The Other Sixties

Two decades, the 1950s (1950–59) and “The Sixties” (ca. 1965–74), continue to be the touchstones by which American liberals and conservatives define themselves. To those on the right, the 1950s were the last good time, an era of sanity and maturity, order and discipline, of adults behaving like adults and children knowing their place. To those on the left, the 1950s were a time of fatuous complacency, mindless materialism, and stultifying conformism—not to mention racism, sexism, and other ugly prejudices. By contrast, “The Sixties,” for conservatives, were an explosion of puerile irresponsibility and fashionable rebellion, the wellspring of today’s ubiquitous identity politics, debased high culture, sexual permissiveness, and censorious political correctness. For liberals, the period was a desperately needed corrective that drew attention to America’s injustices and started us down the road toward greater fairness and equality for all.

Of course, we know all this. But what do we know about the early 1960s, the years between those touchstone decades? Well, we know that they saw perhaps the most dangerous incident in the history of American foreign policy, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and perhaps the most stirring moment in the nation’s long domestic racial conflict, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. These events, recounted in numerous books and movies, have become the stuff of American legend, though their social and cultural contexts have too often been given short shrift. Indeed, the period itself has too often been lost in the shuffle, viewed as merely transitional (the lingering twilight of the Eisenhower era, the predawn of the Age of Aquarius), and largely overshadowed by the legend of the man who presided over it, John F. Kennedy. So enthralled, or benumbed, have later generations been by the endlessly repeated anecdotes about Kennedy, his family, his women, and his administration’s crises that they have failed to look closely at the era itself.

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