American society was polarized by the ultimately futile war and by antiwar and antidraft protests, as well as by the shocking Watergate affair, which revealed corruption and gross misconduct at the highest level of government.

While general distrust of high officials had been an American characteristic for two centuries, the Watergate scandal of 1973–1974 forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon, who faced impeachment, as well as criminal trials for many of his senior associates.

A "cultural war" was emerging as a triangular battle among conservatives, liberals, and the New Left, involving such issues as individual freedom, divorce, sexuality, and even topics such as hair length and musical taste.

The OEO reflected a fragile consensus among policymakers that the best way to deal with poverty was not simply to raise the incomes of the poor but to help them better themselves through education, job training, and community development.

In 1967, the Summer of Love, an event in San Francisco where thousands of young people loosely and freely united for a new social experience, helped introduce much of the world to the culture.

In July 1965, after extensive consultation and no publicity Johnson dramatically escalated the war, sending in American combat troops to fight the Viet Cong on the ground, and mobilizing the U.S. Air Force to bomb its supply lines.

[citation needed] Despite their high media profile, antiwar activists never represented more than a relative minority of the American population, and most tended to be college educated and from higher than average income brackets.

Even Republican candidates in the 1968 presidential election, including Nixon and California governor Ronald Reagan, did not call for total war and the use of nuclear weapons on North Vietnam, believing that Barry Goldwater's hawkish stance may have cost him his bid for the White House four years earlier.

The Vietnam draft did have numerous flaws in it, especially its high reliance on lower middle class Americans while exempting college students, celebrities, athletes, and sons of Congressmen, although contrary to the claims of antiwar activists, most draftees were not impoverished white and black youths who had no other job opportunity.

The proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, passed by Congress in 1972 and favored by about seventy percent of the American public, failed to be ratified in 1982, with only three more states needed to make it law.

[45][46] There was also a disconnect between the older, relatively conservative Betty Friedan and the younger feminists, many of whom favored left-wing politics and radical ideas such as forced redistribution of jobs and income from men to women.

In 1967, the Hays Code, a censorship guideline imposed on the motion picture industry since the 1930s, was lifted and replaced by a new film content rating system, and by the 1970s, there was a surge in sexually-explicit movies and social commentary coming from Hollywood.

Notable X-rated films that were widely screened in the early 1970s (provoking much public controversy, and in some states, legal prosecution) include Deep Throat, The Devil in Miss Jones, and Last Tango in Paris, starring Marlon Brando, whose performance was nominated for an Academy Award.

Due in large part to the dramatic reduction in the risk of unwanted pregnancy engendered by the introduction of the Pill in 1960, not to mention the legalization of contraception nationwide by the Supreme Court decision in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, along with the steadily increasing acceptance of abortion and delayed marriages for career-minded young women influenced by second-wave feminism, or the chic rejection of the responsibilities of marriage altogether in favor of living together without raising a family, U.S. birthrates fell below replacement level starting in 1965 and remained depressed for almost 20 years; thus, children born during this period became known, at least in the popular press, as "baby busters" (as opposed to the "baby boomers" of the postwar years).

In 1972, Nixon announced the end of mandatory military service which had been in effect since the Korean War, and the final American citizen to be conscripted received his draft notice in June 1973.

If feminists, blacks, antiwar demonstrators, and advocates for the poor attacked the status quo with uncompromising vehemence, millions of other Americans rallied around the flag and made clear their intent to uphold the lifestyle and values to which they had devoted their lives.

However, Watergate resulted in significant Democrat gains in the 1974 midterm elections and when the new 94th Congress convened the following January, it immediately voted to terminate all aid to South Vietnam in addition to passing a bill forbidding all further US military intervention in Southeast Asia.

The boundless optimism and belief in science and progress that characterized the 1950s–60s quickly eroded and gave way to a general cynicism and distrust of technology among Americans, fueled by growing concern over the negative effects on the environment by air and water pollution from automobiles and manufacturing, especially events such as the Cuyahoga River Fire in Cleveland, Ohio in 1969 and the Three Mile Island nuclear accident in 1979.

The administration largely remained aloof; practically all press conferences and public statements by the White House dealt with foreign policy issues despite Gallup polls showing that the state of the economy was of concern to 80% of Americans.

[63] The administration's continued preoccupation with foreign policy matters stood in stark contrast to Gallup polls showing that the economy and cost of living was the primary concern for most Americans.

Virtually all White House press conferences in 1973 dealt with Vietnam, superpower relations, and Watergate while almost totally ignoring economic issues that had a far more immediate impact on Americans' lives.

Following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Arab members of OPEC announced they would no longer ship petroleum to nations supporting Israel, that is, to the United States and Western Europe.

[69] Chrysler, the smallest of the Big Three, began suffering a growing financial crisis starting in 1976, but President Carter declined their request for a federal bailout so long as the company's existing management remained in place.

[70] From 1972 to 1978, industrial productivity increased by only 1% a year (compared with an average growth rate of 3.2% from 1948 to 1955), while the standard of living in the United States fell to fifth in the world, with Denmark, West Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland surging ahead.

Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon just before the 1974 midterm elections was not well received, and the Democrats made major gains, bringing to power a generation of young liberal activists, many of them suspicious of the military and the CIA.

The Church Committee investigated numerous questionable activities performed by the CIA since the 1950s, including large-scale domestic surveillance, involuntary testing of psychotropic drugs on American citizens, and support for various unsavory Third World political figures.

Welch's identity had been outed by Fifth Estate, an organization founded by writer and left-wing activist Norman Mailer, and the nature of his death merely resulted in increased public sympathy for the agency.

[77][78] The Watergate scandal was still fresh in the voters' minds when former Georgia governor Jimmy Carter, a Washington, D.C. outsider known for his integrity, prevailed over nationally better-known politicians in the Democratic Party presidential primaries in 1976.

During the mid-1970s, the Kremlin announced that it would allow a number of Russian Jews to move to the United States, however it came out too late that most of them were criminals and the entire exercise amounted to little more than a scheme by the USSR to empty their prisons of "anti-social elements".

Carter's responses to the crisis, from a "Rose Garden strategy" of staying inside the White House to the failed military attempt to rescue the hostages, did not inspire confidence in the administration by the American people.