Nixon to win southern supporters, he pledged to ease up on enforcing federal civil rights legislation and oppose forced busing to achieve racial integration in schools. He criticized antiwar protesters and promised to end the Vietnam War with honor.

dismantling Great Society social programs, cutting funds for the War on Poverty, and eliminating the Office of Economic Opportunity. In 1972 the president adopted a program of revenue sharing, which transferred federal tax revenues to the states to use as they wished.

Expanding affirmative action programs begun under the Johnson administration, he adopted plans that required construction companies and unions to recruit minority workers according to their percentage in the local labor force.

supported “benign neglect” concerning the issue of race and rejected new legislative attempts to use busing to promote school desegregation.

Nixon signed the extension of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, thereby renewing the law that had provided suffrage to the majority of African Americans in the South. The law also lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen for national elections.

Nixon and Kissinger pursued a realpolitik foreign policy, which prioritized American economic and strategic interests over fostering democracy or human rights.

Nixon and Kissinger’s greatest triumph came in easing tensions with the country’s Cold War adversaries, a policy known as détente. China opened up possibilities of mutually beneficial trade between the two countries.

Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty: The pact froze the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles and submarine-based missiles for five years and restricted the number of antiballistic missiles that each nation could deploy.

this preemptive pardon polarized Americans and cost Ford considerable political capital. Ford also wrestled with a troubled economy as Americans once again experienced rising prices and high unemployment.

It was eventually revealed that the break-in had been authorized by the Committee for the Re-Election of the President in an attempt to steal documents from the Democrats.

With Nixon’s cover-up revealed, and impeachment and conviction likely, Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974. damaged the office of the president, leaving Americans wary and distrustful.

The greatest challenge Carter faced once in office was a faltering economy. America’s consumer-oriented economy depended on cheap energy, a substantial portion of which came from sources outside the United States.

Energy concerns helped reshape American industry. With energy prices rising, American manufacturers sought ways to reduce costs by moving their factories to nations that offered cheaper labor and lower energy costs.

this process of deindustrialization accelerated a significant population shift that had begun during World War II from the old industrial areas of the Northeast and the Midwest (the Rust Belt) to the South and the Southwest (the Sun Belt), where cheaper costs and lower wages were enormously attractive to businesses

The president’s pursuit of détente, or the easing of tensions, with the Soviet Union was less successful.