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see a downturn in the industry as a whole. We workers would read about the oil crisis in the papers, and we didn’t quite know what to make of it. All we knew is that people were waiting onseemingly endless lines to get a tank of gas, and Chrysler just kept building those huge cars. The public started paying closer attention to gas mileage and began turning to smaller, more fuel-efficient cars from abroad like the Germans’ Volkswagen Beetle and Japanese cars. We had a Chrysler Imperial at that time, and it was a real gas-guzzler. We were getting eight miles to the gallon on it, and it seemed as if you could barely get from one gas station to the other before you had to fill up again. Eventually I had to say goodbye to it because I couldn’t afford to keep gas in it.
    The American companies were refusing to change to what was now going to be the new road for the auto industry. We workers just kind of looked at that and said, “Well, why don’t they change? When are they gonna get the message that we’re not in love with those big cars anymore?” We’d try to tell them that we were the ones that were buying those little cars, but the company didn’t want to listen. We were looking for companies that made smaller cars, of course, that were American-made, but if America was not making those cars, then you had to buy what you could find. We had to get to work, we had to get our families around,and with gas prices climbing much faster than our wages, we had to do something. We had to buy what was economically feasible for our families.
    I worked at Chrysler until around 1974. I had bought my first home and started a family. That November they came around and told us that we were permanently laid off. I was terrified. I thought, “What does this mean? I’ve had a job for all these years, and now I’m being put in the street.” All of a sudden there was not enough money for the mortgage note and the car note. We could barely keep food on the table. I thought I could rely on unemployment for a while, but the industry had recently changed some of its policies in the cutbacks, so the sub fund, which was to help laid-off workers, was depleting quickly, and I realized there was just one step between me and the welfare line. There was a sentiment of despair everywhere. These were very shaky times, and we just didn’t know what to do.
    The faltering economy led many people to feel that their leaders were failing them. This disappointment in the government had really begun with Vietnam, a war Richard Nixon inherited from Democrat Lyndon Johnson when he became presidentin 1969. At first many Americans were pleased when Nixon set up a policy of “Vietnamization,” which placed more of the burden of their own defense on the South Vietnamese, and started bringing American GIs home. But this good feeling did not last. In 1970 it was revealed that U.S. soldiers had massacred Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, and that same year the United States illegally invaded Cambodia. Protests against the war continued to divide the nation. In May four college students were killed by National Guard troops during an antiwar rally at Kent State University in Ohio. Rage and resentment seemed to be the only emotions Americans had in common.
    The 1972 presidential campaign was under way when a seemingly minor crime took place. One night in June seven men broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. The burglars were arrested. But when it was discovered that they were on the payroll of the Committee to Reelect the President, a chain of events was set in motion that would eventually create a constitutional crisis known as Watergate. Americans watched with fascination and disgust as a complicated story of intrigue and obstruction of justice reached higher and higher in the government, eventually touching the president himself.
    Hugh Sloan,