Question 1
a. The entire decade of the 1970s was marked by a sudden reversal of the
continuous and substantial worker productivity gains that characterized the
early post-World War II era (1945–1968) and which were instrumental in the
producing the economic boom of this early postwar period in America.
b. The continued unrestrained government spending on military undertakings
and social welfare programs during the 1970s, which failed to be offset by any
significant federal tax increases, fed the rampant inflation increases of the
1970s. This inflationary spiral of the 1970s had its roots in President Johnson
simultaneous fighting the war in Vietnam and funding the Great Society social
welfare programs during the 1960s without seeking a concurrent tax increase.
c. Sharply rising oil and energy prices, exacerbated by a series of interruptions to
oil supplies and by rising domestic oil consumption, fed the spiraling inflation
America experienced during 1970s.
d. Key sectors of the American economy, such as steel, automobiles, and
consumer electronics, found themselves at a competitive disadvantage with
their industrial counterparts in Japan and Germany who had built new
factories with innovative technologies and contemporary management
techniques.
e. Correct answer. Neither President Johnson nor President Nixon sought
Congressional passage of significant federal tax increases during the 1960s
and early 1970s to offset the progressive increases in domestic and military
spending each president presided over during his respective tenure.
Consequently, steep federal tax increases did not contribute to the economic
stagnation during this period.
Question 2
a. Beginning in March 1969, and continuing until the open American incursion
of Cambodia in May 1970, the United States Air Force secretly conducted,
without any Congressional authorization, some thirty-five hundred bombing
raids against North Vietnamese positions in neutral Cambodia. The revelation
of the secret bombing campaign of Cambodia sparked fierce Congressional
and popular opposition to Nixon’s Vietnam policy and facilitated the rise to
power of the genocidal Cambodian leader, Pol Pot.
b. President Nixon’s Vietnamization policy involved a gradual withdrawal of the
540,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam to permit the South Vietnamese, with
American money, weapons, training, and advice, to assume the burden of
fighting their own war against North Vietnam.
c. Despite President Nixon’s Vietnamization policy, President Nixon ordered
periodic massive U.S. bombing campaigns of North Vietnam, Cambodia, and
Laos during his tenure to enhance the strategic position of the United States
and South Vietnam and secure favorable cease-fire arrangements with North
Vietnam.
d. President Nixon created a draft lottery that shortened the period of draftability
from eight years to one year and reduced the total number of draft calls that
subjected eligible Americans to compulsory military service.
e. Correct answer. President Nixon gradually reduced the total number of
American troops in Vietnam during his tenure as part of his Vietnamization
policy. Nixon’s Vietnamization policy transferred slowly the military burden
and responsibility for fighting the Vietnam War to America’s ally, South
Vietnam. The United States government continued to provide substantial
financial, military, political, and strategic support and guidance to South
Vietnam during the Nixon administration.
Question 3
a. President Nixon’s policy of détente, or relaxed tension with communist China
and the Soviet Union, was motivated by Nixon’s perception that he could
utilize a secretly negotiated American diplomatic breakthrough with
communist China to play off the communist powers of China and the Soviet
Union against one another and gain a strategic advantage for American
bilateral relations with the Soviet Union. President Nixon expected that
détente would exacerbate the deteriorating diplomatic relationship between
communist China and the Soviet Union.
b. President Nixon’s policy of détente did not envision that its successful
implementation would lead to the reunification of either Germany or Korea.
c. President Nixon’s policy of détente generally received strong bipartisan
support from Democrats and Republicans, who admired his diplomatic skill in
checkmating and co-opting the two great communist powers, China and the
Soviet Union.
d. Correct answer. President Nixon’s policy of détente ushered in a multi-year
period of relaxed bilateral relations between the United States and the Soviet
Union and the United States and communist China. For example, during the
1970s, the United States reached arms control agreements between the United
States and the Soviet Union, finalized agricultural trade agreements with the
Soviet Union, and accepted a one-China policy that nurtured closer diplomatic
and economic relations with communist China and reduced American
commitment to the political independence of Taiwan.
e. President Nixon’s policy of détente was largely formulated and implemented
by his national security adviser, Dr. Henry Kissinger, a former Harvard
University government professor who conducted covert negotiations with
Chinese and Soviet officials that led to key diplomatic breakthroughs and
agreements with communist China and the Soviet Union. Vice President
Agnew played no role in developing, modifying, or implementing the policy
of détente.
Question 4
a. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the U.S. Supreme Court, presided over by
Chief Justice Earl Warren, struck down a state law that prohibited the use of
contraceptives, even among married couples.
b. In Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the Court held that all defendants in serious
criminal cases were entitled to legal counsel, even if they were too poor to
afford it.
c. In Escobedo (1964) and Miranda (1966), the Court ruled that the accused had
a constitutional right to remain silent and enjoyed other constitutional
protections when accused of a crime. These Warren Court decisions also
provided procedural safeguards against the use of physically coerced
confessions by the police during interrogations of men and women accused of
a crime.
d. In Engel v. Vitale (1962) and School of District Abington v. Schempp (1963),
the Court invoked the First Amendment principle of the separation of church
and state to prohibit required prayers and Bible reading in the public schools.
e. Correct answer. In Reynolds v. Sims (1964), the Court ruled that all state
legislatures, both the upper and lower houses, would have to be reapportioned
according to the human population and follow the one-man, one-vote
principle in apportioning state legislative districts.
Question 5
a. The creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the
Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the early 1970s
was prompted by an emerging public consensus that many businesses were
failing to undertake constructive steps to protect the environment and
guarantee worker safety.
b. Correct answer. Businesspeople resented that the regulatory authority of EPA
and OSHA now meant that the federal government possessed the
unprecedented power to regulate the use, release, and disposal of toxic and
hazardous materials by businesses and curb potentially unsafe workplace
practices. Previously, such industrial production decisions and workplace
practices primarily fell under the purview of business owners and managers.
c. These two new federal agencies were not financed by any new corporate taxes
imposed by the Nixon administration.
d. While the laws that created the EPA and OSHA were passed during the Nixon
administration, big business and the Nixon administration generally enjoyed a
cordial, mutually supportive relationship during the entire Nixon
administration.
e. President Richard Nixon did not appoint environmentalist and author Rachel
Carson to lead the EPA, and he did not appoint consumer and labor advocate
Ralph Nader to head OSHA.
Question 6
a. The June 1972 break-in and attempted bugging (secret recording) of the
Democratic Party’s headquarters, by men subsequently revealed to be working
for the President Nixon’s Republican Committee for the Re-election of the
President (CREEP), represented one of the many different illegal activities
perpetrated by the Nixon administration that were revealed during the
Watergate affair, 1974–1974.
b. The Watergate scandal revealed that President Nixon had illegally used the
Internal Revenue Service to investigate and harass innocent American citizens
named on a White House political enemies list.
c. The publication and dissemination of forged documents by Nixon
administration political operatives to discredit prominent Democratic
politicians, including Democratic presidential candidate Senator Edmund
Muskie, represented another illegal dirty trick uncovered during the Watergate
affair.
d. Correct answer. Although the Nixon administration undertook several illegal
actions to obstruct and undermine the administration of justice in the United
States, the Watergate scandal did not reveal any attempt by Nixon
administration officials to bribe U.S. Supreme Court justices to write
favorable judicial opinions.
e. The Watergate affair revealed that the FBI and the CIA were used by
President Nixon to conceal and cover up many of the illegal political dirty
tricks undertaken by the political operatives working for CREEP and the
Nixon administration.
Question 7
a. Correct answer. President Nixon unsuccessfully sought to assert executive
privilege (presidential confidentiality) in order to withhold turning over to the
Watergate special prosecutor his secretly recorded conversations with White
House aides. In July 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that
executive privilege did not provide President Nixon with a legal justification
to withhold evidence relevant to possible criminal activity, including the most
incriminating tape-recorded conversations between President Nixon and his
top White House aide.
b. President Nixon did not offer the legal claim that releasing the tapes would
violate the personal right to privacy enjoyed by all Americans.
c. President Nixon did not advance the legal claim that releasing the tapes would
violate his 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination. Up until the
U.S Supreme Court ordered release of the famous “Smoking Gun” tape,
which demonstrated Nixon’s culpable role in the Watergate cover-up, Nixon
had asserted vigorously that the White House tapes included no evidence of
criminal activity on his part.
d. President Nixon did not assert that he retained absolute sovereign immunity,
which protected the president from cooperating with all criminal
investigations.
e. While President Nixon asserted the Watergate scandal weakened the ability of
the United States to conduct an effective foreign policy, he did not offer the
legal argument to the U.S. Supreme Court that releasing the Watergate tapes
would undermine his constitutional foreign policymaking responsibilities.
Question 8
a. Correct answer. The decision by President Ford to pardon Richard Nixon for
any known or unknown crimes Nixon had committed during his presidency
sparked widespread public outrage among many Americans and was a
lingering political handicap in Ford’s effort to win election as president in
1976.
b. While the Helsinki accords were controversial among conservative American
critics because they legitimized Soviet-established boundaries of Poland and
other Eastern European countries, many Americans hailed the third basket of
Helsinki agreements because they guaranteed increased cultural and
educational exchanges between East and West and ostensibly protected
certain basic human rights. These accords sparked small dissident movements
in the USSR and Eastern Europe that were subsequently extinguished by the
Soviets and their communist allies in Eastern Europe.
c. The frantic evacuation of the last Americans and Vietnamese by helicopter
and the subsequent rescuing of about 140,000 South Vietnamese refugees,
who fled South Vietnam in 1975, ahead of the victorious North Vietnamese
communists may have been a politically embarrassing coda to America’s
debacle in Vietnam. Nevertheless, most Americans were relieved that the
haphazard evacuation of the last Americans in Vietnam and the rescuing and
subsequent American re-settlement of these fleeing South Vietnamese
refugees, who feared political reprisals from the North Vietnamese
communists, prevented the onset of an even more chilling humanitarian and
political disaster from occurring in Vietnam.
d. While many Americans suspected the existence of a secret deal between
President Nixon and President Ford, involving the promise of Nixon’s
resignation in exchange for a full presidential pardon by President Ford, no
evidence was ever produced during President Ford’s presidency or afterwards
that he had negotiated or participated in any agreement that secured Richard
Nixon’s resignation as president in 1974.
e. President Carter, not President Ford, offered a presidential pardon to some ten
thousand Vietnam War draft evaders and resisters during his presidency.
Question 9
a. The U.S. Congress passed and President Nixon signed in 1972 Title IX of the
Education Amendments, prohibiting sex discrimination in any federally
funded education program or activity. The act represented a significant
political achievement in the feminist movement’s efforts to obtain equitable
access and resources for women seeking to participate fully in federally
funded educational programs including intercollegiate and interscholastic
athletics.
b. The Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wad e (1973) held that state laws
prohibiting abortion were unconstitutional because they violated a woman’s
constitutional right to privacy. The Court decision was considered a notable
achievement for the feminist movement in America because it provided a
constitutionally mandated right for a woman, rather than male-dominated state
legislatures, to make the ultimate decision about whether to terminate her
pregnancy.
c. The Supreme Court in Reed v. Reed (1971) and Frontiero v. Richardson (1973)
overturned sexually discriminatory practices and rules in legislation, estate
administration, and employment.
d. The political and judicial victories, achieved by the feminist movement in
America, precipitated an intense reconsideration of traditional gender roles
that did help propel millions of American women into the workplace and
obtain professional positions and enter occupations previously thought to be
the exclusive domain of men.
e. Correct answer. Despite intense political advocacy on the part of feminists,
the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), constitutionally guaranteeing women
equality of rights under law in all fifty states, failed to be ratified by the
requisite thirty-eight states during the 1970s. The constitutional amendment
died in 1982, three states short of ratification, much to the consternation of the
feminist movement.
Question 10
a. The U.S. Supreme Court did not hold that the plaintiff Allan Bakke, who
challenged the constitutionality of the racial and ethnic minority admissions
preferences of the medical school education program at the University of
California at Davis, should have received such a minority preference from the
university because he was Jewish.
b. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the Bakke case, held that any university, public or
private, that receives federal funding was constitutionally prohibited from
using numerical racial or ethnic quotas in its admissions procedures.
c. The Court, in the Bakke case, declined to hold that all forms of affirmative
action in university admission programs were unconstitutional forms of
reverse discrimination. Instead, the Court ruled that those school admissions
programs that allowed racial or ethnic considerations to be a plus factor in
admissions were constitutionally permissible, as long as such racial or ethnic
considerations did not amount to a rigid numerical quota for that minority
group.
d. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the Bakke case, did not address the
constitutionality of universities establishing minority-based educational
programs, such as minority-based scholarships and academic departments of
study, nor did the Court establish any legal guidelines for permissible
minority-based housing arrangements at universities.
e. Correct answer. In the Bakke case, the Court found that the use of rigid racial
quotas in university admissions programs represented an unconstitutional
violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
However, the Court also ruled that race could be taken into account as one of
several plus factors in a school’s overall admissions policy. The Court’s
splintered and sharply divided decision was decried by liberals who feared it
would be used to reverse years of civil rights progress and hailed by
conservatives as affirming the legal principle of colorblind justice in
American society.
Question 11
a. The inflationary oil shocks of the 1970s, successive substantial increases in
the price of imported oil, fueled the rampant, double-digit inflation rates,
b.
c.
d.
e.
yawning federal budget and international trade deficits, depreciations in the
value of the dollar, and the meteoric rise in interest rates, that combined to
undermine the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
The invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in December 1979 and
President Carter’s political response of imposing economic sanctions on the
Soviets and calling for a worldwide boycott of the upcoming Olympic Games
in Moscow sparked a generalized fear by Americans that the Cold War had
been revived and caused many Americans to agree that with Carter’s
concession that he had misjudged the political intentions of the Soviet Union.
The protracted and unsettling personal agony of the Iranian hostage crisis,
lasting from November 1979 to January 1980, caused many Americans to
doubt the ability of President Carter to manage effectively critical American
political and economic interests in the increasingly volatile and anti-American
Persian Gulf region.
Some observers believed that President Carter relied too heavily on a small,
insular circle of Georgia advisers, whom he had known since he was
Governor of Georgia in the early-mid 1970s, for mediocre political,
bureaucratic, and policy advice. Moreover, these critics believed Carter’s
overreliance on his Georgia advisers led him to misinterpret the national mood
of popular discontent and profound anxiety during the late 1970s and to
deliver a perplexing and poorly received televised speech to the nation in the
summer of 1979 that blamed the discontent, anxiety, and hardships of
Americans on a collective spiritual and moral crisis in the nation.
Correct Answer. One of President Carter’s most notable foreign policy
achievements was his personal mediation of peace negotiations with Israeli
Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at the
presidential retreat at Camp David in September 1978. President Carter’s
relentless pursuit of a peace agreement between the two historical Middle East
enemies led to the signing of a formal peace treaty between Israel and Egypt
in March 1979.
Question 12
a. President Carter’s activist personal Middle East diplomacy involving Israel
and Egypt and his administration’s interventionist championing of individual
human rights in Latin America, Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe), and South Africa
demonstrated that the Carter administration did not practice isolationism in its
foreign policy.
b. President Carter failed to anticipate or reverse the Soviet Union’s military and
political expansion into Afghanistan, leaving the economically vital oil-rich
Persian Gulf region, including Iran, vulnerable to possible Soviet military
attack and political dominance. Critics contended that President Carter’s
misreading of Soviet intentions regarding Afghanistan and the entire Persian
Gulf region represented a betrayal of the realist principles of containment.
c. President Carter’s respectful and successful negotiation of the Panama Canal
treaties with Panama, which turned over complete ownership and control of
the Panamanians by the year 2000, and his overall efforts to nurture
democracy and political and economic cooperation in Latin America, belied
any contention that unilateralism propelled President Carter’s foreign policy.
d. Correct answer. Advancing individual human rights throughout the world
remained an overriding guiding principle of President Carter’s foreign policy.
The Carter administration demonstrated its central concern for upholding
individual human rights through its strong anti-apartheid policies and verbal
denunciations of South Africa and Rhodesia, by its promotion and nurturing
of democracies in Latin America that upheld individual civil rights and civil
liberties, and through its vigorous diplomatic efforts to free political prisoners
being held in totalitarian nations such as the Soviet Union.
e. President Carter refused to commit significant American military and
economic resources to roll back geopolitical gains made in Africa by the
Soviet Union as a result of its military, political, and economic support of a
successful Cuban-backed Marxist revolution in Angola and the communist
superpower’s support of other successful leftist revolutionary insurrections in
Africa.
Question 13
a. State governments played little role in the uncovering and handling of the
Watergate crisis. Although federalism is a major principle of the U.S.
Constitution, this was a national matter.
b. Correct answer. The actions of many members of the Nixon administration,
including the president himself, were investigated, brought to light, and
handled by the legislative and judicial branches through Congressional
hearings and investigations, the ruling that forced Nixon to submit the tapes,
and the articles of impeachment drawn up in the House of Representatives.
The system of checks and balances exists so that two branches can intervene if
another abuses its powers. That is precisely what happened in 1973-1974.
c. The Constitution does not have an amendment against taping in the White
House, nor was one considered. In fact, presidents record conversations in the
offices of the White House to this day.
d. The two party system did survive, and the next elected president was a
Democrat. Nixon’s and CREEP’s efforts weren’t directed at destroying the
entire party as much as guaranteeing that the Democrats couldn’t hurt Nixon’s
chances for reelection in 1972. Moreover, the Constitution does not provide
for political parties. In fact, many of the framers opposed parties.
e. The opposite is true—there have been presidential scandals since Nixon left
office, like the Iran-Contra Affair, and many presidents post-Nixon have
exercised a great deal of power.
Question 14
a. In 1973 OPEC placed an embargo on oil shipments to all nations that
supported Israel, including the United States. Arab states also cut their oil
production, making less fuel available for homes and cars. In 1979, OPEC
increased oil prices as decreasing production in Iran led to massive shortages
and increased demand.
b.
c.
d.
e.
The 1973 crisis resulted from U.S., and other Western nations’, support of
Israel in the Yom Kippur War. The U.S. airlifted $2 billion in war materials
to the Israelis and assisted in creating the ceasefire that ended the war. The
shortages in Iran in 1979 were the result of the Iranian Revolution that
toppled the shah and installed the Ayatollah as the leader of Iran. The shah
rose to power with the support of the U.S., and many Iranians blamed the
upheaval in 1979 on American interference.
In both 1973 and 1979, shortages in the United States meant that lines at gas
stations were so long that some took up many blocks. There were several
restrictions on when cars could fill up and how gas could be used. In 1973,
the need to conserve energy led to the 55 mile per hour speed limit that is still
in effect in many places today.
Correct answer. The 1973 crisis revealed that the U.S. was no longer an oil
producer and exporter. This fact was hidden for many years by cheap and
readily available sources, but when those sources were unavailable the U.S.
could not meet the huge needs of a nation that tripled its oil consumption
between 1945 and 1973. By 1979, it was widely known that America was
dependent on foreign oil.
In 1973, the oil shortage in the U.S. led to a major economic recession both
at home and abroad. In 1979, the energy crisis coincided with rampant
inflation, high interest rates that damaged small businesses and the
construction industry, and a ballooning deficit. President Carter attributed
these problems to America’s dependence on foreign oil.