LAURA KALMAN. Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974-1980.

Abstract

The decade of the 1970s has been relatively neglected by scholars, a historical interlude overshadowed by both the leftist tumult of the 1960s and the rightward turn of the 1980s. Yet, as this illuminating political history of the years from 1974 through 1980 shows, the pivot from leftward to rightward movement was not without its own inherent significance, complexity, drama, and interest. Laura Kalman provides a political history of the transition that is somewhat traditional in its focus on Washington, D.C., and on presidential politics and policies, but always engrossing and enlightening. Choosing to concentrate on the “short 1970s,” she intertwines two themes: the difficulties the moderate presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter had dealing with a multitude of daunting foreign and domestic issues, and, as their failures dimmed public faith in government's ability to solve problems, the simultaneous rise of conservative political activism. Ford's essential decency and troubling ineptitude surfaced almost immediately when he began his presidency by pardoning his predecessor Richard Nixon. Overnight he sacrificed much of the goodwill that he had inherited when Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace. In time, many commentators would come to forgive the pardon; in 2001 the former president won a Profile in Courage award from the John F. Kennedy Library for having put the national interest above his own political fortunes in so decisively removing the issue of Nixon's alleged criminality from the nation's subsequent action agenda. Nevertheless, in her detailed analysis, Kalman makes it clear that “the timing of the pardon was poor, its justification, ill-conceived, and the deal on Nixon's records accompanying it, unacceptable” (p. 14). Ford had no greater luck or success dealing with the substantively more challenging issues of stagflation, energy, the controversy over détente with the Soviet Union, and the dispiriting endgame in Vietnam. Ford's paucity of achievement was fully matched by Carter, a man with arguably sharper edges and certainly much less national political experience than the affable Michigander, who stumbled over a similar array of economic and foreign issues as well as the divisive complexities of busing, affirmative action, and identity politics. In the end, Kalman is unblinking in her judgment that neither leader deserved re-election.