Western Kentucky University - Talisman Yearbook (Bowling Green, KY)

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X' 'T' as YY YY PRESIDENT Richard Nixon had a tearful wave for the country as he prepared to leave Washington in 1974 after his resignation. Commentary by Tom McCord Long before the champagne was uncorked on New Year's Eve 1979, it was somehow, somewhere decided that the previous 10 years - the 19705 - should be summed up in one taut, timely label. Pundits began their reviews with a long, languid yawn. Thank God, they said with benign amusement, the '70s were going. The preceding 10 years were, the critics said, little more than years of preoccupation with Self, with Fulfillment, with Identity. They called it the Decade of Me. Well, yes, you could say that was, at times, true about the '70s. The Adidas-decked jogger, the beaming Nest convert, the sequined disco dancer: each was saying, sometimes unwittingly, Look out for me, l'm Number One. But it would be wrong to argue that the 1970s were simply the years of Narcissis. There was just so much more. Think of some of the images and you'll see why: -Locked arm-in-arm, demonstration style, women marched in the '70s and they politicked and they made more headway in gaining their rights than at any time since the push for the vote in the early years of the century. But their biggest goal remained the most elusive - passage of an equal rights amendment to the U.S. Constitution. -The photograph of a teen-ager named Mary Ann Vecchio, weeping over the body of a 20-year-old Kent State University stu- dent, cuts more deeply and illustrates most strongly the degree to which Americans were involved in Southeast Asia throughout the early 1970s. -Looking faintly menacing, the bedouined head of Saudi oil minister Sheik Decade In review Yamani popped up on Americans' television screens throughout the latter half of the decade as oil and energy in general became an increasing obsession for Americans. -A sweaty, shadowy Richard Nixon cried in the East Room of the White House and told of his mother's love, then climbed aboard a Presidential helicopter to leave Washington in 1974 and become the first U.S. president to resign. -The lovable bigot, Archie Bunker, became a regular visitor to millions of American homes each week via CBS. As star of the TV situation comedy All in the Family, Bunker, played by Carroll O'Con- nor, and the rest of the cast explored, with humor, prickly areas of social relations previously taboo. -When C-3PO and R2D2 hobbled across movie screens in 1977 as part of the movie Star Wars, their popularity said less about acting and more about the growing af- fection for the computer-machine-friend. The computer, in the hands of Americans, became in the '70s, no longer a gadget, but a part of life. As life, for Western students and everybody else, seemed to grow more com- plicated, more confusing in the '70s, we tried - usually in haphazard ways - to absorb the creeping changes while retaining some sem- blance of balance. With so much conflict, the tendency was to look back, to view what-had already occurred with a kind of nostalgia. In- deed, nostalgia became big business in the 1970s. Revivals of hit shows were hot on Broadway. Politicians cultivated their relationships with the nation's conservative voters who longed for simple answers and simpler times. And, on a deeper level, there was a fascination with, and even an embrac- ing of, fundamentalist religion and its reassuring tones. Nothing better symbolized the increasing visibility of conservative religion in American life than the election in 1976 of a Southern Baptist from Georgia to the White House. Fundamentalist faith was no longer the property of small-town, small-time churches, and Jimmy Carter knew that when he launched his bid for the presidency. So- called Christian broadcasting became a multi-million dollar operation, with television shows such as The PTL Club pulled in fantastic sums for their producers and, presumably, soothed the souls of their viewers. But some reached for other, less orthodox types of faith. Witness the 914 members of the Rev. Jim Jones, Peoples Temple community in Guyana who commit- ted one of the largest mass suicides in history in 1978. Many of them poor and ignorant, they followed Jones to South America to found a community of brotherhood, but died in pain after their corrupt leader instructed them to do so. The Unification Church, under Sun Myung Moon, attracted thousands of other followers who saw their founder as Gocl. Then there were the children of Hare Krishna, continuing a fascination with Eastern religion that blossomed in the '6Os. ln the '70s no major airport was without its Krishna followers, heads shorn, selling trinkets for donations At the other extreme, at decade's close, was John Paul Il. He was different. He was Polish and the first pope chosen from a Communist country. He was dynamic and a

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man of the people, having worked in a fac- tory in his youth. As Life magazine explained soon after John Paul's impressive visit to the United States in 1979, Americans were delighted by a pope who looked as though he could coach the Chicago Bears, but who spoke to them of love. But talk of love was often overshadowed in the '70s, as always, by talk of hate. After the sit-ins and riots of the '60s, confrontation between blacks and whites most often bub- bled to the surface in the next decade over court-ordered busing of children in order to establish racial balance in the schools. ln cities as vastly different as Boston and Louisville, demonstrations against busing deteriorated into violence. With busing came an increase in so-called seg academies - private schools that usually had overwhelmingly white enrollments. It would be no exaggeration to say that Americans became more minority conscious in the '70s. When Allan Bakke applied for admission to the medical school at the Un- iversity of Califomia-Davis and was tumed down, he sued, charging that less-qualified minority applicants were accepted ahead of him. He won his case. ln 1972, members of the American lndian Movement staged a protest takeover of Wounded Knee, S.D,, as a symbol of In- dians' increasing frustration with the dis- crimination they endure in the U.S. Even women, constituting just over half the U.S. population, were a minority in the '70s, so govemment officials scurried to fill jobs with qualified applicants. By decade's end, the most prominent remaining bastions of male supremacy were the U.S. Supreme Court and the presidency itself. The growing clout of women and the transformed roles of men and women together were probably the biggest changes in the 1970s and maybe the century. By 1980, women were serving as govemors fElla Grasso in Connecticut, Dixie Lee Ray in Washingtonl, mayors fJane Byrne in Chicago, Diane Feinstein in San Franciscol and top-flight network TV news correspon- dents fBarbara Walters at ABC, Jessica Savitch at NBCJ. Women had been admit- ted to the military service academies, to astronaut training and, in greater numbers than ever, to the ministry. By decade's end, there were thousands of women firefighters, beat police officers, telephone repairers, train engineers, stockbrokers and airline pilots. The FBl even reported a rise in the number of crimes committed by women. Few of these gains by women occurred with ease. If anything, the women's move- ment spavlmed at least two side battles that remained into the '80s. One was the push by some for a legitimising of women's rights through an amendment to the Constitution. Another even more emotional battle was over a woman's right to control her body. This led to action in such areas as abortion rights, birth control and protection from rape. But much was left unresolved by New Year's Day 1980. Likewise, Americans' long, wrenching in- volvement in Southeast Asia was something few, if any, were able to come to grips with in the '70s. When the decade opened in 1970, a play about a blind Vietnam veteran by David Rabe called Sticks and Bones was still shocking enough to be censored by some CBS television affiliates when a taped version was to be shown. Nearly 10 years later, a spate of war movies - 'The Deer Hunter, Coming Home, Apocolypse Now - generated more controversy about the wounds left by the war in Wetnam, Cam- bodia and Laos. From the death of the first American ad- viser in 1961 to the Tet offensive in 1968, Americans associated the Vietnam war with the '60s. But Americans were present and sometimes fighting in Vietnam and Cam- bodia for half the '70s. After personnel at the U.S. embassy in Saigon fled by helicopter in 1975, we tried to forget. But then there was Mayaguez, the fall of Phnom Penh, the inva- sion of Vietnam by China, the fleeing of Viet- namese refugees - the boat people - and no forgetting. At home, into the '80s, were reminders of Vietnam -and the war: the frustrations of veterans, especially those confined to Veterans Administration hospitals, criticism of those who escaped the infamous draft through college defemrentsg the resettle- ment of thousands of Indochinese refugees in towns and cities across the United States. Whether any lessons were learned or any issues resolved by the whole bloody thing remained to be seen. Whether American politicians leamed any lessons from Richard Nixon also remained a question. Just as Vietnam disrupted American politics from abroad, dividing everybody regardless of age, group or label, the scandals, Congressional hearings and court cases that came to be known collec- tively as Watergate left govemment in tur- moil at home. Though the growth of presidential power was only altered, not halted, by Nixon's resignation in August 1974, a numbed dissatisfaction with presi- dents, legislators and politicians in general remained. Nixon's successors, Republican Gerald Ford and Democrat Jimmy Carter, were unable to capture enough of the public spirit necessary to make any strides in solv- continued on page 24 23 Decade In review