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As Richard Nixon reduced the U.S. troop level in Viet Nam to 339,200, the war cooled as an issue, to be revived only in episodes like the raid on the North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp at Son Tay, which called into question the intelligence procedures of the U.S. military. Americans were much more preoccupied with a recession-cum-inflation that raised the unemployment rate to 5.8%, the highest level since 1963, and firmly resisted Nixon's best monetary and fiscal prescriptions. The consumer movement championed by Ralph Nader gathered strength, often in alliance with the year's overriding cause, ecology (see page 21).
In the off-year election campaigns, Nixon invested an extraordinary amount of his prestige. He commissioned Vice President Spiro Agnew. already a rhetorical event in American politics, to go forth as the G.O.P.'s scourge. Agnew's campaign, calculatedly outrageous, won headlines but not votes, and ended by alienating and irritating many of the voters. The Republicans suffered a net loss of 13 governorships and nine seats in the House, and gained only a probable two seats in the Senate, where the Democrats retained a commanding lead. The election was scarcely over when Nixon began tacking into more conciliatory positions for 1972. After an impressive election-eve television rebuttal of the President, and a healthy 61.8% majority in his own re-election campaign, Maine's Senator Edmund Muskie emerged as the man most likely to challenge Nixon two years from now.
As he came to the midterm of his presidency, Nixon still awaited major accomplishment. His welfare reforms and other proposals were tangled in a truculent, disorganized Congress dominated by the opposition. Desegregation of public institutions in the South was statistically successful, but his racial policies, North and South, remained unsatisfactory. On his own terms, he had yet to "bring us together."
Abroad, the death of Charles de Gaulle ended the era of great wartime leaders. The death of Egypt's Nasser seemed of more immediate importance; Golda Meir lost her worthiest antagonist, her only equal in the Arab world. It is still open to question whether Nasser's heirs will be strong enough not simply to make peace but to make it stick. Apart from Viet Nam, the Middle East preoccupied U.S. attention as Russia expanded its influence by installing missiles along the Suez Canal.
There were some stunning individual gestures. Palestinian guerrillas hijacked three airliners in September and landed them in the Jordanian desert. The Quebec Liberation Front seized two hostages, murdering one of them. In other areas, Russia resumed a dismaying assault on its restive intellectuals, with the Soviet press damning Nobel Prizewinner Alexander Solzhenitsyn who continued his lonely battle against tyranny. Chile's Salvador Allende became Latin America's first democratically elected Marxist president. China seemed to have recovered from the violence of the Cultural Revolution. For the first time a majority of the U.N. General Assembly voted to admit the Peking government. It was not the required two-thirds majority, but nevertheless indicated that the mainland cannot be excluded much longer.
For all that, no other event on the world scene is likely to have the lasting importance of the