Late 1964 was a buoyant time for the majority of Americans: a prosperous year that promoted extraordinarily high expectations about the future.
The opening sentence of the first chapter sets the groundwork for what is to come. The chapter is subtitled “America in Late 1964” and it goes on to present a portrait of a country not at all ready for what to come. Hits songs included “I Feel Fine” by the Beatles and were packing cinemas to watch the impossibly beautiful Mary Poppins curing ills with a spoonful of sugar. The five-year string of trips to the World Series by the much-hated Yankees had just unwittingly begun a drought that would last for the next twelve years. For much of the country, everything was good and the future was so bright that…well, you know.
The struggles in Selma ultimately had a positive outcome: voting rights legislation. The second development of early 1965 that would great change America, however, had no benign result: America’s military escalation in Vietnam. More than any other event of the year, it spurred the polarization that characterized the Sixties in the United States.
The eve of destruction can be taken two ways. It could be viewed as a term explaining how that was good and pure in the world was devastated. Or, alternately, it could explain how that which was bad was destroyed to pave the way for a rebirth. To some, of course, the Civil Rights movement which paved the way for voting rights legislation was absolutely a devastation of the America that was great and needs to be made great again. For the norms, just the opposite is true: granting rights to a wider swath of the population is what makes America greater. As for the war in Vietnam, it is interesting, is it not, that America has been involved in a series of even longer and more pointless wars and yet those wars have not ripped the country asunder as happened in the sixties.
Americans who think about the Sixties often highlight the dramatic events of 1968 and 1969. This hardly surprising, for the volatile mixture of restlessness, rights-consciousness, and discord that had first become clearly evident in 1965 peak in those extraordinarily tumultuous years.
It is true. When people think of the volatile upheaval characterized by the decade, they usually zero in on the last two years, especially 1968. That was the year of assassinations and the infamous Democrat convention in Chicago. Of course, 1969 was, of course, the year that men landed on the moon. The author by this point in the narrative has reminded the reader that those future-altering touchstone events did not happen in a vacuum, but were the result of an intricate and complex weaving of previous policies and decisions which began to coalesce and formulate in 1965. Ultimately, the book is not really so much one about 1965 in particular, but rather 1965 as a key point linking the first half of the decade to the last half.
