NYT book review: THE LIBERAL HOUR: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s

[DeepModem Mom]

Books of The Times
The ’60s: Once Upon an Optimistic Time
By BARRY GEWEN
Published: August 12, 2008

THE LIBERAL HOUR: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s
By G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot

Reading “The Liberal Hour” by G. Calvin Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot, two professors at Colby College, is a bit like standing backstage at the opera and being told that the real action is taking place among the electricians, dressers and stagehands. Too many historians who write about the 1960s, the authors contend, have focused on the decade’s very visible rebellions and disruptions — all that sex, all those drugs, all that rock ’n’ roll.

What is often ignored, they say, is the hard work of little-known politicians and bureaucrats who were methodically creating a ’60s revolution from within. . Bob Dylan sang:

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall.

But Mr. Dylan was wrong, Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Weisbrot write. Senators and congressmen weren’t blocking up the hall; they were permanently transforming the country with a tsunami of social and economic legislation. Granted, it’s more fun to read about Abbie Hoffman than about Edmund Muskie, but Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Weisbrot have a persuasive case to make, and even if much of their story has been told before, their overall argument is a valuable corrective to a lot of hackneyed thinking about the significance of the ’60s.

The “liberal hour” lasted only a few years, from 1963 to 1966, from the final days of John F. Kennedy’s presidency through the first three years of Lyndon B. Johnson’s, but in that brief period of time came two civil rights acts that remade politics not only in the South but also across the entire country; the unassailable edifices of Medicare and Medicaid; pioneering environmental laws; education and immigration bills; stronger protections for consumers; a host of antipoverty programs, including food stamps and Head Start; new federal departments of transportation and housing and urban development; and other reform measures, literally hundreds. Washington hadn’t seen such legislative energy since the New Deal.

If it was poverty and want that drove the New Deal, it was prosperity that provided the momentum for the ’60s, and with it the confidence to take on any challenge. “In the early years of the 1960s,” Mr. Mackenzie and Mr. Weisbrot write, “national optimism reached epidemic levels.” Inspired by Kennedy’s rhetoric and Johnson’s acumen, hundreds of inside-the-Beltway role players set about to change their country and the world....

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/13/books/13gewen.html