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jail because they lied about the cover-up.
    It is unlikely that President Nixon knew about the break-in itself. The attempt to cover it up afterward was the mistake that finally forced him to resign. And what Watergate revealed about the Nixon White House turned the public against him. Nixon had gathered around him a loyal group of advisers who followed orders without question. In the interest of serving the president they faked information, attempted to slander his opponents, tried to steal documents, and were involved in other “dirty tricks” that had become a way of life at the White House.
    On August 8, 1974, Richard Nixon became the first president ever to resign his office. His vice president, Gerald Ford, was sworn in as the thirty-eighth president of the United States. Just four weeks later Ford issued a “full, free, and absolute” pardon to Richard Nixon, guaranteeing, to the disappointment of many, that the man who had brought such shame to America would never be asked to explain his part in the Watergate scandal.
    Just six months after Nixon’s resignation, SouthVietnam fell to the Communists. Americans watched the humiliating spectacle of marine helicopters taking off from the roof of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, leaving desperate South Vietnamese friends behind. It was yet another blow to American pride. Now, with the defeat of South Vietnam, America had undeniably lost a war. Fifty thousand American soldiers had died for nothing.
    The collapse of faith in American leadership and the defeat in Vietnam further undermined Americans’ self-confidence. People responded by turning inward and becoming more focused on themselves. Instead of identifying themselves as Americans, many people began to think of themselves as members of groups with particular interests and rights. Many people now saw themselves first as women, or Latinos, or senior citizens, or environmentalists. The population seemed to be separating into special-interest groups, each fighting for its own cause.
    Women were by far the largest and most successful of these groups. Feminist claims to equal rights had begun in the days of the suffragist movement. By the 1960s, the light cast by the civil rights movement made it increasingly obvious that African Americans weren’t the only ones being denied equal opportunity.
    In 1962 Betty Friedan had published a landmark book called
The Feminine Mystique
. In it she gavevoice to the powerful but hard-to-explain feeling that so many women shared: that there was something missing from their lives, that motherhood and housework alone did not nourish the spirit or bring fulfillment. In 1966 Friedan established the National Organization for Women (NOW), which quickly focused on two main goals: the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and the right to safe, legal abortion.
    In 1972 Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment. And in 1973 the Supreme Court ruled in favor of abortion rights in a landmark case called
Roe v. Wade
. While both of these victories would come under severe attack (the ERA was never ratified by the states), they signaled an important shift in the way American society viewed women. Many people began to take another look at the traditional roles of men and women. Why were girls always sent to home economics classes while boys were assigned to shop classes? Shouldn’t boys learn to cook? Shouldn’t girls know how to use tools? Why was it always the husband who worked and the wife who raised the children? Couldn’t women be the family breadwinners? Couldn’t fathers stay home to take care of the kids?
    But these questions also awoke a backlash against some aspects of feminism. By using the same argument that had been used against suffragists—the idea that rights for women would destroy the family—conservatives encouraged an antifeminist campaign. The issue that brought the emotions ofboth sides to a fever pitch was abortion. To many feminists, abortion