America's Woes in the Sixties
Meyer, Karl E.
America's Woes in the Sixties by KARL E. MEYER It is one of the ironies of the 1960s in America that the decade saw a re- vival of passionate belief in Marxism, though its events confounded any...
...Much time and energy were spen in Africa, the Near East, and Europw to little effect...
...O'Neill is a pro- fessor of history at Rutgers and author of Everyone Was Brave...
...The seeds of disastei were sown in Vietnam...
...The decade was tragically scarred by mind- less assassinations, and by a mindless war, which recalled more than anything else Goya's mordant etching in which the sleep of reason breeds monsters...
...The arm race was pointlessly raised to a highe: order of magnitude...
...Quadrangle Books...
...It is impressive how often our historian quotes unheard voices, prophets with inadequate honor: Walter Lippmann, I. F. Stone, Bernard Fall, David Halberstam, and Milton Mayer among them...
...he is kind to Robert F. Kennedy...
...As O'Neill writes of the lecade, in language that recalls the dnewy prose of the great English his- :orian, A. J. P. Taylor: "Statesmen in- voked past glories to justify present ?qualor...
...The nation's heritage was wasted...
...America was beautiful all the same...
...An army wa formed capable of fighting a land wai in Asia, thus creating the irresistibh temptation to have one...
...Others see the Vietnam war as a conspiracy of rapacious imperialism, a conviction which shows a blind faith in dogma in the face of awkward fact, since the war has been a moral, political, and eco- nomic catastrophe for our ruling class...
...Seldom has a decade so vindicated the cardinal im- portance of dissent...
...In the early 1960s, we projected the thing that was happening inexorably into the future...
...Yet if no longer mankind's last, best chance for freedom, as politicians liked to think, America was still a place worth saving...
...What does O'Neill's book add up to...
...He writes justly: "It was typical of President Eisenhower that his great achievements were all negative...
...Yet one cannot evaluate the Ken nedy years solely in these practica terms...
...Even so, the 1960s were not wholly :ontemptible...
...For me, one of the visual epitaphs for the era was a demonstration in Wall Street—the heart of the beast—against the war...
...People were grateful for the first, took the second for granted, an< as often as not, attacked him for th third...
...Of all of George Orwell's great essays, few demand periodic re-reading more than his seminal essay, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" (author of The Managerial Revolution, and still a guru among Buckley conservatives...
...I wish Marx were alive to see this," he replied...
...We were pitifully wrong...
...First, that we lamentably took for granted the dull virtues of the Eisen- hower era...
...His military pol icy was an expensive folly...
...He maintained the notioi that China was really a small island of the coast of a large, unidentified lane mass...
...Coming Apart: An Informal His- tory of America in the 1960s, by William L. O'Neill...
...It was because violence poi- soned our public life, because our bureaucracy was blind (see the Pen- tagon Papers passim), and because the received dogmas of our past (faith in racial integration, for example) were abysmally inadequate to a stormy present...
...O'Neill's tone is likewise astringenl in his approach to Presidents Johnsor and Nixon...
...We believed that the rational, if slick, managerial approach exemplified by the Kennedys was the wave of the future...
...No mere bookkeeper's calcula- tion can explain his hold on the world': imagination . . . Critics often com plained that his dazzling style obscurec the thin substance of his government But while true, that also was beside: the point...
...If there is a fault, it lies in O'NeilPj sometimes excessive quest for balance— a refreshing fault, let me hastily add in a time when hysteria is more often than not the normal tone of political discourse...
...Patriotism was corrupted by mperialism...
...I doff my bowler to him...
...Still, the problem is understandable...
...What is striking, as our woes multi- plied, is that there was always a dissent- ing minority who saw the shoals of calamity ahead...
...It would be foolish for us to repeat the same blunder as we march into the 1970s—we cannot outguess his- tory, and our pessimism today may be is ill-founded as our optimism was in 1961...
...materialists soiled her way of life...
...In appraising Burnham's notorious predilection for forecasting the victory of totalitarianism (either of the Nazi or Soviet variety), Orwell remarks that in every case Burnham "is predicting a continuation of the thing that is hap- pening...
...O'Neill is tough but fai about President Kennedy...
...Reason was weaker, and ab- surd accident more potent, than any of us expected...
...This saving remnant gives us greater confidence as we confront a scary fu- ture...
...12.50...
...Romanticists scorned the American dream...
...To which, a hearty Amen...
...I hap- pened to be standing next to the New York correspondent of Izvestia, & Geor- gian of some charm, and I asked him how he would explain to his befuddled Soviet readers this workers' uprising, in support of the war, against the well- known running-dogs of Wall Street, who were opposing it...
...He ended the Korean War, entered into no new ones, and kept military spend- ing down...
...442 pp...
...So it was with us...
...Shared fictions are more po- tent than truths denied...
...Yet they were all equally diffi cult and worthwhile accomplishments.' Second, that we (liberals at least] were mesmerized by Kennedy glamour and were all too ready for nationa adventure...
...America's Woes in the Sixties by KARL E. MEYER It is one of the ironies of the 1960s in America that the decade saw a re- vival of passionate belief in Marxism, though its events confounded any glib dialectical materialist explanation...
...In general he is kind tc people, while ruthlessly dissecting then doctrines...
...Which is not to say that he abdicates judgment...
...One of the merits of William L. O'Neill's brilliant history of the 1960s, Coming Apart, is that he wears no doc- trinal blinders, and offers no pat Theory of History...
...His narrative is superla- tive, tightly and gracefully written, and he shows an almost appalling erudition about everything from the arms race to Zen Buddhism...
...on the contrary, his judgments are firm and frequent, and invariably sensible...
...Burnham's tendency, comments Or- well, is not simply a bad habit but "a major mental disease...
...If the 1960s were a tragic decade, it was not because our leaders were wicked...
...Some discern a sinister master plot in the murder of four of our most gifted leaders (Malcolm X was the fourth), a symptom of our refusal to entertain ab- surdity as an engine of change...
...Our chronicler is kind tc Eugene McCarthy...
...he sees the former as a complex man who did well in his first years before grotesquely overcommitting the country to Vietnam, and the latter as a mediocre leader who is not as bad as liberals feared...
...There is hardly a stone he has not turned over to our illumina- tion and entertainment, as he pounces on the bugs that scurry out from beneath...
...his summar runs like this: "The less said about his Cuban pol icy the better...
...Surely one cannot have it both ways...
...The rally was organized by students and teachers at our leading business schools—and it was clamorous- ly opposed by a counter-rally organized by construction workers, one of whom flourished a banner which read, God Bless the Establishment...
Vol. 35 • August 1971 • No. 10
