Jon Margolis's The Last Innocent Year
Perlstein, Rick
I HAVE BEEN thinking a lot, lately, about what it is history professors do, what jour-nalists who write history do, and what the difference is. Recently, I wrote a profile of the Stanford...
...Acknowledged as a masterpiece, that is, by just about everyone but my graduate seminar...
...Without recourse to guild members' accountability to one another—and the good old-fashioned internalized shame at betraying it—a nonacademic historian is left to his or her initiative, to compel the level of exactitude that propels scholars through their profession's hoops as a matter of course...
...then in August he lied about the Gulf of Tonkin to escalate the Vietnam War...
...Bobby Kennedy began his rocky, arrested journey to the stewardship of American liberalism...
...Consensus liberalism entered one of its most dramatic crises in credibility: the baffling outbreak of race riots in the North weeks after the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act...
...Half right, sometimes, is all wrong— like saying, as Margolis does, that A.J...
...Professors will begin to write better—beyond cases of individual initiative, which social democrats know is never enough—just as soon as other professors begin to demand it...
...William Rusher is 118 DISSENT / Fall 1999 identified as editor of National Review where he was the publisher (to make that mistake obscures the towering role of William F. Buckley...
...It wasn't world historic, but I thought back to my experience in a history seminar during my short graduate school career...
...Or, as he put it when accepting the Republican nomination: "There's a virtual despair among the many who look beyond material successes toward the inner meaning of their lives...
...Margolis evokes the mood wonderfully...
...I've spent the last thirty months working on a book on the 1964 presidential election and the rise of the conservative movement, though, and I think his thesis is sound...
...Muste had "vaguely left-wing leanings...
...even a society for the refurbishment of centrist Republicanism proclaimed themselves in their founding statement (which Margolis does not quote) "fiery moderates...
...But one of the things that made the conservatism of Barry Goldwater new was that he was forever saying things like "I'll fight anyone who tries to destroy unions...
...Kennedy's volume is a masterpiece, fulfilling in every way Hofstadter and Woodward's grand vision—delightful enough to take to the beach...
...The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964: The Beginning of the "Sixties" is the product of Jon Margolis, the Chicago Tribune's longtime chief Washington correspondent, now retired...
...the logic of the market guarantees that...
...NBC's John Chancellor was escorted off the floor of the Republican National Convention by local police, not by White's security forces...
...HISTORIANS AND theorists have spewed reams from computer printers in the last ten years or so about how stories work...
...The Promised Land bears many of the faults that, I think, only a journalistic history can—most conspicuously the bizarre but narratively convenient claim (he begins his book with the dramatic scene) that one of the grandest mass migrations in human history was set off entirely by the first public demonstration of the mechanical cotton picker on October 2, 1944...
...There is, of course, an inglorious tradition in American conservatism of attacking unions as dangerous and unAmerican, often at the point of National Guard rifles...
...Or that day the Beatles arrived on the tarmac in New York and inaugurated a debate that made it seem that whether you were for or against a pop band was almost a political issue...
...He is, in other words, a storyteller...
...It could have been the first time a white SNCC volunteer came back to school wearing farmer's overalls, or when Bob Dylan blew into an SDS national council meeting and slurred, "Ah don't know what you all are talking about, but it sounds like you want something to happen, and if that's what you want, that's what ah want"— or when Nat Hentoff and labor secretary Willard Wirtz went on a walking tour of Harlem and Wirtz asked a teenager whether he was looking for a job...
...Teachers were once trusted to teach...
...America changed on or around...well, pick your date...
...When I interviewed Kennedy, he ticked off the names of some journalistic historians who have gladly filled the gap: Doris Kearns Goodwin, David McCullough, Taylor Branch...
...We were reading Nicholas Lemann's The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America, widely acknowledged as a masterpiece of serious journalistic history for the way it smoothly intercuts between the life histories of two black families who found their way to Chicago after World War II, the bureaucratic battles in Washington over the War on Poverty, and back to Chicago to examine how its programs did and did not work on the ground—finishing with a set of very specific, hard-headed, aggressively social democratic policy recommendations gleaned from the tale...
...The result, as Publishers Weekly's starred review (excerpted on the back), puts it, is "a breezily well-written, episodically structured book that reads so much like a good PBS film documentary that readers will be creating soundtracks in their own minds...
...I offer a stratified sample from my area of expertise...
...rigorous enough to turn to for reference in any dozen topics in financial, social, diplomatic, military, cultural, and legal history...
...It could be dated to May 22, 1964, when in his famous "Great Society" address, Lyndon Johnson, the man who had acceded to the presidency with an image as a plodding time-server, spoke of creating an America "where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce, but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community...
...That catalyzed the takeoff of the environmental movement, even as the New Left DISSENT /Fall 1999 117 began to stir, inspired by Berkeley, the Gulf of Tonkin, by the great dreams of the newly announced War on Poverty, by Freedom Summer, and by the sellout of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party in Atlantic City...
...How stories stick to your brain...
...Is it such a bad thing to have a reader playing a soundtrack in her mind when you're trying to evoke the past...
...The book I'm talking about is quite self-consciously aimed at reformminded university administrators...
...Andy Warhol was in flower...
...And HarperDisneyRandom won't make them do it...
...My old history professor is right: history professors—all professors—have something precious...
...The article told of the briefings the new president had received on the possibility of launching strikes against Slobodan Milosevic's ethnic-cleansing forces...
...How much to condemn for getting the facts wrong...
...IWON'T MENTION the name of another book I reviewed recently, by a University of Wisconsin professor, published by Cornell University Press, that manages to make one of the most inherently gripping events in recent American history—the takeover of the Cornell student union by African-American militants with machine guns—as boring as a computer manual...
...to correct them serves mostly to mark the reviewer as a pedant...
...It was very much a part of the badfaith populism of George Wallace in the Democratic primary in the spring...
...Where historians are not, journalists will be— which is not always to the good...
...And if he were a professor —reading his work before colleagues, distributing drafts to helpful experts, seeing his manuscript vetted by readers at journals and presses —it never would have seen print...
...and Hentoff called that "a healthy reaction to a sick society...
...Two of the rare historians who enjoyed the esteem both of their professional community and the common reader, Richard Hofstadter and C. Vann Woodward, around 1960, endeavored to institutionalize their accomplishment by commissioning major synthetic treatments of American history that married gripping narrative to scholarly rigor...
...Not how we shape stories, but how stories shape us: what kinds of power they exert over us when we think we're taking mere pleasure, how the conjuring up of a certain textual vibe does more analytic work than a thousand data points...
...Here, it is the guild that beats the market every time...
...Goldwater rarely made a speech where he didn't accuse his opponent of soulless materialism...
...It is a question, really, of writing: hints dropped, scenes set, apt details...
...A statement of Goldwater's is described as "recent" although he had made it four years earlier...
...politics, in short, was becoming a theater of the self—where, as Margolis observes of SNCC leaders like John Lewis, "the method by which one achieved one's goal was part of the goal...
...the bloody scene at the Edmond Pettis bridge in Selma removed any illusions about whether America was at war over race...
...It will miss...
...He writes, "it was the Birchers who created the nucleus of the political organization that Cliff White was creating," which is akin to saying that members of the Communist Party were the nucleus of Americans for Democratic Action...
...Just because you've put facts and analysis down on the page doesn't mean a reader will remember it...
...Timothy Leary repaired to a farm outside Poughkeepsie to experiment with LSD full time...
...Ken Kesey's pranksters took their merry bus trip...
...now their stuDISSENT / Fa11 1999• 119 dents are given high-stakes tests to guarantee "accountability...
...Other mistakes, however, are land mines in the way of the story he's trying to tell...
...There were wellsprings of détente in January when President Johnson, in an extraordinary act of courage and parliamentary skill, muscled through the sale of surplus wheat to the Soviet Union...
...Why are history readers forced, too often, to chose...
...The backstory is politics becoming not just a question of who gets what and how, but a quest after authenticity, meaning, and dignity, in a manner more associated with existentialist philosophy...
...this book sets the context by explaining that a month earlier, Sullivan's biggest coup was landing an appearance by the Singing Nun...
...and against labor influence in politics by arguing that using union dues to support liberal candidates violated the First Amendment rights of members who were conservative...
...The kid replied, "Why...
...Not to let Lemann off the hook...
...The history profession so militates against producing scholars willing and able to write this way, a ninety-year-old C. Vann Woodward told me when I reached him by phone, that he doesn't expect to live to witness the publication of another volume in the series...
...But let us excuse these...
...For young ones it would be a tenure-breaker, for old ones a reputation-breaker...
...And the professional readers for Cornell University Press won't make them do it...
...The Common Reader in Chief strolled into one of the meetings carrying a book— Balkan Ghosts, by the journalist Robert Kaplan, who has never seen a reductionist portrait of a foreign clime that he didn't like—that he said had convinced him that ethnic conflict in that region was so primordial, so ineluctable, of such ancient provenance, that the world was helpless to try to do anything about it...
...In that same dark night when The Beverly Hillbillies topped the ratings, irreverence invaded pop culture in the form of the pre-Saturday Night Live antics of That Was The Week That Was...
...Johnson initiated the bombing of Vietnam, then sent in the Marines...
...Mobilizing such shimmering American ideals to restrict organized labor to the narrowest possible role was a far more powerful weapon against it than any million Pinkertons...
...But it washes from the mind at the first new tide...
...Both wrote their constitutions to ecraser l'infame...
...And not just because only every fifth fact gets a footnote...
...You can build a castle out of undifferentiated grains of sand...
...Yet at the same time he fought against the union shop— he called it "compulsory unionism"—through "right-to-work" laws...
...It could have been the day a young man burned his draft card in Union Square in New York with the declaration, "The basic issue is my right of choice...
...RICK PERLSTEIN 's book on the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign will appear in the spring...
...Margolis says a White House meeting with Goldwater in July was about Vietnam when it was about civil rights...
...It was ecumenical, a zeitgeist...
...116 DISSENT /Fall 1999 To them—to us—it was a pathetic piece of journalism (my professor spit out the word with the venom of someone who had something precious stolen from him...
...In fact that point was often made, in, among other places, this magazine, whose editor, a certain Irving Howe, wrote that YAF's "concern for the preservation of personal initiative in a bureaucratic society is something an intelligent radical ought to accept...
...You remember them...
...He might have added that these are authors the president of the United States has been known to savor...
...I'm not sure many orthodox scholarly historians could pull it off...
...It was only years later, when Clinton got his hands on a more scholarly account of the subject published by an academic press, Noel Malcolm's Bosnia: A Short History, that he allowed the Serbs the same tangled motives—answerable to the same disincentives—as every other group of mortal human beings...
...The opposite side of the issue, though, has been more neglected...
...Freedom From Fear is the series' fourth book...
...On the other hand...
...Elsewhere, when he mentions that the Goldwater campaign predicted early on that it had locked up 451 delegates, Margolis says that all of them came from southern states, when only half did...
...Barry Goldwater, Margolis writes, thought "unions were dangerous, almost un-American...
...Nor, by any means, was this the sole province of the left...
...The New York Times recently published a piece about Bill Clinton's reading habits...
...He hasn't read too many primary sources...
...he misses the point—his own point, of the power of the existentialist ideal of autonomy to move men's souls...
...One of the casualties of these years of market triumphalism is the ancient idea of the guild—a group of professionals who regulate themselves by standards, both internalized and externalized, formed and upheld by those whom they have apprenticed under...
...At the front end of the "long 1964," the latest bout of American innocence ended when a president was gunned down in the street...
...But what is most impressive about this book is not how he handles the stories, but the backstory—how he creates its textual vibe...
...No scholar could put out a book with this many mistakes...
...It is an embarrassing flaw in an otherwise marvelous book...
...Boy, was that book exact—all the way down to just about every letter, memo, meeting, and post hoc reflection the event ever produced, until the reader is left with so many undifferentiated grains of narrative that what should stick out like a boulder (a militant announcing over campus radio that "before this is over James Perkins, Allan Sindler, and Clinton Rossiter are going to die in the gutter") looks the same, vibe-wise, as a minority report of the student disciplinary committee...
...But despite the best attempts of some state legislatures, professors have held their guild intact...
...Watts went up in flames...
...The impressario of Goldwater's nomination was Clif, not "Cliff," White...
...The managerialliberal love affair between Big Business and government reached its public apotheosis in Robert Moses's glittering World's Fair in Flushing, and its private one in the rise of the WEST consortium, which oversaw the turnover of public lands to western power companies...
...There are those who would amalgamate us into a unit of the one," he cried, "subservient to a powerful central government, with laws designed to equalize us into the common denominator necesary for a slave people...
...It's better than it sounds.The title suggests a gimmick, a confusion of an accident of number with the quickening of history...
...How many mistakes to excuse for getting the vibe right...
...There are garbled facts...
...Margolis spells out what happened in between with remarkable skill and economy...
...For that, a professor has to seize the imagination...
...WHIGH BRINGS me to the other side of my evaluation...
...We never got to Lemann's discussion of its policy prescriptions because we were too busy superciliously abusing him for not "problematizing race...
...Of those wartime conscientious objectors who deployed the politics of personalism to defend their decision, Margolis makes an aside: "At the time, no one seems to have noticed that although the foreign policy of these young pacifists was as far as it could be from that of the Young Americans for Freedom, (YAF) their insistence on the individual's autonomy was similar...
...Sometimes, if you're a politician, you act on them...
...I say all this because it's taken me that much work to figure out why I have been having a harder time than usual deciding whether the book under review is good, bad, or excellent...
...now health maintenance organization accountants do it for them...
...People tell stories about themselves when they think they're just writing objective analysis, these theorists argue, or reveal underlying power relations when they think they're merely giving pleasure...
...The Beatles appeared on Ed Sullivan...
...It seems an unobjectionable point—Goldwater first made his name as a young senator by savaging Walter Reuther—but to leave it at that begs every question...
...by the middle of 1965, enough had happened to make people wonder why they ever believed in innocence in the first place...
...And then, of course, there was Barry Goldwater...
...More footnotes just mean more pages to print...
...Doctors once were trusted to make their own decisions...
...Margolis is not just in error here...
...Recently, I wrote a profile of the Stanford historian David Kennedy, whose Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 is the most recent volume in the monumental Oxford History of the United States series...
Vol. 46 • September 1999 • No. 4
