Ted Widmer is a distinguished lecturer at Macaulay Honors College of the City University of New York.
October has been ghoulish by any standard, with a horrifying mass shooting in Maine, the outbreak of war in the Middle East, the ongoing trials of a former president, the unprecedented removal of a House speaker and a bruising 22-day struggle to find a replacement.
These challenges find a distant but instructive mirror in the hellscape Americans witnessed 50 years ago. A single month in 1973 left scars that changed the country for more than a generation. Some have never healed.
In October 1973, a series of cascading crises dramatically reduced American confidence that the future would be better than the past. Watergate exposed the cynicism of a president who spied on his political rivals, denied that he had done so, then fired the officials whom he had charged with looking into it. The Arab-Israeli War, also known as the Yom Kippur War, led to an oil embargo that forced Americans to realize how vulnerable they were to the whims of nations thousands of miles away. These shocks fell hard as it became clear that the Vietnam War — finally drawing down in 1973 — had failed to achieve its objectives despite an extraordinary sacrifice.
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Understandably, Americans began to question authority and to talk in coarser accents. Some of these conversations were about Watergate, but many were not, as Americans found plenty of other reasons to complain and dissent. The left was certainly growing, at Richard M. Nixon’s expense, but so was the right, where an immense organizational energy was stirring among law-and-order types, free-marketers and evangelical Christians energized by the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion in January 1973. As angry voices rose on both sides, so did the culture war. And along the way, the center shrank.
In January 1973, Nixon stood atop the world. Reelected with one of the largest mandates in history, 60 percent of the popular vote and a 520-17 edge in the electoral college, he believed a historic political realignment was coming.
But 1973 would turn into a year of brutal reckoning. On Oct. 10, Vice President Spiro Agnew resigned after pleading no contest to a felony charge of tax evasion (after failing to convince a judge that he was above prosecution). Soon after, Nixon refused to obey a court order to turn over his Watergate tapes. On Oct. 20, in events that came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre, Nixon ordered the firing of a special prosecutor looking into Watergate, Archibald Cox. Nixon’s attorney general, Elliot L. Richardson, and his deputy, William D. Ruckelshaus, refused, then resigned. That left the third-ranking official in the Justice Department, Robert H. Bork, to fire Cox, which he did. Ten days later, on Oct. 30, the House initiated impeachment proceedings.
The Watergate narrative, so familiar, fails to tell the whole story. Nixon’s problems went even deeper, because the Middle East decided to intrude, as it so often does, in a moment of maximum inconvenience. On Oct. 6, Egyptian and Syrian armies poured into the Sinai Peninsula in the west and the Golan Heights in the east. Israel eventually repulsed the attacks, with considerable help from the United States, and a cease-fire finally held on Oct. 25. But it was a terrifying three weeks.
For Americans, the worst shocks were yet to come. On Oct. 20, the day after Nixon announced a massive $2.2 billion aid package for Israel, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia declared a total embargo on oil shipments to the United States, and most of the other Persian Gulf oil exporters joined the Saudis. This was a disaster at a time when America’s appetite for oil was unquenchable but U.S. production was in decline.
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These events would take a heavy toll in the years to come. Nixon’s Watergate problems might have been remote to many Americans, but the cost of gasoline and heating oil were not, especially in a growing recession and with winter coming on. In a speech on Nov. 7, Nixon urged Americans to turn down their thermostats, fly less often and drive 50 miles an hour, if they had to drive at all.
Share this articleShareAfter the Arab leaders put the embargo into effect, the cost of gas quickly rose from 34 cents a gallon to 84 cents (in today’s version, a $4 gallon of gas would approach $11). Worse, the crisis forced many gas stations to ration supplies, offering small amounts or no gas at all on Sundays, when Nixon asked stations to close. For four months, until March 18, 1974, Americans lived in a constricted snow globe of frozen possibility.
This was not simply an economic crisis — it was a profound psychological blow to a people who had been encouraged to go wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted, since the days of manifest destiny. Suddenly, in late 1973, there were limits. NASA had stopped sending lunar missions after Apollo 17, in late 1972. Vietnam had all too clearly revealed the limits of American influence in Southeast Asia, and the embargo felt like another humiliation. The embargo would again reveal how vulnerable Americans were to purposeful adversaries overseas in the Middle East — adversaries that the United States would spend the next half-century trying to appease, co-opt, defang and defeat, all at great cost in blood and treasure.
At the time, though, these setbacks piled onto other feelings of frustration. As Nixon’s recommendations kicked in, resentments were stirred, not just toward his government but toward all politicians. Congress enacted a 55-mph speed limit that was widely flouted (especially by musicians, who would launch a cottage industry of songs proclaiming their right to drive any speed they pleased). Drivers also wrestled with a new requirement, the “interlocking seat belt mechanism,” required on all cars sold after Aug. 15, 1973 — it prevented the engine from starting unless the seat belt was engaged. Congress received more angry letters about seat belts than about the Saturday Night Massacre. Other mandates rankled — Arizona became the first state to declare some public areas smoke-free. That improved public health, but it led to decades of anger, especially in heavy-smoking states such as Ohio and Michigan that were already reeling from the effects of the oil embargo. Many communities banned the display of Christmas lights that year.
Even before October ended, it was clear that Detroit would have to rethink its business model. Without cheap fuel, how could any family afford the gas-guzzling land yachts that General Motors, Ford and Chrysler had been selling for as long as anyone could remember? Cadillac and Lincoln sales plummeted while car designers shortened wheelbases to boost fuel economy. Declining sales would translate into huge layoffs — nearly 200,000 autoworkers in Detroit and Flint were let go in December.
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The oil embargo ultimately ended, and we returned to our gas-guzzling ways, but in some elemental ways, we never fully recovered from that winter. A distrust and resentment of authority, which many believed had peaked in the 1960s on the left, simply went mainstream in the 1970s. Democrats elected a huge class of new lawmakers in 1974, many brimming with a fervent idealism. But the right, too, was on the march, furious that Nixon had been removed from power, angry that big business had become the bad guy in popular culture, bewildered by Roe and energized by a rising tide of televangelists. The fevered anxieties were close to the surface decades later during the rise of Donald Trump, who never failed to criticize government regulations, or lightbulbs that did not burn brightly enough, or showers that were too weak, or town halls that failed to display Christmas lights. Though a young man then, he, too, was in the news in October 1973: On Oct. 16, a front-page headline in the New York Times described a Justice Department investigation of “antiblack bias” in the Trump real estate empire. From the firm’s headquarters on Avenue Z in Brooklyn, the firm’s president denied the charges: “They are absolutely ridiculous,” said Trump.
Just as we look back at our forebears, they were looking at us. At the end of his classic book, “The Imperial Presidency,” published in 1973, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. predicted that presidents such as Nixon would come around every 50 years and it was incumbent on voters to defeat leaders who display the worst in human instincts. As he put it: “Around the year 2023 the American people would be well advised to go on the alert and start nailing down everything in sight.”
Schlesinger was not far off in his forecast. Trump won the presidency ahead of that schedule, in 2016, and though voters fought him off four years later, it appears the war is not finished. Now, another ugly October has intervened, reminding Americans both of their seemingly unbridgeable divisions at home and their inability to dictate events overseas. If to some Americans, Watergate seems like a long time ago, to others it feels like yesterday: Earlier this week, ABC News reported that Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was cooperating with the Justice Department in its probe of events leading up to Jan. 6, 2021.
It has been a harrowing half-century. October 1973 was a foreboding turning point in our history. The frightening echo from 1973 invites the question: Will we manage the next 50 years any better than we managed the last half-century?
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