Patterson - The eve of destruction: how 1965 transformed America

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Smart, thoughtful, fast-paced, engaging, and insightfulthese are just a few of the adjectives that describe James T. Pattersons masterful new book, The Eve of Destruction. Patterson makes a convincing case that you cannot understand America today without coming to terms with this eventful, and in some cases, tragic, year.

STEVEN M. GILLON, Scholar-in-Residence,
The History Channel

Based on rich learning and resonant with thoughtful interpretations, this incisive and lucid book does more than identify a point of inflection. Its fascinating chronicle captures and explains how a configuration of racial and social change, popular culture, robust legislative action, and a fierce and often brutal war as well as unrest at home decisively altered the vectors of American life in ways that simply had not been anticipated just before 1965.

IRA KATZNELSON, Ruggles Professor of
Political Science and History, Columbia University

While in many respects 1965 was a very good yearthe Voting Rights Act, Head Start, and Medicare come quickly to mindtrouble lay ahead. The civil rights coalition was starting to unravel just as the specter of Vietnam loomed large on the horizon. In this illuminating, absorbing, page-turner of a book, James T. Patterson makes the case that After 1965, for better and for worse,... the United States would never be the same again.

John Dittmer, author of Local People:
The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi

WHEN PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON TURNED ON THE LIGHTS of the National Christmas Tree on the evening of December 18, 1964, he had reason to be concerned about the state of the nation. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy thirteen months earlier still haunted the country. Troubles were mounting in Vietnam. But LBJ was optimistic about the future and understandably so. In June he had signed the historic Civil Rights Act, which guaranteed a bundle of rights, notably equal access to public accommodations, that would end legal segregation in America. In November he had trounced Barry Goldwater to win a full term as president. The economy was booming as never before. With his wife, Lady Bird, his daughters, Luci and Lynda, Vice Presidentelect Hubert Humphrey, and various ambassadors at his side, Johnson pressed a button to illuminate five thousand red bulbs on the seventy-two-foot tree.

These are the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born in Bethlehem, he exclaimed. He added, Todayas never beforeman has in his possession the capacities to end war and preserve peace, to eradicate poverty and share abundance, to overcome the diseases that have afflicted the human race and permit all mankind to enjoy their promise in life on this earth.

Many contemporary observers, caught up in the triumphalism of the time, echoed Johnsons confidence about Americas prospects and the likelihood of enacting a socially progressive agenda. The political scientist James MacGregor Burns declared, this is as surely a liberal epoch as the late 19th Century was a conservative one. James Reston, chief political columnist for the New York Times, wrote on January 1 that the nation was entering an Era of Good Feelings. Time magazine gushed a month later that America was On the Fringe of a Golden Era.

Responding to such aspirations, Congress in 1965 would approve an avalanche of Johnsons proposals for a Great Societyamong them a path-breaking Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Medicare and Medicaid, a powerful Voting Rights Act, and long overdue immigration reform. Meanwhile, the economy continued to flourish. Crime rates and unemployment remained low, marriage rates and male labor force participation high. Detroit-made automobiles ruled the world. By early August, when most of Johnsons Great Society laws had been signed, American liberalism was riding at an all-time high tidea crest that has not been equaled since that time.

By mid-summer, however, the pervasive optimism of late 1964 and early 1965 was already ebbing. Starting in January, divisions among civil rights advocates widened during angry demonstrations in Selma, Alabama. In early February, LBJ responded to a bloody Vietcong attack on American soldiers at Pleiku by ordering the bombing of North Vietnam. A month later, combat marines splashed ashore at Danang. By late April, antiwar activists, blaming a less than forthright LBJ for opening up a credibility gap, were staging widely noted protests.

On July 28, Johnson announced another, far larger escalation of the war. A little later, five days after passage of the Voting Rights Act, angry blacks erupted violently in the Watts region of Los Angeles. By October, small but rising numbers of opponents of the Vietnam War were burning draft cards, enraging prowar advocates, and causing confrontations and standoffs. By autumn, rock musiciansone, Barry McGuire, sang Eve of Destruction, a top hitwere bewailing the materialism, militarism, and racism of American society, even as Republicans, having recovered from the debacle of the 1964 election, were girding up for what they expected would be political triumphs in 1966.

Many Americans, stunned by these pivotal events, have subsequently identified 1965the year of military escalation, of Watts, of the splintering of the civil rights movement, and of mounting cultural change and polarizationas the time when Americas social cohesion began to unravel and when the turbulent phenomenon that would be called the Sixties broke into view. They were right to see 1965 as a year of exceptionally rapid and widespread change, though by no means was all of it for the worse. The tumultuous times that erupted in 1965 and that lasted into the early 1970s differed greatly from the early 1960s, which, for the most part, were years of political and social consensus that resembled the 1950s.

A number of writers since that time have also identified 1965 as a pivotal year in American life, the year that the 1960s became the Sixties. Richard Goodwin, who was LBJs chief speechwriter in 1965, reflected in 1988, In the single year of 1965100 years after AppomattoxLyndon Johnson reached the height of his leadership and set in motion the process of decline. Nicholas Lemann, a prominent journalist, observed in 1991 that the 1960s turned as if on a hinge in the summer of 1965. The columnist George Will, writing in 1995, commented, rarely has there been a year eventful in the way 1965 was. He, too, liked the hinge metaphor. That year, he concluded, was the hinge of our postwar history.

Sante and others are correct to recognize that battles for reforms and entitlementsracial equality, a wide range of personal choices, freedoms, and rightsintensified considerably in 1965 and led to large and lasting changes. The Sixties that ensued by no means demolished all the liberal advances of 1965many of them driven into legislation by President Johnson, a masterful congressional manager who is the commanding figure in this book. But the unrest besetting the nation as of late 1965 unnerved many people who lived through it and who have viewed it in hindsight as a pivotal time. Conservatives, shaken by the pace of change, sensed that an inexorably expanding rights-consciousnessa rights revolutionwas undermining a durable and long-cherished culture of rules and responsibilities, and they were quickeven in 1965to voice their fears. One such anguished observer was former president Dwight Eisenhower, who wrote a friend in October, Lack of respect for law, laxness in dress, appearance and thinking, in conduct and in manner, as well as student and other riots with civil disobedience all spring from a common source: a lack of concern for the ancient virtues of decency, respect for law and elders, and old-fashioned patriotism.