1960s Coming Apart: Book Review
William L. O’Neill’s Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960’s is noteworthy not so much for its depiction and description of America in the sixties as it is for its insightful comments on the decade which preceded this turbulent era and the connection between the two. The contrast between these two decades could hardly be more striking, yet the fifties laid the groundwork for all that was to follow in the sixties and, indeed, throughout the rest of the twentieth century and into the early twenty-first century. The fifties was a period of time when the catastrophic events of the first and (especially) the second World Wars began to recede into the mists of time, while at the same time the American nation began to become accustomed to the political, strategic, socio-economic, and technological developments which occurred during the first half of the twentieth century. Trends which developed in the fifties continued into the sixties and even to the present.
A case in point is the presidential election of 1960. Dwight David Eisenhower, a phenomenally popular president, is described as the man who for “the majority of Americans . . . was the man of the year every year.” His having completed two terms, however, obliged the Republican Party to search for a viable candidate in order to retain control of the oval office. Eisenhower’s “heir apparent,” Richard Nixon, is described by O’Neill as “the most distrusted man in American politics.” O’Neill writes that, “Governor Rockefeller had the best chance of beating the Democrats . . . Polls showed him to be the Republican most likely to succeed in 1960. But regular Republicans thought him too liberal . . . Richard Nixon, on the other hand, was loved by the regulars, especially for his defects.
This situation was a portent of things to come later in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries for the Republicans. Beginning in the fifties, the progressive popularism exemplified by earlier Republican presidential candidates such as Alf Landon was eclipsed by an increasingly intolerant brand of exclusive conservativism. Big tents be damned! What mattered was the ideology of the people inside of the tent, however small their numbers and however unappealing their views might be to a majority of the electorate. The 1960 “Nixon” situation was repeated again in an even more extreme fashion with the nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964. (One might even be tempted to compare the 1960 “Nixon” situation with the nomination of George W. Bush in 2000, although in that case, a calamitous constitutional crisis precipitated by the Republican’s razor-thin majority in Florida lead to his election as president.) O’Neill observes, “As so often before and after, vanity, prejudice, and ideology combined to make the GOP put its worst foot forward. Dedicated Republicans would almost always rather be Right than President.”
The inordinate influence of the right wing of the Republican Party which began in 1960 merged with a reactionary Christian fundamentalism some twenty to forty years later. The licentious excesses of the sixties reinforced this tendency and the current ideology of this wing of the party is largely directed against liberal concepts and lifestyles which were developed during this decade. The same “vanity, prejudice, and ideology” which precluded the nomination of Governor Rockefeller as the Republican presidential nominee in 1960 may very well prevent the nomination of a social moderate, such as Mayor Rudy Giulliani (who, polls show, has probably the best chance of defeating the likely Democratic nominee in the general election) as the Republican candidate for president.