Richard Nixon was sworn in at noon on January 20, 1969. Between that date and American withdrawal from Vietnam in 1975, President Nixon carried on this war as though he expected to "win" it, at least until his resignation on August 9, 1974. During this period, Nixon pursued three major policy initiatives, ending the Vietnam War, deploying anti-ballistic missiles defenses, and retreating from the positions established by the Supreme Court in desegregating the nation's public schools. Dr. Henry Kissinger was the president's National Security Adviser and laid the foundation for Nixon's trip to China in 1972. As a result of this trip, the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC), Nixon laid the foundation for the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China. The PRC also succeeded to Taiwan's seat at the United Nations. In exchange for this concession, the United States should have, but did not demand, that the PRC withdraw its troops from Tibet. It had occupied this Buddhist country in 1950 in violation of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter. Since 1950, the PRC has systematically killed an estimated 800,000 Tibetens, and in 1995 appointed its own Panchen Lama, an eight-year old child, to be the successor to the Dalai Lama, the religious leader of the Buddhists. The legitimate Dalai Lama is now a refugee. Domestically, however, Vietnam occupied center stage from January 20, 1969 to August 9, 1974. Richard Nixon also engaged in the secret bombing of Cambodia. According to Tom Wicker, "The president ordered and Kissinger arranged a sustained bombing campaign, kept secret from the American public and requiring doctored Air Force records to remove all traces of the bombing from the history of the war." Notwithstanding, the New York Times ran a story about this illegal bombing of a friendly neutral on May 8, 1969. About a year later, Nixon announced a joint American-South Vietnamese operation into Cambodia, noting at the same time that "for five years, neither the U.S. nor South Vietnam moved against those sanctuaries [in Cambodia]. " This statement was false on its face; Nixon lied to the American public, describing his action as "winding the war down" when in fact he was expanding its reach to Cambodia. Antiwar protests mounted.
Nixon could not have been unaware of antiwar protests as early as 1965, even though he was not occupying any elective office then. However, in 1964 an obscure organization called Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) publicly announced there would be a demonstration in Washington on April 17, 1965. The date was not chosen by accident. President Johnson was scheduled to and did deliver a speech at Johns Hopkins University on April 7. In his speech, Johnson announced he was then ready for "unconditional negotiations" -- but not with the National Liberation Front (NLF) and only to negotiate an "independent South Vietnam." If the speech had any effect, it probably increased the anger at Johnson's duplicity and galvanized more people into action. The SDS march in Washington brought out an estimated 25,000 demonstrators, at that time, the largest demonstration in the city's history. Demonstrations continued into the 1970s throughout the entire country. On November 15, 1969 a million people marched against the war, after a demonstration in New York in October of an estimated 400,000 people. About year to a year and a half later, the Supreme Court ruled in the so-called Pentagon Papers case. New York Times v. United States, 403 U.S. 713 (1971).
On June 13, 1971 the New York Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers, a classified, seven thousand page document commissioned by President Johnson's Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. These documents were leaked to the press by Daniel Ellsburg who was later indicted for his role in the case. Ironically, the case against Ellsburg was later dismissed for governmental misconduct.
Initially, Nixon was not particularly upset with publication of the Pentagon Papers which were critical of American involvement in Vietnam. According to one of Nixon's biographers, Tom Wicker in his book, One of Us, Dr. Henry Kissinger "was beside himself with rage and fear....He figured frequently in the Pentagon Papers, for one thing, owing to his work as a consultant for the Johnson administration; and he did not wish to be connected with that earlier and none too admirable history....Daniel Ellsburg, in fact, had drafted -- at Kissinger's instigation -- an important transition paper on Vietnam that had first guided Nixon's policy in Southeast Asia." Nixon now shared Kissinger's feelings up to a point.
On June 15, 1971 the Nixon Administration secured an order from the District Court temporarily enjoining publication. Three days later, the judge of that court denied a permanent injunction, but a judge of the Court of Appeals blocked further publication pending an appeal by the United States. On June 25, the Supreme Court agreed to hear an expedited appeal by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. In the District Court for the District of Columbia, the judge rendered judgment from which the United States appealed and the Court of Appeals affirmed. During this process and in argument before the Supreme Court, the Pentagon Papers case became better known by far than any other case before the Supreme Court. Every newspaper in the country carried the story in banner headlines. Television and radio news carried almost hourly reports on the judicial process and what the Pentagon Papers -- entitled "History of U.S. Decision-Making Process on Viet Nam Policy -- " was all about.
On June 30, 1971 the Supreme Court, by 6-3, held that the United States had not met the heavy burden of showing justification for the imposition of prior restraint on publication of the Pentagon Papers; it would have been in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. Chief Justice Warren Burger, appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon and was sworn in on June 23, 1969 dissented. "I suggest," he wrote, "that we are in this posture [of not knowing the facts] because these cases have been conducted in unseemly haste....Here, moreover, the frenetic haste is due in large part to the manner in which the Times proceeded from the date it got the purloined documents." Even so, Erwin N. Griswold, Solicitor General of the United States observed after the decision that "It turned out as it should."
The aftermath of the Pentagon Papers case had implications for later actions of President Nixon. In July, 1971 Nixon authorized Egil Krogh to get information discrediting Ellsberg; he didn't trust either the CIA or the FBI. Krogh put together a secret unit later referred to as the "plumbers;" they had the duty of stopping informational leaks in the Nixon Administration. Two members of the plumbers unit proposed to and did break into the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding in Los Angeles. Fielding was Ellsberg's psychiatrist. As Tom Wicker wrote in One of Us, the Fielding break-in over the Labor Day weekend "produced nothing of use to the plumbers, much less to national security." Krogh agreed to the break-in because "he thought the doctor's files might show whether Ellsberg was acting under Soviet influence." In stead of reporting the plumbers to the police, as he probably should have, John Ehrlichman saw his job "as protecting the president, not exposing him," again according to Tom Wicker. Ehrlichman was one of two chief aides to President Nixon. The other was Robert Haldeman.
On June 7, 1971 an article by Marine Corps veteran, Colonel Robert D. Heinl, Jr. appeared in the Armed Forces Journal. The article, entitled "The Collapse of the Armed Forces" in turn appeared in Vietnam and America: A Documented History, published by the Grove Press in 1995. The first two paragraphs of this long article suggest the dimensions of the military problem within the armed forces in Vietnam and Germany.
The morale, discipline and battleworthiness of the U.S. Armed Forces are, with a few salient exceptions lower and worse than at any time in this century and possibly in the history of the United States. By every conceivable indicator, our army that now remains in Vietnam is in state bordering on collapse, with individual units avoiding or having refused combat, murdering their officers and noncommissioned officers, drug-ridden, and dispirited where not near-mutinous. Elsewhere than Vietnam the situation is nearly as serious. Intolerably clobbered and buffeted from without and within by social turbulence, pandemic drug addiction, race war, sedition, civilian scapegoatise, draftee recalcitrance and malevolence, barracks theft and common crime, unsupported in their travail by the general government, in Congress, as well as the Executive branch, distrusted, disliked and often reviled by the general public, the uniformed services today are places of agony for the loyal, silent professionals who doggedly hang on and try to keep the ship afloat.
According to a note in the Introduction of this article, its editors state: " It was hard to dismiss the views of Colonel Heinl, a combat veteran with twenty-seven years' experience in the Marines....and author of five books...." Whether this article was ever read by or described to President Nixon is unknown. He continued with conduct calculated "to end the war with honor."
The year 1971 was not all bad for President Nixon. On July 9 Henry Kissinger made a secret trip to Beijing to start the process of normalizing relations with the People's Republic of China. Nixon had complicated reasons for this step. Nixon saw a rapprochement with Beijing as influencing Moscow to help with a settlement of the war in Vietnam. When Nixon made his announcement about the deal in Beijing, Moscow reacted predictably with shock as did officials in Hanoi. They felt betrayed by the Chinese. Nixon also said he would travel to China in mid-1972. He travelled to Bejing in February, 1972 and had long discussions with Mao Tse-tung. Nixon's trip was a big domestic political plus, particularly since in October, 1971 he had announced a summit meeting for May, 1972 in Moscow. At this summit meeting, Brezhnev and Nixon would sign the ABM Treaty. Nixon was a success on the international scene, except for Vietnam. China, a nation of about one billion people was brought into the international community, and Nixon was continuing down the road to limitation of nuclear weapons.
An agreement to end war was not signed until the Paris Peace Accords of January 29, 1973. Even after the agreement was signed, there was about two years of fighting still ahead. The war finally ended with the fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975. Some 58,000 Americans died in this war that even Robert McNamara described as a "horrible mistake." Mr. McNamara was Secretaty of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
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Escape from Vietnam
An American official punches a man in the face during the evacuation of Nha Trang, dated April 1, 1975
Just before election day in November, 1972 Nixon had another problem. Russell Means and some native Americans from the American Indian Movement (AIM) moved into the Washington office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They had discussions in mind about all the treaties the United States had made with Indian nations and broken. The trip from Denver to Washington was called "The Trail of Broken Treaties." Means wrote a book about these and other wrongs, Where White Men Fear to Tread, published in 1995 by St. Martin's Press. AIM and Means took on the federal government during the 1970s, demonstrated at Mount Rushmore -- the Indian claim to title seems valid historically -- and for seventy-one days AIM withstood the attack of heavily armed federal agents at Wounded Knee. There, in 1860, American soldiers had killed Indian women and children, moving the Sioux out of land wanted by the United States. Endpapers of the book show maps of the Great Sioux Indian Reservation of 1890. However, according to Means, by then "the white man had already stolen the Black Hills [of the Dakotahs] and much of the land reserved by the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868." That treaty "granted to the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe the unqualified right of 'absolute and undisturbed use and occupation' of their reservation lands." Justice Thomas had no trouble finding a way around this language. South Dakota v. Bourland, 113 S.Ct. 2309 (1993). "Congress," he wrote, "has the power to abrogate Indians' treaty rights." Justices Blackmun and Souter joined in an a strongly-worded dissent. In 1973, Means was charged with crimes arising out of Indian occupation of Wounded Knee, the site of the Sioux Massacre there in 1890. However, he was acquitted on some charges and the rest were dismissed because of governmental misconduct. At Wounded Knee, Nixon had a small shooting war on his hands, but he refused to negotiate as long as the Indians occupied their territory as described in the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868.
While President Nixon was managing the Vietnam War, he was also looking at reelection in 1972. He had kept the promises made to his Southern supporters by nominating Warren Burger as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. Burger took his oath of office on June 23, 1969. One early case was destined to reach the Supreme Court from Virginia, and Nixon may have known what outcome would be favorable from his point of view. Bradley v. School Board of Richmond, Virginia, 338 F. Supp. 67 (CD Va. 1972). There, the District Court made the only possible decision in ordering school districts in two adjoining counties consolidated with a third for the purpose of achieving racial balance. Busing was not involved. On appeal, the District Court judgment was reversed at a hearing en banc. Bradley v. School Board of Richmond, Virginia, 462 F.2nd 1058 (4th Cir. 1973). Judge Winter dissented, excoriating his judicial colleagues. The Supreme Court affirmed the Court of Appeals by a 4-4 vote in a per curiam order, Justice Powell not participating. See 412 U.S. 92. "The judgment is affirmed by an equally divided court." However, while this judicial travesty was being decided in Virginia, another case in Michigan was working its way through the federal court system and reached the Supreme Court. Milliken v. Bradley, 418 U.S. 717 (1974).
The Detroit school district, then the fifth largest in the country, covered 140 square miles; at the time of the litigation in 1970, its school population of almost 290,000, was 65 percent black and 35 percent white -- a substantial recent growth due to white flight from Detroit to its suburbs. The District Court held that the Detroit School District had engaged in segregative practices. It concluded that the only way to achieve the racial balance mandated by Green v. New Kent County was to order busing that included some of the surrounding suburban school districts. The Court of Appeals affirmed, fearing that not to to do so would "nullify Brown v. Board of Education" and "restore the separate but equal doctrine" of Plessy v. Ferguson. In the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Burger wrote for the narrow 5-4 majority, with Justices Douglas, White, Marshall, and Brennan dissenting.
In Milliken v. Bradley, parents and others brought an action in the District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan. The action sought relief from illegal segregation in the Detroit school system. After a trial, the court found the system was illegally segregated, 338 F. Supp. 582. In its opinion, the court found that: "Governmental actions and inaction at all levels federal, state and local, have combined with those of private organizations, such as lending institutions and real estate associations and brokerage firms, to establish and maintain the pattern of residential segregation throughout the Detroit metropolitan area."
After an appeal, the Court remanded the case to the trial court, directing it to prepare a metropolitan desegregation plan. By this, the Court of Appeals meant not only Detroit in Wayne County, but also the 85 school systems in adjoining Macomb and Oakland Counties. 468 F.2d 902. The District Court acted by preparing a multidistrict desegregation plan. 345 F. Supp. 914. The state agencies appealed, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. In other words, a constitutionally adequate system of desegregated schools could not be established within Wayne County alone and that a metropolitan multidistrict was essential, 484 F.2d 215 (CA6). In part, the court held that "any less comprehenve a solution than a metropolitan area plan would result in an all black school system [in Wayne County where Detroit is situated] immediately surrounded by practically all white suburban school systems, with an overwhelmingly white majority population in the total metropolitan area."
Writing for a bitterly divided court, Chief Justice Burger had difficulty getting around this record, but he found a way. He simply wrote: "With no showing of significant violation by the 53 [suburban] outlying school districts and no evidence of any interdistrict violation or effect, the [District and Court of Appeals] court went beyond the original theory of the case as framed by the pleadings and mandated a metropolitan area remedy," This said the Chief Justice "was wholly impermissible."
In a dissent written by Justice White with whom Justices Douglas, Brennan, and Marshall join, Justice White wrote: "Regretfully, and for several reasons, I can join neither the Court's judgment nor its opinion. The core of my disagreement is that deliberate acts of segregation and their consequences will go unremedied, not because a remedy would be infeasible or unreasonable in terms of the usual criteria governing school desegregation cases, but because an effective remedy would cause what the Court considers to be an undue administrative inconvenience to the State. The result is that the State of Michigan, the entity at which the the Fourteenth Amendment is directed, has successfully insulated itself from its duty to provide effective desegregation remedies by vesting sufficient power over its public schools in its local school districts. If this is the case in Michigan, it will be the case in most States....I am even more mystified as to how the Court can ignore the legal reality that the constitutional violations, even if occurring locally, were committed by governmental entities for which the State is responsible..."
Justice Marshall, joined by Justices Douglas, Brennan, and White, wrote a separate dissenting opinion. Marshall wrote: "In Brown v Board of Education, this court held that segregation of children in public schools on the basis of race deprives minority group children of equal educational opprotunities....After 20 years of small, often difficult steps, the Court today takes a giant step backward."
In 1972, the Supreme Court considered the death penalty in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972). It held that this penalty was a violation of the Eighth Amendment which stated that "cruel and unusual punishment [shall not be] inflicted." Justice Stewart wrote for the court, noting that the Eighth Amendment incorporated a "basic concept of human dignity." He found that the death penalty was not cruel and unusual per se. However, only four years later the Supreme Court reinstated this penalty in Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153 (1976). This decision has been criticized by legal scholars. If, in other words, human dignity stands as an independent moral criterion for deciding when a punishment is cruel and unusual, then the plurality should have read into the amendment the specific moral and factual conditions that aggravate and mitigate the case for capital punishment. In Furman, Justice Stewart also emphasized that constitutional acknowledgement and public acceptance of the death penalty strengthens its presumptive validity and that retribution is a valid legislative consideration.
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© 1996 Danziger
Used with permission of The Christian Science Monitor
and The Los Angeles Times Syndicate
Nixon was as eager to pack the Supreme Court in 1970 as Roosevelt was in 1937. As part of his Faustian bargain with the Southern Devil, he nominated Clement F. Haynesworth, Jr. to the Supreme Court. J Edgar Hoover's FBI, when conducting the background check, overlooked Haynesworth's segregationist baggage and instead sent a glowing report. He had consistently voted against civil rights in opinions he wrote as a judge of the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The Senate declined to confirm the nomination. Never one to give up, Nixon instructed Harry Dent, an aide, to find a judge even more conservative than Haynesworth. Nixon's search team came up with Florida's Harold Carswell. According to Kenneth O'Reilly's book, Nixon's Piano, Carswell was considered "a boob, a dummy" by Senator Birch Bayh. Another Nixon aide, Bruce Harlow agreed with Bayh's description. But the FBI was ecstatic, having completely missed Carswell's segregationist background and his attitude of white supremecy. So, Carswell was rejected by the Senate, too. Desperate, Nixon finally nominated Justice Blackmun, a moderate, and an exhausted Senate confirmed the nomination.
Milliken v. Bradley was decided in 1974. Richard Nixon had been overwhelmingly reelected in 1972 running against George McGovern. Ironically, his popular vote -- 60.7 and all but 18 electoral votes -- Nixon probably got less than an impressive share of the black vote in 1972. They wanted the United States to withdraw from Vietnam, since the war required so much federal funding, the needs of black Americans were being ignored. Among other things, black Americans found it very difficult to move to the suburbs and better schools for their children.
Another Nixon Supreme Court, Justice Lewis Powell, wrote for the majority in Village of Arlington Heights, Illinois v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corporation, 429 U.S. 252 (1977). Metropolitan Housing was a non-profit real estate developer which had contracted to purchase a tract of land in suburban Arlington Heights about fifteen miles from Chicago. Some 190 units of racially integrated residential units for low and moderate income groups were planned. The local plannning authorities refused to change the zoning from single family to multi-family classification. The area involved was owned by a religious order, and the contract was subject to cancellation unless the zoning change was approved. It was not approved after hearings before the local Planning Commission, and three black Americans filed suit alleging racial discrimination. With three dissents, the Supreme Court rejected the claim of racial discrimination violative of the Fourteenth Amendment. Citing an earlier case, Justice Powell wrote that "official action will not be held unconstitutional solely because it results in racially disproportionate impact." The quoted language is little better than an empty formalism designed to skirt equal protection with the added feature of denying black Americans a right to move to all-white suburban areas created by white flight from inner cities.
Despite his Faustian bargain with the representatives of the white South, Nixon's undoing began in Washington on the night of June 17, 1972. The Democratic Party headquarters in the Watergate complex there were broken into and burgled. The Washington Post led the press in getting the ensuing story and wrote a bestselling book, All the President's Men. Later, it was a film produced with some, but not all of the story behind the story. Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward kept the story alive with their news in the Washington Post, and the rest of the press had to take some of what they got about Watergate from Bernstein and Woodward. These two reporters had a secret source named Deep Throat whose identity remained a secret. Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies is an anthology discussing quite a few films, one of which was All the President's Men. William E. Leuchtenburg offers some comments on that film. "[It] succeeds brilliantly in providing the public policy context of Watergate. Its use of television footage also gives the film a cinema verité quality. Yet despite its virtuosity, All the President's Men still conveys a highly misleading impression of how Nixon and his cronies met their fate. The film draws to a close in 1973 with the completion of the Post's Watergate investigation -- but, curiously, with Nixon, reelected to a second term, triumphant....It leaves out almost all of the history of the Watergate affair. Sen. Sam Ervin, whose select committee held the first Congressional Watergate hearings and discovers the existence of the White House tapes, never makes an appearance. Nor does Congressman Peter Rodino, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee that approved three articles of impeachment against Nixon;"
Linda Wertheimer is editor of a book entitled Listening to America: Twenty-Five Years in the Life of a Nation as Heard on National Public Radio. She did a good job of filling in most of the gaps in All the President's Men. The dimensions of the Watergate scandal are breathtaking. An Attorney General of the United States was convicted of obstructing justice. John Mitchell controlled a secret fund of about $500,000 for use against the Democrats and those on the president's Enemies List, for forging letters and leaking false news items to the press. Maurice Stans and John Mitchell were charged with taking $250,000 from Robert Vesco, now a fugitive living in Cuba, in exchange for deleting information about to be used by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Some material had disappeared from FBI files. This material rested on illegal wiretaps ordered by Henry Kissinger, and it turned up in John Ehrlichman's office. He and Haldeman were both convicted in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal.
In Listening to America, there is an account of Congressman Emanuel Cellar's interview on National Public Radio on May 16, 1973. In part, he said:
I wonder how many of our citizens were as frightened as I was by the ways of the Watergate revelations. But for the courage of a federal judge and the persistence of some of the press, a sickening perversion of our whole political process would have become a standard of political behaviour.
On June 26, 1973 John Dean III, Counsel to the President, testified before Senate Watergate Committee. He accused Nixon of participating directly in the cover-up of the Watergate burglary. Dean read a 245-page statement to members of the committee that was televised nationally on all three networks. Josh Darsa covered the hearings for National Public Radio (NPR). In part, Darsa said:
Darsa: If it wasn't vivid before, today's session of the Watergate hearings conclusively illustrated the one fact in this investigation upon which hinges the future course of this committee, this administration, and history. The fact is that John Dean at this moment is alone in presenting what he says he believes is the truth in the Watergate affair. If John Dean can be corroborated by other figures involved in Watergate, if his testimony before this committee can be cemented, if what he is saying is the truth, then the ramifications are enormous. Here's Senator Talmadge of Georgia:
Talmadge: Mr. Dean, your charges are very grave. What makes you think your credibility is greater than the president's?
Dean: I've told the truth as I've seen it.
Darsa: Senator Montoya, reflecting on the president's April 17 statement of this year saying, "I condemn any attempts to cover up in this case, no matter who is involved.
Montoya: Was the president telling the truth when he made that statement?
Dean: No, sir. By that time he knew the full implications of the case. Haldeman and Ehrlichman were still on the staff. There was considerable pressure that they remain.
On July 16, 1973 Alexander Butterfield, Deputy White House Chief of Staff almost casually disclosed that Nixon secretly recorded conversations held in the Oval Office of the White House. President Nixon remained in office for about one year after this disclosure. Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned in disgrace, pleading guilty to tax evasion, not paying taxes on bribes paid to him while he was Governor of Maryland. Nixon named Congressman Gerald Ford to replace Agnew as vice-president. Elliott Richardson who had become Attorney General of the United States after Mitchell's resignation, was fired by Nixon on November 20, 1973. Nixon had ordered Richardson to fire Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox who had announced he would probably subpoena the White House tapes. Richardson refused to fire Cox, and resigned. Instead, Leon Jaworski was named Special Prosecutor, and Robert Bork, Solicitor General of the United States fired Cox. The House decided to hold hearings for the purpose of presenting a bill of impeachment agaimst Nixon. If adopted by the full House, the Senate would conduct the trial with the Chief Justice presiding. Had the process gone that far, one has to wonder if Burger would have recused himself as an appointee of Nixon. Burger, however, did write for a unanimous court in Nixon, President of the United States v. United States, 418 U. S. 683 (1974).
In this case, Leon Jaworski, Special Prosecutor, filed a third party subpoena for the production of certain tapes held by the president. President Nixon, claiming executive privilege, resisted compliance. The Supreme Court held on July 24, 1974 that Nixon had to produce the tapes. Nixon sought to claim virtually unlimited privilege as executive by arguing that the judiciary was without jurisdiction to review a presidential assertion of executive privilege. See Nixon v. Sirica, 487 F.2d 700 (DC Cir. 1973). Justice Rehnquist, named to the court by Richard Nixon in November, 1971 took no part in the consideration or decisions of these cases. President Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974 very soon after the Supreme Court affirmed the order to produce the tapes. In an accompanying statement, he admitted the tapes subpoened contained statements "at variance with certain of my previous statements." A month after Nixon's resignation and departure from Washington, President Ford unconditionally pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed while in office.
Ford was nominated by the Republicans at their convention in 1976. He ran unsuccessfully against Democrat Jimmy Carter, formerly Governor of Georgia and a graduate of the Navy college in Annapolis, Maryland. Carter got 50.1 percent of the popular vote and 297 electoral votes. Ford got 48 percent of the popular vote and 240 electoral votes. Jimmy Carter contributed more to his country after he had served one full term. He may be remembered as the president at the time Iranians occupied the American Embassy in Teheran and didn't leave until Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980. He was also president during the second oil shock sending prices skyrocketing -- the first oil shock was in 1974. However, high interest rates and the hostage situation were probably the most important factors in Carter's defeat.
During its thirteen-year journey through the federal courts, President Carter did involve himself in a bitter dispute involving religious fundamentalism in the South, one that echoed the racism of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, Bob Jones University v. United States, 461 U.S. 574 (1983). In their book, Storming the Gates: Protest Politics and the Republican Revival, Dan Baltz and Ronald Brownstein touch on this case. As the Supreme Court noted, "Bob Jones University is not affiliated with any religious denomination, but is dedicated to the teaching and propagation of its fundamentalist Christian religious beliefs."
Until 1970, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) granted tax exempt status to private schools without regard to their racial admissions policies. That policy changed in January, 1970 after the decision in Green v. Kennedy, 309 F. Supp. 1127 appeal dismissed Cannon v. Green, 398 U.S. 956 (1970). That case prohibited the IRS from according tax exempt status to private schools in Mississippi that discriminated as to admissions on the basis of race. In 1971, Bob Jones University in South Carolina instituted an action seeking to enjoin the IRS from revoking its tax exempt status. The Supreme Court held that the University could not request injunctive relief before it paid a tax on income. It finally paid $21 and sued to recover it. The trial court held that revocation of the university's tax exempt status exceeded the delegated powers of the IRS and violated the university's rights under the Religion Clause of the First Amendment. 468 F. Supp. 890 (SC Dist. 1978). After the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit reversed the lower court in 1980, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Goldsboro Christian Schools, Inc. v. United States was consolidated with Bob Jones University for purposes of argument. In November, 1981 Representative Trent Lott (R. Miss.) moved the court for permission to file an amicus uriae (friend of the court) brief in both cases. His motion was granted at 454 U.S. 1121. As of 1995, Lott was a United States Senator from Missisasippi. In his brief, Lott argued that his Mississippi constituents were engaged in enterprises that would be threatened by the loss of tax exempt status for Goldsboro Christian Schools. It seemed clear he was referring to contributions made as to which his constituents in Mississippi claimed a deduction on their tax returns for contributions made to religious institutions in North and South Carolina, both of which were segregated. These constituents were in effect subsidizing segregation the court found inconsistent with the national interest. See also Green v. Connally, 330 F.Supp. 1150 (DC 1970), summarily affirmed Coit v Green, 404 U.S. 997 (1971). This was a case in which the IRS was sued by parents of black public school children to enjoin the IRS from according tax exempt status to private schools in Mississippi that discriminated against blacks. The IRS said it was without authority to deny the exemption, but did so in 1970 reacting to an injunction issued in Green v. Kennedy.
Finally, the Supreme Court affirmed the judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit that denied tax exempt status to segregated Christian schools in the South. Their teaching of religious fundamentalism did not bring them within the Free Exercise of Religion Clause of the First Amendment. Justice Rehnquist dissented. So, until 1983, contributors to these universities were subsidizing the political missionaries of the fundamentalist religious right.
In 1980, Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan who promptly abandoned efforts to deny tax exempt status to Bob Jones University. The Supreme Court was forced to exercise its power to appoint counsel. It appointed William Coleman, Jr. who successfully argued the position abandoned by Reagan.
All contents © 1996 William M. Brinton
All photographs © Archive Photos, New York
All film © Archive Film, New York