The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed that the Engel decision practically suppresses all religion, especially in the public schools. Engel and other cases did more than anything else over time to a...
Congress, responding with patriotic fervor, approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, as it was called, with only desultory debate.
ALTHOUGH THE WATTS RIOT of 1965 was an extreme response, it appears in retrospect as an ominous omen of the future. One domestic crisis after another in the next few years, including even bloodier rac...
But the Great Society did not do nearly as much to improve the economic standing of people as did the extraordinary growth of the economy. When this stopped—in the 1970s—the flaws in LBJ's programs se...
By 1971 the United States had an unfavorable balance of international trade for the first time since 1893.
Moreover, Kissinger and Nixon deeply distrusted each other. Kissinger was sometimes contemptuous (behind Nixon's back) of the President. He called Nixon our drunken friend, a basket case, or meatball...
For these reasons the Vietnam-era army (unlike the armies that had fought in World War II or Korea) consisted disproportionately of the poor, minority groups, and the working classes. They were gettin...
Members of Congress, outraged by the events at Selma, forty times interrupted his address with applause. Johnson closed by raising his thumbs, fists clenched, and proclaiming, Their cause must be our...
In January 1971 he startled the newsman Howard K. Smith by telling him, I am now a Keynesian in economics, and in August he jolted the nation by announcing a New Economic Policy. This entailed fightin...
Less apparent at the time, but in many ways more problematic, were deep-seated structural developments in the work force. By the late 1960s millions of baby boomers were already crowding the job marke...
Many black and poor people, moreover, had become politicized by the civil rights movement and had begun to develop higher expectations from life. Some joined a newly formed National Welfare Rights Org...
In 1970 he was hailed on a Time magazine cover as the Paul Revere of ecology. A year later he published The Closing Circle, an impassioned book that warned of the dangers of environmental pollution. I...
Roughly 80 percent of American soldiers in Vietnam were from poor or working-class backgrounds. Neither in college nor in graduate school—where most students received near-automatic deferments until m...
Prominent opponents of the war, among them Dr. Spock and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, openly counseled young men to resist the draft and were indicted.
Most of the blacks who took part in the riots of 1966 and 1967 apparently did not expect much in the way of tangible results. Fired up by conflicts with the police, they started disturbances that expl...
The 1965 Voting Rights Act greatly extended federal power in the United States. A frankly regional measure, it took aim at Deep South states by stipulating that the Justice Department could intervene...
The Graduate, an Oscar-winning movie that appeared in late 1967, dramatized these changes. It featured a young man (Dustin Hoffman) who was in no way a hippie, a user of drugs, or a political radical....
During the racial confrontations of the 1960s, An American Dilemma encountered rising criticism from activists and scholars who disputed Myrdal's optimism about white liberalism, as well as his negati...
By the time Nixon reached office the environmental cause had grown stronger than ever, thanks in part to media attention given to Malthusian prophets of doom. Paul Ehrlich, a professor of biology at S...
By 1967 McNamara was pacing about his expansive Pentagon office, staring at the large framed photograph of Defense Secretary Forrestal (who had committed suicide), and weeping. By late 1967 Johnson ha...
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