Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
Question 1 a. The entire decade of the 1970s was marked by a sudden reversal of the continuous and substantial worker productivity gains that characterized the early post-World War II era (1945–1968) and which were instrumental in the producing the economic boom of this early postwar period in America. b. The continued unrestrained government spending on military undertakings and social welfare programs during the 1970s, which failed to be offset by any significant federal tax increases, fed the rampant inflation increases of the 1970s. This inflationary spiral of the 1970s had its roots in President Johnson simultaneous fighting the war in Vietnam and funding the Great Society social welfare programs during the 1960s without seeking a concurrent tax increase. c. Sharply rising oil and energy prices, exacerbated by a series of interruptions to oil supplies and by rising domestic oil consumption, fed the spiraling inflation America experienced during 1970s. d. Key sectors of the American economy, such as steel, automobiles, and consumer electronics, found themselves at a competitive disadvantage with their industrial counterparts in Japan and Germany who had built new factories with innovative technologies and contemporary management techniques. e. Correct answer. Neither President Johnson nor President Nixon sought Congressional passage of significant federal tax increases during the 1960s and early 1970s to offset the progressive increases in domestic and military spending each president presided over during his respective tenure. Consequently, steep federal tax increases did not contribute to the economic stagnation during this period. Question 2 a. Beginning in March 1969, and continuing until the open American incursion of Cambodia in May 1970, the United States Air Force secretly conducted, without any Congressional authorization, some thirty-five hundred bombing raids against North Vietnamese positions in neutral Cambodia. The revelation of the secret bombing campaign of Cambodia sparked fierce Congressional and popular opposition to Nixon’s Vietnam policy and facilitated the rise to power of the genocidal Cambodian leader, Pol Pot. b. President Nixon’s Vietnamization policy involved a gradual withdrawal of the 540,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam to permit the South Vietnamese, with American money, weapons, training, and advice, to assume the burden of fighting their own war against North Vietnam. c. Despite President Nixon’s Vietnamization policy, President Nixon ordered periodic massive U.S. bombing campaigns of North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos during his tenure to enhance the strategic position of the United States and South Vietnam and secure favorable cease-fire arrangements with North Vietnam. d. President Nixon created a draft lottery that shortened the period of draftability from eight years to one year and reduced the total number of draft calls that subjected eligible Americans to compulsory military service. e. Correct answer. President Nixon gradually reduced the total number of American troops in Vietnam during his tenure as part of his Vietnamization policy. Nixon’s Vietnamization policy transferred slowly the military burden and responsibility for fighting the Vietnam War to America’s ally, South Vietnam. The United States government continued to provide substantial financial, military, political, and strategic support and guidance to South Vietnam during the Nixon administration. Question 3 a. President Nixon’s policy of détente, or relaxed tension with communist China and the Soviet Union, was motivated by Nixon’s perception that he could utilize a secretly negotiated American diplomatic breakthrough with communist China to play off the communist powers of China and the Soviet Union against one another and gain a strategic advantage for American bilateral relations with the Soviet Union. President Nixon expected that détente would exacerbate the deteriorating diplomatic relationship between communist China and the Soviet Union. b. President Nixon’s policy of détente did not envision that its successful implementation would lead to the reunification of either Germany or Korea. c. President Nixon’s policy of détente generally received strong bipartisan support from Democrats and Republicans, who admired his diplomatic skill in checkmating and co-opting the two great communist powers, China and the Soviet Union. d. Correct answer. President Nixon’s policy of détente ushered in a multi-year period of relaxed bilateral relations between the United States and the Soviet Union and the United States and communist China. For example, during the 1970s, the United States reached arms control agreements between the United States and the Soviet Union, finalized agricultural trade agreements with the Soviet Union, and accepted a one-China policy that nurtured closer diplomatic and economic relations with communist China and reduced American commitment to the political independence of Taiwan. e. President Nixon’s policy of détente was largely formulated and implemented by his national security adviser, Dr. Henry Kissinger, a former Harvard University government professor who conducted covert negotiations with Chinese and Soviet officials that led to key diplomatic breakthroughs and agreements with communist China and the Soviet Union. Vice President Agnew played no role in developing, modifying, or implementing the policy of détente. Question 4 a. In Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), the U.S. Supreme Court, presided over by Chief Justice Earl Warren, struck down a state law that prohibited the use of contraceptives, even among married couples. b. In Gideon v. Wainwright (1963), the Court held that all defendants in serious criminal cases were entitled to legal counsel, even if they were too poor to afford it. c. In Escobedo (1964) and Miranda (1966), the Court ruled that the accused had a constitutional right to remain silent and enjoyed other constitutional protections when accused of a crime. These Warren Court decisions also provided procedural safeguards against the use of physically coerced confessions by the police during interrogations of men and women accused of a crime. d. In Engel v. Vitale (1962) and School of District Abington v. Schempp (1963), the Court invoked the First Amendment principle of the separation of church and state to prohibit required prayers and Bible reading in the public schools. e. Correct answer. In Reynolds v. Sims (1964), the Court ruled that all state legislatures, both the upper and lower houses, would have to be reapportioned according to the human population and follow the one-man, one-vote principle in apportioning state legislative districts. Question 5 a. The creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) in the early 1970s was prompted by an emerging public consensus that many businesses were failing to undertake constructive steps to protect the environment and guarantee worker safety. b. Correct answer. Businesspeople resented that the regulatory authority of EPA and OSHA now meant that the federal government possessed the unprecedented power to regulate the use, release, and disposal of toxic and hazardous materials by businesses and curb potentially unsafe workplace practices. Previously, such industrial production decisions and workplace practices primarily fell under the purview of business owners and managers. c. These two new federal agencies were not financed by any new corporate taxes imposed by the Nixon administration. d. While the laws that created the EPA and OSHA were passed during the Nixon administration, big business and the Nixon administration generally enjoyed a cordial, mutually supportive relationship during the entire Nixon administration. e. President Richard Nixon did not appoint environmentalist and author Rachel Carson to lead the EPA, and he did not appoint consumer and labor advocate Ralph Nader to head OSHA. Question 6 a. President Nixon’s successful development and execution of his southern strategy, in advance of the 1972 presidential election, involved appointing conservative Supreme Court justices, soft-pedaling civil rights, and opposing school busing to achieve racial balance in order to obtain the electoral support of white Americans living in Southern states. b. Senator George McGovern, the Democratic nominee for president in 1972, alienated white working-class voters by appealing to and mobilizing the support of racial minorities, feminists, liberals, and young people committed to withdrawing the remaining American troops from Vietnam immediately. c. Correct answer. Feminists and racial minorities represented two of the core political constituencies that supported wholeheartedly Senator George McGovern over President Nixon in the 1972 presidential election. d. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger announced just days before the November 1972 presidential election that “peace is at hand” in Vietnam and that cease-fire agreements with the North Vietnamese would be forthcoming in a few days. This premature announcement of the conclusion of a peace agreement with North Vietnam helped boost the presidential campaign claim of President Nixon that he had wound down the Democratic war in Vietnam and was finalizing a peace agreement in Southeast Asia that preserved America’s honor. e. The forced removal of Missouri Senator Tom Eagleton as McGovern’s vice presidential nominee, following the Democratic convention, because of the revelation Eagleton had undergone psychiatric care virtually crippled McGovern’s presidential candidacy. Question 7 a. Correct answer. The July 1973 revelation of President Nixon’s protracted, secret, and Congressionally unauthorized bombing campaign of Cambodia, prompted Congressional passage of the War Powers Act later in 1973. The War Powers Act reflected Congressional opposition to the unchecked expansion of presidential war-making powers by Presidents Johnson and Nixon. The law attempted to limit the authority and duration a president could commit and expand American combat troop involvement in a foreign country without the expressed approval of Congress. b. The Arab oil embargo in October 1973 was directed against the United States and other Western nations for supporting Israel during the war launched that month by Syria and Egypt against Israel. The Nixon administration’s decision to launch an emergency American airlift of $2 billion in war materials to assist in Israel’s defense received strong Congressional support. c. The 1970 revelation of the 1968 massacre of innocent women and children in the village of My Lai by American military troops intensified domestic opposition to the Vietnam War. The massacre placed increasing pressure on President Nixon to develop a new strategy for ending the demoralizing Southeast Asia conflict, resulting in Nixon’s decision to widen the war by openly and illegally invading neutral Cambodia in 1970. d. The decision of the Nixon administration to provide $2 billion in war materials to Israel to stave off the invasions launched by Syria and Egypt received strong Congressional support. President Nixon did not commit any American military troops to assist Israel in its efforts to rebuff the invading Egyptian and Syrian armies during the October 1973 war. e. In 1970, the Nixon administration employed covert operations in Chile, through the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA); imposed an economic embargo on the democratically elected Marxist Allende government; and offered direct encouragement and political support to the Chilean army leaders that conducted the violent overthrow of the Allende government. The United States government’s role in overthrowing the Allende government fell short of committing U.S. military personnel to support the Chilean army coup, and the American covert operations in Chile were not revealed until after President Nixon resigned in 1974. Question 8 a. The June 1972 break-in and attempted bugging (secret recording) of the Democratic Party’s headquarters, by men subsequently revealed to be working for the President Nixon’s Republican Committee for the Re-election of the President (CREEP), represented one of the many different illegal activities perpetrated by the Nixon administration that were revealed during the Watergate affair, 1974–1974. b. The Watergate scandal revealed that President Nixon had illegally used the Internal Revenue Service to investigate and harass innocent American citizens named on a White House political enemies list. c. The publication and dissemination of forged documents by Nixon administration political operatives to discredit prominent Democratic politicians, including Democratic presidential candidate Senator Edmund Muskie, represented another illegal dirty trick uncovered during the Watergate affair. d. Correct answer. Although the Nixon administration undertook several illegal actions to obstruct and undermine the administration of justice in the United States, the Watergate scandal did not reveal any attempt by Nixon administration officials to bribe U.S. Supreme Court justices to write favorable judicial opinions. e. The Watergate affair revealed that the FBI and the CIA were used by President Nixon to conceal and cover up many of the illegal political dirty tricks undertaken by the political operatives working for CREEP and the Nixon administration. Question 9 a. Correct answer. President Nixon unsuccessfully sought to assert executive privilege (presidential confidentiality) in order to withhold turning over to the Watergate special prosecutor his secretly recorded conversations with White House aides. In July 1974, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that executive privilege did not provide President Nixon with a legal justification to withhold evidence relevant to possible criminal activity, including the most incriminating tape-recorded conversations between President Nixon and his top White House aide. b. President Nixon did not offer the legal claim that releasing the tapes would violate the personal right to privacy enjoyed by all Americans. c. President Nixon did not advance the legal claim that releasing the tapes would violate his 5th Amendment protection against self-incrimination. Up until the U.S Supreme Court ordered release of the famous “Smoking Gun” tape, which demonstrated Nixon’s culpable role in the Watergate cover-up, Nixon had asserted vigorously that the White House tapes included no evidence of criminal activity on his part. d. President Nixon did not assert that he retained absolute sovereign immunity, which protected the president from cooperating with all criminal investigations. e. While President Nixon asserted the Watergate scandal weakened the ability of the United States to conduct an effective foreign policy, he did not offer the legal argument to the U.S. Supreme Court that releasing the Watergate tapes would undermine his constitutional foreign policymaking responsibilities. Question 10 a. Correct answer. The decision by President Ford to pardon Richard Nixon for any known or unknown crimes Nixon had committed during his presidency sparked widespread public outrage among many Americans and was a lingering political handicap in Ford’s effort to win election as president in 1976. b. While the Helsinki accords were controversial among conservative American critics because they legitimized Soviet-established boundaries of Poland and other Eastern European countries, many Americans hailed the third basket of Helsinki agreements because they guaranteed increased cultural and educational exchanges between East and West and ostensibly protected certain basic human rights. These accords sparked small dissident movements in the USSR and Eastern Europe that were subsequently extinguished by the Soviets and their communist allies in Eastern Europe. c. The frantic evacuation of the last Americans and Vietnamese by helicopter and the subsequent rescuing of about 140,000 South Vietnamese refugees, who fled South Vietnam in 1975, ahead of the victorious North Vietnamese communists may have been a politically embarrassing coda to America’s debacle in Vietnam. Nevertheless, most Americans were relieved that the haphazard evacuation of the last Americans in Vietnam and the rescuing and subsequent American re-settlement of these fleeing South Vietnamese refugees, who feared political reprisals from the North Vietnamese communists, prevented the onset of an even more chilling humanitarian and political disaster from occurring in Vietnam. d. While many Americans suspected the existence of a secret deal between President Nixon and President Ford, involving the promise of Nixon’s resignation in exchange for a full presidential pardon by President Ford, no evidence was ever produced during President Ford’s presidency or afterwards that he had negotiated or participated in any agreement that secured Richard Nixon’s resignation as president in 1974. e. President Carter, not President Ford, offered a presidential pardon to some ten thousand Vietnam War draft evaders and resisters during his presidency. Question 11 a. The U.S. Congress passed and President Nixon signed in 1972 Title IX of the Education Amendments, prohibiting sex discrimination in any federally b. c. d. e. funded education program or activity. The act represented a significant political achievement in the feminist movement’s efforts to obtain equitable access and resources for women seeking to participate fully in federally funded educational programs including intercollegiate and interscholastic athletics. The Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wad e (1973) held that state laws prohibiting abortion were unconstitutional because they violated a woman’s constitutional right to privacy. The Court decision was considered a notable achievement for the feminist movement in America because it provided a constitutionally mandated right for a woman, rather than male-dominated state legislatures, to make the ultimate decision about whether to terminate her pregnancy. The Supreme Court in Reed v. Reed (1971) and Frontiero v. Richardson (1973) overturned sexually discriminatory practices and rules in legislation, estate administration, and employment. The political and judicial victories, achieved by the feminist movement in America, precipitated an intense reconsideration of traditional gender roles that did help propel millions of American women into the workplace and obtain professional positions and enter occupations previously thought to be the exclusive domain of men. Correct answer. Despite intense political advocacy on the part of feminists, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), constitutionally guaranteeing women equality of rights under law in all fifty states, failed to be ratified by the requisite thirty-eight states during the 1970s. The constitutional amendment died in 1982, three states short of ratification, much to the consternation of the feminist movement. Question 12 a. The U.S. Supreme Court did not hold that the plaintiff Allan Bakke, who challenged the constitutionality of the racial and ethnic minority admissions preferences of the medical school education program at the University of California at Davis, should have received such a minority preference from the university because he was Jewish. b. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the Bakke case, held that any university, public or private, that receives federal funding was constitutionally prohibited from using numerical racial or ethnic quotas in its admissions procedures. c. The Court, in the Bakke case, declined to hold that all forms of affirmative action in university admission programs were unconstitutional forms of reverse discrimination. Instead, the Court ruled that those school admissions programs that allowed racial or ethnic considerations to be a plus factor in admissions were constitutionally permissible, as long as such racial or ethnic considerations did not amount to a rigid numerical quota for that minority group. d. The U.S. Supreme Court, in the Bakke case, did not address the constitutionality of universities establishing minority-based educational programs, such as minority-based scholarships and academic departments of study, nor did the Court establish any legal guidelines for permissible minority-based housing arrangements at universities. e. Correct answer. In the Bakke case, the Court found that the use of rigid racial quotas in university admissions programs represented an unconstitutional violation of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, the Court also ruled that race could be taken into account as one of several plus factors in a school’s overall admissions policy. The Court’s splintered and sharply divided decision was decried by liberals who feared it would be used to reverse years of civil rights progress and hailed by conservatives as affirming the legal principle of colorblind justice in American society. Question 13 a. The inflationary oil shocks of the 1970s, successive substantial increases in the price of imported oil, fueled the rampant, double-digit inflation rates, yawning federal budget and international trade deficits, depreciations in the value of the dollar, and the meteoric rise in interest rates, that combined to undermine the presidency of Jimmy Carter. b. The invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in December 1979 and President Carter’s political response of imposing economic sanctions on the Soviets and calling for a worldwide boycott of the upcoming Olympic Games in Moscow sparked a generalized fear by Americans that the Cold War had been revived and caused many Americans to agree that with Carter’s concession that he had misjudged the political intentions of the Soviet Union. c. The protracted and unsettling personal agony of the Iranian hostage crisis, lasting from November 1979 to January 1980, caused many Americans to doubt the ability of President Carter to manage effectively critical American political and economic interests in the increasingly volatile and anti-American Persian Gulf region. d. Some observers believed that President Carter relied too heavily on a small, insular circle of Georgia advisers, whom he had known since he was Governor of Georgia in the early-mid 1970s, for mediocre political, bureaucratic, and policy advice. Moreover, these critics believed Carter’s overreliance on his Georgia advisers led him to misinterpret the national mood of popular discontent and profound anxiety during the late 1970s and to deliver a perplexing and poorly received televised speech to the nation in the summer of 1979 that blamed the discontent, anxiety, and hardships of Americans on a collective spiritual and moral crisis in the nation. e. Correct Answer. One of President Carter’s most notable foreign policy achievements was his personal mediation of peace negotiations with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at the presidential retreat at Camp David in September 1978. President Carter’s relentless pursuit of a peace agreement between the two historical Middle East enemies led to the signing of a formal peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in March 1979. Question 14 a. President Carter’s activist personal Middle East diplomacy involving Israel and Egypt and his administration’s interventionist championing of individual human rights in Latin America, Rhodesia (later Zimbabwe), and South Africa demonstrated that the Carter administration did not practice isolationism in its foreign policy. b. President Carter failed to anticipate or reverse the Soviet Union’s military and political expansion into Afghanistan, leaving the economically vital oil-rich Persian Gulf region, including Iran, vulnerable to possible Soviet military attack and political dominance. Critics contended that President Carter’s misreading of Soviet intentions regarding Afghanistan and the entire Persian Gulf region represented a betrayal of the realist principles of containment. c. President Carter’s respectful and successful negotiation of the Panama Canal treaties with Panama, which turned over complete ownership and control of the Panamanians by the year 2000, and his overall efforts to nurture democracy and political and economic cooperation in Latin America, belied any contention that unilateralism propelled President Carter’s foreign policy. d. Correct answer. Advancing individual human rights throughout the world remained an overriding guiding principle of President Carter’s foreign policy. The Carter administration demonstrated its central concern for upholding individual human rights through its strong anti-apartheid policies and verbal denunciations of South Africa and Rhodesia, by its promotion and nurturing of democracies in Latin America that upheld individual civil rights and civil liberties, and through its vigorous diplomatic efforts to free political prisoners being held in totalitarian nations such as the Soviet Union. e. President Carter refused to commit significant American military and economic resources to roll back geopolitical gains made in Africa by the Soviet Union as a result of its military, political, and economic support of a successful Cuban-backed Marxist revolution in Angola and the communist superpower’s support of other successful leftist revolutionary insurrections in Africa.