Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 by Rick Perlstein

Author:Rick Perlstein
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-08-17T23:00:00+00:00

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THAT SATURDAY, JUNE 23, THE American Automobile Association said that fewer than half of the gas stations in America were open. In New York, where 95 percent were closed, truckers blocked rush hour traffic on the Long Island Expressway for thirty miles. Nationwide, it was the most violent day of the trucking strike yet. And President Carter was in Tokyo.

He was there for a summit of the “G7,” the world’s seven biggest capitalist economies. That meeting, however, began in five days. First, he enjoyed a state visit—which he had decided not to cancel. And so, as Levittown burned, TVs broadcast the sumptuous ceremonies at Akasaka Palace, modeled on the Palace of Versailles; the president striding down a red carpet past an honor guard outfitted in blinding whites to the strains of a military band; Carter greeting the Japanese diplomatic corps beside Crown Prince Akihito, who was clothed in a traditional hakama skirt; Carter reviewing rank upon rank of crisply uniformed schoolchildren waving little paper Stars and Stripes and Rising Suns. He posed with one of the white-faced performers after a kabuki play, lunched with Japanese celebrities, made a pilgrimage to a Meiji shrine. (He refused the priests’ request to bow and say a prayer. “Afterwards,” he wrote in his diary, “my interpreter said he was a Christian and was proud that I did not worship heathen gods.”) He held a televised town hall meeting. “Suppose you are not married and suppose you fall in love with a colored girl,” a local asked. “What would you do?” Carter answered with an unstinting, unsentimental lesson about slavery and racial discrimination in the United States, and the halting, incomplete progress Americans had made in the years since. He concluded, sweetly, “As far as intermarriages are concerned, I’ve never been in love with any woman except my wife. But I would hope that in the true spirit of equality and in an absence of racial prejudice that I would not let the color of a woman’s skin interfere with my love for her if I felt that way.”

He glanced playfully at his wife: “It is a hypothetical question, Rosalynn, and I have no intention to leave you for another woman.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. President. I like the U.S. more because of your answer.”

He smiled like he hadn’t a care in the world. He had plenty. In Belgium, General Alexander Haig, retiring with a hero’s honors from his posting as supreme commander of allied forces in Europe (some said to run for the Republican nomination) was riding to work at NATO headquarters when an explosion detonated by remote control lifted his limousine several feet in the air, leaving a five-foot crater. An attempted assassination of the commander of 4.5 million men under arms, by forces unknown, had come within a split second of success.

Time featured shots of rotting crops in the field for want of truckers to transport them. Newsweek said, “Like some Biblical plague, the nation’s energy problems keep multiplying.” Then, they multiplied some more.

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