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Despite the victory, Carter’s approval ratings plummeted. The Iranian hostage crisis brought more bad news every day, andan official report on the failed rescue attempt—describing how eight Americanservicemen died and half a dozen U.S. helicopters full of classified documents were abandoned in the desert—raised doubts about the readiness of the military. Although Carter was a devout Christian, a newly created evangelical group, the Moral Majority, was attacking his support for legalized abortion and a constitutional amendment to guarantee equal rights for women. A midsummer opinion poll found that77 percent of the American people disapproved of President Carter’s performance in the White House—a higher disapproval rate than that of President Richard Nixon at the height of Watergate.
    The Republican candidate for president, Ronald Reagan, had a sunnier disposition. “I refuse to accept [Carter’s] defeatist and pessimistic view of America,” Reagan said. The country could not afford “four more years of weakness, indecision, mediocrity, and incompetence.” Reagan called for large tax cuts, smaller government, deregulation, increased defense spending to confront the Soviet threat, and a renewed faith in the American dream. A popular third-party candidate, Congressman John B. Anderson, described himself as a centrist, labeling Reagan a right-wing extremist and Carter “a bumbler.” Anderson agreed that things had gone fundamentally wrong in the United States. “People feel that the country is coming apart at the seams,” he said.
    The nation’s underlying anxiety fueled sales ofa bestselling nonfiction book in late September:
Crisis Investing: Opportunities and Profits in the Coming Great Depression
. A number of bestselling novels also addressed the widespread fears about America’s future.
The Devil’s Alternative
, by Frederick Forsyth, described a Soviet plot to invade Western Europe.
The Fifth Horseman
, by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, described a Libyan plot to blackmail the United States with a hydrogen bomb hidden in New York City.
The Spike
, by Arnaud de Borchgrave and Robert Moss, told the story of a left-wing American journalist who uncovers Soviet plans for world domination but cannot persuade his liberal editor to publish them.
    Perhaps the most influential bestseller of the year was
The Third World War: August 1985
, a novel written by a retired British officer, General Sir John Hackett. It offered a compelling, realistic account of a full-scale war between NATO and the Soviet bloc. After a long series of European tankbattles, the British cities of Birmingham and Wolverhampton are incinerated by a Soviet nuclear strike. The Russian city of Minsk is hit by nuclear weapons in retaliation, and the shock of its destruction causes the swift collapse of the Soviet Union. The moral of the story was clear: the United States and its allies needed to increase their military spending. “In the last few years before the outbreak of war the West began to wake up to the danger it faced,” Hackett wrote, “and in the time available did just enough in repair of its neglected defenses to enable it, by a small margin, to survive.”Ronald Reagan later called
The Third World War
an unusually important book. And it helped to launch a new literary genre,the techno-thriller, in which military heroism was celebrated, the intricate details of weaponry played a central role in the narrative, and Cold War victories were achieved through the proper application of force.
    On television,
The Waltons
, a long-running drama about an ordinary family’s struggles during the Great Depression, was facing cancellation. Instead of worrying about how the show’s young protagonist, John-Boy, would overcome adversity, American viewers were now far more interested in who’d shot J.R., the wealthy lead character of a new series,
Dallas
. Other