By the beginning of 1967, the war in Vietnam had ended America’s ‘consensus’ for good.
Is there a word that means the opposite of nostalgia — something to describe the acrid taste at the back of one’s tongue when confronted with a vivid retelling of events recalled with loathing?
Although, since I was too young to notice pre-primary candidates outside my parents’ Democratic faith party, I never previously realized how much Willard “Mitt” Romney’s campaigning style owes to his wounded Franklinian vanity. Nixon’s willingness to crawl through whatever rancid sewers of innuendo and misdirection necessary to activate the collective lizard brains of the American voting public seem to have permanently marked young Willard.
(Tech note: You can edit your comment by right-clicking on the ‘Edit’ button to open a new tab/window and working from there. Another FYWP glitch… )
Rick Perlstein
Careful, the author’s listening… ;-)
Linda Featheringill
Just read the two chapters in Nixonland and now I’m all depressed.
Bear in mind the psychological theory that depression is basically involuted anger.
[“bastards” are part of the Establishment.]
Regarding Vietnam:
The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied.
Regarding the civil rights struggle:
The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied.
Regarding what the hippies were actually doing at this time:
The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied.
Regarding political campaigns and promises:
The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied. The bastards lied.
I remember the anger, as we knew we were being lied to and yet people seemed to believe the lying bastards. I remember the frustration. I remember the feelings of hopelessness and futility.
And I remember that one popular painkiller for folks torn by these feelings was to get high, drunk, and laid. I also remember that as a temporary analgesic, this combination was quite efficacious.
Linda Featheringill
Okay. I got that off my chest. Now, to the topic at hand . . .
Rick Perlstein
And yet: aren’t we all, on some level, bastards?
It’s not all bad guys and good guys.
Comrade Luke
I was born in the Fall of Love (Nov 1967), and as I’m reading this I’m shocked at how bad things were.
Does it come across like this because I’m reading everything in one place, and people actually living through it didn’t notice the extent because of the lack of 24/7 news? Or was it as chaotic for people all over the country as it sounds?
It was stressful just reading it; I can’t imagine how I would have felt if I was going through it. It sure seems worse than anything we’re going through now.
Villago Delenda Est
Oh, it only gets worse on Vietnam.
As I related earlier, I read The Pentagon Papers in HS, not long after they were liberated.
The entire thing, from the start, was a lie.
We could have had Ho Chi Mihn as an ally, if we weren’t so fucking idiotically paranoid about Communism.
Linda Featheringill
Romney:
I don’t remember much being made of his being a Mormon. I’m confident that just as much distrust of Mormons existed in the mid 20th century as today, but I don’t remember any talk about it.
In fact, in 2008, I was surprised to learn that the Romney family members were Mormons in good standing. Not that it mattered much to me but I was surprised, nonetheless.
General Stuck
Yes, in foreign policy. But it also then opened up a pandora’s box of long simmering social grievances of every shape size and color. It all got thrown into the Vietnam meat grinder of rage, and I got stoned, and stayed that way.
Villago Delenda Est
@Comrade Luke:
I was 10 at the time, and there was stuff on the TV, there was stuff on the radio, there was stuff in the papers…but you just don’t notice as much when you’re 10 as you do when you’re older. I’m sure 24/7 cable “news” does not help, so much cable “news” is basically filler…commentary, pseudo-documentaries, press releases repackaged as “news”.
Anne Laurie
@Linda Featheringill:
Heck, I was old enough to understand the lying, but not old enough to resort to those analgesics. Although it wasn’t until 1972, when I was a freshman at a big Midwestern university, that I fully understood how much of my economic life was going to be summed up by the phrase “You should’ve been here just three years ago, it was AMAZING back then… “
Linda Featheringill
@Villago Delenda Est:
I have long suspected that we [the US] inflicted more damage on ourselves in our fear of Communism than the USSR ever caused us.
Comrade Luke
@Villago Delenda Est:
What i’m taking away from it is more than paranoia; people we fundamentally incapable of seeing the forest for the trees, so they fall back on “must be the Commies”.
The rioting and demonstrations are just two examples from these chapters. The establishment couldn’t fathom that the peons could organize themselves in such a fashion, so…musta been the Commies.
Rick Perlstein
Linda, seven years after Kennedy, it seems like a lot of people who wouldn’t otherwise were “ready” for a Mormon (of course some people would never have been ready, and didn’t accept Kennedy because of his religion). Thinking about it, that it is more of a problem for Mitt, I think it’s another one of those ways we’ve gone backward.
Comrade Luke
Find and replace Communism/USSR with Muslims and/or Mexicans. Nothing seems to have changed.
Linda Featheringill
@Comrade Luke:
It was pretty stressful. If you listen to the old hippies still around, you can hear the pain and anger, still lurking in our chubby elderly brains.
Villago Delenda Est
@Linda Featheringill:
Osama bin Laden learned this lesson, and applied it. It’s like toppling over an ant hill…the reaction is perfectly predictable, every single time. Now we’re busy doing his dirty work to ourselves…dismantling the freedoms that supposedly the Islamists hate.
Playing right into Osama’s hands.
Davis X. Machina
OTFEO: (Off Topic: For Etymologists Only)
nostalgia itself has two parts — nostos a homecoming, and algos, pain. Nostalgia, at least orignially was painful, not wistful, or nostalgic in our sense. It’s the bitterness of an exile longing for a home that is no more.
Big word in the Odyssey, is nostos
Rick Perlstein
By the way, those are probably the two scariest chapters in the book. The next one actually is funny (I hope!).
Comrade Luke
I also find it strange that all of these hippies and “leftists” that we spending their time getting drunk, getting high or getting laid (which sounds like a great gig btw), are now retired and vote Republican.
WTF happened there?
licensed to kill time
@Linda Featheringill: Excellent rant.
@Comrade Luke: It felt like the world was burning all around you and your government was actively trying to kill you. From the assassinations to the riots to the nightly bloodshed on your tv from Vietnam (shown very graphically), the rage and fear and paranoia was palpable. And that’s from a teenager’s perspective(mine).
Villago Delenda Est
@Rick Perlstein:
Rick, the “Mormon” problem isn’t with the general population, that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about those things. They didn’t care about his dad..but of course this was before the “born again” decided to get into politics, in the late 70’s/early 80’s, with Falwell and Robertson leading the way.
It’s with the rabid Christianist portion of the GOP base.
Anne Laurie
@Comrade Luke:
At the time, in one of those urban blue-collar enclaves, the overwhelming impression I remember from my parents, neighbors, teachers (parochial school) was that the techtonic plates were shifting. Things that had been “eternal verities” could no longer be relied upon, and the fear was that there might never be solid ground again.
Certainly part of the ‘fundamentalist’ Catholic backlash that’s helped feed so much of the anti-woman, anti-gay agenda since Reagan is the impression that the Vatican II reforms somehow “broke” not just the Church but the whole world. I’m sure the same social terrors had an effect on the rise of the Protestant mega-churches…
Villago Delenda Est
One thing about the TV coverage of Vietnam…the Pentagon did learn about controlling the footage out from the battlefields. Seeing the war, even on film delay, in your living room, had an effect on people. The Pentagon has never allowed that degree of media freedom ever again. The two Gulf wars and the war in Afghanistan are tightly controlled on what footage is allowed out.
Rick Perlstein
@Luke, not precisely. Here’s a great sociological study showing that most kept their values.
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Barricades-Sixties-Generation-Grows/dp/0877227071/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1298841542&sr=1-4
NeverRepentAmarillo
These two chapters so reflect my memories growing up in St. Louis. The distrust, the fear, the young men going off to war. The panic of all adults in the neighborhood that their comfortable suburban existence they had worked and sacrificed for would be up in flames. Even the minorities I knew were fearful that the riots and reactions would make their plight worse, that they would be cast in an even more suspicious category than they had previously experienced. Also, the music, the drugs, the coronation of the youth as saviors of the world. Living through that whole period really had me mystified about the fear after 9-11. Fighting foreign terrorists just seemed so much more doable than dealing with a country which was violently pulling apart into two irreconcilable pieces.
Comrade Luke
@Rick Perlstein: So does that mean that the whole narrative of the elderly voting Republican is overblown? Or are there just more of them (implying there were more conservatives in the 60s too)?
Davis X. Machina
Not to fast-forward too much, but I just finished Kutler’s The Wars of Watergate and I await the Nixonland sequel on tenterhooks.
My wife’s an old Newark girl. She says your account of the riots was a.) spot on and b.) left her in tears.
Linda Featheringill
@Rick Perlstein:
So not all of us became Republican stock brokers? That’s good to know.
Rick Perlstein
@Villago Delenda Est Ah, that brings me to another book recommendation–a systematic content study of TV news stories on Vietnam that showed that most of them were pretty damned John Wayne-like in tone.
http://www.amazon.com/Uncensored-War-Media-Vietnam-preface/dp/0520065433/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1298841765&sr=1-3
Comrade Luke
BTW, on the commie paranoia issue. My dad escaped from Yugoslavia in the 50s, and is a staunch liberal. He has voted for only one Republican in his life, ever: Nixon, because of his stance on Communism. He regrets it.
So I don’t mean to downplay the “commies are gonna git us” angle; it was definitely pervasive. I just wonder if it became an easy crutch to avoid dealing with the reality that the people didn’t agree with the government.
Rick Perlstein
Just Jerry Rubin, Linda. And he got all the press.
General Stuck
@Comrade Luke:
That’s not true, boomers went for Obama in 2008, the greatest generation folks are the ones that went, or were always mostly republican. I’m talking about white people of course.
Many of those smoking dope and getting laid, did end up conservative, as they likely saw the world that way all along, but couldn’t resist the fun. There were still way more kids that didn’t go that route, they just kept quiet, got married out of HS in their home towns, joined a local church, and voted gooper like most married white people do. The majority of the old hippies, obviously moderated their behavior some, but remained center left, imo. They fought later for environmental laws, and all sorts of other social justice causes, or settled in and had little hippie babies and voted democrat when they felt like it.
The problem folks have with baby boomers seems to be centered around the fact there are so damn many of us that are going to cause entitlement problems, and that is a valid concern. But nobody has a choice of when they are born.
Anne
I first read this book two years ago and these chapters were so eye-opening. I was born in 1972 so I didn’t live through any of this.
I finally saw the roots to the battles that the Boomers kept fighting, over and over again, through the 90’s and early 2000’s–so many times, any Boomer running for office, we always had to go back to “what were doing in the 60’s, what did you do over Vietnam?” And the “elitist lib” dog whistles go right back to this. I never could understand why those dog whistles were so powerful, and now I do.
It’s infuriating, of course, that we are still fighting these battles, but somehow it helps me that I can understand why.
Rick, glad to see you posting. :) You really brought this time alive for me. Fabulous book!
Villago Delenda Est
Well, as you go further into the book, eventually we’ll get to the absolutely amazing “Only Nixon could go to China” period, in which the entire freaking world is turned upside down.
NeverRepentAmarillo
@Anne Laurie: Exactly; that is what I remember. Even the church could not be counted on to offer relief from the chaos.
gnomedad
@Rick Perlstein:
Concern troll is concerned. Oh, wait … :)
PurpleGirl
@Villago Delenda Est: It wasn’t only seeing it on TV, it was the time when the news shows were on. Today, the local news and the national news are on earlier than they were back then. Imagine watching the war at 6:30/7:00 p.m., right when the family was sitting down to dinner.
I haven’t watched broadcast news since they began showing it at 5:00 p.m. when I would still be traveling home from work.
Anne Laurie
@Rick Perlstein:
To a degree, I think part of it is that George made his share of the family fortune the “old-fashioned” way, running a big American car company. Willard made his share as a
vultureventure capitalist, buying up American companies & dismantling them for parts. When he was running for governor here in Massachusetts, it was widely mooted that Mitt got his start by serving as a figurehead for smarter financial privateers, selling legal Ponzi schemes to his fellow Mormons.I think an overlooked part of the latest (current) “religious awakening” in America since the 1970s (the Third Great Wave, IIRC?) is how much people decided, consciously or not, that if they couldn’t rely on their local government any more, they’d better retreat to the “safety” of a church community. Americans feeling prosperous after the New Deal (and the post-WWII economic boom) were willing to relax their old religious prejudices enough to vote for a (not very practicing) Catholic like Kennedy. We don’t feel prosperous now — quite the opposite — so we’re not going to trust anybody outside Our Tribe.
Linda Featheringill
@Comrade Luke:
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He postulates that older people who fail to develop through the years become bitter, rigid, judgmental, and very selfish. We have seen a lot of this in the last couple of years. Not all older people are that way. I think that when you see a group of these failed-to-develop senior citizens in action, it is so disgusting that you notice it more. Those older folks who are still trying to make a contribution to society as well as to their families just aren’t as visible.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
The impression I get from reading this part of Nixonland is that Vietnam anti-war and pro-war movements on the one hand and the Civil Rights movement and white backlash against it on the other hand were at first seperate issues (one a mainly domestic issue and the other more of a foreign policy issue with domestic costs and implications), each explosive and throwing off violent incidents like two highly charged electrodes sparking angrily. But as they converged each one became even more emotionally charged and then when they made contact and fused an uninterrupted circuit was created within which fear and rage could flow freely with little resistance on either side of the issue. It makes me wonder if either of these issues would have been as explosive in the absence of the other.
But the other thing is, it is important to remember that the US wasn’t the only country going through this sort of crisis. To mention just a few examples: The Prague Spring, the student riots in Paris, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China were all also either underway or about to begin, based in part on local political issues very different from those here in the US, but fueled by similar generational tensions. So I wonder how much of this turmoil in the US was specifically political and how much of it was a byproduct of the demographics of the Baby Boom.
chris
I think the lesson of Vietnam that we most needed to learn but didn’t is how dangerous the politics of demagoguery can be for the country. LBJ knew from the beginning that there would be no victory in Vietnam, but he also knew damned well how vilified he would be by Nixon and the rest of the red-baiting world if he let the Saigon government fall to Ho without a fight — he remembered quite well how thoroughly Truman was trashed for “losing” China. Hence, every move he made was meant to postpone the inevitable while he got his visage chiseled onto Mount Rushmore for his remaking of the country into a Great Society, the assumption being that the fall of Saigon would destroy his presidency. Little did he know the price he would pay for spending American and Vietnamese lives to try to cement his domestic legacy. He just didn’t see how anything could be as bad as what Truman had suffered.
Watching Watts go up in flames so soon after the passage of the Voting Rights Act didn’t help, either, of course. Still, I can’t help but wonder how different this country would be today had LBJ simply arranged to have Saigon ask us to leave in early 1965, giving us cover to actually leave. A conservative resurgence was inevitable anyway, I think, but I don’t believe that the cultural divide would have been nearly as wide or as easy to exploit.
Linda Featheringill
@General Stuck:
Cute! :-)
Rick Perlstein
@Anne (the one born in 1972) where did you grow up?
Rick Perlstein
@Linda Featheringill:
That is a “village” narrative if there ever was one.
Rick Perlstein
/Meaning the narrative Luke points out of “baby boomers all turning Republican.”
Maude
@General Stuck:
I had a friend who would look around at the state of affairs in the world and say, “No wonder I drank.”
Villago Delenda Est
I think the “crime wave” of the 60’s and 70’s had much more to do with demographics than with any ‘relaxing’ of sexual/recreational drug mores. There were just a lot more people in the prime age groups that get involved with criminal activity than ever before. Percentage wise, about the same…but the pie was bigger, so it seemed like all hell was breaking loose.
Naturally, cause and effect got confused, because the demographic numbers explanation is not nearly as satisfying as “it’s because those damn kids are running wild!” as an explanation…and we can blame it all on Dr. Spock, to boot!
Ruckus
We got news, not 24/7 and it seemed trustworthy. It was harder to find out if it was true without the internet. But just like now you have to ask how sure you are of the information. On this blog today we have people saying that Walker wants to stop all wind power in WI. And that may be (and I believe it is) the effective truth but it is not what the bill says. Is the truth the whole picture or the bits and pieces?
ETA After most of the war pictures stopped being shown every night, the lying and deception became much more obvious.
Nixon lied because he was a conservative and sociopath. But I repeat myself.
@Anne Laurie:
From what I remember of high school in the 60’s, drugs, alcohol and sex were quite widely available. Well at least 2 out of the 3.
General Stuck
I still am way behind reading Nixonland and haven’t read the chapters in question. Although last night, I put the book under my pillow and let osmosis do it’s thing. It might have worked. or not.
Mike E
@gnomedad: You Bastard! ;-)
Rick Perlstein
@NeverRepentAmarillo:
Yes–and “liberal” and “mainstream” churches like the Methodists and Unitarians which saw as their mission to remain “revelant” to the times saw their attendence drop off because the reason people wanted to go to church was to STEER CLEAR of all that “relevant” stuff, which is to say the traditional world falling apart.
Rick Perlstein
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Smart points, both of them. Anti-Vietnam, pro-civil rights: both became the spine of the “law and order” issue, in which all kinds of disorder just ran together in people’s minds.
Linda Featheringill
@Rick Perlstein:
[older people turning Republican]
Every now and then we have a thread on BJ in which liberal people think that all older folks are “the enemy.” We need to spread the word now and then that this is not really the whole story. Some of us still have a lot to contribute to the cause, and the younger to middle-aged liberals could benefit from our participation.
Rick Perlstein
@General Stuck:
General, if you had a nasty nightmare, it worked.
General Stuck
@Rick Perlstein:
LOL
Villago Delenda Est
I recall that my dad decreed that we were no longer going to our church, because the pastor was heavily into Clergy and Laity Concerned, quite outspoken. So my mom “shopped around” for an alternative to the local main Presbyterian church. Eventually wound up at the main Methodist church, where the pastor was not so outspoken about ‘Nam.
It didn’t matter to me, long term, because I’m fully into Pastafarianism now.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yes, I agree. My rough impression (I haven’t read deeply on the subject of the macro-statistics of crime but it is a subject which pops up on the periphery of other issues) is that by the time you remove the effects of demographics and the state of the economy there just isn’t much left in the way of trends begging for an explanation. And that perversely these two biggest factors are precisely the explanations you will never hear about in the mass media, especially on the TV where crime is always going up, never down.
Anne Laurie
@Ruckus:
I went to an all-girls parochial school, which would’ve made that a little more difficult even if I hadn’t been a geek. Not impossible (two girls in my graduating class of 78 dropped out when they “had to get married”) but easier to not-notice if you weren’t actively looking.
Rick Perlstein
I have an untested theory that one of the unsung reasons crime increased in the 1960s is that cops became especially unprofessional (read Serpico) and corrupt; and that one contributing factor is that a lot of lazy assholes became cops to get out of going to Vietnam. You can read throughout the book stuff on police becoming insane reactionaries, such as the KKK cell within the Chicago police force that stockpiled grenades.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Rick Perlstein:
So what was it exactly which caused these two issues (Vietnam and civil rights) to fuse together into a single issue? Was it something simple and thematic like authority vs rebellion, or youth vs their elders? Or were there more specific tactical mistakes which the Left made that played into the hands of the Right?
I guess what I’m wondering is: was it inevitable that things happened this way, or with wiser and more effective political leadership could these two issues have been compartmentalized and kept apart from one another? Because from the book it seems clear that the fusion of Vietnam and Civil Rights into a single issue of LawNOrder was very much to the advantage of the Right.
4jkb4ia
@Anne Laurie:
Here’s a link on Yehuda Levin and Carl Paladino with some references to well-done NYT article. The impression is not that these rabbis don’t trust local government. The impression is that you are safe enough in America that you can let your religious freak flag fly.
It’s not that Mormons would take orders from the Pope, there seems to be doubt whether Mormons are theologically Christians at all. If your objection is that this person is not a Christian, then your objection could be almost to being thought of as a member of a tribe. Once you did not have to worry about these people who were different from you and if they might be offended by prayers in school and so on. The values of the larger society were your values. Now you have to act as a member of a minority in a much more religiously diverse society than 40 years ago and you don’t like it very much.
Linda Featheringill
@Villago Delenda Est:
And may the FSM embrace you with her noodly appendages.
Ruckus
@Maude:
Yes. I knew 16/17 yr olds who drank/ingested whatever a fair amount, knowing that soon they could end up being another statistic on the nightly news. Some of us have sobered up but wonder why.
Villago Delenda Est
@Rick Perlstein:
Well, the Supreme Court got serious about the 4th, 5th, and 6th Amendments, and those requirements demanded a higher degree of professionalism from the police, which coupled with a demographic landslide, led to a “perfect storm” type condition developing to make matters seem that much worse.
Also, the entire “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality of local news got its start during this period, as your chapter covering the Watts riots alludes to. That has a lot to do with the perception of “rising crime” that the statistics don’t support.
Mary G
The baby boomers’ generation was not monolithic. I grew up in the home of the “Western White House”; the 60s never arrived there. When there was a rumor that some hippies are coming to demonstrate and everybody rushed down to see them. They never materialized.
I was accepted to the University of Southern California in 1972. I went eager to become a hippie, but instead I found a young Republicans hanging Jane Fonda effigy. This was exactly like my hometown !Not surprisingly, there are a lot of teabaggers here.
Anne Laurie
Just checked with the Spousal Unit, who was a teenager in semi-rural Michigan when George Romney was governor. He remembers that people generally knew Romney was a Mormon, but most of his neighbors didn’t have a real idea what that might mean. His parents were agnostic, but when he went through a comparative-religion phase and asked his “mainstream” neighbors / classmates how Mormons differed from the local standard Lutheran – Methodist – Baptist, quote: “Nobody could really explain that to me”.
Don’t know how much of that was a deliberate attempt by the Mormons to stay “under the radar” but they certainly couldn’t get away with that in our current ‘awakened’ political climate, could they?
Rick Perlstein
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
In part just a coincidence–they happened at the same time. In part one of the great tragedies of history–the old “guns and butter” problem. But you could riff out an interpretation, I think, that what linked the two was the incredible confidence that postwar prosperity gave liberals that they could get way out in front of the public and solve any problem (and remember the people who started Vietnam were largely liberals, acting in accord to what they believed was liberalism–which was why liberalism split over this issue shortly thereafter). Sixties liberties were prone to rush headlong into new “project”; risk of backlash ensued.
4jkb4ia
Related to Comrade Luke’s comment, my mom promised me that I would not recognize this book as the United States. This section is when that kicked in.
Rick Perlstein
Going down for a nap in five.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Rick Perlstein:
IIRC, in his book about the Rodney King incident and subsequent riots in Los Angeles, the author Lou Cannon has several intersting chapters early in the book covering the prior history of race relations and police work in LA. And one of the things he points out is that it was in the post-WW2 period that the police in the low density cities and suburbs of the western US turned increasingly to the use of squad cars to move around rather than pounding the pavement, and that planners used this development to promise taxpayers that large areas could be covered with fewer police (and hence less expense) per capita and per square mile than before. This promise turned out to be hollow and a false economy but it took time to show what a bad decision it was.
I don’t know how much that explains regarding crime in the denser cities of the east and midwest, but it does fit with my experience of growing up in a California suburb during the 60s and early 70s. The only time you ever saw a cop was when they were driving around. The idea of a police officer walking anywhere was simply unthinkable.
Ruckus
@Anne Laurie:
For freshman year I went to an all boys technical parochial school. Alcohol and drugs were around. On campus(see #63). And the guys old enough to drive were actively looking and finding girls. Sometime, maybe, I’ll tell the story of who I went to public school/church with. Talk about drugs and sex.
Rick Perlstein
Interesting. Does Canon note that LA Police Chief Parker (who I predict if he hadn’t died in 1966 would have been a huge backlash political figure) loved to recruit his cops from the most racist parts of Mississippi?
Julia Grey
I really see your premise becoming clear, Rick.
The way Nixon made use of the politics of sheer RESENTMENT is awe-inspiring. The resentment had its roots in fear, of course, the fear that everything was going to hell in a handbasket. But Nixon stoked it, stroked it, encouraged it to grow.
And using fear and resentment in that same cynical way is still what his party does best.
One of the things I’ve noted that I didn’t understand as well as I do now is that there was so much genuine terror and hatred of Martin Luther King, who seems to have been considered not much less of a threat than Stokely Carmichael himself. I guess I’ve always had the impression that he was more recognized for his non-violent approach during his own time.
Villago Delenda Est
This is a meme that needs to be killed, because I know a LOT of older people who are very much not what the Villagers imagine they are. For example, a very old friend of my dad’s was a WWII combat Marine, and when he and his wife visited my parents a few years back, he and I compared military notes, and I found that his view of Oliver North was even more critical than mine was, which is seriously saying something. Also, he’s one of those Marines who can’t stand John Wayne in any way, shape or form.
General Stuck
@Ruckus:
This was a fact that permeated everything growing up male during that period. Any thoughts of the future had to include the possibility of an early death in a foreign jungle half a world away. It controlled so much of the decisions I made in those days, which were already shaky from being young and dumb.
An example was, I had a baseball scholarship to a junior college, and started college in the fall of 1971, then in a short period of time, had a draft lottery number of two digits, and Nixon doing away with student deferments. So I let some friends and family talk me into transferring from the junior college I was at, to a university with ROTC. I did transfer, and joined ROTC, for about two weeks, when I didn’t like the fact I was draft dodging, and my quite long hair had the dickens staying tucked into those funny green baseball caps. So I quit, got drafted in the summer of 72, and let fate have it’s way with me. Luckily, the war ended while I was still in training. But for a young male, the draft and all it’s possibilities messed with your head, a head barely able to pick it’s nose and walk at the same time, as it was. Needless to say, no more baseball for me, after that.
Got to walk the dog with howling blizzard outside, dog don’t care.
licensed to kill time
@Rick Perlstein: It really is wonderful to have you here for the discussion. I am (painfully) enjoying your book.
Slaap lekker!
Rick Perlstein
@Julia Grey:
One of my missions in life is to fight the Santa Clausification MLK. You should see what happened when he reached out to street gangs in Chicago in 1966. The speeches in the Congressional record (on how he was organizing gangs to take over the city modeled on his studies of how the Communists used gangs in Saigon) were straight up Bircher insanity (and much like the stuff you hear on Glenn Beck every night…)
NeverRepentAmarillo
@Villago Delenda Est: Just smoking weed made you a member of the undesirable subculture and thus less inclined to obey all the laws of the dominate culture. Plus the “if it bleeds, it leads” news coverage did make it seem less likely that breaking the law would lead to punishment, which was a minor consideration if you didn’t feel you would live to 21 anyway.
Mike E
@General Stuck:
If that isn’t an awesome euphemism for something, it should be!
Ruckus
@Rick Perlstein:
Have had similar thoughts as well.
Many guys that I knew would do anything to avoid the draft. Eat glass(he almost died), act homosexual at the necessary times, commit minor crimes to have a record are some examples that I know of. The last one didn’t always work so well. A friend was told by the judge that he could go to jail for 5 yrs or join the marines for 2. He joined the marines (67 or 68 if I remember correctly) and got lucky. He lived.
Anne Laurie
@Rick Perlstein:
At least in NYC, there were plenty of lazy asshole cops even before Vietnam, some of them my neighbors & classmates’ parents. There were a lot of civil servants (my dad was a dockmaster for the Port Authority) and the standing joke was you took the cop exam if you were too dumb for an indoor job and too lazy to be a firefighter. When one of my brothers (post-Nam) mentioned he was thinking of taking the police exam, my father’s advice was “Better go for the garbagemen’s union — you’ll still be dealing with trash all day, but at least it won’t be actively trying to kill you.” If anything, I’d go with the theory that the post-Miranda changes made it easier for “outsiders” to see just how badly / corruptly their local precincts really were. Including the new post-60s attention on those civil-service exams, which had a lot in common with the post-60s spotlight on “poll exams” in the South…
Anne
@Rick Perlstein:
I grew up in Alaska. But in my area it wasn’t really the religious/pro-life Sarah Palinesque area, but more the libertarian, “leave me alone” crowd. My earliest political memories are of the Reagan/Carter election. Anyway, my parents were older and had been out of the country for the late sixties, early seventies. (My mom always says she was “out of town” for the sixties.) I feel like I missed all of this stuff, so it was great to be able to read about it.
Rick Perlstein
@NeverRepentAmarillo:
It was fascinating to see how hard and fast these divisions became. It was fascinating to me how many of the VVAW activists had long hair and looked more like hippies than the hippies; it stands to reason that they should have kept their crew cuts and wore suits to be more politically effective–that’s how they would be today. But people didn’t think like that then; the idea of “crossing over,” of marking yourself as “not part of square culture,” was very important and powerful to people then.
OK, to bed, then I get to wake up to smart things people have written inspired by my work–paradise! Thx
Kirbster
Class and race did figure in to your likelihood of being sent to Viet Nam. College guys got deferred, and your parents’ political connections and acquaintance with members of the local draft board could get you a National Guard slot (e.g., G.W. Bush)or a NATO posting. Poor kids and black kids got to do the most of the dirty work in the war.
Maude
@Ruckus:
I’ve been meaning to tell you that I loved your comment on an old TOD post in June.
It was: last week I learned how to spell engineer, this week I am an engineer.
I’ve got one of those around computer tech. My, oh, my.
Getting drunk would be fine, but we’d come to with the same things in play.
I spent some time outside of the US during Vietnam. It was quite something to see my own country from a different vantage point.
liza
I was born in 1981, so this is all history to me (and I am increasingly thankful for it). I cannot get over the astonishingly disproportionate level of police brutality described here. That leapt out at me beyond everything else.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Rick Perlstein:
I’d have to go back and re-read the book (“Official Negligence : How Rodney King and the Riots Changed Los Angeles and the LAPD”) to see. But my guess would be no, he probably didn’t mention that.
The impression that sticks with me the most after having read the book about a decade ago when it first came out is that, for a right-leaning author (amonst other things he was Reagan’s official biographer) how scathing his criticism was of the false economy practiced by both the taxpayers of LA and the city planners and LAPD officials who told them pretty lies. He pretty much calls them all out as idiots and cheap bastards for skimping on both the LAPD as a whole and on police training specifically and implies that both the Rodney King incident and the riots were hardly accidents but more of the nature of something inevitable given the unwillingness of any of the responsible parties to take public safety seriously and be willing to spend the money to do it right. It struck me at the time, and even more so today, as an argument for “higher taxes = better results” that just isn’t kosher on the Right and I was surprised to read it coming from Cannon.
chris
@Julia Grey: Resentment has always been a staple of American politics. The New Deal coalition was comprised of folks whose resentment flowed upward, to Wall Street and bankers who bankrupted the economy and evicted families from their homes. What Nixon did was cultivate a redirection of class resentment downward. He didn’t create it, but he took full advantage of it. To me, the key question of contemporary politics is whether class resentment is about to start flowing primarily upwards again; and, if so, whether economic elites will bear the brunt rather than social elites (e.g., Hollywood). Madison seems to be the canary in the coalmine to see whether the winds have truly changed.
4jkb4ia
@General Stuck:
Yes. My husband was scared that he would have to go, and he’s a few years younger than you. (Graduated college in 1981)
kansi
@Rick Perlstein: Totally agree with this analysis.
Bob Loblaw
@Davis X. Machina:
Thanks Don Draper.
kansi
@Rick Perlstein:
Totally agree with this analysis.
Chet
@Rick Perlstein: Wasn’t that the whole idea behind “Clean for Gene”, though? Apparently there were at least a few people thinking along those lines back then.
nelle
I’m way behind on reading. I’ve wanted to read this and found that, while reading, it has become emotionally difficult to revisit it, even while it is helping me understand it. I’m in a mixed marriage, a pacifist Mennonite who was getting teargassed in DC at the same time that my future husband, a Naval Academy grad, was in charge of 20 some gunboats on the Mekong. We met about eight years after that time period. We come at these issues from many angles and the fissures run right through our families and still catch us unawares. We sorrow for our country, but we’ve left the States. We’re having a saner life far away.
4jkb4ia
Anne Laurie has responded to my point, but someone as strict as R’ Moshe Feinstein poskened that it was a mitzvah to vote–it did not matter who it was for.
Nutella
@Kirbster:
Class and race largely determined if you were going to be drafted and sent to Viet Nam. Poor and working class men got drafted with pretty much the only exceptions, AFAIK, physical disabilities or young children.
And who you knew, of course. Later (1969) they brought in the draft lottery to get rid of the ‘who you know’ factor but college deferments still saved many of the middle and upper class men from the draft.
Anne Laurie
@Davis X. Machina:
Is there another word for ‘a home that never was’? I think we need that one, to describe the current state of American politics, and not just for the Teatards either.
R-Jud
@liza:
This really affected me, too (I was born in 1979). I read Rick’s account of the Newark riots very late at night, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I drooled on the book because my mouth was literally hanging open in shock.
When I brought it up to my Dad, who grew up on the Jersey Shore, he said, “Oh yeah, we had riots in Asbury Park. About 50 people were shot.”
Anne Laurie
Thanks everybody — especially Rick!
Two more chapters, “In Which A Cruise Ship… ” and “Fed-Up-Niks”, same time next week?
Ruckus
@General Stuck:
A bit older than you. Was 1A for almost 3 yrs before I couldn’t stand the stress. Joined the navy. Around 8 weeks later the first lottery my number came up. FIFTEEN. So screwed either way. But like my friend I lived through it, although I know those who didn’t and many who wished they hadn’t.
Ruckus
@Maude:
last week I learned how to spell engineer, this week I
am an engineerare one.It just sounds better if you leave it in the original form.
eemom
@General Stuck:
you’re way ahead of me. I just bought the book.
These threads are still great to read, though, even not having done the homework. I was born in ’62 and the only real impression these events made on me is that the word “Vietnam” has always been synonymous with “war.”
Phyllis
@eemom: Me too, born in 62. For me, Vietnam for a long time was a tv show that came on every day that my parents would watch and argue about. I think the reality of it all coalesced for me with the Watergate hearings, again a daily tv show.
General Stuck
@Ruckus:
Same here. My high school senior year book was dedicated to a friend who had quit HS and joined the army, and didn’t make it back.
There were excerpts from his last letter home from a firebase he was at that was about to be overun. IN That letter, he already knew his fate and said goodbye to his friends and family, and has haunted me, and likely others ever since.
I have no fair reason to complain about any of it
Jinx
While DXM is technically correct with the etomology of nostalgia I think we need something more nuanced:
I would offer that the opposite of nostalgia is a profound sense of brietbart.
General Stuck
@Ruckus:
My first night upon arriving at Ft Knox for basic, in the middle of the night, two school buses full of guys pulled up to the barracks, and I wondered if now they were just pulling kids out of HS, until I saw on the side of one Huntsville Corrections (AL), or something like that. I didn’t sleep much that night.
licensed to kill time
I don’t know if people who didn’t live through that era can fully appreciate how heavily the draft weighed on…I was going to say young men, but really it affected almost everyone. If it wasn’t you facing the imminent possibility of death, it was your son or your brother or your husband or boyfriend. You know the saying “nothing focuses the mind like a hanging” ? Well, every young man at the age of 18 faced that possibility. It was all guys thought about, all their loved ones thought about. And the war was so obviously wrong and unwinnable, and yet they still kept calling them up and feeding them into the machine.
It fueled a lot of rage and despair.
PanAmerican
A couple of points – voters and thus generational cohorts tend to vote consistently across their life spans, and time happens. Members of a voter age breakout change every four years.
Reagan’s best voters were those who are now 65-80, aka the Silent Generation. Those born during the Depression and too young to have served in WWII. For whatever reasons, they are, and always have been, reactionary leaning asshats.
Nellcote
I grew up in San Francisco in the 50s and 60s. I was always puzzled that the rest of the country seemed so alien. Still puzzled I guess.
Nellcote
@Anne Laurie:
Never understood why candidate Obama saying that frightened/nervous people cling to their guns and bibles was taken as such an insult.
eemom
@licensed to kill time:
That reminds me — I also remember that at some point my parents were worrying about my dad being “drafted.” Fortunately I didn’t know what the word meant at the time or I would have been scared to death.
Ruckus
@General Stuck:
I have no fair reason to complain about any of it
Same here. But that’s with the passage of time.
I spent 2 months in the hospital in 73 with mostly marines. The human destruction I saw and the stories I heard have left me with profound sorrow that I imagine I will never be able to forget. And knowing that people did and are continuing to do all that for fucking power… The thing is I still feel that we need to be able to protect our country. But what that means to me and to conservatives are polar opposites. I think that’s why it is so hard to get traction on the military. The very concept of survival has been changed from defense to hugely overcompensated offense.
Bob Loblaw
@Nellcote:
Because he never in a million years would have said anything of their sort to their faces. It was just a matter of a candidate talking out of both sides of his mouth from the safety of competing constituencies.
As a Democrat running for President, you tell rural voters about unfeeling, identity politics driven liberal elites. And you tell coastal liberals about bitter white resentment in the heartland due to failures of global capitalism. And when one group gets wind of what’s being said about them to the other, the candidate gets embarrassed for a few days and has to utter a forced apology.
General Stuck
@Ruckus:
Very well put
Nellcote
Not to take away from the agonizing pervasiveness of the Vietnam war but the thing that freaked me out the most, both then and now was the asassinations. It seemed like everytime we found a spokesperson who was making some little bit of impact, they’d be killed off. My political awakening came with (John) Kennedy’s asassination and it just kept happening for the next years everytime you turned around.
Davis X. Machina
@Nellcote: It was a Kinsley gaffe.
Ruckus
@Nellcote:
There are so many things that were/are wrong. Many of them stun us because we most likely didn’t think americans capable of them. Boy were we wrong. Those of us most likely to be directly affected (draft age men) will probably remember the war highest on our lists. That’s not to belittle everyone else affected by the war, but look at the supporters, almost none of them had to go and that’s even more so today. But this time in our history taken in total is the real shocking thing to those of us who respected our government and had a modicum of an idea that most politicians actually might be on our side. The result has been an awakening for some, head in the sand for others.
Jinx
Rick-
I know you’ve headed out, but I leave this additional context on the off chance you check back in later.
Federal Civil Rights Act legislation was enacted in June of 1964 and the Watts riots occurred in August of 1965 which is over a full year later. California in fact had passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act in 1963 which was fully 2 years before Watts, A 1964 ballot initiative passed which repealed Rumford. Prop 14 as it was called was eventually struck down by CA state courts in 1966 and the US SC in 67.
With all of that said, I think it is more than fair to say that the African American community felt doubly under attack. First, the 1963 Fair Housing legislation may have been in place but it’s use as a remedy was not meaningful in the face of the broader systemic impediments that had long been in place. Second, even those members of the AA community who could avail themselves of the protections were now witness to efforts to the repeal their only means of legislative recourse. That would send a hell of a message black californians.
Remember too that the black population of LA County at that time was 650,000 with approximately 2/3 living in Watts in an area of only 42 square miles. Transportation into and out of the Watts was almost non-existent and unemployment was high. The black community was basically densely caged in rundown rental housing. Only erecting a physical fence could have made it more plain. Add widespread law enforcement abuses on this already highly stressed population and it’s like a match to kerosene. Watts was no accident.
That’s just 1 county in California. There were approximately 300 so-called race “riots” between 1964-1968.
Here’s a neat link to a response letter drafted by the Church-Community Action Center in Portland, OR that movingly describes the level of crisis in black communities across the country. Watts came as no surprise. Read the whole thing it’s that good. Note to the specific mention of non-violence as their strategy. TPTB had a strategy too though. Peaceful assembly would be met with red-baiting tactics. Violent protest would be met with extreme force and the police were itching for it.
Jinx
Rick-
I know you’ve headed out, but I leave this additional context on the off chance you check back in later.
Some background:
Federal Civil Rights Act legislation was enacted in June of 1964 and the Watts riots occurred in August of 1965 which is over a full year later. California in fact had passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act in 1963 which was fully 2 years before Watts, A 1964 ballot initiative passed which repealed Rumford. Prop 14 as it was called was eventually struck down by CA state courts in 1966 and the US SC in 67.
With all of that said, I think it is more than fair to say that the African American community felt doubly under attack. First, the 1963 Fair Housing legislation may have been in place but it’s use as a remedy was not meaningful in the face of the broader systemic impediments that had long been in place. Second, even those members of the AA community who could avail themselves of the protections were now witness to efforts to repeal their only means of legislative recourse. That would send a hell of a message to the black community in CA.
Remember too that the black population of LA County at that time was 650,000 with approximately 2/3 living in Watts in an area of only approx. 50 square miles. Transportation into and out of the Watts was almost non-existent and unemployment was high. The black community was basically densely caged in rundown rental housing. Only erecting a physical fence could have made it more plain. Add widespread law enforcement abuses on this already highly stressed population and it’s like a match to kerosene. Watts was no accident.
That’s just 1 county in California. There were approximately 300 so-called race “riots” between 1964-1968.
Here’s a neat link to a response letter drafted by the Church-Community Action Center in Portland, OR that movingly describes the level of crisis in black communities across the country. Watts came as no surprise. Read the whole thing it’s that good. Note to the specific mention of non-violence as their strategy. TPTB had a strategy too though. Peaceful assembly would be met with red-baiting tactics. Violent protest would be met with extreme force and the police were itching for it. I think it’s reasonable to believe that there were a few police officers that would have no problem throwing the first blow.
Ruckus
@Jinx:
Nice recap of one of the reasons for the riots. There were other things as well. I worked in the area and the closest supermarket had half empty shelves, noticeably higher prices, horrible produce that looked like it was the left overs from other stores. IOW it looked more like the pictures that we were shown from the Russian state stores than where I shopped by home. Any one who went outside of Watts could see this, every day.
Jinx
@Anne Laurie:
Anne Laurie can you clean up my multiple posts above please?
Around 117.
Thanks
Jinx
Svensker
@Linda Featheringill:
Mine’s skanky and elderly, but yeah.
chris
@Jinx: Check the date of the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and compare *that* to the dates of the Watts riots.
sherifffruitfly
“Flashback” is the closest to a single-word opposite I can think of.
dexter45
67 wasn’t that bad a year compared to 68. In 67 we had a little optimism left. In 68 we go tet, lost Martin and Bobby, gotriots in Chicago and the nation elected Nixon. 68 sucked much more than 67. I get tired of people saying they worried about the draft because one did not have to go into the army. All you had to do was refuse induction.
Jinx
@chris:
The only folks who were likely out looking to start something as a result of the passage of the VRA would be the police.
Indeed the watershed incident that had the members of the Watts community finally say enough was a traffic stop that the police escalated needlessly. This despite appeals for reason from a group of bystanders who witnessed what they deemed abuse of power and authority on the part of the police.
chris
@Jinx: I don’t think any reasonable person would seriously try to establish causality between passage of the VRA and the Watts riots, but the *timing* of the events led to a lazy “we gave the Negros everything they wanted and now they’re rioting and threatening us anyway” interpretation among middle-class whites that decimated the coalition that enacted the liberal agenda from 1933 up until then.
That’s a horribly written sentence. I blame my Oscars-fueled drinking binge.
mclaren
@Comrade Luke:
No, it was evil and horrible back then and everyone with a pulse realized it. I was just a little kid back then but I could clearly see the country descending into a cesspool of violence and lies and insanity. 1968 was the Year of Hell. Not for me, personally, as a small kid I didn’t have a lot of problems…but the entire country was coming apart. It just kept getting worse…and worse and worse. More decent hope-filled people assassinated, the evil liars and sociopaths kept winning, the thug cops kept marching and killing, the national guard kept shooting people down like animals, the grunts in Nam kept massacring and murdering brown babies and women and old men…and the only people who ever got arrested and sent to prison were the people who were protesting the insanity.
It was a nightmare. It was a descent into hell. It was madness, dementia, lunacy, horror, torment, and grotesquerie. Imagine a world run by the Joker out of Batman: The Dark Knight and that’s 1967-1972.
Now imagine the population applauding that world and cheering the sociopathic demented leader who orchestrated this rampant lunacy, and you’ll get some feel for that era.
mclaren
@Rick Perlstein:
One thing people in California don’t realize today is how bizarrely reactionary all of Southern California was in the 1960s. When I grew up in Southern California in the 1960s, I recall vividly tuning in to a radio talk show host who urged bystanders to beat antiwar protestors to death with rebars or baseball bats. This was in 1968.
In 1970 I recall tuning in a radio program about the Kent State Massacre. I expected to hear people lamenting the shooting, but instead caller after caller rejoiced in the killings and said things like “Kill all those dirt hippies!” “Shoot ’em down!” “America, love it or leave it–in a body bag!” And on and on. So much so that the radio host started getting scared and tried to get the callers to back off, but they were rabid. Southern California was fanatically reactionary in the 1960s.
The initiative that essentially repealed the California Fair Housing act in 1964 passed with overwhelming support, support mainly from the population of Southern California. Today, Califonia is distinctly left-leaning despite islands of reaction like Orange County…but back in the 1960s, California was a fanatically far-right extremist reactionary cesspool of political authoritarianism. People tend not to realize that today.
As for the cops using patrol cars instead of walking a beat, my sense is that this is largely the result of the massive growth of the suburbs. Urban policing used cops walking the beat, but that wasn’t practical once HelL.A. grew to the point where it took 90 minutes to drive across it. In the 1960s, HelL.A. was growing by leaps and bounds and it wasn’t practical to police new communities like Tarzana or the Inland Empire by cops who walked a beat. The radio cars were the reaction to the unreasonable growth and sprawl of cities like HelL.A. and the lack of police presence was a direct result.
Ruckus
@dexter45:
Let’s see, refuse induction, that was a minimum 5 yr federal beef at that time. I know because I looked into it, at the time. There was Canada, Sweden or wherever, but at the time you were never coming back without doing that 5 yr federal beef if you got caught, and they liked catching you. You could join and take your chances in the military (my choice) that you would not be sent in country. You could claim conscientious objector status but then you most likely got to be a medic and sent, in country.
Unless you were wealthy enough to go to school till you were, I think 35 or could buy into the national guard/coast guard with political capital you were subject to the draft or fairly dire consequences. Maybe that was OK for some people, it was not for most.
So yes there were choices. Most of them pretty sucky if you didn’t believe in that particular war but didn’t think defending your country was wrong.
And yes 68 was worse than 67 but the whole time sucked for the nation and a lot of it’s citizens. There was little good about the whole time, in fact as a country I can’t think of a damn thing, other than maybe more realized that conservatives were and still are assholes. With oak leaf clusters.
Janet Strange
@Mary G:
One of the things that frustrates me when people get into one of those heated discussions about “the Boomers” is that some young’uns seem to equate Baby Boomer with “hippie when they were young.”
But it’s revealing, I think, that we actual hippies never called ourselves “hippies.” We called ourselves “freaks.” Precisely because we were such a small minority, even among people our age at the time. The time being late 60’s and very early 70’s. By the mid to late 70’s, smoking dope and wearing tie dye had become trendy and more common, especially among high schoolers, but that was quite different from the political and social radicalism of their older brothers and sisters of just a few years before.
To answer someone’s earlier question, yes, most young people at that time were quite conservative, and those people still are now that they’re older. Those of us who weren’t (the minority) mostly still aren’t. It’s not a matter of a whole generation being liberal when young, then becoming conservative as they age, which I think is the impression many people have.
Actually, the most conservative under 65 generation are the genXers (like our beloved BJ host), who came of age during the Reagan years and who still vote for Republicans more than either the generation older (Boomers) or younger (Millennials) than they are.
Another point of confusion seems to be not realizing that the younger Boomers are in their late 40’s now, or maybe about 50 depending on when you set the end of the Baby Boom. (Seems to range from 1960 to 1964.) At least half of the generation were simply too young to have been hippies in the late 60’s. They were young children at the time.
Porlock Junior
@PanAmerican:
As a youngish member of that generation, I need to point out how many of (what the Press called) the leaders of the Hippie/Yippie generation were pre-Boomer, even though it doesn’t refute that generally true over-generalization. Jerry Rubin, anyone? Abbe Hoffman? The most prominent surviving icon of that time, perhaps, is Wavy Gravy, who is turning 75 in a couple of months. (And the subject of a documentary “Saint Misbehavin” that’s in very limited distribution and you must see.)
All of which doesn’t do a damn thing to disprove the generalization, but if people are going to correct the post-Boomers who complain about the old greedhead Boomers, we gotta do the same to the Boomers who say the same things about their elders.
rf80412
@mclaren: Time and shifting demographics haven’t done as much as you might think to moderate the beliefs of those people 40 years on. There are pockets of blue in neighborhoods dominated by Mexicans and Blacks, gays, and young people in general, and thanks to population, they carry some weight, but the area as a whole is still very conservative: money in LA, Marines in San Diego, and farmers out east.
Chet
@mclaren: In suburban Detroit, where I live, you mention 1968 and all anyone thinks about is the Tigers winning the World Series. It’s like that alone makes up for all the shit that came down the other 51 weeks of that year for people here.