THE LAST INNOCENT YEAR: American in 1964
By Jon Margolis
Morrow, 401 pages, $25
For most of us, the ’60s refuse to conform to any one vantage point. “I have a dream” collides with “the revolution is gonna come, off the pigs.” John Kennedy’s sublime pledge echoes–“We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty”–and into blurry focus come images of hollow-eyed Marines at Khe Sanh. Angry white mobs beat saintly black students asking politely for “a cup of coffee, please”; enraged black rioters put the torch to their own neighborhoods: “Burn, baby, burn!” Betty Friedan publishes “The Feminine Mystique”; Phyllis Schlafly publishes “A Choice Not an Echo.” Mayor Richard J. Daley wins applause lambasting “hippies, Yippies and flippies”; Abbie Hoffman brings a smile, gleefully burning dollar bills at the New York Stock Exchange.
What happened back then?
Conservatives: The ’60s mark the advent of a disastrous countercultural takeover of American society.
Liberals: It was the beginning of an equal-opportunity society.
Radicals: It was a time of hope and democratic renewal that was betrayed.
Was it, in the old standby, the best of times and the worst of times?
Jon Margolis, a former national political writer for the Tribune, doesn’t provide any simple answers about the place of the ’60s in American history, in our memories, or in American society today. He’s too good a writer to take so much dramatic conflict and reduce it to any sort of pat response. In “The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964,” he tells some celebrated and some less-well-known stories of one pivotal year in a decade full of society-shifting events. The key stories he has woven together–Lyndon Johnson’s tragic ascent to the presidency, passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the Mississippi freedom summer, Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, the Berkeley free-speech movement, J. Edgar Hoover’s persecution of Martin Luther King, the escalation of the Vietnam War and several others–let us think about who we were as a nation back then, the choices we faced and the decisions we reached. Margolis’ compelling account lets readers sift the drama of history for their own understandings and their own sense for what the drama of one fabled year, 1964, tells us about who we once were and who we have become.
“The Last Innocent Year” is fun to read. Margolis writes with wit and is a great storyteller. He mixes his accounts of the great and near-great with capsule comments on everyday life: the 1964 baseball pennant race, celebrity shenanigans, Broadway plays. While entertaining the contemporary reader with amusing trivia, he also reminds us that while history-making struggles were transforming the nation, more people in 1964 were titillated by the Elizabeth Taylor-Richard Burton affair than were concerned about developments in Vietnam. The past as it was lived is not usually what becomes history for later generations.
Part of that history, as seen from an end-of-the-20th-Century perspective, is the critical importance of Goldwater’s stunning victory in winning the 1964 Republican presidential nomination. Back in 1964, and for a good decade after, pundits and various other know-it-alls treated the victory of the conservative U.S. senator from Arizona as some kind of atavistic mistake. They pointed to the trouncing Goldwater took in the general election and declared that old-fashioned, anti-government, religiously oriented conservatism was dead in America. After the rise of the religious right in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan’s triumphs and the political victories of a right-wing Republicanism that makes Goldwater seem like a moderate, history looks different. Margolis takes that history seriously and places the Goldwater campaign front and center in his pivotal year of 1964 and, more generally, in the history of the ’60s.
Margolis astutely portrays the born-again conservatism of the ’60s, and while he is even-handed, what he shows is not pretty. He summarizes the 1964 game plan of Goldwater strategist Cliff White:
“Like Goldwater, Cliff White was no racist. But as a conservative political strategist, he knew what George Wallace knew, that race was conservatism’s entree to support from the broader public. For decades, a few conservative intellectuals and a few entrepreneurs disliked government. Rank-and-file voters never did. . . . Hating the government never got political legs until the government made it against the law to discriminate against people because of the color of their skin. . . . Only the civil rights movement made Goldwaterism strong in the South.”
One of the strengths of Margolis’ overall account of life in the U.S. in 1964 is his pointed reminders of just how normal the most blatant and raw racist statements and actions were among so many whites. Here, memory, at least for many white Americans, has too often softened hard reality. In gut-wrenching detail, Margolis describes the murder of freedom summer activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner by Ku Klux Klan members in collusion with local police in Mississippi; despite compelling evidence, Mississippi officials never charged anyone with the murders. In syncopation to his stories of civil rights struggles, Margolis quotes a litany of racist statements about black Americans made by powerful and respected white Americans. J. Edgar Hoover, director of the white-only FBI and one of the most powerful men in the U.S. for decades, casually referred to King as a “burr-head.” Texas Gov. John Connally, referring to a challenge at the 1964 Democratic National Convention by black and white Mississippians to the traditional white-only Southern state delegations, tells President Lyndon Johnson ” `you let those bugaboos march in and the whole South will march out.’ “
Both William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, legal advisers to Goldwater, were strongly opposed to the civil rights movement and any government role in integrating American society. Margolis argues that Rehnquist’s views in 1964 on racial justice were still based on the infamous 1954 memo he wrote as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, in which Rehnquist said the federal government should stop its ” `pathological search for discrimination. . . . (I)t is about time the (Supreme) Court faced the fact that white people in the South don’t like the colored people.’ ” While race relations remain among America’s greatest problems, those who believe little has changed should read this book.
If racism and the struggle for civil rights figure at the heart of this book, its central mystery is the character of Lyndon Johnson. Margolis retells some of the classic crude, rude and vulgar Johnson stories: his nude swims at the White House pool and his meetings with advisers while he sat on the toilet; his obsessive, petty dislike for Bobby Kennedy; the time he proudly picked up his pet beagles by their ears. He also shows the complex man who drove himself and all those around him to transform the nation: “the Southerner who believed in civil rights, the rich man who wanted to uplift the poor, the rough-hewn pragmatist who was more of a dreamer, more of a revolutionary, than he ever let anyone know.” Lyndon Johnson, who was at the center of so many of the triumphs and failures of the ’60s, well embodies the contradictions that characterize our memories and our histories of that era.
At the end of the 20th Century, Jon Margolis’ fine book on the year 1964 reminds us how far we have come as a nation and how uneasy the journey has been.
