Quotes from James T. Patterson

Reporters were ill paid in those days and lacked the resources in staff or money to dig deeply into McCarthy's charges. The Washington press corps was small. It was not until later, amid growing anger about a cover-up during the Vietnam War, that significant numbers of reporters became obstreperous in challenging official sources. Only in the 1970s, in the aftermath of Watergate, did this attitude become widespread among political journalists in the United States.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act greatly extended federal power in the United States. A frankly regional measure, it took aim at Deep South states by stipulating that the Justice Department could intervene to suspend discriminatory registration tests in counties where 50 percent or fewer of the county's voting-age population had been able to register.

Prominent opponents of the war, among them Dr. Spock and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, openly counseled young men to resist the draft and were indicted.

ALL THESE CONFRONTATIONS PALED before the outbreak of urban riots in 1966 and 1967. There were thirty-eight riots in 1966, the most serious in Chicago, Cleveland, and San Francisco.

For these reasons the Vietnam-era army (unlike the armies that had fought in World War II or Korea) consisted disproportionately of the poor, minority groups, and the working classes. They were getting drafted and killed while others—many of them university students who were loudest against the war—stayed safely at home.92

Moreover, Kissinger and Nixon deeply distrusted each other. Kissinger was sometimes contemptuous (behind Nixon's back) of the President. He called Nixon our drunken friend, a basket case, or meatball mind. Kissinger was also given to fits of temper. After one of these tantrums Nixon confided that he might have to fire Kissinger unless he got psychological help.

ALTHOUGH THE WATTS RIOT of 1965 was an extreme response, it appears in retrospect as an ominous omen of the future. One domestic crisis after another in the next few years, including even bloodier racial confrontations in the cities, shattered the optimism of social engineers and threw liberals back on the defensive. By late 1965 Johnson himself seemed close to despair.

In 1950, 10 percent of families had television sets and 38 percent had never seen a TV program. Although 33 million of America's roughly 38 million households in 1945 had radios, these were for the most part bulky things cased in wooden cabinets, and they took time to warm up. Some 52 percent of farm dwellings, inhabited by more than 25 million people, had no electricity in 1945.1

In February, Nixon, his way paved by secret journeys that Kissinger took in 1971 to Peking, made a lavishly televised week-long visit to the People's Republic of China, thereby dramatizing his commitment to better relations with one of America's most determined foes. That Nixon, a life-long Cold Warrior who had assailed Truman for losing China, could and did make such a journey staggered and excited contemporaries.

But the Great Society did not do nearly as much to improve the economic standing of people as did the extraordinary growth of the economy. When this stopped—in the 1970s—the flaws in LBJ's programs seemed glaring. Hyperbole about the Great Society aroused unrealistic popular expectations about government that later came to haunt American liberalism.

Congress, responding with patriotic fervor, approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as it was called, with only desultory debate.

Veteran political observers were astonished and shaken by the powerful emotions that Kennedy aroused. Kennedy capped his exciting run with a close but decisive victory over McCarthy in the key California primary in early June. In his moment of triumph, however, he was fatally shot by Sirhan Sirhan, a deranged Arab nationalist

Developments during the war unleashed a fantastically growing pharmaceuticals industry and hastened research that culminated in the arrival of the first digital computer in 1946 and the transistor in 1947.7

A rock concert at a farm in Bethel, New York, in 1969 attracted some 400,000 people who wallowed happily about in the rain, some in various stages of undress and drug-induced haze, for three days. Traffic jams and police barricades prevented many thousands more from attending. Woodstock was the culminating event of countercultural

The American Zionist Emergency Council (AZEC) embarked on a well-financed publicity campaign that helped by late 1947 to generate large majorities—some polls said over 80 percent—of the American people in favor of such a homeland. AZEC's efforts helped induce thirty-three state legislatures to pass resolutions favoring a Jewish state in Palestine. In addition, forty governors, fifty-four senators, and 250 members of congress signed petitions to Truman on the issue. 34

Between September 1969 and May 1970, there were at least 250 bombings linked to white-dominated radical groups in the United States. This was an average of almost one per day. (The government placed the number at six times as high.) Favorite targets were ROTC buildings, draft boards, induction centers, and other federal offices. In February 1970 bombs exploded at the New York headquarters of Socony Mobil, IBM, and General Telephone and Electronics.

The depopulation of rural America at the time, accelerated by the technological revolution that was rendering farm labor superfluous, was one of the most harrowing and large-scale demographic developments of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. Because relatively few American officials attended to the problems of these people in the 1950s, the mass migrations set the stage for social and racial dynamite that exploded in the cities after 1965.73

The Democratic convention that took place in Chicago in late August turned out to be such a wild and bloody affair that the first-ballot nomination of Humphrey, by then foreordained, was scarcely noticed.36 Chicago Mayor Richard Daley had long anticipated some sort of confrontation.

Although Nixon stepped up military pressure by bombing heavily and greatly expanding South Vietnamese forces, the enemy did not bend. Nor did détente with the Soviets assist the American cause: Moscow continued to send military aid to Hanoi.

The optimistic, prosperous spirit of the time further advanced Friedan's message. Relatively few of the women who responded to The Feminine Mystique, surveys suggested, were from minority groups or the blue-collar classes. Many of these people, after all, had always worked outside the home, ordinarily in low-paid and sex-segregated jobs, and they found little that was liberating in her talk about careers.

A Gallup survey in 1962 indicated that only about one-third of American women considered themselves victims of discrimination. Eight years later the proportion had risen to a half, and by 1974 to two-thirds. By any standard these were striking measures of social and cultural change.18

Four months later, NOW was formed, with Friedan as its first president. It had only a small membership, most of whom were white, middle-class women who advocated legal equality. Then and later the organization had difficulty attracting blue-collar or minority women to its ranks, and it was cool, especially at first, to demands for sexual liberation.

The proliferation of these self-conscious groups, some of which (such as seniors-only enclaves) virtually excluded others, added to a perception by the early 1970s that the United States was becoming both a claimant society and an ever more openly balkanized culture.

By 10:00 P.M. it decided to pull out all the stops: DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN. An early election-eve edition of the San Francisco Call-Bulletin carried a cartoon depicting a jubilant elephant and a doleful donkey. Only in the next edition was there a fast retouch: the elephant was now startled, the donkey joyous.62