Refusing to fade into antiquity, the 1960s grudgingly maintain an irrepressible hold over the nation’s imagination. Although nearly two-thirds of Americans were born after 1969, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr. and others from that epoch live on as mythological figures. Hollywood and the publishing industry, meanwhile, in their continued glamorization of the decade’s political accomplishments, cultural icons and social revolutionaries, seem unconcerned that Congress last passed a major civil rights bill in 1968, the Beatles released their final album two years later, and the flower children are now babysitting their grandchildren.
“The Times They Were a-Changin’: 1964, the Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn” jumps into this well-covered ground with gusto. Benefiting from the insights and wisdom of Robert S. McElvaine, a renowned scholar who has studied and lived through the period, “The Times” reflects upon the era’s consequential yet thorny legacy through an illuminating, provocative and entertaining lens. To do so, McElvaine sidesteps an encyclopedic account of the decade in favor of a focused examination of a 22-month period stretching from the Kennedy assassination in November 1963 to the fall of 1965 — what McElvaine dubs the “Long 1964” — as the starting point of what are now considered “the sixties.”
He makes a convincing argument. The list of transformative events within this time span included the Kennedy assassination, two historic civil rights bills, the conservative takeover of the Republican Party, a sweeping immigration law, the escalation of the Vietnam War, the Freedom Summer in Mississippi, the launching of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley and the Watts riots.
The social changes were equally consequential. The “Long 1964” saw the arrival of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and Muhammad Ali. Betty Friedan’s best-selling “Feminine Mystique,” along with the “Sex and Caste” memo drafted by Mary King and Casey Hayden, inspired the women’s liberation movement. Sparked in large part by the Freedom Summer, what McElvaine considers “the central event … that marked the arrival of the sixties,” the youth-driven culture that challenged authority emerged during this epoch.
McElvaine occasionally overstates the impact of the “Long 1964,” however. The depiction of Barry Goldwater’s candidacy as the starting point of the GOP’s takeover of the South exemplifies this tendency. Goldwater’s presidential run certainly played a key role in this process, but the party’s inroads in the region had started on Dwight D. Eisenhower’s watch.
Taking advantage of the Democratic Party’s divisions over civil rights, the former general tallied the second-largest number of electoral votes by a Republican in the South since Reconstruction. Eager to extend the inroads from the 1952 election, he expanded the GOP’s organizational presence in the South, culminating in Operation Dixie in 1957.
To further woo the region’s White population, Eisenhower repeatedly declined to endorse Brown v. Board of Education, the groundbreaking Supreme Court ruling ending segregation, going as far as threatening to skip the 1956 GOP convention if the party’s platform gave his administration credit for the ruling. He also downplayed the South’s efforts to resist desegregation, framing, for instance, the Southern Manifesto, the toxic decree supported by more than 100 Southern congressmen urging the region to “resist … integration,” as a tempered proclamation rather than the radical challenge to federal authority it represented.
By 1960, Eisenhower’s efforts had converted the GOP’s threadbare presence in the South into a sizable organization with ample funding and a roster of newly minted party leaders and candidates.
McElvaine also places too much significance on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s masculinity in explaining America’s involvement in Vietnam. Examining Johnson’s psyche unearths valuable insights, but McElvaine’s emphasis on Johnson’s manhood — both literal and figurative — infantilizes the former president. What about the influence of the domino theory, a key Cold War doctrine, on his decision-making? What about the litany of advisers — most of them holdovers from the Kennedy administration — urging Johnson to proliferate America’s forces? What about Johnson’s attempts to deflect critics accusing him of being soft on communism? What about the fact that instead of blithely plunging ahead like a cowboy at a rodeo, Johnson agonized over sending additional troops in 1965? Although McElvaine acknowledges these rationales and motivations, particularly Johnson’s fear of looking politically weak, he places far too much stress on Johnson’s “manly” ego to explain America’s embroilment in Vietnam.
The book shines when serving as a reminder of why the public remains infatuated with the decade. The 1960s, McElvaine explains, “still define the political, social, cultural, and economic battle lines along which Americans contend today.”
To McElvaine, Republicans represent the “anti-sixties party” aiming to roll back many of the decade’s accomplishments.
The GOP’s antagonism goes far beyond the political or social realm. To conservative critics, the epoch serves as a perpetual reminder of America’s shortcomings, making it impossible for them to return to an airbrushed national image without eradicating the decade’s revolutionary changes. Ratcheted up by Donald Trump, this perspective, McElvaine aptly notes, isn’t so much the loss of innocence but a longing for a time in which many White Americans were oblivious to the injustices around them — the “ignorance of guilt” that, in idolizing the nation’s idealistic principles, disregarded the plight of African Americans, women and others.
For its admirers on the left, like McElvaine, the era remains “the most intense, meaningful, and — on balance — positive period of change in American history,” even when taking into consideration the violence, radicalism and hedonism it unleashed.
One can draw a direct line between these contrasting viewpoints of the 1960s to modern-day battles over the 1619 Project, the removal of Confederate statues, and the standing of many of the nation’s founders and leaders. These conflicts stem from irreconcilable views of America’s character and a clash over how to judge its virtues and transgressions — a divergence unleashed during the “Long 1964.”
The perpetuation of these divisions has fueled the nation’s preoccupation with the sixties as well as today’s noxious political climate. “Should we return to what 1964 was all about,” McElvaine asks, “or should we seek to bury the accomplishments that began to be achieved then?” No matter the outcome, it’s fair to say that the answer will inevitably keep America fixated on the 1960s for years to come.
Michael Bobelian teaches journalism at Columbia University and is the author of “Battle for the Marble Palace: Abe Fortas, Earl Warren, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and the Forging of the Modern Supreme Court.”
The Times They Were a-Changin’
1964, the Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn