How We Got Here: The 7o's
Frum, David
ety" have been discredited in actual practice, and few politicians anxious to win election or re-election wish to revisit them) As it is, the first Democratic president to be re-elected to...
...repeated acts of terrorism...
...He writes: "It was better when people showed more loyalty to family and country, better when they read more and talked about themselves less, better when they restrained their sexuality, better when professors and curators were unafraid to uphold high intellectual and artistic standards, better when immigrants were expected to Americanize promptly, better when not every sorrow begat a lawsuit...
...A new individualism erupted, taking diverse political manifestations...
...and the occult...
...The legal profession, still intoxicated by what it had wrought through Brown v. Board of Education (1954) , says Frum, continued to believe that there were no problems lawyers could not solve...
...He also treats the wrongheaded effort to control wages and prices under Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford's ludicrous "Whip Inflation Now" program, and Jimmy Carter's dumb but inevitable use of controls...
...And besides, America has experienced "the most total social transformation...since the coming of industrialism...
...Frum proves a mostly reliable guide to these years...
...In a broader sense, there is no leader in sight capable of building a majority constituency which unites both the satisfied and dissatisfied components of our society...
...That they should have done so was not unusual...
...Though this organization effectively conveys Frum's perspective on the 7o's, it is not always apparent why he treats material in one part of the book that would seem to fit as well or better in another...
...How We Got Here does not treat the 7o's chronologically but thematically, and Frum's themes evince his interest in human character, for they concern "trust," "duty," "reason," "desire," "rights," and "regeneration...
...Obscenely high inflation (and interest rates) also helped elect Ronald Reagan, and one of Frum's best chapters is his account of the origins of inflation during the Kennedy years and its take-off thereafter...
...He skillfully reports the due process revolution that took place in the public sector (Justice Brennan at work again) and the tort revolution in the private sector...
...the genocide in Cambodia (which proved to be the death of"liber66 Mar c h 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator al anti-anticommunism," as Frum nicely puts it...
...But then "sometime after 1969," writes Frum, "millions of Americans decided that they would no longer live this way...
...Aside from their contrasting political tendencies, with the mainline veering left and the evangelical churches tilting right, the chief difference lay in the fact that the evangelical churches preached one Way, while the mainline churches, reflecting the relativism of the times, suggested that there were many...
...He covers the rise of investigative journalism but doesn't report other key media developments- such as dying newspapers and the advent of cable television and the quantum leap in programming it would offer...
...and actor Warren Beatty, have each chosen not to run for the presidency this year...
...They became preoccupied with their bodies by dedicating themselves to exercise and food-this was the age of kitchen expansion...
...As if that were not enough, his sudden death saved them from the disillusionment and despair of practical politics...
...Wholly characteristic ofth~s state of affairs is the fact that the two Democrats who remain unapologetic advocates of semi-socialism, Senator Paul Wellstone (D-Minn...
...Frum also leaves out or scants subjects worthy of treatment in this popular history...
...And he much too briefly treats technology, giving it just a few paragraphs despite its obvious importance...
...The ideal of bridal virginity virtually disappeared...
...Until 1965, reports Frum, one in 2o marriages ended in divorce, and by 198o more than two of five did...
...A personal right of sexual freedom had emerged...
...When It All Bega n to Go Very Wrong-- and Right HowWe Got Here: The 70's: The Decode That Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse) David Frum Free Press/4~8pages / $25 REVIEWED BY TerryEastland J J ~ hese are America's best days," writes David Frum, "its high I I noon of empire...
...Frum, a Harvard Law graduate, is especially good on legal matters...
...Yet the 7o's also contributed to a seachange in manners and morals that can hardly be called conservative in a traditional sense--indeed Frum calls it "the greatest rebellion in American history...
...He reports little about sports, but the 7o's saw the advent of free agency in professional sports (recall Andy Messersmith's case) and their increasing commercialization (consider the Super Bowl...
...Seven years later Eisenstadt v. Baird, "the most radical and portentous case of the sexual revolution," extended the right to unmarried couples in an opinion written by Justice William Brennan...
...What has happened...
...He would like to see Americans make some conscious choices inspired by old ways of living that they now can see-should see-are better...
...It was better, yes...
...Like those two, Frum is a moralist, his abiding interest being human conduct and the ideas and rules and conventions that affect it...
...The law kept pace and no doubt helped speed this revolution...
...At times this loss of trust took the form of rebellion, which Frum says was one directed against the central planning and control that the public and private collectives alike required...
...Frum calls this seachange in manners and morals "the greatest rebellion" in our history...
...Frum, a Canadian-born journalist who lives and works in Washington, D.C., also covers education, immigration, smoking, regulation, civil rights (including the early affirmative action cases, from 1978,1979, and 198o), the underclass, the Pentagon Papers, photography, the volunteer army, food scares, eschatology, obscenity, Congress, the energy crises, the snail darter, even Friedrich Hayek (winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize for economics...
...The sexual revolution included the rise of the "new man," the more expressive and emotive male symbolized by Alan Alda, and the emergence of the gay rights movement...
...All too many Americans," he writes, "had felt like cogs in the wheel...
...They became vulnerable to scaremongering and apocalyptic fantasies (remember Paul Ehrlich, "who was invited onto The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson some twenty-five times in the 197o's...
...How We Got Here is history of a sort you don't often find these days...
...But most of all they pursued sex...
...Busing, one of the great disasters of the 7o's, taught otherwise, but it required the 8o's and the 9o's for it to be phased out...
...The American Spectator - Marc h 2 o o o 67...
...They are often nostalgic for those days, he says, but there is never any going back...
...The 7o's led not only to the Reagan and Bush presidencies but also to the New (rhetorically less liberal) Democrats of the 199o's, not to mention the first Republican Congress in 4 ~ years, now in its sixth year...
...Indeed, each of these words titles one of the book's six parts...
...Frum finds the answer to how we so mutated, of "how we got here," in a generously defined 7o's, which starts around 1965 and runs through 198o...
...R elatedly, there was the Equal Rights Amendment, which fell ,short of ratification, thanks to the efforts of Phyllis Schlafly...
...It is perhaps also worth observing-one of the very few omissions in Steel's book-that Kennedy's political career coincides with that final moment in the history of American liberalism in which white males could pretend to speak for the disinherited without fear of contradiction or embarrassment from within their own ranks--a golden age which still knew not Jesse Jackson, A1 Sharpton, or Patricia Ireland...
...and ever higher taxes (which, most notably, brought about California's property tax-cutting Proposition 13...
...Frum neglects to point out that the mainline churches weren't that theological in the first place...
...No wonder they miss him...
...Resentment against the crimping and cramping of the individual personality inspired not only the New Left...but also the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign...
...His narrative sparkles with descriptions of events that one might think were Tom Wolfe's, and the confidence of his judgments could remind readers of Paul Johnson...
...In moving away from the old order of mid-century, which prized rationality, Americans also became more and more interested in the paranormal (remember Uri Geller...
...is individualist, permissive, emotional, enterprising, garrulous, rebellious, hedonistic, and guilt-ridden...
...But Americans are not satisfied with all they have...
...This is evident in the book's organization...
...A people once collectivist, censorious, calculating, conformist, taciturn, obedient, puritanical, and selfconfident has mutated...into a people that TERRY EAST~ND is publisher and president ofTAS...
...No society had ever seen anything like it...
...And he treats the 7o's decisions by the Supreme Court (starting with Lemon v. Kurtzman, in 1971 ) which so strictly but incoherently separated church and state...
...Nonetheless, Frum has managed to include most of the big stories of the 7o's, and he is right to see the decade as one that produced an upheaval in the habits, beliefs, and morals of Americans of every station in life...
...But statutory law already was moving--rapidly-toward equal rights, and the courts were legislating them anyway...
...Much that happened in the 7o's (think of the creation of Ethernet, the forerunner of the Internet) brought us modern digital life...
...Religion became more emotional and less theological, says Frum, as the mainline Protestant churches collapsed and evangelical ones thrived...
...With Bobby Kennedy, affluent whites could feel adventurous and compassionate, self-righteous and unthreatened, all at the same time...
...But From shows, too, that the 7o's also marked the beginning of a loss of trust in the other large institutions that had shaped the nation for decades, including big corporations and trade unions...
...ety" have been discredited in actual practice, and few politicians anxious to win election or re-election wish to revisit them) As it is, the first Democratic president to be re-elected to a second full term since Franklin D. Roosevelt has presided over a far-reaching reform of our welfare system--without regret and without apology...
...But the Reagan majority itself arose, as Frum shows, in response to certain events and trends: exploding criminality (which "utterly discredited the liberal ideas that had governed American public life" since World War II...
...And the answer to whether Americans now will make such choices lies, as always, in the counsel they get at home, school, and church...
...That disastrous campaign ultimately can be said to have succeeded when Ronald Reagan was elected in 198o...
...Frum emphasizes that the Kennedy administration consciously chose to inflate the currency, and that they did so for reasons of ideology and personal weakness disguised as hubris...
...Frum correctly observes that Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) conferred a constitutional right to buy contraceptives on married couples only...
...The self came first, something Tom Wolfe noticed when he called the 7o's the "Me Decade...
...The conduct of the Vietnam War and then the Watergate scandal damaged Americans' trust in the federal government-a loss of trust codified in the 1978 independent counsel law...
...Indeed, it is a throwback to an earlier era in its reminder to readers that individual choice is what makes history, and that, as Frum puts it at book's end, "it is never t o o late to lead a better life...
...They feel "less content, less secure, less proud" of their country than they did a half century ago...
...And divorce, well, boomed...
...Americans for decades had lived a life of "labor and toil, and its rewards were never to be reaped by oneself, always by one's children...
...Americans, men and women both--and, t would add, conservatives and liberals alike-started to do more and more of whatever they wanted to do...
...The next year came Roe v. Wade, which declared a constitutional right to abortion...
Vol. 33 • March 2000 • No. 2
