Quotes from James T. Patterson

In the Senate the key leader was Robert Taft of Ohio, son of the former President. Acting quickly, they drafted the so-called Taft-Hartley bill in early 1947. Taft-Hartley was a bold effort to weaken the pro-labor Wagner Act of 1935.

Along with the booming economy, which after 1962 seemed capable of almost anything, the magnified mystique of the presidency stimulated ever-greater expectations among liberals and others who imagined that government possessed big answers to big problems. The revolution of popular expectations, a central dynamic of the 1960s, owed a good deal of its strength to the glorification of presidential activism that Kennedy successfully sought to foment.

Jackie added in White's article, read by millions, that the Kennedy administration had been Camelot, a magic moment in American history, when gallant men danced with beautiful women, when great deeds were done, when artists, writers, and poets met at the White House and the barbarians beyond the walls were held back. But it will never be that way again. . . . There'll never be another Camelot again.76

Nothing did more during these years to excite such emotions than the successful launching by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957 of Sputnik, the world's first orbiting satellite. Sputnik was small—about 184 pounds and the size of a beach ball.

December 6 a nationally televised test of the Vanguard missile proved deeply embarrassing. The missile rose two feet off the ground and crashed. Press accounts spoke about Flopnik and Stay-putnik.

Most important, Kennedy's commission encouraged women activists on both the state and federal levels to develop networks and to talk seriously about curbing long-standing divisions within their ranks. In this way, Kennedy unintentionally aroused expectations that encouraged a much more self-conscious feminist movement after 1964.

fact, there was no such thing at that time—or later—as a missile gap, a phrase that Democrats and others flung at the GOP during the 1958 and 1960 election campaigns. The Sputnik launches indeed demonstrated that the Soviets had an edge in capacity for thrust—the ability to boost satellites into orbit. But in fact the Soviets lagged badly in the production of usable warheads and did not deploy an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) during the Eisenhower years.

Kennedy, who had a mentally ill sister, also moved more actively than presidential predecessors to advance the cause of mental health. In 1963 Congress passed a Mental Retardation Facilities and Community Mental Health Centers Act, which funded local mental health centers that were to provide a range of out-patient services, including marital counseling, help for delinquents, and programs for unwed mothers and alcoholics.

AFTER WINNING THE ELECTION Eisenhower went as promised to Korea, where he spent three days on the front. He returned convinced that the war had to be brought to a close, and he concentrated on that goal during the first six months of his administration in 1953. A combination of circumstances, including the fatigue of the enemy, led to signing of a cease-fire that took effect on July 27. This was thirty-seven anguished months after the start of the war in 1950.50

Ervin's committee opened televised hearings on the matter in May, enabling the public to watch McCord accuse Dean and Mitchell of foreknowledge of the break-in, and Mitchell and Magruder of authorizing it. Testimony before the Ervin Committee that summer, especially by Dean, broke further news of the plumbers, of the Huston plan to abuse the powers of the FBI and the CIA, of presidential wiretapping, and of Nixon's authorization of hush money in order to seal the cover-up.

General Lawton Collins, a top American adviser, said that the United States must put the squeeze on the French to get them off their fannies. Nothing of that sort happened, and the French, hanging on to major cities such as Hanoi and Saigon, foolishly decided in early 1954 to fight a decisive battle at Dienbienphu, a hard-to-defend redoubt deep in rebel-held territory near the border with Laos.49

Many black and poor people, moreover, had become politicized by the civil rights movement and had begun to develop higher expectations from life. Some joined a newly formed National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO).

The divorce rate in 1945 shot up to double that of the prewar years, to 31 divorces for every 100 marriages—or 502,000 in all. Although the divorce rate dropped in 1946 and returned to prewar levels by the early 1950s, its jump in 1945 exposed the rise of domestic tensions in the immediate aftermath of war.

By 1955 thirteen states had passed laws regulating the publication, distribution, and sale of comic books. Leading intellectuals, including C. Wright Mills, praised Wertham's efforts.70

Most of the blacks who took part in the riots of 1966 and 1967 apparently did not expect much in the way of tangible results. Fired up by conflicts with the police, they started disturbances that exploded suddenly, raged out of control, and then stopped before participants could develop much of a program.

The three decades following the Second World War were prolific breeders of myth. The two great military victories on opposite sides of the globe, followed by unparalleled prosperity at home and world leadership abroad, bred a national euphoria, even hubris in some, capable of the boast that America could do anything: The impossible takes a little longer.

Though the ending is schmaltzy, there was bite enough in the film to distinguish it from a Norman Rockwell vision of the nation. The Best Years of Our Lives captured rather well the stresses encountered by many veterans and their families in the immediate aftermath of war.

Everything finally unraveled for McCarthy in early 1954. In March and April, Edward R. Murrow, a widely respected investigative reporter, ran a series of programs concerning McCarthy on See It Now, a CBS network production. It was the first time that television—which had expanded by then to 25 million households—had exposed him in any major way. For the most part Murrow let McCarthy's bullying words and truculent actions speak for themselves.

All the structural problems that economists had warned about coalesced after 1973–74 to jolt American life. These included sagging productivity, declining competitiveness in world markets, accelerating inflation, rising unemployment, especially among minorities and the millions of baby boomers now seeking work, and a slowing down in the creation of good-paying, career-enhancing jobs outside of the increasingly dominant service sector.35

Responding to these pressures from the Right, Eisenhower had announced that the United States would remove its Seventh Fleet from the straits between Taiwan and the mainland of China. Chiang, he implied, was now unleashed so that he could invade the People's Republic.

Environmentalists had enjoyed modest successes during the New Frontier-Great Society years: a Clean Air Act in 1963, a Wilderness Act in 1964, a Clean Water Act in 1965, and an Endangered Species Act in 1966. In 1967 movement leaders coalesced to form the Environmental Defense Fund, a key lobby thereafter.

By the late 1950s millions of Americans were enjoying the bounties of affluence and the consumer culture, the likes of which they had scarcely imagined before. In the process they were developing larger expectations about life and beginning to challenge things that had seemed set in stone only a few years earlier. Older cultural norms, however, still remained strong until the 1960s, when expectations ascended to new heights and helped to facilitate social unrest on a new and different scale.

Sustained by popular responses such as these, conservatives in Congress mobilized to attack an administration effort then pending to exterminate rats in the ghettos. One denounced the measure as a civil rats bill. Another suggested that the President buy a lot of cats and turn them loose.

By the time Nixon reached office the environmental cause had grown stronger than ever, thanks in part to media attention given to Malthusian prophets of doom. Paul Ehrlich, a professor of biology at Stanford, published The Population Bomb (1968), which foresaw the starvation of hundreds of millions of people throughout the world during the 1970s and 1980s if population growth were not controlled.