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The '70s did not destroy the family, but they permanently altered its structure. Everywhere, women—and increasingly, men —found themselves redesigning their lives as single parents. New sexual rules came into play. With a speed at least startling and at worst scandalous, the decade absorbed the '60s' extravagantly experimental sexual mores into the main currents of American society. Marriage became only one extreme of a range of possibilities from the casual date through living together and only then, more remotely, to marriage.
According to Joseph Epstein, editor of the American Scholar, "a few things ought to be said on behalf of the 1970s —not least among them that they weren't the 1960s." But for a number of years the 1970s were the 1960s—at least until, say, the fall of Saigon in the spring of 1975. The '60s, which are often said to have begun on Nov. 22, 1963, lingered messily into the '70s, through Kent State, the Pentagon papers case, the McGovern campaign, the long, slow-motion parallel collapses of the Nixon presidency and the South Vietnamese Republic. The Symbionese Liberation Army and the kidnaping of Patty Hearst also belonged in spirit to the '60s.
More typical of the '70s was the repeated theme of greed and corruption. In one poem, W.H. Auden described the '30s as "a low, dishonest decade." That verdict would apply to numerous episodes in the '70s: the various thuggeries of Watergate, the offenses that led Spiro Agnew to resign, Lockheed's worldwide bribery, the office employment policies of Wayne Hays. One of the more bizarre spin-offs of Watergate was its literary industry; almost everyone, good guys and bad guys alike, the Deans, Haldemans, Jaworskis, Ehrlichmans, Colsons and so on, sat down at tape recorder and typewriter and produced books to cash in on the scandal. A headlong rush to excess profits was joined in the '70s by oil companies, sports stars negotiating multimillion-dollar contracts and writers whose most meretricious junk could command seven-figure advances.
Fanaticism stained the decade as vividly as greed did. The U.S. cooled after its own violent '60s. The rest of the world suffered a long siege: 17 died in the Palestinian terrorists' attack at the Olympic Village in Munich in 1972. Twenty-five died when terrorists opened fire in the Tel Aviv airport the same year. The Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy turned life for European executives into a routine of paranoid precautions. Former Premier Aldo Moro was kidnaped and executed. With grotesque ingenuity, Italian terrorists practiced "kneecapping"—blowing holes in their victims' knees. Hijackers in the '70s forced every major airport in the world to search passengers and X-ray luggage.
The decade also had madmen working on a grander scale: Idi Amin, who slaughtered tens of thousands of his own people in Uganda; the Emperor Bokassa, who brought other homicidal variations on the heart of darkness to the Central African Republic. Millions of Cambodians and Vietnamese boat people were caught in the lethal politics of Southeast Asia.