THE END OF THE GOLDEN AGE ★^1043on millions of Americans and had tried to disrupt the civil rights movement.
The CIA had conducted secret operations to overthrow foreign governments
and had tried to assassinate foreign leaders. It had even recruited a secret army
to fight in Laos, a neighbor of Vietnam. Abuses of power, in other words, went
far beyond the misdeeds of a single president.
Along with Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, and the Vietnam War itself, the
Church Committee revelations seriously undermined Americans’ confidence
in their own government. They led Congress to enact new restrictions on the
power of the FBI and CIA to spy on American citizens or conduct operations
abroad without the knowledge of lawmakers. Congress also strengthened the
Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), initially enacted in 1966. Since 1974, the
FOIA has allowed scholars, journalists, and ordinary citizens to gain access to
millions of pages of records of federal agencies.
Liberals, who had despised Nixon throughout his career, celebrated his
downfall. They did not realize that the revulsion against Watergate under-
mined the foundations of liberalism itself, already weakened by the divisions
of the 1960s. For liberalism rests, in part, on belief in the ability of government,
especially the federal government, to solve social problems and promote both
the public good and individual freedom. Nixon’s fall and the revelations of
years of governmental misconduct helped to convince many Americans that
conservatives were correct when they argued that to protect liberty it was nec-
essary to limit Washington’s power over Americans’ lives. The Watergate crisis
also distracted attention from the economic crisis that began in the fall of 1973.
Its inability to fashion a response to this crisis, which gripped the United States
for much of the 1970s, dealt liberalism yet another blow.
THE END OF THE GOLDEN AGE
The Decline of Manufacturing
During the 1970s, the long period of postwar economic expansion and con-
sumer prosperity came to an end, succeeded by slow growth and high inflation.
For the only time in the twentieth century, other than the 1930s, the average
American ended the 1970s poorer than when the decade began. There were
many reasons for the end of capitalism’s “golden age.” With American pros-
perity seemingly unassailable and the military- industrial complex thriving,
successive administrations had devoted little attention to the less positive eco-
nomic consequences of the Cold War. To strengthen its anticommunist allies,
the United States promoted the industrial reconstruction of Japan and Ger-
many and the emergence of new centers of manufacturing in places like South
In what ways did the opportunities of most Americans diminish in the 1970s?