Kennedy blundered into a major defeat within 3 months of entering the White House. He kept in motion a plan sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and begun by the Eisenhower administration to land an invasion force in Cuba, which under Fidel Castro had become a Communist state and a Soviet state. The Bay of Pigs invasion failed, utterly and completely. The force was quickly smashed when it struggled onto the beaches of the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. During the succeeding 2 years, Kennedy labored to break the rigid cold-war relationship with the USSR. In October 1962, however, he discovered that the Soviets were rapidly building missile emplacements in Cuba. Surrounding the island with a naval blockade, he induced the Soviets to desist, and the sites were eventually dismantled. The relieved world discovered that, when pushed to the crisis point, the two major powers could stop short of nuclear war. This Cuban Missile Crisis effectively ended the cold war.

The atomic bomb now seemed defused, and Moscow seemed ready to negotiate on crucial issues (perhaps, it was suggested 15 years later, to give the Soviets time to build a far more powerful armaments system). A new and more relaxed relationship developed slowly into the U.S.-Soviet dιtente that emerged in the late 1960s and persisted through the 1970s. A test-ban treaty, the Moscow Agreement, signed in October 1963 symbolized the opening of the new relationship. Three of the world's nuclear powers (Great Britain, the United States, and the USSR — the fourth, France, did not sign) agreed to end the detonation of atomic explosions in the atmosphere.

In this new environment of security, American culture, long restrained by the sense of team spirit and conformity that the crises of depression, war, and cold war had induced, broke loose into multiplying swift changes. People now began talking excitedly of "doing their own thing." The media were filled with discussions of the rapidly changing styles of dress and behavior among the young; of the "new woman" (or the "liberated woman," as she became known); of new sexual practices and attitudes and new styles of living. The sense of community faded. Romanticism shaped the new mood, with its emphasis on instinct and impulse rather than reason, ecstatic release rather than restraint, individualism and self-gratification rather than group discipline.

Styles of life changed swiftly. Effective oral contraceptives, Playboy magazine, and crucial Supreme Court decisions helped make the United States, long one of the world's most prudish nations in sexual matters, one of its most liberated. The drug culture mushroomed. Communal living groups of "dropouts" who rejected mass culture received widespread attention. People more than 30 years old reacted angrily against the flamboyant youth (always a small minority of the young generation) who flouted traditional standards, glorified self-indulgence, and scorned discipline.

In the second half of the 1960s this generation gap widened as many of the young (along with large numbers of older people) questioned U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Peaceful protests led to violent confrontations, and differences concerning styles of life blurred with disagreements about the degree of allegiance that individuals owed to the American system. In 1968 the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and President Kennedy's brother Robert F. Kennedy seemed to confirm suspicions that dark currents of violence underlay many elements in American society.

Kennedy then asked Congress to enact a law to guarantee equal access to all public accommodations, forbid discrimination in any state program receiving federal aid, and outlaw discrimination in employment and voting. After Kennedy's death, President Johnson prodded Congress into enacting (August 1965) a Voting Rights Act that eliminated all qualifying tests for registration that had as their objective limiting the right to vote to whites. Thereafter, massive voter registration drives in the South sent the proportion of registered blacks spurting upward from less than 30% to over 53% in 1966.

The civil rights phase of the black revolution had reached its legislative and judicial summit. Then, from 1964 to 1968, more than a hundred American cities were swept by race riots, which included dynamitings, guerrilla warfare, and huge conflagrations, as the anger of the northern black community at its relatively low income, high unemployment, and social exclusion exploded. At this violent expression of hopelessness the northern white community drew back rapidly from its reformist stance on the race issue (the so-called white backlash). In 1968, swinging rightward in its politics, the nation chose as president Richard M. Nixon, who was not in favor of using federal power to aid the disadvantaged. Individual advancement, he believed, had to come by individual effort.

Nonetheless, fundamental changes continued in relations between white and black. Although the economic disparity in income did not disappear — indeed, it widened, as unemployment within black ghettos and among black youths remained at a high level in the 1970s — white-dominated American culture opened itself significantly toward black people. Entrance requirements for schools and colleges were changed; hundreds of communities sought to work out equitable arrangements to end de facto segregation in the schools (usually with limited success, and to the accompaniment of a white flight to different school districts); graduate programs searched for black applicants; and integration in jobs and in the professions expanded. Blacks moved into the mainstream of the party system, for the voting-rights enactments transformed national politics. The daily impact of television helped make blacks, seen in shows and commercial advertisements, seem an integral part of a pluralistic nation.

Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans were also becoming more prominent in American life. Reaching the level of 9 million by the 1960s, Spanish-surnamed Americans had become the second largest ethnic minority; they, too, were asserting their right to equitable treatment in politics, in culture, and in economic affairs.

Johnson launched his War on Poverty, which focused on children and young people, providing them with better education and remedial training, and Congress created a domestic Peace Corps (VISTA). Huge sums went to the states for education. Medicare was enacted in 1965, providing millions of elderly Americans a kind of security from the costs of illness that they had never known before. Following Kennedy's Clean Air Act of 1963, the Water Quality Act of 1965 broadened the effort to combat pollution. New national parks were established, and a Wilderness Act to protect primeval regions was passed. The Economic Development Administration moved into depressed areas, such as Appalachia. Billions were appropriated for urban redevelopment and public housing.

In April 1965, Johnson began sending American ground troops to Vietnam, the total reaching nearly 550,000 in early 1969. (In that year alone, with a full-scale naval, aerial, and ground war being waged in Vietnam, total expenditures there reached $100 billion.) Huge regions in the South were laid waste by American troops in search of hostile forces. Still victory eluded. Responding to mass public protests that went on year after year and put the United States in a state of near-insurrection — and in recognition of fruitless American casualties, which in 1967 passed 100,000 — Johnson decided in March 1968 to halt the bombing of the North and to begin deescalation. At the same time he announced that he would not run for reelection. From being an immensely popular president, he had descended to a position as one of the most hated and reviled occupants of that office.

Nixon soon announced his "Vietnamization" policy, which meant a slow withdrawal of American forces and a heavy building up of the South Vietnam army. Nonetheless, in the 3 years 1969-71, 15,000 more Americans died fighting in Vietnam. In April 1970, Nixon launched a huge invasion of Cambodia in a vain attempt to clear out communist "sanctuaries."

Then, most dramatically, he deflected world attention by ending the long American quarantine of Communist China, visiting Beijing in February 1972 for general discussions on all matters of mutual concern — a move that led to the establishment (1979) of diplomatic relations. At the same time, he continued the heavy bombing attacks on North Vietnam that he had reinstituted in late 1971. He brushed aside as "without binding force or effect" the congressional attempt to halt American fighting in Vietnam by repealing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964, which had authorized Johnson to begin military operations. Nixon asserted that as commander in chief he could do anything he deemed necessary to protect the lives of American troops still in Vietnam.

In May 1972, Nixon became the first American president to consult with Soviet leaders in Moscow, leaving with major agreements relating to trade, cooperation in space programs and other fields of technology, cultural exchanges, and many other areas. He became more popular as prosperity waxed and as negotiations with the North Vietnamese in Paris seemed to be bringing the Vietnam War to a halt. In 1972 the Democrats nominated for the presidency Sen. George McGovern of South Dakota, a man who for years had advocated women's rights, black equality, and greater power for the young. With the nation's increasingly conservative cultural mood and the trend in Vietnam, Nixon won a massive landslide victory. In January 1973, Nixon announced a successful end to the Vietnamese negotiations: a cease-fire was established and an exchange of prisoners provided for.

These scandalous events had their roots in the long Democratic years beginning with Roosevelt, when the American presidency had risen in a kind of solitary majesty to become overwhelmingly the most powerful agency of government. All that was needed for grave events to occur was the appearance in the White House of individuals who would put this immense power to its full use. Lyndon Johnson was such a man, for he was driven by gargantuan dreams. One result was America's disastrous war in Vietnam. Richard Nixon, too, believed in the imperial authority of the presidency. He envisioned politics as an arena in which he represented true Americanism and his critics the forces of subversion.

At least from 1969, Nixon operated on the principle that, at his direction, federal officials could violate the law. On June 17, 1972, members of his Special Investigations Unit (created without congressional authorization) were arrested while burglarizing the national Democratic party offices in the Watergate office-and-apartment complex in Washington, D.C.

A frantic effort then began, urged on by the president, to cover up links between the Watergate burglars and the executive branch. This cover-up constituted an obstruction of justice, a felony. This fact, however, was kept hidden through many months of congressional hearings (begun in May 1973) into the burglaries. Televised, they were watched by multitudes. The American people learned of millions of dollars jammed into office safes and sluiced about from hand to hand to finance shady dealings, of elaborate procedures for covering tracks and destroying papers, and of tapes recording the president's conversations with his aides.

With Watergate eroding Nixon's prestige, Congress finally halted American fighting in Indochina by cutting off funds (after Aug. 15, 1973) to finance the bombing of Cambodia, which had continued after the Vietnam Peace Agreement. Thus, America's longest war was finally concluded. In November 1973, Congress passed, over the president's veto, the War Powers Act, sharply limiting the executive's freedom of action in initiating foreign wars. When Vice-President Spiro T. Agnew resigned his office on Oct. 10, 1973, Nixon, with Senate ratification, appointed Gerald R. Ford to replace him.

On July 24, 1974, the Supreme Court ordered Nixon to deliver his Oval Office tapes to Congress. This order, in turn, led to the revelation that he had directly approved the cover-up. Informed by Republican congressional leaders of his certain conviction in forthcoming impeachment proceedings, Richard Nixon resigned the presidency on Aug. 9, 1974.

Most of these problems continued to plague the American nation during the presidency (1977–81) of Jimmy Carter, Democrat of Georgia, who defeated Ford in the 1976 election. Carter brought to the presidency an informality and sense of piety. He arranged negotiations for an Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty (signed in 1979) and guided the Panama Canal treaty through narrow Senate approval (1978). Carter also had to deal with shortages of petroleum that threatened to bring the energy-hungry U.S. economy to a standstill, with soaring inflation and interest rates, with the taking (1979) of U.S. hostages by Iranian militants, and with an international crisis precipitated by Soviet intervention (1979) in Afghanistan. His popularity waned as problems remained unsolved, and in 1980 the voters turned overwhelmingly to the conservative Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan.

Robert Kelley

The "Reagan Revolution," combined with the tight money policies of the Federal Reserve System, initially dismayed those who hoped for a reversal of the economic stagnation of the 1970s. Although high interest rates helped cut inflation from more than 12% in 1980 to less than 7% in 1982, unemployment rose from 7% to 11% — the highest rate since 1940 — and the annual federal deficit soared to $117 billion, almost twice as high as it had ever been. The United States experienced its worst recession since the 1930s. Beginning in 1983, however, the economy rebounded sharply. By the end of 1986, 11 million new jobs had been created, the consumer price index had dropped from 13.1% in 1979 to just 4.1%, and the Dow-Jones average had climbed to an all-time high.

The Reagan recovery did little for rural America or for the declining industrial regions of the Midwest. In the first half of the 1980s, 8.4 million people joined the ranks of the poor, an increase of 40%. Nearly 33 million Americans — one out of every seven — were reported as living below the poverty line. But the bulk of middle-class America, buoyed by low inflation and its own prosperity, gave the president high marks for his economic program. Conservatives were pleased with his appointments to the federal bench, his declarations of faith in traditional values, and his proud patriotism.

In practice, and often in response to congressional pressure, Reagan balanced his ardent anti-Communist rhetoric with generally restrained foreign-policy actions. He denounced the USSR as an "evil empire" but ended the embargo on grain sales to the Soviets imposed by President Carter after the invasion of Afghanistan. While presiding over the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history, he observed the still-unratified SALT II arms control treaty negotiated by his predecessor. He sent American troops to Lebanon as part of a peacekeeping force but withdrew them after 241 marines were killed in a bomb attack in October 1983.

Only in Central America and the Caribbean did the president's actions match his rhetoric. To quash a Communist revolt in El Salvador, Reagan committed military advisors and furnished financial aid to the Salvadoran government. Determined to oust Nicaragua's pro-Communist Sandinista government, he gave covert aid to antigovernment rebels — known as the contras — in defiance of a congressional ban on such aid. In 1983 he used military force to topple a pro-Cuban regime on the Caribbean island of Grenada.

Reagan and his running mate, George Bush, easily defeated their Democratic opponents, Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro, in 1984, but the Democrats maintained control of Congress and the president offered fewer domestic initiatives during his second term. Partisan wrangling over what parts of the budget to cut in order to reduce the staggering federal deficit led to passage of the Gramm-Rudman Act (1985), which mandated automatic, across-the-board spending cuts over a period of years. The Supreme Court declared the automatic cuts unconstitutional in 1986, however, and repeated failure by the president and Congress to agree on budget reductions kept the deficit at record levels. Disputes over the control of trade policy also worsened the imbalance of imports over exports, which rose to $161 billion in 1987.

Tax reductions and defense spending, however, kept the economy booming. Reagan boosted defense spending 35% above the 1980 level, and in 1986 he secured congressional approval for a major income tax reform law that further cut taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals.

At the end of Reagan's tenure the GOP could boast that his administration had helped create 16.5 million new jobs, bring down the unemployment rate to a 17-year low, cut double-digit inflation down to about 4%, and raise the gross national product by one-third. Democrats, on the other hand, could criticize "Reaganomics" for promoting prosperity at the expense of the poor and the nation's future well-being. The number of people below the poverty line rose by 8 million, and their lot was made worse by cuts of nearly $50 billion in social welfare programs. Reductions in subsidized housing from $30 billion in 1981 to $7 billion in 1988 made homelessness part of the national lexicon, and the number of Americans without any health-care insurance rose to 37 million. By borrowing rather than taxing to rearm, Reagan mortgaged the financial future. The cost of servicing the national debt rose from 8.9% of all federal outlays in 1980 to 14.8% in 1989. Moreover, persistent trade and budget deficits made the country a debtor nation for the first time since 1914.

During its eight years in office the administration had a significant impact on the composition of the federal judiciary. President Reagan appointed three conservatives to the Supreme Court and elevated conservative William Rehnquist to chief justice. Overall, he filled about half of the 700 federal judgeships, most of them with conservative appointees.

A major scandal of Reagan's second term was the Iran-contra affair, in which national security advisor John M. Poindexter, Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, and other officials were involved in a secret scheme to sell arms to Iran, diverting some of the proceeds to the contra rebels in Nicaragua. Investigation by Congress in 1987 led to the prosecution of Poindexter and North and damaged the administration's image.

Ironically, developments in foreign affairs during Ronald Reagan's second term led this most anti-Communist of presidents into a new, harmonious relationship with the Soviet Union and to sign the first superpower treaty that actually reduced nuclear armaments. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, determined to relax tensions with the West, met with Reagan in 1985 and 1986; in 1987 they signed the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, and in 1988 a triumphant Reagan traveled to Moscow for a fourth summit and further arms-reduction talks.

Decisive in acting abroad, Bush failed to evolve a domestic program that addressed a persistent recession starting in 1990. That year, despite the recession, he and congressional leaders agreed to a deficit-reduction package that raised federal taxes, thereby breaking his "no new taxes" 1988 campaign pledge. He also failed on his promise to be both "the environment president" and "the education president" and angered many women by naming Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court and continuing to support him despite allegations of sexual harassment. Concerned about the economy and demanding change, many conservatives backed columnist Pat Buchanan's challenge to Bush's renomination while moderates rallied to the independent H. Ross Perot. Also focusing on the nation's economic woes and promising change, Bill Clinton, governor of Arkansas, beat several rivals in the Democratic primaries and chose as his running mate Tennessee senator Al Gore. Capitalizing on a slumping economy, the Clinton-Gore ticket won 43% of the highest voter turnout (55%) since 1976 and 370 electoral votes.

But Clinton, an adept politician, outmaneuvered his GOP opponents. He succeeded in picturing the "Contract with America" as extremist measures that would unduly benefit the rich at the expense of the elderly and needy and his own more moderate proposals as being both compassionate and fiscally responsible. At the same time he adopted as his own various Republican issues that were designed to appeal to middle-class Americans worried about the decline in the nation's morals and values. Clinton appeared more surefooted in responding to events abroad as his administration helped to arrange a peace treaty between the warring parties in Bosnia and to move negotiations forward in Israel and Northern Ireland. Fortunate, above all, in presiding over an improving economy — with a growing GDP, falling unemployment, and the lowest "misery index" since 1969 — Clinton ran unopposed for the Democratic nomination in 1996. He easily won reelection over the Republican nominee, former Senate majority leader Robert Dole, and the Reform party's Ross Perot. A majority of Americans, however, continued to have doubts about Clinton's character and to fear both Democratic tax-and-spend programs and Republican efforts to curtail such entitlements as Medicare and Social Security. Accordingly, the lowest turnout of voters since 1924 returned Clinton to the White House with just 49% of the popular vote. Again facing a Republican-controlled House and Senate, Clinton came to an agreement with Congress on a bill that significantly modified the welfare system in place since the mid-1930s, and on a budget that lowered taxes on both the wealthy and the middle classes, allocated less to the poor, and further reduced the federal deficit. Although bothered by old allegations of sexual and financial improprieties by Clinton, as well as new ones of violations of campaign contribution rules, many voters in a peaceful and prosperous United States opted to maintain the status quo.

In 1998 the new set of sexual-misconduct charges threatened President Clinton. Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr spent the year investigating these allegations, questioned the president in front of a grand jury, and delivered a report to Congress recommending impeachment on the grounds of perjury and obstruction of justice. Congress initiated an impeachment investigation. Despite the results of the 1998 midterm elections, which demonstrated once again that the electorate did not want impeachment of the president, the Republican-controlled House voted (December 19) largely along party lines in favor of impeachment.

Clinton's trial by the Senate lasted five weeks, from Jan. 7 to Feb. 12, 1999. The impeachment managers appointed by the House presented the case against the president, charging him with perjury and obstruction of justice. Clinton's lawyers argued that the charges stemmed from his private life and that the offenses fell short of the "high crimes and misdemeanors" stipulated by the Constitution as grounds for impeachment. In the final vote the senators found the president not guilty of perjury by a majority of 55-45, and not guilty of obstruction of justice by a vote of 50-50; in both cases the results were far short of the two-thirds majority necessary for conviction. The Democrats all voted for acquittal. On the first count they were joined by 10 Republicans, and on the second by 5.

No sooner was the impeachment crisis over than the country faced a major foreign policy challenge. After repeated Serb attrocities against ethnic Albanians in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, President Clinton demanded that Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic gree to allow a NATO peacekeeping force in Kosovo. When Milosevic refused, the United States and its allies launched (Mar. 24, 1999) air strikes against Yugoslavia in an effort to force his compliance. After more than two months of daily bombing raids, Yugoslavia agreed to accept NATO's terms on June 3, 1999.

In April China's prime minister Zhu Rongji visited the United States at a time when American-Chinese relations were troubled by U.S. objections to China's human rights policies, charges of espionage activities by Chinese agents in the United States, and China's condemnation of U.S. actions against Yugoslavia. Relations between the countries were further complicated when NATO bombs hit the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May. Harmony was restored at a meeting between President Clinton and Chinese President Jiang Zemin in September at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in New Zealand, and normal trade relations between China and the United States were established in 2000. Other items on the president's foreign policy agenda fared less well. In December 1999 the World Trade Organization rejected his proposals for a new set of rules governing international commerce, and peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority dragged on through the summer and fell apart amid renewed violence in the fall of 2000.

Clinton spent much of his final months in office negotiating to avoid possible criminal action against him by Robert W. Ray, who had succeeded Kenneth Starr as independent counsel, and in fashioning his legacy — his hoped-for place in history. In exchange for avoiding prosecution, the president admitted making false and misleading statements while testifying under oath and agreed to pay a fine and have his license to practice law in Arkansas suspended. And while his critics emphasized that the president left office having incurred enormous personal distrust, his supporters countered that Clinton ended his term with the highest job-approval rating of any modern president.

Both were right. While most Americans loathed the president's personal behavior, they supported to an even greater extent the Clinton policies that brought them peace, and especially prosperity. For during the Clinton years unemployment dropped from 7.5% to 4%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average of stocks rose from 3,200 to more than 11,000, and the federal budget went from a quarter-trillion-dollar deficit to a surplus nearly that large. And while the stock market exploded, the welfare state imploded, as Clinton made good on his promise to "end welfare as we know it," to repeal the federal guarantees of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children program. At the same time, he bungled, and lost, his most important initiative, universal health insurance (leaving more than 44 million Americans uninsured), never pushed strongly for large-scale investments in education and job training or devised an energy policy, and avoided risking his political capital on reforming social security and Medicare. Ironically, his main achievements — welfare reform, free-trade treaties, and a balanced budget — were each largely initiated and supported by the Republican party.

As Clinton himself rued, great presidents are associated with great crises — war and economic depression — and he faced nothing of that magnitude. Nevertheless, good presidents are ones who make the most of what they do face and who move public opinion in their direction. Clinton failed to do that. Rather than chart a bold new course, he followed the currents of popular opinion. Rather than set the terms and tone of public debate, he governed by polls. Rather leading by example, Clinton's behavior and frequent efforts to mislead embarrassed most Americans. And so, historians may ultimately judge, many Americans concluded that the Clinton presidency was one of both accomplishment and disappointment.

The mixed record of the Clinton administration played a key role in the election. With the economy booming, Vice-President Gore should have enjoyed an enormous advantage in the election. However, the shadow of the Clinton scandals and some liabilities of Gore's own with campaign fund-raising allowed the untested Governor Bush to make "character" more important than "experience" for many voters. In terms of issues, both candidates cleaved to the center. This produced an election closer than any in modern history. It was so close, in fact, that the actual outcome was finally determined by court decision more than a month after the election.

Election-night returns on November 7 showed Gore leading in both electoral votes (255 to 246) and popular votes (48,707,413 to 48,609,640), but neither candidate had the 270 electoral votes necessary for victory. The outcome was too close to call in three states — Oregon, New Mexico, and Florida — and it was clear that Florida's 25 electoral votes would determine the winner. The vote in Florida, as in the nation at large, was extremely close. The initial count showed Bush leading by 1,784 votes, a margin so small that it required a recount under Florida state law. The recount took several days to complete. During this time, manual recounts were ordered by the courts in several counties where Democratic voters initiated legal action on the ground that the original vote count had been distorted by poorly designed ballots or faulty voting machines. When the official recount was completed and the absentee ballots were added in, Bush's lead had narrowed to 930. Then, on November 21, the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the results of manual recounts in three strongly Democratic counties should be included in the final tally, and the court extended the date for certification of the vote to November 27. The Bush campaign, arguing that the hand counts were being conducted in an arbitrary manner and that the Florida Supreme Court had acted improperly in extending the certification deadline, appealed the decision the U.S. Supreme Court. On November 27, with the hand recounts still incomplete, Florida's Republican secretary of state, Katherine Harris, declared Bush the winner in Florida by a margin of 537 votes. The Gore campaign contested her ruling in the courts; at the same time, the Republican-dominated state legislature threatened to bypass the courts by naming its own slate of electors favorable to Bush.

On December 4 the U.S. Supreme Court vacated the November 21 ruling of the Florida Supreme Court and sent the case back to that court for clarification. Meanwhile, the Gore campaign's appeal against the vote certification by Secretary Harris had been turned down by Florida circuit court judge N. Sanders Sauls. On December 8, responding favorably to an appeal from the Gore campaign against Judge Sauls's decision, the Florida Supreme Court ordered an immediate manual recount of "undervotes" (ballots that registered no presidential vote in the machine count) throughout the state. The following day the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a halt to the recount; then, on December 12, the U.S. justices voted 5-4 to bar any further recounts. On the next day, December 13, Gore conceded the election, and Florida's electoral votes went to Bush. In the final tally, Bush had five more electoral votes than Gore (271-266) but lost the popular vote by a margin of more than 500,000. Bush thus became the first candidate since Benjamin Harrison in 1888 to win the presidency while losing the popular vote.

The Bush administration took office in January 2001. The new president named a cabinet that included both conservatives and moderates, but quickly and methodically began to promote an agenda that reversed many of the policies established during the previous administration. President Bush laid special emphasis on his plan for a $1.6 trillion tax cut, which he said would give a boost to a faltering U.S. economy. Critics countered that since the tax reductions would occur gradually over a 10-year period, no immediate relief could be expected; they also claimed that Bush, by continually warning about the danger of a recession and the need of a tax cut to prevent it, was actually helping to bring on the economic downturn that he feared. Indeed the first months of the new administration coincided with an end to the booming economy of the 1990s and the emergence of a bear market on Wall Street. The House passed the president's tax cut in its entirety in March 2001, but the Senate would agree only to a $1.2 trillion reduction when it took up consideration of the plan a short time later. The administration's budget increased spending for education and the military but cut funding for transportation, agriculture, and environmental protection. The new administration also made proposals to relax some rules relating to oil drilling on public lands, it lowered drinking water standards, and it canceled a plan to regulate carbon dioxide emissions by power plants.

In foreign affairs the Bush administration showed a tendency to pull back from international commitments, moving to limit U.S. peacekeeping activities in the Balkans, to reduce economic assistance to Russia, and to abandon an effort to reach an understanding with North Korea. America's allies in Europe reacted negatively to the president's repudiation of the Kyoto treaty on global warming, as well as to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's criticisms of an independent European defense force. Tensions with China, already high because of proposed weapons sales by the United States to Taiwan, were further aggravated by a collision (April 2001) between a U.S. surveillance plane and a Chinese fighter off the coast of China that resulted in the death of a Chinese airman. An expression of regret by the United States brought about the release of the American crew (who had landed at a Chinese airfield), but China remained dissatisfied about the Taiwan issue and about U.S. surveillance flights close to the Chinese mainland, which were viewed by the Chinese government as violations of their airspace.

In May, Republican Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont declared himself an Independent; this caused the GOP to lose control of the Senate, which had been evenly split between the two parties, with Vice-President Cheney casting the tie-breaking vote. On June 7 the president signed the tax cut into law; in the final version, arrived at by agreement between the two houses, the total value of the legislation was put $1.35 trillion.

Harvard Sitkoff

To (c.)1860
Bailyn, B., The Peopling of British North America (1986); Boorstin, D. J., The Americans: The National Experience (1965; repr. 1985); Elkins, S., and McKitrick, E., The Age of Federalism (1993); Genovese, E., Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974).

From (c.)1860
Biles, R., A New Deal for the American People (1991); Ehrman, J., The Rise of Neoconservatism (1995); Foner, E., Reconstruction (1988; repr. 1989); Freedman, S. G., The Inheritance (1996); Higham, J., Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860–1925, 2d ed. (1965; repr. 1988); Hodgson, G., The World Turned Right Side Up (1996); Hofstadter, R., The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R. (1955); Kennedy, D. M., Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (1999); Leuchtenburg, W. E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (1963) and In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan (1985); McPherson, J. M., Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (1988; repr. 1989); Nevins, A., Ordeal of the Union, 8 vols. (1947–71); Patterson, J. T., Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–74 (1996); Powers, R. G., Not without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (1995); Sitkoff, Harvard, The Struggle for Black Equality, 1954–1992 (1993); Traxel, David, 1898: Birth of the American Century (1998); Wiebe, R. H., The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (1967; repr. 1980).