AROUND THE WORLD IN 40 YEARS

...Yet the ultimate beneficiary of all this in the election was Richard Nixon...

...Just as permanent prosperity proved illusory around the time The American Spectator first appeared, so other, more gloomy prognostications remained unfulfilled and evil certitudes turned out to be transitory...

...In that dreadful decade I lectured all over the world, often to business audiences, and my most popular lecture by far was called “Can Capitalism Survive...

...In America, there were 221 major demonstrations on campus in 1968, student radicals ran the campaign of Eugene McCarthy, which knocked Lyndon B. Johnson out of the presidential race, and at the Chicago Democratic Convention in August 1968, students fought a pitched battle with 11,900 of Mayor Daley’s police, 7,500 of the Illinois National Guard, and 1,000 FBI and Secret Service agents...

...This effectively began the “Green” Movement, with all its hostile implications for business...

...But they are sure to be succeeded by new ones...

...This seems amazing to us today, and of course it did not last...

...Indeed, during the first decade and a half of The American Spectator’s existence, Soviet military power, relative to America, was actually increasing, in naval units, in divisions, and in the number of nuclear warheads and delivery systems...

...economic and financial power...

...In Paris it led to a huge electoral victory for President de Gaulle, statistically the biggest success ever achieved by the Right in France...

...Though he was in the end forced to back down, and subsequently removed by his colleagues, his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, felt sufficiently confident to promulgate what was called “The Brezhnev Doctrine...

...No doubt our present fears and anxieties will pass too...

...These soon took legal form: the Land and Water Act of 1964, the Clean Air Act 1965, the Clean Water Restoration Act 1966, and from 1968 the “Conservation Congress,” as it was called, sought to impose “Ectopia” with such gigantic measures as the Environmental Protection Act, the Toxic Substance Control Act, the Occupational Health and Safety Act, and a series of air, food, and drugs acts...

...The Soviet Union transformed itself into something approaching a legitimate state...

...The absence of any Western response to this act of aggression against the Czech people showed that America and its allies were not prepared to risk a confrontation with the Soviet empire on the freedom issue...

...He did so in the smug optimism of the time: “The present generation of young people in our universities are the best informed, the most intelligent and the most idealistic this country has ever known...

...In Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre played the “applauding idiot” role of Cox, while Trilling’s role of cynical sage fell to Raymond Aron...

...By 1966, the year before the Spectator came into existence, with inflation passing the 3 percent barrier and interest rates rising to 5 1/2 percent, the Great Bull Market died, with the Dow-Jones Index short of the magic 1,000-point mark...

...But plenty of fear remains, including fear of nuclear wars, albeit small-scale ones...

...IF, AT THE TIME The American Spectatorwas founded, the U.S...

...The follies and over-confidence of the silly sixties brought grievous retribution in the sullen seventies, when business lost its confidence and collectivism advanced on all fronts...

...That brought a sour comment from Lionel DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 1 7 B Y P A U L J O H N S O N Surveying the turbulent life and times of The American Spectator...

...Life is an adventure, an endless adventure, with new episodes succeeding each other incessantly, and no final chapter in sight...

...Their success in doing so, helped by other factors of course, became one of the most important events of the last 40 years, and this in turn became the emotional, energizing force in the growth of Moslem fundamentalism and violence...

...I realized,” he said, “that America could not carry through my Great Society program, and fight a full-scale war in Vietnam, at one and the same time...

...Terms like “privatization” and “Thatcherism” made their triumphant appearance...

...The idea of “permanent prosperity” collapsed...

...Meanwhile, in China, Communism appeared to be strengthening its grip...

...The explosion of militant Islam gave international terrorism a new and much more alarming dimension...

...This, in effect, laid down that the Soviet empire was immutable...

...In the seventies alone, it dropped 43 percent...

...industrial production was over a third (34 percent) of the entire world total...

...Earlier in the 1960s decade, Russia, under Khrushchev, had felt strong enough to risk nuclear confrontation over Cuba...

...And since 9/11, no great city in the world has felt safe...

...A demonstration of the Soviet resolve was provided when the “Prague Spring” of 1968 was put down by the Red Army, whose tanks occupied the Czech capital...

...The most important single factor behind this achievement was cheap energy...

...1 6 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 Around the World in 40 Years Around the World in 40 Years O MUCH HAS HAPPENED TO THE WORLD in the last 40 years, nearly all of it, good and bad, having its roots in the feverish 1960s, that different people will pick on different key points according to their outlook and temperament...

...Student rioting took its most dramatic form in May 1968 in Paris, but as early as 1964 student violence had been so severe at Berkeley that the governor of California had to call in the riot police...

...DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 1 9 P A U L J O H N S O N Celebrate every month in 2008 with...

...The spirit of capitalism recovered its energy and impetus, and spread, often dragging democracy with it...

...Thus Lyndon Johnson, president for most of the decade, told me that it was in 1967-68 that he first became painfully aware of the limitations of U.S...

...Russia would resist by force any attempt to overthrow Communist regimes anywhere...

...The 1980s formed one of the watersheds of modern history...

...For two decades the price of fuel, especially oil, had declined consistently compared to manufactured goods—it fell sharply in relative terms, 1953-69, and in the years 1963-69, when The American Spectator was conceived and born, it actually fell in absolute terms...

...S Trilling: Cox was “celebrating as knowledge and intelligence” what was “merely a congeries of ‘advanced’ public attitudes...

...Capitalism had not only survived but become, in many ways, the global ideology, as the two most populous nations on earth, China and India, took to it enthusiastically and with enormous success...

...The fact that such a question was seriously asked reflected the gloom and doom of the period...

...In the summer of 1966, following Mao’s proclamation of a “great proletarian cultural revolution,” designed to impose the ideal “Marxist-Leninist society,” armies of Red Guards moved systematically across the country, taking violent physical action in every town and village...

...Whereas, when The American Spectator was born, “student power” was the vacuous, damaging, and mendacious slogan of the day, now, at the time of its 40th birthday, we have “climate change,” “global warming,” and “environmental catastrophe” to catch the attention of the young and their more foolish elders, and to lead to acts of folly, cowardice, and unreason...

...Paul Johnson’s many books include Modern Times, Intellectuals, A History of the English People, and A History of the American People...

...In 1968 U.S...

...Then there was the threat of violence...

...They were the trio who laid Communism, as an expanding and triumphant ideology, to rest...

...economy was producing over onethird of all industrial goods, this overwhelming paramountcy was not matched in military terms...

...There was no “End of History,” as some had foolishly proclaimed in the heady days of the early 1990s...

...Yet, by the end of the decade, business was getting its confidence back, and it was the Soviet empire, and Communism itself, that was beginning to tremble A R O U N D T H E W O R L D I N 4 0 Y E A R S 1 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 2007/JANUARY 2008 And in the 1980s, there came a great wind of change in the affairs of mankind that gathered momentum throughout the decade and beyond into the 1990s...

...YET—AGAIN!—nothing is for sure...

...YET SURVEYING SUCH A HUGE CHUNK of history as 40 years, one’s overriding impression is that nothing is sure...

...And in the 1980s, there came a great wind of change in the affairs of mankind that gathered momentum throughout the decade and beyond into the 1990s, swept all before it, and left the global landscape changed beyond recognition...

...The huge global increase in the demand for energy transformed Russia, no longer a military superpower but a major exporter of oil and gas, into an energy superpower...

...The job of a paper like The American Spectator is to record and comment on each episode as it occurs, relate it to earlier ones, and prognosticate about those to come...

...Then, too, new threats appeared...

...The 20th century was the most savage of all epochs in human history, with the totalitarian states killing their enemies, real or imaginary, on an industrial scale...

...Rather, history became more complicated...

...Suddenly, all the Communist satellites in Europe regained their freedom—and without bloodshed too...

...The number of Chinese people killed by the Communists during the entire Maoist period has now been calculated at over 70 million...

...At the same time the Soviet Union stepped up its plans to build and operate an enormous navy which, in the 1970s, was to enable it and its surrogates, such as Cuba, to operate at will in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia...

...We no longer fear “nuclear annihilation” in a war between superpowers...

...Student power” was essentially negative...

...As The American Spectator approached its 40th anniversary, the kaleidoscope changed again...

...The end of cheap oil, which came in the 1970s, was not the only indication that the climate was changing...

...The rule of law was re-established in parts of the globe where it had appeared to be vanishing...

...Total costs to business of compliance, and to the taxpayer for enforcement, had passed $100 billion a year by 1979...

...From this smoke and confusion, the United States emerged as the sole superpower...

...Forty years ago, the triumphant Israeli Six-Day War, which won for the Israelis all Jerusalem and the West Bank, seemed to present the entire Arab and Moslem world as impotent before a tiny Westernstyle nation...

...This publication was born at a time when the slaughter was at its most intense, the moral climax of the century of darkness and death...

...The Cultural Revolution was the most intense and prolonged period of killing, and looking back on it from the standpoint of 40 years, it is shocking to think that each week, when The American Spectatorwas in its infancy, between 10,000 and 100,000 Chinese were being murdered by the authorities...

...The Cold War was won, or at any rate over...

...Cox was confusing youth with soundness...

...Future historians may well pick on these years as marking the summit of American power relative to the rest of the world...

...In 1962 Rachel Carson published The Silent Spring, a book of warning about polluting the environment initially hailed with universal approval...

...Request YOUR calendar today...

...Coincidentally it acquired its most sinister regime since the departure of Brezhnev...

...Producing and editing such a magazine is an endless adventure in itself, and reading it an endless education —and, dare I say it, entertainment...

...A devastating riot at Columbia on April 23, 1968, led to Professor Archibald Cox of the Harvard Law School being called in to report...

...IN 1967 BUSINESS HAD ENJOYED an exceptionally benevolent climate in the U.S...

...Even by the time this publication celebrates its 50th anniversary, in 2017, we shall be living in a different world, not necessarily a more reasoning one either...

...When The American Spectatorwas founded, the “campus riot” was becoming part of American college culture...

...Call (888) 891-4288 or visit CBLPI.org conservative ladies extraordinary 2008 Calendar Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute...

...By the late seventies, adjusted for inflation, it had fallen to about 300...

...with fear...

...The Soviet empire collapsed...

...Soviet political and military power appeared to be a geopolitical fact of life, which would last for decades, indeed perhaps forever...

...The Big Three of the time were Ronald Reagan in Washington, Margaret Thatcher in London, and Pope John Paul II in Rome...

...But it was the detonator of the process that led the OPEC countries to consider how they could turn their oil resources into a political and diplomatic weapon...

...a sentiment not universally shared at the time...

...Already, in 1962, the attack on the steel industry led by Robert Kennedy, the attorney general, had brought the first big postwar fall in the New York Stock Market...

...Fighting this, and providing against the spread of nuclear weapons technology to rogue states, and their terrorist clients, became the chief military preoccupation in the United States...

...So it will always be...

...for nearly 30 years...

...The businessmen liked it, because it concluded with an emphatic “Yes...