On the morning of September 8, 1974, Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon and, by afternoon, the country’s attention had been successfully diverted to a steam rocket on the rim of Snake River Canyon. The pardon closed the books on a presidency that had spent its last years trying, by the instruments of law and order, to contain the cultural revolution that the 1960s had set in motion. The jump gave the public something louder to watch. Spectacle performed its oldest service: it occupied the foreground so that a graver settlement could recede. What looked like two unrelated Sunday events now reads, half a century later, as a single hinge—the moment when the last serious attempts to arrest a transformation already primed by the civil-rights settlement and the cultural revolt of the preceding decade were either legally extinguished or theatrically spent.

Knievel’s Skycycle X-2 left the ramp, the drogue parachute opened too soon, and the craft drifted back onto the near side of the gorge, a few yards from the river. Nixon’s presidency had already ended in resignation; the pardon made certain it would not resume in a courtroom. Each man had tried, in his own idiom, to hold a line. Nixon used the state. Knievel used his body and a machine that announced, with steam and noise, that American manhood still believed limits could be jumped. Both failed in public. The mechanical cause of the rocket’s return was a cover that had not accounted for base drag. The political cause of the larger failure was that the culture they opposed had already captured the institutions that interpret failure and success.

Fifty years of subsequent disorder—the hollowing of authority, the inversion of standards, the substitution of therapy and grievance for competence—can be dated from that Sunday with more justice than from any single later scandal. The 1960s supplied the priming charge; 1974 supplied the demonstration that the charge would not be defused. Knievel fell short because he carried a ballast of unapologetic excess no parachute could lighten. Nixon fell short because the order he defended had already been rewritten beneath him. Ford’s pen and the canyon’s wind did the rest. The nation was invited to remember a daredevil and forget a pardon, and in that invitation the next half-century announced itself: a people taught to stare at rockets will not notice when the ground under the launch pad has already given way.

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