Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings Read Online Free PDF Page B

before the 1960s were over. Now, in 1969, that promise had been fulfilled.
    Among those at the crowded Apollo XI launch site was the 1920s pilot Charles Lindbergh. It had been only forty-two years since his heroic flight across the Atlantic, but the world had changed a great deal. His had been an individual achievement; he had navigated his own plane through near disaster. The Apollo program was the work of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money and more than four hundred thousand people in assembly plants and control rooms.
    Still, like Lindbergh’s flight in the twenties, the mission of the three Apollo XI astronauts gave their wounded country something to be proud of, something to share. And when the nation’s weary citizens saw pictures of their planet taken from space, they were moved: It was not the troubled world they knew, but a beautiful, peaceful globe, ordered and still.

CHAPTER 2
Years of Doubt
1969–1981
    In the 1970s the booming postwar economy finally went bust. There was no single event that announced this decline, nothing like the 1929 stock market crash, which announced the arrival of the Great Depression. Instead, high unemployment and rising prices crept up on Americans. The unpopular war in Vietnam and the crisis in the economy combined to spread a feeling of mistrust of the government and its leaders. There was a new awareness that the growth of industry had helped to damage the environment. People worried about pollution, overpopulation, inflation, and recession. The earth itself, and the United States along with it, now seemed fragile and the future uncertain.
    Prices were going up and up, and the most painful price increase was the one at the gas pump. Oil was—and still is—the lifeblood of America. Every plane, tank, and car needs it. Every skyscraper and industrial plant runs on it. Oil is part of the fertilizer that helps farmers produce crops for the world; when used in drugs, it helps fight disease. Like no other raw material, oil created the American way of life. And it fueled the American dream machine, the automobile.
    Since the 1920s the car had become a symbol of American prosperity. GM made big cars after World War II, and people bought them according to their status: the more successful you were, the bigger your car. For years America had been buying cheap oil from the petroleum-producing countries of the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and others. But when America supported Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the oil-producing countries punished the United States. They organized an oil embargo, cutting off America’s pipeline.
    Suddenly the price of gasoline and heating oil went up. Everything in the American economy that had depended on cheap energy got more expensive. People had to turn down their thermostats, cut back on driving, make do with less. A new thrift was force-fed to the country.
    Long lines formed at gas stations, whose owners were asked to sell a maximum of ten gallonsper customer. Now the large cars that Americans had been driving for so long were a handicap. Still, the powerful American automakers kept right on rolling big cars down the assembly lines. People began buying smaller, more fuel-efficient foreign cars instead. The era of the gas guzzler was over.
    In Detroit the big automakers started laying off their workers. LaNita Gaines, born in 1950, was a Chrysler employee who watched as the oil crisis began hurting people’s lives.
    W hen I first started working at the plant, Chrysler was manufacturing these giant-sized cars. They had gigantic gas tanks and got little mileage, but they were big and comfortable. It seemed as if people were changing cars every two years, and they weren’t really going for the quality of the car; they just wanted to keep up with the latest model. I swear at one point they were moving down the assembly line so fast that we’d sometimes miss a screw.
    In 1973 we began to