In the late 1960s, a spotlight cast upon some of the CIA’s more questionable activities in the subcontinent had a profound and enduring impact on Indian perceptions of the United States’ government and its external intelligence service. In the wake of the Ramparts scandal, the CIA came to occupy a prominent place in mainstream Indo–U.S. cultural and political discourse. For the remainder of the twentieth-century, and beyond, anti-American elements in India drew repeatedly upon the spectre of CIA subversion as a means of undermining New Delhi’s relationship with Washington. The blanket exposure given by the world’s press to CIA indiscretions, exemplified by the international media circus surrounding Congressional probes into the U.S. intelligence community, made a deep psychological impression in South Asia. This chapter traces the socio-political impact of Indira Gandhi’s assertions that the malevolent hand of the CIA lay behind India’s problems, foreign and domestic. It recovers South Asian agency in intelligence terms by interrogating the utility of Gandhi’s policy of exploiting the CIA’s reputation as a socio-political malefactor to court popular legitimacy.

This chapter recounts how the 1973 war in the Middle East became a test case for Brezhnev's vision of a condominium with the United States. The Yom Kippur War highlighted the fragility of detente and pointed to the inevitably competitive nature of the Soviet–American relationship. Although both the United States and the Soviet Union were interested in detente, competing pressures and the need to cater to diverse audiences created constraints on joint action. The Soviet Union craved American recognition but also wanted to be respected as a superpower with a wide clientele. The Kremlin's imperial overextension in the 1970s stemmed from a search for attributes of a superpower. For a time, the Soviets mistakenly believed they could achieve this hand in hand with the United States rather than in competition.

In the late 1960s, Brezhnev aimed to downplay the East–West ideological divide, prioritizing practical relationships over ideology. Worsening relations with China, demonstrated by the 1969 border clashes, heightened Moscow's fears of China. The prospect of an economic bonanza tempted the Soviets to reach out to France and West Germany in search of trade deals and access to markets. However, as this chapter shows, it was Nixon's visit to Beijing in February 1972 that awakened Brezhnev to the imperative of engaging with the United States. Despite America's ongoing war in Vietnam, he went out on a limb to host Nixon in Moscow. Brezhnev subsequently discovered that he and Nixon had much in common. He then strove to end the Cold War on terms that would approximate a Soviet–American condominium. This chapter argues, however, that the contradictions between the Soviet desire for American recognition and the Soviet quest for revolutionary legitimacy weakened the prospects for genuine superpower detente.

Chapter 5 assesses US air power following the Tet Offensive through the cross-border incursion into Cambodia in 1970. The newly elected US president, Richard Nixon, sought an American withdrawal from South Vietnam. However, he initially expanded the conflict into Cambodia to deny the NVA/VC sanctuary and sever their southern supply lines. Leading up to the invasion, the Commando Hunt air interdiction campaign in southern Laos slowed the movement of supplies. It also imposed substantial costs on the North to keep the Ho Chi Minh Trail open. Commando Hunt could not halt the NVA troops from making the journey to South Vietnam on foot, but the direct attack of fielded forces in South Vietnam and Cambodia did continue to keep the NVA/VC dispersed and hidden. Keeping the North Vietnamese on the defensive provided the time and space for South Vietnam’s pacification program to take root and for the Vietnamization program to generate conventional capabilities for the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) to replace withdrawing American combat troops.

Prisons in this country did not fill simply because crime went up, police arrested more people, and judges sent them to prison. The crime surge’s primary contribution was that it fostered an environment where politicians and the public became attracted to harsh criminal laws. The steady ratcheting up of the severity of American criminal law played a larger role in Mass Incarceration than the transitory crime rise. This chapter introduces the critical punitive pattern: crime leads to public outrage, and outrage leads to harsher laws.

Chapter 5 reveals how Hong Kong’s freedom of expression was defined and confined by changes in the China strategies of Britain and other world powers. The diplomat Murray MacLehose assumed Hong Kong’s governorship in 1971 with an express mandate from London to build civic pride and raise living standards in Hong Kong to maximise the British bargaining position in negotiations over Hong Kong’s future with a post-Mao regime. In addition to the well-known expansion of social services and efforts to combat crime and corruption, MacLehose’s governorship also featured a hitherto understudied loosening of media control. Yet behind the overt building of a free city were the covert surveillance of political activists and unchanged draconian laws of political censorship that were used to crack down on anti-government dissent whenever it overstepped the government’s political red lines.

The Great Migration ended in 1970 as manufacturing was replaced with electronic goods. Wages stagnated, and income inequality increased rapidly. This led to a new Gilded Age. Nixon replaced Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty with his War on Drugs. Blacks were opposed to Nixon’s Vietnam War, and he penalized them by incarcerating them. This, helped by state laws and President Reagan, led to mass incarceration – which became known as the New Jim Crow. Public education was reserved for suburban whites, while urban Blacks were in prison or attended underfunded schools. The Flint, Michigan, water crisis demonstrates the difficulty of urban Blacks as jobs and urban facilities disappeared. President Obama was the first Black president, elected in the financial crisis of 2008. The Supreme Court nullified the 1965 Voting Act as it had done with amendments in the 1880s. Obamacare was the most enduring achievements of Obama’s presidency.

It is perhaps surprising how little political satire Philip Roth wrote. Over a career that spanned more than fifty years, with more than thirty books – many of them explicitly political and explicitly funny – there’s really only one book that can be truly called a political satire. That book, 1971’s Our Gang, is considered by most of its readers (if it is considered at all) an unmitigated failure. A satire of Richard Nixon, written and published in a white heat of rage before Nixon had even committed his most notorious crimes, Our Gang is a curious work in Roth’s oeuvre. This essay will look at that failure, and the handful of other times political satire appears in his work, and try to explain why Roth never fully returned to political satire as a writing strategy.

Looking at the Korean and Vietnam Wars, we evaluate the influence of casualties disaggregated by space/hometowns and time on mass opinion in both the Korean and Vietnam wars and on individual opinion in the Vietnam War. We find a powerful connection between US casualties and public support for a war consistent with our expectations about the importance of casualty trends, the geographic locations of casualty hometowns, and the interaction of these dynamics. Disaggregated casualties are better able to capture variation in mass public and individual wartime opinion than are logged cumulative national casualties – the standard wartime measure employed. We also find that the wartime information-opinion process operates more strongly in the ex ante identifiable early stages of a conflict, and less effectively later in a conflict when casualty expectations (and thus the value of new information) begin to harden. These results strongly support the general notion that casualty patterns act as an observable proxy for our RP/ETC process by capturing information that individuals draw on to generate ETC and formulate wartime positions, improving our ability to understand and predict wartime opinion.

The 1932–1968 period represents a crucial era of change between the Republican Party and the American South. With the New Deal realignment, the GOP slowly but surely came to the realization that some form of electoral competition in the South could no longer be avoided for the party to have a chance at winning presidential elections and congressional majorities consistently. After FDR’s death, and with liberals and conservatives in the Democratic Party divided on civil rights, Republicans – for the first time – had both the opportunity and the need to advance in the South. But how to take advantage of this opening in the South while simultaneously not alienating traditional Republican voters elsewhere proved to be a difficult puzzle to solve. While the 1964 election showed that catering to Dixiecrats could open the South up to the Republican Party, Goldwater’s dismal performance everywhere else temporarily scared Republican leaders. A breakthrough in the inherent conflict between (a) the party’s failure to succeed in the South and (b) the price it paid outside of the South for trying was forged by Richard Nixon, in his efforts to win the 1968 presidential nomination. In assessing both the internal dynamics within the GOP as well as the national effects of previous Republican southern strategies, Nixon identified a winning strategy. By rejecting segregation, Nixon reassured voters outside of the South that he was not giving in to the worst elements in the Dixiecrat movement. Yet Nixon’s support for the less extreme policies that Southern conservatives were demanding – a slowdown in the implementation of civil rights reforms – was tied to the broader sense of insecurity whites felt across the country with regard to job safety and crime.