USA: Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter

Somehow - perhaps because the brutally suppressed riots at the Chicago Democratic Convention raised the specter of anarchy - the misery of 1968 resulted in the election of Republican Richard Nixon as president. Eisenhower's vice-president while still in his thirties, Nixon had famously told the press after his failed bid for the governor of California in 1962 that "you won't have Nixon to kick around any more." Now he was back, and it soon became apparent that he had scores to settle with his countless perceived enemies, above all in the media. Nixon's impeccable conservative credentials enabled him to bring the US to a rapport with China, but the war in Vietnam dragged on, to claim a total of 57,000 American lives. Attempts to win it included the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia, which raised opposition at home to a new peak, but ultimately it was simpler to abandon the original goals in the name of "peace with honor." The end came either in 1972 - when Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a treaty, and Tho at least had the grace to decline the award - or in 1975, when the Americans finally withdrew from Saigon.

During Nixon's first term, many of the disparate individuals politicized by the events and undercurrents of the 1960s coalesced into activist groupings. Native Americans occupied the island of Alcatraz in San Francisco, in the gene sis of the American Indian Movement; gay men in New York's Stonewall bar fought back after one police raid too many; feminists united to campaign for abortion rights and an Equal Rights Amendment; and even the prisoners in America's jails attempted to organize themselves, resulting in such bloody debacles as the 31 prisoners killed when the military stormed Attica prison in September 1971. Nixon directed various federal agencies to monitor the new radicalism, but his real bugbear was the antiwar protesters. Increasingly ludicrous covert operations against real and potential opponents culminated in the botched attempt to burgle Democratic National Headquarters in Washington DC's Watergate complex in 1972. It took two years of investigation before Nixon's role in the subsequent cover-up was proved conclusively, and in 1974 he resigned, one step ahead of impeachment by the Senate, to be succeeded by vice-president Gerald Ford.

With the Republicans momentarily discredited, former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter was elected to the presidency as a clean-handed outsider in the nation's bicentennial year of 1976. His victory showed how far the US had come in a decade, let alone two centuries; a crucial constituency of this new-style Southern Democrat was the recently enfranchized black population of the South. Carter's enthusiastic attempts to put his Baptist principles into practice on such issues as global human rights were soon perceived as naive, if not un-American. Misfortune followed misfortune. He had to break the unpleasant news to the nation that it was facing an energy crisis, following the formation of the OPEC cartel of Middle East oil producers. Worse still, the Shah of Iran, a close American ally, was overthrown, and the staff of the US embassy in Teheran was taken hostage by Islamic revolutionaries. Carter's failed attempts to arrange the hostages' release was seized upon by the Republicans as a sign of his weakness as a leader and all but destroyed his hopes of winning re-election in 1980. In fact, the tenacious refusal of the Iranians to release the hostages while Carter was still President, holding them until the very day he left office to be replaced by the former B-movie actor Ronald Reagan , led to accusations that the Republicans had struck a secret deal with the hostage-takers. Whatever the truth, the facts are that Carter's presidency ended with the taint of the hostage crisis still present, and Reagan's term started in an aura of celebration at their final return home.

USA: Richard Nixon to Jimmy Carter

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