America's 37th president, Richard Milhous Nixon, served his presidency from 1969 to 1974. The 1960s and 1970s had marked the greatest changes in morals and manners since the 1920s. Young people, college students in particular, rebelled against what they viewed as the repressed, conformist society of their parents. They supported a sexual revolution, aided by the birth control pill and later by Roe v. Wade (1973), a Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion. Recreational drugs such as marijuana and LSD were increasingly used. Opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam promoted the rise of a New Left, which was anti-capitalist as well as anti-war. A "counterculture" sprang up that legitimized radical standards of taste and behavior in the arts as well as in life. Feminism was reborn and joined the ranks of radical causes.

The biggest problem during the presidency of Nixon is easily identified as the Watergate Affair. On June...