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This chapter traces the complex politics of inflation from the onset of wage-price controls in 1971 through the peak of America's inflationary experience during the Carter administration. During those years, the country's major business associations successfully mobilized a powerful lobbying operation by negotiating the new political terrain that inflation created. From the frustrating nadir, typified by the public spat between treasury secretary John Connally and Vice President Arch Booth, organized business leaders rebounded mightily, successfully engaging in both ideological debates and interest group politics to bolster their institutional unity and achieve clear policy victories. Historically, battles over price instability emerged along the class lines created by an industrial political economy—they pitted the interests of workers against those of employers, or labor against capital.

This chapter discusses how John Connally summarized the Nixon administration's economic strategy to a number of Treasury consultants when he pointed out that his philosophical conviction was that the foreigners are out to do bad things. It describes the unorthodox approach to international economic policy and cooperation with allies. A sort of gunboat diplomacy had characterized Connally's eleven months as President John F. Kennedy's secretary of the Navy in 1961 when at the height of the Cold War he sent the Sixth Fleet to the Mediterranean to demonstrate a US presence there. The chapter recounts how Richard Nixon considered Connally as a potential vice presidential running mate in place of Spiro Agnew. However, Henry Kissinger managed to prevail despite Nixon's prolonged reluctance to offer him the post that Kissinger so desperately wanted.

This chapter describes how the assassination of John F. Kennedy sapped the energy of the Democratic Coalition. Disagreements within the multiracial alliance over goals and strategy and the pressure of its participants’ ongoing, unconscious white supremacy would produce interracial acrimony and suspicion that gradually displaced the hard-won mutual trust of the previous years and decades. Still, despite its gradual coming apart, the Democratic Coalition and its members would win their right to a remarkable degree. Their massive voter registration campaign in 1964 would break down the doors of the Democratic Party and would forever transform Texas politics.

This chapter describes the growing militancy of PASO and African American activists from 1962 on. In response to conservative democratic gubernatorial candidate John Connally, African American and Mexican American activists would both take to the streets, reenergizing their respective civil rights movements with new campaigns for complete integration, real political power, and equal economic opportunity.

Nixon considered canceling the Moscow summit even as Kissinger finalized plans to go on a secret trip to the Soviet Union in April 1972 to discuss Vietnam and the summit planning. Nixon was concerned with the deteriorating military situation in South Vietnam, and he worried that the Soviets would cancel the summit in solidarity with their ally Hanoi after the United States responded with force against North Vietnam. However, the Nixon White House laid the groundwork to encourage the Soviets to consider détente separately from Vietnam, conveying a tacit modus vivendi via the confidential channel with Dobrynin. While Nixon pondered the possibility of canceling the summit, the administration also used back channels to read Soviet intentions. Ultimately, Treasury Secretary John Connally convinced Nixon to leave the onus of any cancellation or postponement of the summit to the Soviets. Domestic opinion polls buttressed the president’s decision since the American public did not see the Moscow summit as interrelated to the situation in Vietnam. In the Kremlin, Brezhnev, Gromyko, and Kosygin blocked hard-liners’ attempts and consolidated control in favor of the summit while rhetorically condemning the American bombing-mining campaign against North Vietnam. The summit thus became the successful product of U.S.-Soviet back-channel diplomacy.