreed to give up a prime keepsake of its earlier expansion; in the other, it mediated where it was powerless to dictate.

But this age of limits was still in some respects an age of exploration. The '70s were when the '60s hit home. Head shops came to suburbia. Mom took yoga. And there were days when all the world was Oh! Calcutta! As experiments do, some ended in disaster, some in the cheesy solipsisms of the Me decade. All the same, by the simple pressure of new possibilities, lives were refashioned, and not just into life-styles. Women, gays, blacks all decided to take seriously that stuff about the pursuit of happiness. Every week, when Mary Tyler Moore threw her hat into the air, a lot of people knew exactly how she felt. Seen in that forgiving light, even the sheer awfulness of '70s taste--leisure suits in grape-jelly purple, shag-carpeted vans, KC and the Sunshine Band--was just an unconfined democratic impulse set loose in the marketplace.

But something else had been set loose too. Patty Hearst, Squeaky Fromme, Jonestown--every year seemed to produce some weird episode that hinted at a deeper instability. By 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and Iranian students seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran--another embassy, another scene of humiliation--there was a feeling in the air that change must come. Let the record show that in his famous speech on the somber national mood, Jimmy Carter never once spoke the word malaise. By that time he didn't need to.