Quotes from James T. Patterson

The Graduate, an Oscar-winning movie that appeared in late 1967, dramatized these changes. It featured a young man (Dustin Hoffman) who was in no way a hippie, a user of drugs, or a political radical. But he seemed unconnected to traditional values. Alienated from many things, he felt no kinship with fraternity men at his university or with materialistic adults of the older generation.

A teacher expressed the feeling of many Americans: After Watergate, it's crazy to have trust in politicians. I'm totally cynical, skeptical. Whether it's a question of power or influence, it's who you know at all levels. Nixon said he was the sovereign! Can you believe that? I was indignant. Someone should have told him that this is a democracy, not a monarchy.32

For all these reasons Eisenhower's first term witnessed little significant domestic legislation. Aside from the extension of Social Security, which had the support of an increasingly well organized lobby for the elderly, the only important law approved was the Interstate Highway Act of 1956.

Their expectations, however, had grown grand indeed, and they were impatient. Increasingly, they sought not only benefits but also guarantees and entitlements. The rise of rights-consciousness, having flourished in the early and mid-1960s, became central to the culture by 1970.

Perhaps the most prominent young radical in the early 1960s was Tom Hayden, a University of Michigan student who had worked with SNCC in 1961. Raised a Catholic, Hayden was a serious thinker with a commitment to elevating the spirit and improving human relationships in the United States. In 1962 he emerged as chief author of a major position paper of the SDS, the Port Huron Statement.

These and other measures, however, seemed relatively inconsequential in 1965 compared to a Big Four that passed by the end of the session: federal aid to elementary and secondary education, Medicare and Medicaid, immigration reform, and a civil rights act to guaranteee voting rights.

The Milliken decision was pivotal in the postwar history of race relations, for it badly hurt whatever hopes reformers still maintained of overturning de facto segregation of the schools and of slowing a dynamic that was accelerating in many American urban areas: "white flight" of familes to suburbs.69 Flight in turn eroded urban tax bases, further damaging schools and other services in the cities.

As it turned out Miranda did not much change the practices of law enforcement: police and prosecutors managed to figure out ways of maneuvering around the decision.

Marshall made it clear that the United States required joint proposals of needs from the European countries, as part of a European Recovery Plan (ERP). At first the Soviets seemed ready to take part, and Foreign Minister Molotov and aides appeared at a conference in Paris to make known their desires. At the last moment, however, Molotov received a telegram from home and marched his delegation out.

In practice Truman's loyalty program was careless of civil liberties. The very word "loyalty" was problematic, encouraging zealots to bring charges on vague and imprecise grounds. While employees had the right to hear of charges against them, accusers could withhold anything they designated as secret. Government workers did not have the right to know the identity of their accusers—often agents of the FBI—or to confront them in the hearings.

On one occasion a demonstrator confronted him with a sign, LBJ, PULL OUT LIKE YOUR FATHER SHOULD HAVE DONE. He complained bitterly to Joseph Califano, a trusted aide, that the "thickness of daddy's wallet" offered protection to the privileged and to the hypocritical young men who were pontificating in order to save their skins.94

Beginning in the late 1940s, the current of people fleeing from farm to town and city swelled into a flood—one of the most dramatic demographic shifts of modern American history. By 1970 only 9.7 million people, or 4.8 percent of the overall population, worked on the land. The number of farms fell from 5.9 million at the close of World War II to 3 million twenty-five years later.

It then became obvious that ethnic differences (like class distinctions) refused to boil away. Even fairly well established groups, such as Irish-Americans, often nursed old resentments and clung to neighborhood enclaves.

A second key decision by Kennedy concerned his Catholicism, which led many Protestants, including Norman Vincent Peale, to question whether he ought to be President. (Martin Luther King, Sr., was another doubter.) Kennedy met the issue head-on by addressing Protestant clergymen in Houston, a center of Protestant strength.

Only later did other scholars, notably Nathan Glazer and Daniel Moynihan in their perceptive book Beyond the Melting Pot (1963), highlight the enduring power that ethnic identifications—what one eats, who one marries, where one lives, how one votes—had in the lives of the American people.53

The unemployment rate rose between 1968 and 1970 from 3.6 to 4.9 percent—a jump of more than 33 percent. The consumer price index increased by roughly 11 percent in the same period. Analysts of the economy coined a new and memorable term for what seemed to be happening: "stagflation.

The contagion of rights-consciousness especially attracted women, who grew more politically engaged than they had been since the achievement of women's suffrage in 1920. Their restlessness had begun to flourish openly in 1963, thanks in part to the publication in that year of Betty Friedan's highly popular The Feminine Mystique.

Experts touted confrontational "encounter," gestalt therapy, bioenergetics, "sensitivity training," meditation, massage, breathing, drugs, and even easy recreational sex. Any or all would bring out the inherent spirituality of the self, enlarge human potential, and light up the dawn of the New Age.12

By 1971 the United States had an unfavorable balance of international trade for the first time since 1893.

Jack, however, was persuaded by an aide to telephone King's wife, Coretta, to express his sympathy. At the same time, Bobby (unbeknownst to Jack) telegraphed the judge and requested King's release. The judge relented, and King got out of prison on bail. King then gave Jack full credit for what had happened. King Sr. came around, announcing, "I've got a suitcase full of votes, and I'm going to take them to Mr. Kennedy and dump them in his lap.

On Flag Day in 1954 Eisenhower signed legislation that added the phrase "one nation under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance as recited by millions of children in American schools.

A year later Congress endorsed this approach by approving legislation that added the words "In God We Trust" to American currency.59

William O'Neill, another historian, observed wryly that many universities prior to the rise of student unrest had at least required hard work and discipline—training for life in the real world. In some of the post-protest universities, he lamented, "The Protestant ethic gave way to the pleasure principle in college but not in life."22 Reactions such as these reflected a widespread sense among Americans that the students were spoiled brats.23

I am not going to lose Vietnam, he said. I am not going to be the President who saw Southeast Asia go the way China went.2 For many Americans then and later the struggle in Vietnam was simply Johnson's War.3