Disturbing History - The 1970's

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

The 1970s opened in conflict.On April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon announced the expansion of U.S. military operations into Cambodia.Days later, four students were killed by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State. On May 8, construction workers attacked antiwar demonstrators in what became known as the Hard Hat Riot, one of the defining images of a country bitterly divided over Vietnam, protest, and generational change.In the third installment of Disturbing History’s series on the American decades, Brian turns to the 1970s—the decade when the young people everyone had spent years worrying about finally began inheriting the country.The voting age dropped to eighteen with the 26th Amendment. The military draft ended. American prisoners of war came home. Smallpox was pushed toward eradication. The microprocessor arrived, environmental protections expanded, and Voyager carried a golden record filled with sounds and greetings from Earth toward the stars.Then Brian turns the photograph over.The decade exposed extraordinary abuses of government power. The burglary of an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania helped reveal domestic surveillance programs. Congressional investigations uncovered CIA and FBI misconduct, while the Church Committee documented intelligence programs including NSA access to international telegram traffic.The Pentagon Papers further exposed how successive administrations had privately understood the Vietnam War very differently from the way it was often presented publicly. The episode also examines the disasters, scandals, panics, and strange cultural moments that defined the decade: Buffalo Creek, the Teton Dam collapse, deadly aviation failures, the Browns Ferry nuclear fire, the Legionnaires’ outbreak, the 1976 swine flu vaccination campaign, the Chowchilla school-bus kidnapping, fears surrounding youth culture, the rise of deprogramming, the Dungeons & Dragons panic, the Amityville story, the Howard Hughes autobiography hoax, and Chicago’s infamous Disco Demolition Night.And running beneath it all is the same question this series keeps returning to: Was the generation coming up really destroying America—or was an older generation simply watching the country change? By the end of the 1970s, the first baby boomers were entering their thirties and raising children of their own. Those children would grow up with seat belts, car seats, lower lead exposure, computers, and a very different America.And eventually, they too would grow old enough to complain about the generation coming behind them.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself,

just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes it's rewritten by the disturbed. Two episodes ago, this series started with a quotation about the young that a dead Greek never said. And last episode, it moved on to one

that a live graduate student did say once to get a newspaper reporter off his back. The children love luxury and have contempt for authority. Don't trust anyone over 30. One of those was invented by a Cambridge student in 1907, and the other was a brush-off from a kid named Jack Weinberg in a Berkeley hallway in 1964, and both of them got carried around for decades as proof of something about a whole generation. Jack Weinberg turned 30 in the spring of 1970. The decade he'd been the voice of had been over for about three months. The children who'd hidden under their desks for Bert the Turtle in the 50s and been called soft for most of the 60s were now the young adults running the campuses, and the country had spent 20 years telling them they were going to ruin everything.

And this is the decade where they got the keys. I've got a personal stake in this one. I was born in the middle of the 70s, which makes this the first episode in the series where I'm in the photograph. I'm not in it in any way I remember. But the people who raised me are, and the country they were standing in when I showed up, is the one this episode is about. And a lot of what I found in the last few weeks of reading is that things I've heard about my whole life happened differently than I was told. The 70s has a quotation of its own about the young, and it's a different kind from the first two. The 50s line was made up and the 60s line was a joke, and the 70s line was set on the record by the President of the United States. On Friday the 1st of May, 1970, the morning after he'd gone on television

to announce that American troops were crossing into Cambodia, Richard Nixon walked out of out of a briefing at the Pentagon and stopped to talk with a crowd of employees who'd gathered in a hallway to see him. A woman in the crowd told him her husband was in Vietnam and that she'd been proud of what he'd said the night before. And Nixon started in on the difference between men like her husband and the students protesting the war. He said the boys on the college campuses were the luckiest people in the world, going to the greatest universities, and there they were burning up the books and storming around. And then he gave them the word that stuck. You see these bums, he said, blowing up the campuses.

Reporters were standing close enough to write it down, and it ran in the Washington Post the next morning with the word bums in the headline. On Monday the 4th of May, the Ohio National Guard fired 67 rounds in about 13 seconds into a crowd of students at Kent State University and killed four of them and wounded nine. One of the dead was a 19-year-old named Allison Krause. Her father, Arthur Krause, went on top. television that week, and what he said was that his child was not a bum. On Friday the 8th of May, four days after Kent State, several hundred students gathered on the steps of Federal Hall on Wall

Street under the statue of George Washington to hold a memorial for the four dead in Ohio. Around noon, about 200 construction workers came down off the building sites in lower Manhattan, in their hard hats, carrying American flags, and went into the crowd. They beat students with their fists and with the hats. The police who were there mostly stood and watched, which is what the city's own investigation found afterward. Something like 70 people were hurt, and six were arrested, and then the workers marched up to City Hall, where Mayor John Lindsay had ordered the flag flown at half-staff for Kent State and made a city employee run it back up to the top of the pole. From there, they went on to Pace College. 18 days later, Nixon had Peter Brennan, the head of the New York

Building Trades Council and a group of other union men to the White House. And Brennan gave the president a hard hat, and Nixon put it on for the cameras. In 1973, he made Brennan his Secretary of Labor. That's the picture at the top of this decade. Men who'd built the skyline with their hands, in the street at lunch hour, beating college students with the hats they wore to work, and a president who invited them over afterward to say thank you. We're going to work it the same way as the last two. The front of the photograph first, because there's a lot on it worth seeing. Then we turn it over and read the back. And the front of this one is harder to make out than the last two, because the 70s is the first decade in this series, where the photograph came out a little

under-exposed. The money is where this decade stops looking like the two before it. In 1970, the median American family brought in a little under $10,000 a year. By 1979, it was close to 20,000, and on paper that looks like the biggest jump yet. Prices nearly doubled over the same 10 years. After inflation, an ordinary family finished the decade maybe 5 or 6% better off than it started, which is real, and is also about a fifth of what the 60s had delivered, and by the last two years of the decade it was going backward. The poverty rate, which had been cut almost in half in the 60s, sat at about 12% the whole time and didn't move. Unemployment, ran near 6% at the end of 1979, and the inflation rate that year was 13%.

And the prime rate at the banks was heading past 15. The word economists reached for was stagflation, because none of their models allowed for prices and unemployment to climb at the same time. And both of them did. So the 70s never had the 60s money. What it had was everything the 60s money had paid for, arriving all at once. The kids got the vote, and the way they got, got it started as a mess. In 1970, Congress lowered the voting age to 18 inside a voting rights bill, and the Supreme Court promptly split the difference and ruled that Congress could do that for

federal elections, but not state ones, which meant every state was about to need two sets of voter rolls for one election. So Congress passed a constitutional amendment in March of 1971, and the states ratified it in a hundred days, faster than any amendment before or since. On the 5th of July, Nixon signed the certification in the East Room with a choir of teenagers standing behind him. The argument that carried it was the one everybody had been making for years. That a man old enough to be drafted was old enough to vote on who did the drafting. And by the following year, 11 million people between 18 and 21 were on the rolls. Then the draft ended, and it ended on one man.

The last man inducted into the United States Army under the draft was a plumber's apprentice from California, named Dwight Elliott Stone on the 30th of June, 1973. The lottery kept running on paper for a couple more years, and nobody was ever called from it. And in 1975, Ford stopped the registration too. For the first time since before Pearl Harbor, an 18-year-old American could plan his life without a jar of capsules in it. The war's prisoners came home in the same year. Between February and April of 1973, 591 men walked. off transport planes at Clark Air Base in the Philippines, some of them after eight years

in a Hanoi prison, and the networks carried it live. The medicine in the 70s is the part people often forget. In October of 1977, a hospital cook named Ali Maileen in the port town of Merca in Somalia, came down with smallpox and recovered. He was the last human being on earth to catch it from another human being. A disease that had killed something like 300 million people in the 20th century alone, more than every war in it put together, had been chased down to one man in one town by a program of vaccinators going door to door, and it stopped there.

The World Health Organization waited two and a half years to be sure, and in May of 1980, declared it gone. In July of 1978, in a hospital in Oldham, England, A girl named Louise Brown was born after being conceived in a laboratory dish, the first person ever, and her parents got letters telling them she'd be born without a soul. She's in her late 40s now and has children of her own. In 1971, a British engineer named Godfrey Hounsfield scanned the first patient with a machine that took x-rays from many angles

and let a computer build a picture of the inside of a living skull. And every emergency room in the world has one now. The company that built it was EMI, and the story that gets told is that the Beatles record sales paid for it. That's partly true, in the sense that EMI had a great deal of money in those years, and some of it went to research. The environment got its laws, and the 50s warnings finally got answered. Earth Day in April of 1970 put something like 20 million people in the streets. The Environmental Protection Agency opened its doors that December. The Clean Air Act was signed the last day of 1970, and the Clean Water Act passed over Nixon's veto two years later.

And in June of 1972, the agency's first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, banned DDT, 10 years after Rachel Carson and eight years after she died. There were about 400 nesting pairs of bald eagles left in the lower 48 when she wrote her book. By the time the government took the bird off the endangered list, They were closer to 10,000. The machines kept getting smaller and cheaper. Intel put a whole computer processor on a single chip in November of 1971. A company called Atari put a game called Pong in a bar in Sunnyvale in 1972,

and the machine broke inside a week because the coin box was full. The Apple 2 went on sale in 1977, and the Atari home console came out the same fall. And by then, a family could buy a machine that recorded television off the air and played it back later, which meant that for the first time, a person could watch a show when they wanted, rather than when the network said. And in the summer and fall of 1977, two spacecraft named Voyager left Cape Canaveral for the outer planets, each with a gold-plated copper record bolted to its side, and the record is where this episode is going to end. And the children of this decade, my crowd, got a television, that had finally decided to be on their side.

Sesame Street had gone on the air the November before the decade started. Schoolhouse Rock started in 1973 because an advertising executive noticed his son could remember every lyric on the radio and none of his multiplication tables. In the summer of 1975, a shark movie made by a 27-year-old kept an entire country out of the ocean. And two years later, a space movie nobody in Hollywood wanted had opened on 32 screens, and by the end of its run had sold more tickets than anything ever

made. The moon program ended in the middle of all this. Apollo 13 blew a tank on the way there in April of 1970, and three men came home alive on the strength of arithmetic, duct tape, and a cardboard box, and in December of 1972, a Navy captain named Eugene Sernan climbed a ladder on the surface and became the last human being to stand there. He said before he stepped up, that they'd leave as they came and God willing return with peace and hope for all mankind. That was the last of six landings in a little over three years, and nobody has been back since. That's the front of the photograph, and it's a good one. The kids got the vote and got out from under the draft. The prisoners came home, smallpox died, the Eagles came back. The machines got small

enough to sit on a desk, and the television finally started teaching the children instead of selling them cigarettes. For a family that had bought the house in the 50s and sent the kids to college in the 60s, the 70s was the decade the kids finished college, moved out and got jobs, and the family discovered that the house they'd paid $18,000 for was now worth 60. The back of the photograph is where the adults are. Every decade in this series has had a set of men in charge who were proudest of the thing they'd built, and the 60s men had built the bomb. The 70s' men had built the bomb. The 70s men had built the presidency, or at least the version of it, that had grown up since the war. And the thing that decades adults kept telling their children was that they had no respect for authority.

So the first thing on the back of this photograph is what the authority turned out to be doing. Spiro Agnew is a good place to begin, because Spiro Agnew was the man the administration sent out to say the quiet part about the young. In New Orleans in October of 1969, the vice president described, the people leading the anti-war movement as an effete core of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals. In San Diego, the following September, he called the press nattering nabobs of negativism. A line William Sapphire wrote for him. He gave dozens of these speeches in a tone the White House liked, and they made him the second most popular Republican in the country. In 1973, federal prosecutors in Baltimore assembled evidence that Agnew had

been taking cash from engineering contractors since his days as Baltimore County Executive, that it had continued while he was governor of Maryland, and that it had continued while he was vice president of the United States. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The Justice Department summary described envelopes of cash being delivered to his office. On the 10th of October, 1973, Adonu walked into a federal courtroom in Baltimore, pleaded no contest to a single count of failing to report income, paid a $10,000 fine, took three years of probation, and resigned the vice presidency the same afternoon. Ten years later, a Maryland court ordered him to pay the state back, $268,000, which is what

the court decided he'd taken. The man who told the country its children were impudent snobs left office over a case that started with a contractor handing him an envelope. Ten months after that, the president went too. Everybody knows the outline of Watergate, and I'm not going to walk it, except for one date. On the 17th of November, 1973, at a resort in Orlando, Nixon stood in front of 400 newspaper editors and told them that people had a right to know whether or not their president was a crook, and that he was not a crook. Nine months later, on the 9th of August, 1974, he became the first president in the history of the office of the office. to resign it, and a month after that, the man who replaced him pardoned him for whatever he'd done. The children who'd been told they had no respect for authority,

watch the authority get on a helicopter on the south lawn and wave. That's the part everybody remembers, and the part that matters more for this series is what the adults had been doing to the children in private, and it came out in the 70s because of a burglary that nobody solved for 43 years. On the night of the 8th of March, 1971, most of the country was listening to Muhammad Ali fight Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden. That was the point of picking the night.

While the fight was on, eight people broke into a two-man FBI field office on the second floor of an apartment building in Media, Pennsylvania, outside Philadelphia, and carried out every file in it in suitcases. They called themselves the Citizens Commission to investigate the FBI. They drove the files to a farmhouse,

sorted them for 10 days and mailed copies to two senators, a congressman, and reporters at three newspapers. Two of the politicians mailed them straight back to the bureau. The Washington Post printed the first story on the 24th of March. What the files showed was that the FBI had informants in college classrooms, that it was tracking the daughters of black congressmen at their universities, that it was opening files on students for attending meetings, and that it had a working policy of keeping the young, afraid. One memo told agents to conduct more interviews with campus activists specifically to

enhance the paranoia and get the point across that there was an FBI agent behind every mailbox, and that's the bureau's own wording from its own file. Another document carried a routing slip with a word on it nobody outside the building had ever seen, which was Cointel Pro, and a reporter at NBC named Carl Stern spent the next two years suing the government to find out what it meant. When the answer came in December of 1973, it was that for 15 years the FBI had been running a program of anonymous letters, forged documents, planted stories, and informants against Americans it considered subversive, including a great many of the students the adults were writing editorials about. Jay Edgar Hoover, who'd run the Bureau for 48 years, put 200 agents on the media burglary and never got anybody. And the statute of limitations ran out in 1976. And the case was closed. Hoover himself died in his sleep in May of 1972,

14 months after the break-in. The burglars didn't identify themselves until January of 2014, when a former post reporter named Betty Medger published a book about them. And it turned out the leader had been a physics professor at Haverford College named William Daviden. And two of the others were a married couple with three young children who'd arranged for the kids to go to relatives if they were caught. They'd been living openly in Philadelphia the whole time. The burglary was the first pull on a thread that came all the way out in the middle of the decade.

In December of 1974, Seymour Hirsch reported in the New York Times that the CIA, which was forbidden by law from operating inside the United States, had been running a domestic program called Operation Chaos against the anti-war movement, with files on more than 7,000 Americans and an index of 300,000. names. Congress set up a committee under Senator Frank Church to find out what else there was, and over the next year and a half, the Church Committee found most of it. It found that for 30 years, from 1945 to 1975, the National Security Agency had received copies of nearly every international telegram sent by an American through the three big cable companies under a program called Shamrock,

and read them. It found the CIA's assassination plots against foreign leaders. It found that a program called MK Ultra, which had spent the 50s and 60s, giving LSD and other drugs to people who hadn't agreed to it, including prisoners, mental patients, and the agency's own employees, to find out whether a mind could be controlled. The agency's director had ordered every record of that program destroyed in 1973, and most of them were. What survived was about 20,000 pages of receipts and invoices that had been misfiled in a building that held financial records. And a writer named John Marks found them with a freedom of information request in 1977. That's how the Senate learned that in November of 1953, an Army scientist named Frank Olson

had been given LSD in his drink at a retreat without being told, and nine days later had gone through a window on the 10th floor of a hotel in New York. His family had been told for 22 years that he'd jumped. The president had them to the White House in 1975 to apologize. And there's the Pentagon Papers, which the last episode promised. In 1967, Robert McNamara had ordered a secret history of how the United States got into Vietnam, and it came to 47 volumes in about 7,000 pages. One of the people who'd worked on it, a former Marine and Defense analyst named Daniel Ellsberg, spent the fall of 1969 photocopying it at night, and in June of 1971, the New York Times started printing it. What the history showed was that the government had been

planning to expand the war while telling the public it was trying to end it. That the Gulf of Tonkin resolution had been drafted months before the attack, it was supposedly written in response to, and that four presidents in a row had known the war was going worse than they said. The Nixon administration got a court order to stop the times, the first prior restraint on a newspaper in American history, and the Supreme Court threw it out inside two weeks. Then the administration put Ellsberg on trial under the Espionage Act,

and the case collapsed in May of 1973, when the judge learned that a team run out of the White House had broken into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist in Beverly Hills in September of 1971, looking for something to smear him with, and that the president's men had offered the judge the directorship of the FBI while the trial was going on. The judge dismissed every charge,

and the men who'd done the burglary were the same men who'd go into the Watergate nine months later. So that's what the authority was doing, while it lectured the young about respect for it. It was taking envelopes, spying on their classrooms, reading their parents' telegrams, drugging its own scientists,

lying about the war their brothers were dying in, and burgling a doctor's office to find out what the man who told the truth had said to his therapist. Every bit of it came out in the same six years, mostly through the courts and the Senate and a handful of reporters, and mostly because a physics professor picked the night of a prize fight to carry some files down a stairwell.

The Russians spent the 70s the way they'd spent the 60s, doing worse and hiding it better, and two of the things they hid came out in this decade, or leaked from it, and both of them deserve a place here because the American government helped hide one of them. In November of 1976, a Soviet biologist living in London named Joris Medvedev published an article in the magazine New Scientist, saying that in the late 1950s, there had been a nuclear disaster in the Ural Mountains that had contaminated hundreds of square miles and killed an unknown number of people, and that nobody in the West had ever heard of it.

The Western nuclear establishment called him a fantasist. The chairman of Britain's atomic energy authority said the story was rubbish. What Medvedev was describing had happened on the 29th of September 1957, at a plutonium plant, called Mayak, near a town called Kishdam, when a tank of high-level waste overheated and exploded and sent a plume across the countryside. And it turned out the CIA had known about it since about 1960, and had said nothing. And a set of agency documents released a few years after Medvedev's article suggested the reason was that a public account of a Soviet waste explosion might frighten Americans about the waste sitting at their own plants. The Soviet government

admitted the accident in 1989. The second one happened in the last year of the decade. In early April of 1979, people in the city of Svordlovsk in the Urales started dying of what the authorities said was anthrax from contaminated meat. The official count was 64 dead. What had actually happened, as far as anyone has ever been able to reconstruct it, is that a military compound on the edge of the city was producing anthrax spores for weapons. in violation of a treaty the Soviet Union had signed seven years earlier,

and somebody had removed a filter on an exhaust vent for maintenance, and the next shift had started the equipment without it. A plume of spores drifted southeast across a ceramics factory and a residential district, and every fatal case fell inside a narrow wedge downwind of the compound. The KGB confiscated the hospital records. The Soviets held to the meat story for 13 years, until Boris Yeltsin, who'd been the Communist Party boss in Svardlovsk that spring, admitted in 1992 that it had been the military.

A team led by a Harvard biologist named Matthew Messelson went in two years later and mapped the deaths against the wind records from that day and published the result in science. The pattern only works if the source is the compound. I put those two here because the American government of the 70s spent a good deal of energy reminding the young how much better this country was than that one. And it had known about Kishdam for 16 years and kept it in a drawer for the same reason the Soviets did. The 50s left a shelf full of things that were quietly killing people, and the 60s sent the bill,

and the 70s is the decade the country started paying it, one item at a time. This section is here because the payments changed the lives of the kids born in this decade, more than anything else on the back of the photograph did, and almost none of them know it. The cigarette ads went off television at the end of the first day of 1971. The last one that ever aired was a Virginia Slim spot at one minute to midnight on the 1st of January, in the middle of the Tonight Show, time so the tobacco companies could squeeze in one more New Year's bowl game, before the law took effect. The ads moved to magazines and billboards, and 37% of American adults were still smoking at the

end of the decade. But a child born in 1975 is in the first generation that never saw Fred Flintstone light a Winston. Lead is the item on that shelf that matters more than the DDT, and it's the one nobody talks about. Tetraethyl lead had been going into American gasoline since the 1920s, and by the 60s, it was coming out of every tailpipe in the country at something like 200,000 tons a year, and settling on the streets and the yards and the windowsills where children played. In 1973, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered the oil companies to start taking it out. And starting with the 1975 model year, every new car came with a catalytic converter that leaded gasoline would destroy. So the fuel had to change, or the cars would. In 1978, the Consumer Product Safety Commission banned lead

from house paint. And in March of 1979, a Pittsburgh pediatrician named Herbert Needleman published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, in which he'd collected more than 2,000 baby teeth from school children in Chelsea and Somerville, Massachusetts, measured the lead in them, and shown that the children with the most lead in their teeth had measurably lower scores on intelligence tests and were more likely to be rated by their teachers as distractible and unable to follow simple instructions. The government's own health surveys tell the rest. A child tested in the late 70s carried on average about 15 micrograms of lead in every 10th of a liter of blood.

By the early 90s, that figure was under 4, and it's kept falling. The kids born in the middle of this decade were the first American children in 50 years to grow up with less lead in them than their parents had. The cars kept killing people. In 1972, a little over 54,000 Americans. died on the roads, which is the most that have ever died in a single year, before or since. Then the oil embargo hit in the fall of 1973 and Congress dropped the national speed limit to 55 to save fuel. And the next year the death toll fell by nearly 10,000, which is the largest one-year drop in the history of the automobile. And it happened for a reason that had nothing to do with safety.

That same year the government tried something else. Every 1974 car came with an interlock that wouldn't let the engine start unless the driver buckled the belt, and the public hated it so much that Congress repealed the rule within a year, and it took another decade before most states would require the belt at all. The Pinto is the one Detroit had actually written down. Ford had rushed a small car to market in 1971 with the gas tank behind the rear axle, And when the car was hit from behind at moderate speed, the tank tended to rupture and the doors tended to jam. In 1977, a reporter named Mark Dowey published a story in Mother Jones built around an internal Ford memorandum

that had been submitted to federal regulators in which the company weighed the cost of a fuel system fix across its fleet against the cost of the burn deaths, the fix would prevent, using a figure of about $200,000 per life that the government itself had supplied. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The memo has been misdescribed for 50 years as a secret Pinto document, and it was neither. It was a general cost-benefit filing

about a proposed federal standard, and it was public. What it showed was an accounting method, and the accounting method was real. In February of 1978, a California jury awarded 125 minutes. million dollars in punitive damages to a boy who'd been burned over most of his body when a pinno was rear-ended, and the judge cut it to three and a half million, and Ford recalled a million and a half of the cars that June. A prosecutor in Indiana tried the company for reckless homicide

in 1980 after three teenage girls burned to death in one, and a jury acquitted it. So the shelf got cleared, item by item, and the patterns the same as the last decade. The chemical came out of the gasoline because the car companies needed it out. The speed limit fell because of the Arabs, and the belt interlock died because the drivers refused it. The kids got the benefit, and the reasons had mostly nothing to do with the kids. The thing the 60s had been right to be afraid of was a machine that wasn't ready, and the 70s had more of them. And this section is here because in almost every one of them somebody had written down the problem beforehand, and the paper had been filed. Start with a dam that was never really a dam.

In Logan County, West Virginia, a coal company called Pittston had been dumping the black slurry left over from washing coal behind a pile of mine waste across a creek called Buffalo Creek. And by 1972, there were three of those piles in a row, holding back a lake of sludge above 16 small towns. The piles had never been engineered. A federal inspector had called them dangerous in 1967. On the morning of the 26th February 1972, after three days of rain, the top pile gave way, and 130 million gallons of black water went down a 17-mile valley in about three hours,

and 125 people died, and 4,000 were left with nothing. Pittston's lawyers described the failure in their first public statement as an act of God. The state's own study said it was an act of Pittston. The survivors settled with the company for $13.5 million in 1974, and the lawyer who won it wrote in his book that the company's vice president had told him that the problem with the people of Buffalo Creek was that they'd never had anything and didn't know what to do with money. The next one was a real dam, built by the government. The titan dam in eastern Idaho was 300 feet high, brand new, built by the Bureau of Reclamation, and it had been holding water for less than a year. On the morning of Saturday the 5th of June, 1976, a wet spot appeared on the downstream face, then a leak, then a hole a bulldozer couldn't fill, and at about a quarter to noon the whole right side of the dam went, and the reservoir went through it. Eleven people died and 13,000 head of cattle, and the towns of Rexburg and Sugar City were

underwater by afternoon. It was the first time a Bureau of Reclamation Dam had ever failed. The government's own review found the design hadn't accounted for the kind of rock the dam was built on, which was full of open cracks that carried water straight through the foundation, and that engineers had known about the cracks and filled them with concrete and decided that would do. The one in the air is the one I keep going back to, because the paperwork on it is the worst of any of them. On the 12th of June, 1972, an American Airlines DC-10 climbing out of Detroit lost its rear car, door at 12,000 feet. The door hadn't been latched properly. The latching system was designed so that it could look locked when it wasn't. And when it blew out the cabin floor above, it collapsed into the

hold and took most of the flight controls with it. The captain got the airplane on the ground at Detroit with a floor full of holes and everybody alive, and the safety board recommended the door be redesigned so it couldn't happen again. What happened instead is that the head of the Federal Aviation Administration and the President of McDonnell Douglas came to what both men later described under oath as a gentleman's agreement, under which there'd be no federal order, and the company would fix the doors on its own, on a voluntary schedule. On the 3rd of March, 1974, a Turkish airline's DC-10 took off from Paris for London with 346 people aboard, and nine minutes later the rear cargo door blew out at about 11,000 feet. The floor collapsed. The controls went, and the airplane

came down in a forest north of the city at 430 miles an hour, and nobody aboard survived. It was the deadliest air crash in the world up to that day. The records on that airplane showed it had received the voluntary door modification. When investigators went to the wreckage, they found the modification had been signed off and not done. The plate that recorded the fix carried stamps from three inspectors at the factory in Long Beach. Five years after that, a different DC-10, American Flight 191, lost an engine on takeoff from Chicago on the 25th of May, 1979, because a maintenance crew had used a forklift to save time when they reattached it and cracked the mount, and 273 people died in about 30 seconds. That's still the deadliest single

airplane crash on American soil. And two years before Chicago, on the 27th of March, 1977, two 747s had run into each other on a runway and fog at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, because a Dutch captain took off without clearance, and 583 people died, which is still the most who have ever died in a single aviation incident. The 70s was the decade the jumbo jet arrived, and it took the industry most of the decade to learn what a jumbo jet cost when it went wrong. The nuclear one is the one everybody knows, and we spent a whole episode on it. So I'll leave Three Mile Island there, except to say that four years before it, there was a rehearsal that almost nobody has heard of.

On the 22nd of March, 1975 at the Browns Ferry Plant in Alabama, an electrician checking for air leaks around a bundle of cables where they passed through a wall, did it the way it was always done. which was to hold a lit candle up to the seal and watch the flame. The seal was polyurethane foam and it caught. The fire burned for seven hours, took out 1,600 cables, and disabled most of the emergency cooling systems on two reactors at once. And the operators kept the cores covered by improvising with equipment.

The plant safety analysis had never counted on. And nothing got out. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's own finding was that the industry had been treating fire as a housekeeping problem. Four years after that, a valve stuck open in Pennsylvania, and the same commission found out how much else it had been treating that way. And the last one fell on Australia. Skylab, the first American space station,

had been abandoned in orbit since 1974 and was supposed to stay up there until the shuttle could come and boost it. And the shuttle was late, and the sun was more active than the engineers had planned for. And the atmosphere swelled and the station began to drag. and NASA had no way to steer it. On the 11th of July, 1979, 77 tons of space station came apart over the Indian Ocean and scattered pieces across the outback of Western Australia

around a town called Esperance, and nobody on the ground was hurt. A local council official wrote NASA a ticket for $400 for littering, and NASA never paid it, and 30 years later, a morning radio host in California took up a collection from his listeners and mailed the town the money. Now to what frightened people in the 1970s.

The fear of the younger generation had not disappeared. It had simply changed as those once rebellious kids grew into adults, and new anxieties took their place. In August of 1976, Tom Wolfe published a long essay in New York Magazine that gave the decade its nickname, and the nickname was The Me Decade. It's been used for 50 years as a verdict on the 60s generation. that the kids who'd marched for other people had turned into adults who cared only about themselves.

What Wolf actually wrote about was mostly middle-aged Americans with money. The essay opens with a woman in a hotel ballroom at a self-improvement seminar, sharing her most private problem with a room full of strangers, and the problem is her hemorrhoids. Wolf's argument was that ordinary people finally had enough money and time to spend them on themselves in the way only aristocrats ever had, and that they were doing it in encounter groups and seminars and religions they'd invented over the weekend, and that the people doing it were as likely to be 45 as 25.

Three years later, a historian named Christopher Lash published a book called The Culture of Narcissism that said roughly the same thing at greater length, and Jimmy Carter read it and had Lash to Camp David to talk about it, and then went on television in July of 1979 and told the country it was suffering a crisis of confidence. He never used the word malaise, and the newspapers supplied it for him. The religions were the part that scared the parents most, and this is where the 70s fear of the young got its own machinery.

Thousands of young Americans joined new religious movements in this decade. The Unification Church and Har Krishna and the Children of God and a hundred smaller ones, and their parents, in a lot of cases, hired a man to kidnap them back. The most famous of those men was a former community relations worker from San Diego named Ted Patrick who'd take a job from a family grabbed the son or daughter off the street

with the parents' help, drive them to a motel and argue with them for days until they renounced whatever it was and he called it deprogramming. He was tried for kidnapping more than once and convicted at least twice and served time

and kept doing it and the parents kept hiring him because the thing they were afraid of was the thing every generation in this series has been afraid of, which was that somebody else had gotten inside the child's head. In November of 1978, the fear got the worst confirmation it could have. A congressman from California named Leo Ryan flew to Guyana to check on constituents' children who'd followed a preacher named Jim Jones into a settlement in the jungle.

And Jones' men shot Ryan and four others dead on the airstrip. And that night in the settlement, 909 people died by cyanide, a third of them children. After Jonestown, every parent whose kid had gone quiet and started talking about a group, had a picture in their head. And the picture was a clearing full of bodies,

and that picture drove the next 10 years of what adults believed about what their children were up to, which is the frame the next one belongs in. On the 15th of August, 1979, a 16-year-old computer prodigy named James Dallas Egbert III disappeared from his dormitory at Michigan State University. His family hired a private investigator named William Deere, and Deere went to the press with a theory.

Egbert played a new tabletop game called Dungeons and Dragons, and there were steam tunnels under the campus, and the theory was that the boy had gone down into the tunnels to play the game for real and gotten lost in it, in the tunnels or in his head. The newspapers ran with it, and a novel and a television movie followed, and a great many parents across the country took the game away from their kids. Egbert turned up in Louisiana a month later, alive. Deer found him, and Deer later wrote that the game had had nothing to do with it, that the boy had been under crushing pressure from his family, and had gone into the tunnels one night and then gone on the road, and that Deer himself had let the game story run because it kept the case in the papers. Egbert took his own life the following summer.

The game got blamed for another decade anyway. Two other fears from the decade are worth putting next to that one, because they were manufactured on purpose and sold. In the fall of 1977, a book called The Amityville Horror, sold 3 million copies with the words, A True Story on the cover. It described a family named Lutz, who'd bought a house on Long Island

where a young man named Ronald DeFio had shot his parents and four brothers in six. sisters in their beds in 1974, and who'd fled after 28 days because of what the house did to them. Two years later after the movie, Defeo's defense lawyer, a man named William Weber, told People Magazine that he'd sat down with the Lutz's and that the three of them had created the horror story together over many bottles of wine. He'd wanted it to help him get his client a new trial. The Lutzes sued him and he sued them, and a federal judge who heard part of it, wrote that the book was largely fiction, and it still sold as a true story. And in 1971, a novelist named

Clifford Irving walked into the offices of McGraw Hill with letters, he said, were from Howard Hughes, the richest recluse in America, authorizing Irving to write his autobiography. The publisher paid $765,000, most of it by check to H.R. Hughes, and Irving's wife deposited the checks in a Swiss bank under the name Helga R. Hughes. Life magazine bought the serial rights. Handwriting experts vouched for the letters. On the 7th of January, 1972, Hughes, who hadn't spoken to a reporter in 14 years, got on a telephone from the Bahamas with seven journalists who'd known him and told them he'd never met Clifford Irving in his life. Irving confessed three weeks later and served 17 months, and the publisher, which had paid three quarters of a million

dollars, had never once spoken to Howard Hughes. I'll add one more to that pile, because it belongs in the newspaper tradition this series has been following since the 38 witnesses. On the 29th of October, 1975, President Ford gave a speech at the National Press Club, saying he would veto any bill to bail out New York City, which was days from defaulting on its debts. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The next morning, the Daily News ran a headline on its front page that said, Ford to City dropped dead.

He'd said nothing of the kind. Five weeks later, he signed a bill lending the city $2 billion, and the following year, he lost New York State by about 160,000 votes and the presidency with it. And he said for the rest of his life that the headline had done it. It's still the most quoted sentence Gerald Ford never said, and the children, for their part, kept up the family business of turning on the ones coming after them. On the 12th of July, 1979,

a 24-year-old Chicago disc jockey named Steve Dahl, who'd been fired from a station that switched to disco, ran a promotion at Comisky Park in which anybody who brought a disco record got into the White Sox doubleheader for 98 cents. The park held about 44,000 people and something overshed. over 50,000 showed up. And between games, Dahl blew up a crate of records in center field. And several thousand people came over the walls onto the grass

and tore up the sod and lit fires, and the police cleared the field on horseback, and the second game was forfeited. And 39 people were arrested. The music the kids in the field hated was the music the kids two years younger than them were dancing to. What was actually killing people in the 70s

runs in the same columns as the two decades before it. With a couple of items, nobody expected, and one item the country expected and never got. The cars and the cigarettes are already on the list, and the war is coming. The murder rate roughly doubled between the early 60s and the middle of the 70s, and stayed there, which is the reason my line of work looked the way it did when I came into it. And that's a story for later episodes, because the country didn't figure out what to do about it until the 90s. Then there's heroin, which the country was terrified of and got wrong in an instructive direction.

In the spring of 1971, two congressmen came back from Vietnam and reported that something like 15% of American soldiers there were addicted to heroin, which was cheap and pure and sold at the gates of the bases, and the newspapers filled up with predictions that hundreds of thousands of addicts were about to come home. In June, Nixon stood in the White House press room and declared drug abuse public enemy number one, which is the line the drug war has run on ever since. The Pentagon started testing every man's urine before he could board the plane home, and a psychiatric researcher named Lee Robbins was hired to follow what happened to the ones who tested positive. Her numbers are still

the strangest in the field. About 20% of the men she followed had been addicted in Vietnam, which was worse than the congressman had said. Of those, only about 5% were addicted again a year after coming home, and about 12% had relapsed at any point over three years, and almost none of the rest had gone through any treatment at all. Everything the country believed about heroin said that was impossible. What Robbins found was that a man who'd used it in a jungle, in a war, with nothing else to do, mostly stopped when he got back to a job and a wife and a street where nobody sold it. The addicts the country was bracing for mostly didn't arrive. The drug war built to receive them did, The disease that was supposed to kill everybody was a flu.

In February of 1976, a 19-year-old army private named David Lewis at Fort Dix, New Jersey, collapsed on a night march and died, and the strain of influenza that killed him turned out to be a swine flu closely related to the one that had killed 50 million people in 1918. 13 other men at the Fort had it. On the 24th of March, President Ford announced that the government would vaccinate every American before the fall, the largest immunization campaign ever attempted. The shot started on the 1st of October, and 10 days later, three elderly people in Pittsburgh died within hours of receiving theirs at the same clinic, of what turned out to be heart attacks that had nothing to do with the shot, and the

newspapers ran the deaths anyway. By December, about 45 million people had been vaccinated, and around 500 of them had come down with a paralytic nerve disorder called Guillambore. And about 25,000 of those had died, and the government stopped the program on the 16th of December. The pandemic never came, because the virus had killed one man at Fort Dix and gone nowhere. The vaccine had killed more people than the disease. The disease that did come, nobody had a name for. In the third week of July, 1976, the American Legion held at State Convention at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia, in the middle of the bicentennial summer, and over the next two weeks, 182 of the men who'd attended fell ill with pneumonia, and 29 of them died, and nobody could find a cause.

The hotel, which had been the grandest in the city for 70 years, closed that November. In January of 1977, a scientist at the Centers for Disease Control named Joseph McDade went back to slides he'd already looked at and found a bacterium nobody had ever identified, and it had been living in the water of the hotel's air conditioning system, and coming out of the vents. It's been called Legionnaires disease ever since, and it kills people in hotels and hospitals every year, and it had almost certainly been killing them for decades under other names.

There's one more item in this column, and it isn't a disease. It's what happened to 26 children in a school bus in the San Joaquin Valley. On the afternoon of the 15th of July, 1976, a bus carrying children between 5 and 14 home from a summer school school swim day outside the town of Chowchilla, California, was stopped on a country road by three men wearing stockings over their faces and carrying guns. They took the driver, a 55-year-old man named Ed Ray, and all 26 children, and put them into two vans with the windows painted over, and drove them for 11 hours to a rock quarry 100 miles away near Livermore. There they made

them climb down a ladder into a moving van that had been buried in the quarry floor, with a few mattresses and some water and bread inside and a couple of fans running off a battery, and they pulled the ladder up and covered the opening with a steel plate, and put two truck batteries on top of the plate and buried it. The three men were the 24-year-old son of the man who owned the quarry, and two brothers from a wealthy family in the same suburb of San Francisco. They wanted $5 million from the state. They went home to sleep before making the ransom call, and when they tried to call, the lines at the sheriff's office were jammed with reporters. Underground after about 16 hours, Ed Ray and some of the older boys stacked the mattresses under the opening,

wedged the steel plate up with a piece of wood, and pushed the batteries off, and dug their way up through the dirt, and all 27 of them climbed out into the quarry and walked to a guard shack, all 27 of them alive. The quarry's ownership led the police to the kidnappers inside two weeks, and all three were convicted and sentenced to life. The last of them was paroled in 2022. Ed Ray drove the bus for another dozen years. The three men in the stockings were the children the country had been afraid of for 20 years,

sons of good families with money in their early 20s, raised in the best suburbs in California. They'd buried a busload of children in the ground to get $5 million, and they'd gone home and slept. The war's end belongs on the back of this fight, photograph too, because the way it ended is a measure of what the men who ran it thought a soldier was worth. The last American ground combat troops left Vietnam in August of 1972, and the peace agreement was signed in Paris in January of 1973. And in the spring of 1975, the North Vietnamese

army came down the coast and took the country in seven weeks. On the 29th and 30th of April, helicopters lifted about 7,000 people off rooftops in Saigon. And the last one off the embassy roof carried a detachment of Marines, and the photographs of the line up the stairs are the ones everybody has seen. That was supposed to be the end of it. Twelve days later, on the 12th of May, Cambodian gunboats seized an American container ship called the Maya Giz in the Gulf of Thailand, and President Ford, who'd been in office nine months and had just watched Saigon fall,

ordered the Marines to get it back. On the morning of the 15th of May, a company of Marines was landed, by helicopter on an island called Kotang, where the crew was believed to be held, and the island turned out to be defended by a Khmer Rouge garrison with heavy machine guns that nobody had told the Marines about, and three of the helicopters were shot down in the first hour. The crew of the Mayagas had already been released. They were in a fishing boat, flying a white flag on their way to an American destroyer, while the Marines were fighting on the beach. Forty-one Americans died in the operation.

23 of them in a helicopter that crashed in Thailand on the way to the staging base. And when the last Marines were pulled off Kotang that night in the dark, under fire, three of them were left behind alive. Lance Corporal Joseph Hargrove, Private First Class Gary Hall, and Private Danny Marshall, a machine gun team, 24 and 18 and 18 years old. The Khmer Rouge captured them over the following days and killed them. Their names are the last three on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. Ford's approval rating went up 11 points.

When I add this decade up, it comes out in the same columns as the last two, and the columns are getting harder to keep separate. What we remember is the kids getting the vote and getting out from under the draft, the prisoners coming off the planes, the last man on the moon, smallpox dying in a town in Somalia, the Eagles coming back, a test tube baby, a shark and a space movie, and a machine on a desk that would turn into everything. That part was real, and for the family that had watched the promise get kept on a color television

in the 60s, the 70s was the decade the kids moved out and the house tripled in value and the parents got to stop worrying. What we forgot is that the vice president who called the young impudent snobs took his last envelope of cash in the White House, that the FBI had told its agents to make the students believe there was an agent behind every mailbox, that the CIA had drugged a scientist and let his family think he jumped for 22 years, that the government had known about a Soviet nuclear disaster for 16 years and hidden it for the same reason the Soviets did, and that in the spring of 1975 it sent three teenagers and a 24-year-old onto a beach for a ship's crew who'd already been let go and left them there. What we feared was the kids' religions, and a

board game, and a house on Long Island invented over wine, and a flu that killed one man, and a wave of addicts who mostly got off the plane and went home to their wives. Our imaginary American born in 1940 turned 30 as this decade opened, and Jack Weinberg, who stood in for him last time, turned 30 on schedule in 1970. The oldest of the baby boom, the ones born in 1946 when the fathers came home, turned 30 in 1976 in the bicentennial year, while the tall ships sailed up the Hudson, and they'd started having children of their own. Fewer of them than their parents had. The number of children an American woman could expect to have in her life fell below two for the first time in 1972, and kept falling, to the lowest figure the country had ever recorded, and the demographers

called the kids who were born anyway the baby bust. The generation that was supposed to ruin everything had grown up, gotten jobs it complained about, bought houses it couldn't quite afford at 15% interest, and had a small number of children who had strapped into the back seat. That last part is new, and it's the thing the 70s actually handed forward. In 1977, a pediatrician in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, named Robert Sanders, who'd spent years watching children come into his emergency room from car wrecks their parents had walked away from, got the state legislature to pass the first law in the country requiring a child under four to ride in a car seat. It took effect on the 1st of January, 1978. The legislature had written

in an exception that let a parent hold a baby on their lap instead, and it took three more years to get that taken out, and every state in the country followed inside a decade. The kids born in the middle of this decade where the first American children the law said had to be buckled in. And the first, who never saw a cigarette sold on television. Their parents had been raised on Bert the Turtle and lead paint and a jar of birthdays on live television. And they raised their own kids on Sesame Street and car seats and a television that for the first time had been told it couldn't lie to them about smoking. And two of the things the decade handed forward left the planet. it. In the summer of 1977, before the Second Voyager launched, a committee led by Carl Sagan was

given six weeks to decide what a spacecraft that would outlast the human race should carry to say who'd built it. They put a gold-plated copper record on the side of each one with a needle and instructions etched on the cover for anyone who found it. The record has the sound of rain on it, and a heartbeat, and a mother kissing her child, and Chuck Berry, and greetings in 55 languages. The English greeting was recorded by Sagan's son, Nick, who was six years old. And what he says is, Hello, from the children of planet Earth. Voyager 2 left on the 20th of August, 1977, and Voyager 1 left 16 days later.

And it's now farther from the sun than any object human beings have ever made, more than 15 billion miles out, past the edge of the sun's wind and into the space between the stars. And as of this year, it's still sending back data on a transmitter. with about the power of a refrigerator light bulb. The engineers who built it have mostly retired or died. The six-year-old who said hello is in his 50s. And the record is still bolted to the side, carrying the voice of a child from the 70s to whoever is out there,

from a country that had spent 30 years convinced its children were going to ruin everything.