Quotes from James T. Patterson

Polls indicated that while women were growing increasingly sensitive about gender discrimination, only a small minority liked to be called feminists. The majority of housewives, indeed, told pollsters that they were largely content with their lives. Many resented being told by elitists that raising families was boring.

All this is to offer the heresy that the role of presidential leadership, yet another shadow cast by the Roosevelt years, is often exaggerated. Presidents of course can take executive actions, especially in foreign affairs, that have dramatic effects. But only sometimes, for many snags—bureaucratic inertia, the capriciousness of public opinion, partisan opposition, interest group pressures, Congress—hem in presidential designs.

Members of Congress, outraged by the events at Selma, forty times interrupted his address with applause. Johnson closed by raising his thumbs, fists clenched, and proclaiming, Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And, we shall . . . overcome.

Their behavior indicated that the stigma of being on welfare, which had been powerful throughout American history—even in the Depression—had lost some of its force. So had the tendency of poor people to defer to people in authority. These were among the most profound and lasting developments of the 1960s.90

The disarray of the convention seemed only to grow as the spectacle careened to a close. McGovern had trouble finding a vice-presidental nominee, finally settling on Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, a relative unknown. But the delegates then proceeded to advance thirty-nine additional candidates for the number two slot, including Mao Tse-tung, Archie Bunker, and Martha Mitchell, the outspoken wife of Nixon's campaign manager.

Few Americans—or members of Congress—read The Public Interest. Still, the rapid rise of the neo-cons to intellectual respectability was revealing. And their complaints, especially about the dead hand of bureaucracy, epitomized a new mood of doubt.

As Melvin Laird, his Defense Secretary, recalled, Every effort was made to create an economic boom for the 1972 election. The Defense Department, for example, bought a two-year supply of toilet paper. We ordered enough trucks . . . for the next several years.48 Congress, too, propelled election-year spending by its approval of sharp hikes in Social Security benefits: some $8 billion in extra checks went out in October.

World War II did more than usher in unparalleled prosperity for the United States. It transformed America's foreign relations. The war devastated the Axis nations, which took years to recover. It also savaged America's allies, including the Soviet Union, which lost an estimated 25 million people during six years of fighting. Alone of the world's great powers the United States emerged immeasurably stronger, both absolutely and relatively, from the carnage.

THESE MANIFESTATIONS OF BACKLASH—against family breakup, illegitimacy, welfare, crime, riots, black activists, anti-war demonstrators, long-haired hippies, government programs that favored minorities, elitists, liberals generally—exposed a major development of the mid-1960s: rapidly rising polarization along class, generational, and racial lines.

Congress, however, stiffened, cutting off appropriations for such bombing as of August 15, 1973. In November it overrode a presidential veto to pass a War Powers Act. This required American Presidents to inform Congress within forty-eight hours of deployment of United States forces abroad and to bring the troops home within sixty days unless Congress explicitly endorsed what the President had done.56

Notwithstanding these feelings of insecurity, which were especially obvious in the immediate aftermath of the war, the leaders of America's postwar foreign policy—a group that came to be known as the Establishment—developed a self-confidence that occasionally bordered on self-righteousness.

One crisis, in Cuba, mounted quickly after Fidel Castro staged a successful revolution against a corrupt pro-American dictatorship and triumphantly took power in January 1959. Castro at first seemed heroic to many Americans. When he came to the United States in April, he was warmly received and spent three hours talking with Vice-President Nixon. But relations soon cooled. Castro executed opponents and confiscated foreign investments, including $1 billion held by Americans.

In 1952 NBC put on its early morning Today Show featuring Dave Garroway. Before then the networks had assumed that few people would tune in at an early hour of day: many channels had been blank. At first the show did not do well, but Garroway then brought on stage a chimpanzee, J. Fred Muggs. The chimp excited children, then adults, and The Today Show became a popular fixture. Cartoons soon dominated morning TV on weekends.19

By 1967 McNamara was pacing about his expansive Pentagon office, staring at the large framed photograph of Defense Secretary Forrestal (who had committed suicide), and weeping. By late 1967 Johnson had given up on him. The war had savaged the self-confidence of the most certain of men.53

The 1950s witnessed especially rapid expansion of electronic and electrical firms, of tobacco, soft drink, and food-processing companies, and of the chemical, plastics, and pharmaceutical industries. IBM blossomed as a leader in the computer business, soon to become a guiding star of the American economy.

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed that the Engel decision practically suppresses all religion, especially in the public schools. Engel and other cases did more than anything else over time to arouse the religious Right from its political quietism. Other Americans, too, thought that the justices had lost their minds.20

GM had assets greater than those of Argentina and revenues eight times those of New York State. (Defense Secretary Wilson had had a point in saying that what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.)

For political matters Kennedy relied heavily on able strategists—critics called them the Irish Mafia—such as Kenneth O'Donnell and Lawrence O'Brien.

Starting in 1964, average scores on Scholastic Aptitude Tests went steadily down, and per student spending went steadily up.33

The John Birch Society, mobilizing in 1958, focused considerable resources on impeaching Warren and on curbing the authority of the Court.

In its broadest sense, the scandal of Watergate arose from the tumultuous and destabilizing trends of the 1960s, especially the war in Vietnam and the deviousness and power-grabbing associated with the rise of an imperial presidency.2

Thanks in part to the commission, Kennedy issued an executive order ending sex discrimination in the federal civil service. In 1963 he signed an Equal Pay Act that guaranteed women equal pay for equal work.

The significance of LBJ's personal traits accounted for the growing belief, especially by anti-war activists, that Vietnam was Johnson's War. His critics are correct in pointing to the role of these traits and in arguing that Johnson, commander-in-chief until 1969, possessed the ultimate power to stem the tide of escalation. He was the last, best, and only chance for the United States to pull itself out of the quagmire.

An anonymous GI poet added: Please Mr. Truman, won't you send us home? We have captured Napoli and liberated Rome; We have licked the master race, Now there's lots of shipping space, So, won't you send us home? Let the boys at home see Rome.9