Quotes from James T. Patterson

Roughly 80 percent of American soldiers in Vietnam were from poor or working-class backgrounds. Neither in college nor in graduate school—where most students received near-automatic deferments until mid-1968—they often found themselves drafted after they got out of high school.

THE ESCALATING DEMANDS for rights after 1965, and especially the riots, did more than bewilder people. They also aroused significant backlash, the most vivid of the many reactions that arose amid the polarization of the era. It long outlasted the 1960s.79

Although Truman and his advisers still hoped to ameliorate gathering tensions, they made only half-hearted efforts to accommodate the Soviets, or even to negotiate seriously with them. In the third phase, clear by February 1947, the administration hit on a more consistent, clearly articulated policy: containment. The essential stance of the United States for the next forty years, the quest for containment entailed high expectations. It was the most important legacy of the Truman administration.

Resurrecting the tactics of Joe McCarthy, Agnew called Humphrey squishy soft on communism. He observed, If you've seen one slum, you've seen them all. The Washington Post concluded that Agnew was perhaps the most eccentric political appointment since the Roman Emperor Caligula named his horse a consul.55

But the sluggishness of the economy widened the gulf between grand expectations and the real limits of progress, undercutting the all-important sense that the country had the means to do almost anything, and exacerbating the contentiousness that had been rending American society since the late 1960s. This was the final irony of the exciting and extraordinarily expectant thirty years following World War II.

Governor Reagan delivered perhaps the most famous one-liner. A hippie, he said, is someone who dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.

As Ellison's black protagonist exclaimed in Invisible Man, You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them [whites] recognize you.30 This did not happen much in the 1940s, but it did in the 1960s, when advocates of black power pushed whites out of the civil rights movement.