Boomers and Backlash
Republicans made a living off the excesses of the Sixties until the 2006 election.
—President Bill Clinton
In a sense, I’m a pure product of that era.
—President Barack Obama
I come from the Sixties. . . . There was a lot of activism on campus and I do appreciate [today] the way young people are standing up and speaking out.
—Hillary Clinton, 2015
We think we’re on the brink of something big, “really really big,” as campy icon Ed Sullivan puts it. It’s 11:59 p.m., December 31, 1959, in Alan Branfman’s backyard at 41 South Drive. Seven of us, all ninth graders at Great Neck South High School, are grabbing for the rebound to make the last shot of the decade.
“Yes!” I bank one from the left side with 30 seconds to go. Larry, Tony, and Alan are scrambling for the ball. Tony grabs it, dribbles back, and lets fly. clang. It bounces high off the back rim and into the sure hands of Steve Eliot, by far the best shooter of the Magnificent Seven, as we self-reverentially would later call ourselves. He calmly waits until 11:59:57 and releases a jumper from 20 feet. Swish.
Bring on the Sixties! It’s our time.
Schooled in the Sixties
Unlike 9 p.m. election night when you count votes, social and cultural progress don’t have a simple metric. It’s only later when a moniker is born that we can figure out what especially bound us together and what made us different from our parents . . . that we were, in fact, a “generation.”
“The Greatest Generation” earned its name by surviving a depression and winning a world war. My Uncle Phil regaled us with stories of his landing at Normandy, when as a lieutenant he led 30 men out of their swaying landing craft onto the beach and into withering fire. Later that day he directed flamethrowers into German bunkers and incinerated brazen enemies who knew that morning, looking out at the massive armada offshore, that would be the day they died.
My generation is born when the Phils come home, marry, raise families, start careers, and spend money jump-starting a consumer engine that doesn’t really slow down until the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo. But as “the child is father to the man,” the Fifties—derided as static, conformist, repressed—are prequel to the tumultuous decade to follow.
The president had been a warrior, but as a politician, Dwight David Eisenhower wants to govern more peacefully. Historians later dub it his “hidden-hand” presidency, reflecting Ike’s modest Kansas temperament and infectious grin. On the one hand, knowing war too well, he avoids military entanglements, so there are reportedly no American military deaths abroad in his eight years in the Oval Office (not counting the winding down of the Korean conflict). On the other, he never denounces Senator Joseph McCarthy, assuming that “Tail Gunner Joe” will destroy himself, which happens only after McCarthy rips up much of our social fabric. And Ike’s all-white upbringing, wartime staff, and presidential cabinet ill-equip him to understand, much less play an active role in, the ripening civil rights movement.
Other events plant the seeds of the Sixties. The U.S. Civil Rights Commission’s report on racial segregation in 1958 meticulously documents the evils of Jim Crow; France’s defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 presages how America stupidly stumbles into the same Big Muddy; Sputnik in 1957 awakens the country out of a smug complacency. And assembly lines of housing, food, and cars—in Levittown, McDonald’s, and Detroit—create a mass consumer culture that in turn creates a new generation resenting such homogenization.
The arts also provide a foundation for boomers. The writings and prosecutions of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and D. H. Lawrence inspire a counterculture that becomes the culture itself in the next decade. Holden Caulfield’s disgust with “phonies” and Elvis’s fusion of soul and country penetrate deeply into the youth psyche. The brooding contempt of Marlon Brando and James Dean depict a generation dissatisfied with its generational dowry.
Adults are often infantilized or frightened. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and The Organization Man are the best of a literature about the conformity required to rise in the new corpocracies. C. Wright Mills, Vance Packard, and John Kenneth Galbraith write huge best-sellers about how the corporate economy allows private pursuits to “crowd out” public needs. Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best are completely at odds tonally with Modern Family and Glee a half century later. And films like On the Beach ensure that people are in a state of perpetual anxiety, especially kids like me cowering under school desks during air raid drills.
Then, boom!
From John Kennedy gracefully announcing his presidential candidacy on January 2 in the Senate Caucus Room to a besieged Richard Nixon in the White House ten years later—one rising on a wave of hope, the other on a backlash against anti-war protestors—the intervening years frame the progressive-conservative tension that has divided America ever since.
Demographically, it’s not hard to chart what’s happening. It starts with, obviously, a baby boom: Todd Gitlin summarizes it best in his monumental 1987 generational biography The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage. The number of births jumps by 19 percent from 1945 to 1946, then another 12 percent the next year . . . and continues to grow into the early Sixties. More babies are born between 1948 and 1953 than in the previous 30 years. By 1964, 77 million Americans make up the largest expansion in our history. By decade’s end, the number of students is triple the number of farmers.
This reordering only accelerates when the federal government builds highways and makes home loans to spur suburban development. Millions of families, including mine, move into split-levels from 1948 to 1957, like on the South Shore of Long Island, and then from 1958 to 1973, on the North Shore.
Other political and social upheavals, however, are not as easy to spot as births and homes. No one has uncovered a great, collective aha moment that sparks the explosion of creativity and disruption to come. Earlier eras have some obvious triggers, like Black Tuesday, October 29, and the “Day of Infamy.” But not the Sixties. They are far too kaleidoscopic for such a singular lens: the Kennedy-Nixon debates, Tet and My Lai, MLK and Malcolm X, Watts and Chicago, assassinations and the Free Speech Movement, Easy Rider and The Green Berets, the Voting Rights Act and Earth Day, Unsafe at Any Speed and speed, Dylan and the Silent Majority, Stonewall and the moon landing.
Critics of this period casually pigeonhole it as merely the “Woodstock Generation,” hoping its only memory will be feather-haired acid freaks screwing in muddied tents during a Grateful Dead show. Former GOP congressman Dick Armey once blustered, “To me, all the problems in the country began in the Sixties.” Even as astute an observer as author Kurt Anderson asserts that “hippie selfishness” contributed to the greed-is-good ethos of the roaring Eighties.
True, this boomer generation is in part about lifestyle, “doing your own thing” in the phrase of the day. There are also gross excesses as sanctimonious protestors call cops “pigs” and soldiers “baby killers.” Little surprise that the initial impact of the decade is to pull the country to the right starting in 1966, since it’s way more popular to salute the flag than burn it.
But the Sixties are far larger than that. Serious social movements begin or grow that tap us on the shoulder a half century later. The names Martin Luther King, Gloria Steinem, and Rachel Carson—classic outsiders who radically overturn the status quo—will continue to historically overshadow the Yippie Left. But their very movements inspire a backlash, more like a whiplash, that becomes a living demonstration that in politics, like physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.
The political divisions start early. In February 1960, “Negro” students sit in at a lunch counter in Greensboro, South Carolina, a heroic nonviolent tactic that spreads throughout the South. In 1962, a meeting of old and new leftists under Tom Hayden’s direction draft the Port Huron Statement, which lays down an ideological marker for how to restore the promise of America: “We are people of this generation . . . looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.”
Port Huron leads directly to the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and a swelling anti-war movement. Senator Barry Goldwater publishes The Conscience of a Conservative, articulating a polar opposite right-wing view of how small government can keep America great. Which in turn creates the Ripon Society and, ultimately, the successful Nixon and Reagan candidacies of 1968 and 1980.
Oddly, there is no economic decline or domestic repression of the kind that has produced revolutions, from 1776 to 1848 to 1917. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, relative prosperity—real income is rapidly climbing—a generation of students is able to focus not on how good America is but how much better it should be. It’s a classic revolution of rising expectations as the deal of affluence for acquiescence offends millions of the young. For members of this new generation, a life of organizational obedience is too dispiriting, and John Kennedy is way more appealing than John Galt.
I’m one.
From Russia to Cornell
It begins in 1905 when my paternal grandfather flees from Kamianets-Podilskyi on the Ukraine-Russian border, hiding in a wheelbarrow to escape pogroms that every few decades kill thousands of Jews. Nathan Greene (at Ellis Island they drop the third e) sells buttons (“notions”) from a cart on the Lower East Side before settling down in attached housing off the Grand Concourse in the Bronx. The next-door neighbors are Morris and Eva Suna—he’s a plumber and she a clerk—who emigrated from Konsk (later Kinsk), Poland, at around the same time. They are among the 18 million who arrive after the turn of the century to the “new country,” as they come to call it.
Nathan and Fannie Green’s son Irving (1907) and Morris and Eva’s daughter Anne (1912) grow up next door to each other and, presumably because of love and not just proximity, marry in 1933. Irv’s a quick-witted kibitzer, the life of the party in a “yesterday I flew to Europe, boy were my arms tired” kind of way. He is also on the short side, bald, brusque, almost handsome. Amazingly for a Jew from the Bronx, then Brooklyn, he attends the University of Virginia as an undergraduate and then New York Law School. Anne is far more subdued, shy almost, pretty and petite; she attends Mills College to become a grade school teacher.
Stephen is born in 1938. He proves to be a terrific athlete, a fair student, popular, and 60 years later not only one of the largest influences in my life but also founder of SL Green Realty Corp, the largest owner of commercial buildings in Manhattan. Between 1938 and 1945 there are five miscarriages—five—before Anne and Irv make one last attempt. I arrive in this context, regarded almost as a miracle child, on March 15.
In 1948, we move from Bensonhurst to Elmont, literally a stone’s throw from Queens if, like me, you recklessly throw rocks over traffic on the Cross Island Parkway. We live in a modest two-story home three long blocks away from the Belmont Race Track, where I hear trumpets announcing races and occasionally sneak in to watch. The community is composed of largely middle-class Jews and, decades later, middle-class Asians. I’m a good but poorly behaved student, a “smart aleck” in my mother’s constant refrain. My teacher Vera Fisher writes on my report card, “In his utter disregard for authority and lack of respect, Mark has failed to measure up to our expectations for 4th graders in the development of good citizens.” In a newspaper interview 15 years later, she says that she expected big things from me, adding, “The worst thing I can say is that he was a bit of a show-off.”
I have a clique of buddies who play lots of touch football and also discover girls (Judi Calflisch, if you’re reading this, please call to say hi). I like winning at whatever I’m doing. My default activity is playing stickball with next-door neighbor Carl Shreck, whom I once beat 63–0 in obnoxious overkill, this apparently being before the invention of the Mercy Rule.
Like so many families in this era, Dad’s the decider. A small-time lawyer and landlord, he buys a Lincoln Continental every couple of years—not just another Cadillac but a Lincoln. I think that’s so different and very cool. But it’s not cool when I periodically take phone calls from building supers and tenants screaming about various emergencies involving water, fire, you name it. “Oh, you want my father, bye.” He also founds a Reform synagogue, Temple B’nai Israel, on Elmont Road just off Hempstead Turnpike, for which he and I occasionally go door to door to raise funds. It’s where I’m bar mitzvahed in 1958, presciently discussing in my speech (given my later career) how to keep “Jews honest in their business dealings in the marketplace.” Even as I become steeped in the tradition of tikkun olam (“repairing the world”), I’m displaying some cha-cha steps at the post-Haftorah party that are the talk of the congregation.
Then, like a Jewish Jeffersons, we move on up in 1957 to Great Neck, a North Shore enclave of spacious, upscale homes on rolling hills off the Long Island Sound made famous by The Great Gatsby’s fictitious West Egg. There I’m ceaselessly borne forward from seventh to twelfth grades, first at the 1895 brick-covered Great Neck North High School (Frances Ford Coppola, ’56) and then the 1958 glassy Great Neck South (Andy Kaufman, ’67) on the Phipps Estate right off what soon becomes exit 33 of the Long Island Expressway.
It’s a crisis-free adolescence of grades, sports, and girls, in that order. Summers are spent at Camp Oquago in the Catskills, where I’m in athletic heaven nine hours a day. That includes basketball with the best white player I’d ever seen (Gary Goldberg, later creator of Family Ties) and with a mediocre but very determined ball-handler (David Stern, later the head of the NBA). The summer of 1960 I play in sanctioned Eastern Lawn Tennis Association tournaments in order to attain a top eastern ranking. But in my last event, I lose in an upset and fall to number 10. The next morning, with no more events to recoup the season, I practice all day in a frenzied attempt to get ready for the next summer.
To this day, with chagrin, I recall my exact grade point average and earned run average as the starting pitcher in high school, my tennis record as first singles from ninth to twelfth grade, as well as the team’s 49 straight wins in ’62 and ’63 that make us Island champions. For years, people only refer to me as Mark Green, the tennis player.
That’s fine, because the competitive impulse honed on those courts becomes embedded in my approach to politics later. “Jeez, I’m down one set and 4–1 in the second. But I’m better than this guy! Stay calm, win your serve, get to a third set, think about this point, not the last one, outlast him . . .” I’m what’s called, with disdain by opponents, a “pusher” because I always keep the ball in play and try to wear down the other guy more with willpower than power. One New Year’s Eve, I listen to Fontella Bass sing Rescue Me 43 straight times, a level of obsession that pretty much sums up my later ability to sit in the same place for hours putting out 80 calls a day every day, every month for two years running for the U.S. Senate and then NYC mayor.
Politics hasn’t yet penetrated my consciousness. Indeed, like most kids, I simply mimic my father’s politics—he’s a Rockefeller Republican who ran for state senate in 1940 in the Lower East Side and campaigned on a platform with, he claims, Wendell Willkie. (When I later ask why he ran, he candidly admits “to boost my law practice,” a rationale that does not inspire my future campaigns.) So, choosing sides in a mock presidential debate in 1960, I pick Nixon! Experience counts and Ike chose him, right? But, like my guy, I lose the debate. And like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren decades later, both of whom start out as Goldwater Girls, I sin and, apparently, spend a lifetime atoning.
Strikingly, the sports symbol at Great Neck South is the Confederate flag and the football team’s name is the Rebels. And in case anyone misses the branding, our newspaper is The Southerner—even though this is the year of Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” and the murder of four black girls at the 16th Street Baptist Church. I don’t recall anyone making a fuss in this liberal community in the early Sixties; that happens only in 1980 when the flag is dropped and the Rebels become, in a smart pivot, the “Colonial Rebels.”
What were we thinking?
It’s August 20, 1963. My dad, mom, and I hook up the U-Haul stuffed with boxes of books, clothing, and other knickknacks to set off for the nearly five-hour drive from Great Neck north up the New York State Thruway and then west on Route 17 to Cornell.
We follow the exact path, month, and year that Jennifer (“Nobody puts Baby in the corner”) Grey travels in Dirty Dancing, by the same rural Catskills towns, same schlocky motels, same music on our car radio over and over—“Twist and Shout,” “Heat Wave,” “One Fine Day,” “Louie Louie”—plus ads mysteriously saying only “the Beatles are coming” with no indication whether it’s a band, movie, or plague. We stop halfway en route at the famous Roscoe Diner where I devour a giant hamburger as my folks try to also stuff me with last-minute wisdom and ease any anxieties.
But I’m not nervous or scared, only eager to test myself on this next stage, scholastically and athletically. Cornell is sort of Great Neck writ large. There are lots of smart, competitive Jewish kids as well as black and Asian students, Chinese food, “mu-sic ev-ry-where,” and, again, grades, sports, and girls (still in that order). I major in government, minor in English, and really enjoy classes on industrial economics and Soviet relations. A few times I sit in on a real estate class at the urging of my father though I hate the subject, not then knowing that I’d be subsequently leaving this line of work to my big brother. (The visiting teacher is a knowledgeable and charming New York City Realtor by the name of Jay Frand, who flies up weekly and whose daughter I’d marry in 1977; I love Deni way more than Jay’s course.)
I also love Cornell, with its sweeping foliage and deep gorges slicing through campus. I’m captain of the tennis team, number 2 on the squash team, and study my brains out to the point (remember Fontella Bass) that I leave a body imprint on a particular chair on the ground floor of the Uris Library where I would sit from 7 to 11 every night. For four years.
But this being the Sixties, politics does arrive on campus, suddenly.
I’m late to Government 101 as I trudge up The Hill, as it’s unaffectionately called, that all freshmen have to scale to get to the main campus. On my way, I stop at the dry cleaner’s. “Hey,” says the kid behind the counter, almost nonchalantly, “did you hear, Kennedy’s been shot?” I freeze, unable to process information so outside my experience and realm. I’m too confused to fully understand, too shocked to cry, but armed with darkness I sprint to class where it turns out that the professor, Allen Gothelf, hasn’t heard yet. When I tell him, he screams, then launches into a monologue against the right wing, the Republican Party, and Dallas. We hear within the hour that the president is dead. Gothelf—whom I’d periodically bump into four decades later at the West 72nd Street subway as I campaigned for office—bursts into tears and cancels the rest of the class.
The power of that event is magnified three days later when I go home for Thanksgiving. Sitting in my girlfriend’s living room and fixated on TV coverage that serves as a kind of national communal fire during the grief, I watch on live TV as suspect Lee Harvey Oswald—a nobody with a beat-up, uneven face—is taken on a perp walk. As he’s approaching the cameras, the lens shifts, there’s a momentary blur on the screen as a man leaps in front of Oswald, and a loud bang fills my living room, all our living rooms.
Of course everyone my age remembers November 1963. For me, this seismic, psycho-spiritual end of innocence coincides with the literal end of my adolescence. While everyone’s horrified by the assassination, we late-teens absorb it on a level deep enough to almost reconfigure strands of DNA. It’s now really time to say good-bye to Archie and Veronica, the Rebels, the Lindy. A door opens for me that hasn’t and can’t be closed.
Increasingly absorbed by public affairs and politics, I stand dumbstruck in October 1964 as Robert Kennedy drives by on Cornell’s East Avenue waving from an open white convertible while campaigning for the U.S. Senate. The next year I hear Adlai Stevenson give a speech on nuclear disarmament in the cavernous Barton Hall and get to shake his hand. I also attend a talk at the law school in May 1967 by an Allard Lowenstein, who is starting up what becomes the Dump Johnson movement. Unkempt, passionate, convincing, and formidable, he hangs around afterward with me and others answering question after question. (Thirteen years later, on March 14, 1980, I’m scheduled to be his 5 p.m. appointment to learn if he’ll be seeking the Manhattan House seat I’m running for, but at 4 p.m. in his Rockefeller Plaza office, he’s shot to death by a deranged former associate.)
I settle on the history of birth control in America for my senior government thesis—how Comstockery and the Catholic Church stigmatized and stymied birth control methods, especially among the low-income minority population. So I’m eager to go hear Black Power radical Stokely Carmichael speak at Bailey Hall in February 1967 since he’s been quoted saying “Birth control is black genocide.” He’s a gifted orator who holds the packed audience spellbound about the subjugation of blacks in America. Then comes the Q&A. I gather my nerve to raise my hand, stand up, and ask, “How can you call birth control black genocide given the rate of infant morality in America [emphasis added]?” There’s then a strange stillness as my brain begins to process my faux pas as 3,000 people inhale before explosively laughing, wave after wave of laughter. My ears grow hot and I sit down, clutching my spiral notepad. Carmichael waits until folks calm down to stick in the stiletto. “Son, I think that’s what’s called a Freudian slip.”
The Summer of ’67
I graduate that spring and head for a Washington, D.C., summer internship in the office of Senator Jacob Javits, who is a “moderate Republican” (i.e., a political dinosaur that later dies off when the Tea Party comet slams into America). I room in Anacostia with several Long Island friends and a Cornell junior named Tom Jones. But when the owner of the apartment complex a few days into our lease informs us that “Negroes” like Tom aren’t welcome there, Sandy Berger, Art Kaminsky, Ken Schanzer, and I tell him to shove it and we overnight move into a different location in D.C. (As for Tom, a year later he leads the armed takeover of Willard Straight Hall at Cornell and, with two bullet belts strapped across his chest, is the person on the Newsweek cover that becomes among the most famous photos of the 1960s. And 20 years after that, he becomes the CFO at TIAA-CREF and sits on the Board of Trustees at Cornell.)
By the time I start in Senator Javits’s office in late June, I have two modest goals for my ten weeks in Washington—be a good intern and end the war in Vietnam. Then, as now, the ideal congressional intern is supposed to be like the ideal hairpiece—effective and unnoticeable. But instead I adopt Andrea del Sarto’s credo that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp.”
Angered by LBJ’s criticism of “cussers and doubters” opposing his Vietnam policy, I organize 20 interns from different congressional offices—a well-scrubbed, quintessentially Ivy League group—who share my anti-war views. We hold several meetings to draft a letter protesting U.S. involvement in Vietnam that we intend to send to President Johnson. My long-winded 15-page version is condensed to two pages of earnest prose: “We sign this statement as a matter of conscience that we can no longer condone this war through our silence . . . [turning] a local struggle into an ideological war in which hundreds of thousands of people have died.”
Compared to other events of the Vietnam era—massive street protests, the killings at Kent State—a congressional intern petition is what later would be greeted with meh. But in what’s evidently a slow news week, I saunter into work on the morning of July 21 and spot an unusual stack of messages on my desk. “You’re dead,” a secretary sitting nearby deadpans.
It seems that our anti-war rump caucus has been infiltrated by a pro-war intern, who’s been ordered by his conservative Republican boss to pilfer the letter. That morning’s Washington Post carries a story (by a stringer named Richard Blumenthal, who will return to Connecticut and big things) about a speech on the House floor by Illinois Republican congressman Bob Michel (later to be House minority leader) “exposing to public light activities of a group of 20 ringleaders . . . behind closed doors about which you may not be aware.” He links us to something called the Washington Spring Mobilization Committee, whose members, he charges, “include Dick Gregory, Muhammad Ali and hippies who work with Hap [sic] Brown’s SNCC”—none of whom we’ve met. Many members of Congress regard us as impertinent if not treasonous. Dixiecrat Mendel Rivers announces, “We must get these pro-Communist agitators off the Hill.” Representative Jacob Gilbert of New York remarks to a colleague, “I’d like to beat the shit out of the kid who started this.”
Perhaps Michel thinks our letter will be his version of Nixon’s “Pumpkin Papers,” though it serves largely to boost not him but us, generating a level of attention we never could have attracted on our own. My life speeds up as if someone pushed the forward arrow. A researcher for columnist Drew Pearson asks me for some dirt on Representative Michel; feeling way over my head, I decline comment. The Taiwanese embassy threatens to cancel its annual summer party for congressional interns unless I promise not to circulate my “left-wing petition.” A ranking Cornell official urges me to “keep Cornell’s name out of this. The alumni will never understand.”
Press coverage is generally favorable, focusing on the David and Goliath aspect and on whether interns have the right of free speech. “Are Summer Interns Muzzled?” is the headline in the Washington Daily News and, as my mother would not soon forget, the Chicago Tribune lists me as one of “the 10 most radical students in America.” Late afternoon two days later, several dozen of us spill out into Delaware Park adjoining the Russell Senate Office Building to plan next steps. We reach an easy consensus that we will immediately go door- to-door scouring for signatures. “Guys, look sharp, and girls, wear nice dresses, so we don’t play into stereotypes,” I suggest, combining Great Neck and Port Huron.
Ultimately, we gather 179 signatures including one from a Robert Reich in Senator Robert Kennedy’s office, who becomes a lifelong friend. When I call the White House to ask if we can present our petition to the president, he instead cancels his traditional summer address to all summer interns at the Washington Monument.
No, the Intern Letter doesn’t end the war. But it does end the intern program itself when an annoyed House votes that fall to terminate it (reinstating it three years later). This episode does, however, have several spin-offs. My immediate boss, Javits’s foreign policy aide Les Gelb, informs me that I escaped firing since, fortunately, I did mention to him that I’d be circulating a petition before Blumenthal’s piece; and it turns out that he and the senator are kind of impressed at my chutzpah. (Les leaves the next year to work on a project with Defense Secretary Robert McNamara that will become the Pentagon Papers and 26 years later is chosen president of the Council on Foreign Relations.)
It proves to be a big learning experience. But what are the lessons? Professionally, I relish attracting attention by framing a strong argument, standing up to big shots, and organizing allies. What, however, is my motivation? There’s the chemical rush of the pace and coverage intersecting with the urgent moral issue of the war. I come to realize later in my public life that the spur of both is what drives me, drives almost all public people, and the way to get stuff done is to be sure that neither narcissism nor sanctimony becomes consuming.
The Law School
On the first day at Harvard Law School in 1967, we gather in Langdell Hall to hear from the legendary Dean Erwin Griswold. As if sent from central casting in 1947 when he first arrives, he now majestically explains in his “Voice of God” how “lucky” we are to be there and how responsible we must be to advance both the law school’s tradition as well as that of the larger society. Luck?
Everywhere there’s intimidating history. Our professors deploy the Socratic Method (which in the original Latin is probably synonymous with in terrorem), calling on one of us for much of an hour class to ensure that all of us read all the cases beforehand to avoid potential humiliation. My administrative law course excites my interest in regulatory and consumer law in part because of the brilliance and, well, judicious manner of my professor, Stephen Breyer. Torts is run by the iron intellect of Charles Fried (later to be President Reagan’s solicitor general as well as a fierce critic of President George W. Bush’s torture policy).
My greatest reverence is reserved for constitutional law professor Paul Freund, always supposedly the next Supreme Court justice. When I visit him in an office piled high with law books, I can’t get out of my head that this man was a law clerk in 1932 to Justice Louis Brandeis, probably the greatest progressive lawyer in American history.
My two roommates at 65 Eustis Street include a fellow Cornellian whom I never met while in college. Sandy Berger comes from tiny Millerton, New York, and smokes throughout the day to relieve his tension. He’s part of our small “study group” that meets weekly to toughen each other up for end-of-year exams that become the stuff of high drama in Scott Turow’s later best-selling book and film, One L. It’s Sandy who’s on the back of my motorcycle en route to our Property exam on June 6, the morning that Bobby Kennedy dies from handgun wounds suffered the night before at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Settling in to our seats and struggling to separate our personal grief from the course’s only test all year, we watch as many classmates come in openly weeping. And then, a first in the recorded history of the 150-year-old law school: our professor walks to the front of the room and announces, “Due to the death of Senator Kennedy, this exam is canceled and everyone will get the same passing grade.” Silence. Gasps. Relief. Sadness.
(Sandy combines brains, a welcoming personality, and real writing skills. Just two years after law school he becomes George McGovern’s speechwriter in his 1972 presidential campaign and, 28 years later, President Clinton’s national security advisor. On the evening of September 11, 2001, when he can’t get out of New York City because the airports are shut down, he stays at our apartment talking about terrorism and security.)
There is no way these student years will be walled off from the larger society. Not with MLK’s and then RFK’s assassinations and with the military draft hanging over all of us. I bus with friends to the march on the Pentagon in 1969 and join 32 law students signing a public ad in the Crimson saying that I would not serve if drafted. Later that year I draw a high number, avoiding selection and what would have been an impossible clash between conscience and career.
I spend my Saturdays at Cambridge Legal Services handling cases of low-income residents, including Abbie Hoffman’s wife seeking a divorce. I convince our placement office to send a survey to all law firms coming to conduct interviews so students can easily access information about pro bono work, hours, and diversity before deciding whether to even interview with a firm. I write articles outside of class, including my first for The Nation after the renowned editor Carey McWilliams amazingly takes my cold call and agrees to assign a piece on the new breed of law students. I coedit a book for Beacon Press of 14 essays titled With Justice for Some: An Indictment of the Law by Young Advocates. Dean Derek Bok, later to be Harvard’s president, calls me into his office to cheerfully say that, while he’s impressed by my many activities, could I please remember to be a law student too? “You’ll have decades of activities ahead of you but only three years as a law student here.”
But really, my passion is the Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review, started only the year before as a progressive alternative to the Law Review. I write my initial article, a 62-footnoted piece on racial discrimination in urban renewal, and then barely beat out Bruce Wasserstein to be chosen editor in chief. Bruce becomes the deputy editor in chief and coeditor with me of With Justice for Some. Among others, I convince Joe Califano, recently President Johnson’s special assistant, and Leon Panetta, who has just resigned from the Nixon White House over its civil rights policy, to write book reviews. Panetta proves to be a personal delight though an unusually poor writer. Putting out a publication with a staff of 60 is my maiden voyage in management.
(Of course, “Bid-’em-Up Bruce”—a phrase he despised—goes on to extraordinary success as a Wall Street Master of the Universe, cofounding Wasserstein, Perella before taking over the investment banking giant Lazard Freres until his untimely death in 2009. At his wedding in Paris in 1996, we have great fun in a roast-toast when I recall our election fight because “if only he had won, perhaps today Deni and I would be living on a 29-acre waterfront estate in Easthampton and he’d be a much-admired assemblyman in Albany.”)
Then, a life-altering event. It’s snowing heavily in Cambridge in mid-March 1969 a couple of months after the Green-Wasserstein showdown. I’m in my driveway shoveling out my car when a roommate shouts down from the window, “Mark, Ralph Nader’s on the phone for you.”
Ralph Nader? The guy pictured as a knight-in-shining-armor on the cover of Newsweek for his auto safety crusade? In the first of what would be perhaps a few thousand phone calls over the next decades, he pleasantly explains that he’s gathering a group of law graduates from Harvard, his alma mater (’58), to research Washington institutions, and he’d like me to be part of his team.
“But Mr. Nader, I’ve been offered an internship with New York City mayor John Lindsay.” “Well, that is exciting,” he allows. “But let me ask you—this summer, would you rather be a political cog or a participant in changing your country?”
It takes me a week but I can’t resist the personal wooing of such a public hero. So I decline the 103rd mayor’s offer and throw in with the person who would become among the most influential private citizens in American history, and my mentor.
Eight Movements: Back to Our Future
Russia, Brooklyn, Tikkun Olam, Great Neck, Cornell, Harvard Law, Nader—I’ve now picked sides in the skins-shirts political contest. This kickoff of my public life coincides with the rise of eight movements that subpoena the attention of the country. “If one of us does [something], they’ll think he’s crazy,” says Arlo Guthrie, who wrote a ’60s anthem of sorts, “Alice’s Restaurant.” “If two of us do it, they’ll think we’re funny. If three of us do it, they’ll think it’s a movement.” In the 1960s, millions do it.
As the Thirties set in motion forces that permanently reshaped Americans’ relationships to government and business, the Sixties too are still occupying America today across the divide of decades. Tom Hayden has written that Obama’s presidential campaign “was a social movement in electoral form, a renewal of sixties energies inside a political system and culture broken open under sixties pressures . . . Without [those movements], there likely would have been no Obama presidency.”
Because principles from that period both molded my life and are influencing the 2016 election, let’s briefly revisit events that many have either forgotten or disparaged as “going back to the Sixties.” Of course, nostalgia should be a thing of the past. But while issues, styles, and politics shift, often values endure to create continuity. It’s odd that traditionalists who today embrace the literal Bible, the originalism of the 1789 Constitution, and the Southern Heritage of the 1860s draw the line at the heritage of the 1960s. Conservatives have chosen a convenient time to conserve—one that preserves the power and privilege of a largely all-white elite. To paraphrase Buffalo Springfield, there was something happenin’ there, and what it was is increasingly clear.
The Civil Rights Movement
For all the obvious civil rights progress since slavery came to America in 1619, racism is still the weed of democracy that hasn’t been pulled out.
Still, an army of idealists has been trying—from the earliest abolitionists to the canny Thurgood Marshall litigating in the South in the 1930s to Gunnar Myrdal’s epochal An American Dilemma in 1944. Then, the great breakthrough—the unanimous 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education declaring that public school segregation creates a “badge of inferiority,” which constitutionally violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Though Brown provokes the white southern establishment to respond with “massive resistance,” the genie is out. Then the immoveable object of tradition collides with the irresistible force of the greatest moral movement in American history. Starting with the lunch-counter sit-ins in February 1960, a tactic as symbolically powerful as Gandhi’s salt march to the sea to protest British colonial rule, thousands of small and large protests as well as murderous violence spreads throughout the South. Scores of civil rights heroes—Bob Moses, John Lewis, Bayard Rustin, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young—multiply the power of Dr. King’s message in his masterful “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” to cautious black ministers:
You may well ask, “Why direct action?” Why sit-ins, marches and so forth . . . For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will . . . when your first name becomes “nigger” and your middle name becomes “boy” . . . when you suddenly find your tongue twisted as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the amusement park and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
Senator and presidential candidate John Kennedy is initially reluctant to offend those few southern states like Texas that might give him their electoral votes. Kennedy aide and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. says years later, “The Kennedy civil rights strategy miscalculated the dynamism of a revolutionary movement.” But this northern Catholic politician does at the least understand prejudice and power. So late in the presidential campaign, JFK makes a bold move. At Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, his brother-in-law Sargent Shriver exhorts him to call a pregnant and very anxious Coretta Scott King to express his sympathy when a local judge in Georgia hauls her husband away in chains for four months of hard labor on some technical ground. “What the hell. That’s a decent thing to do. Why not? Get her on the phone.” The conversation takes two minutes, but word of it ricochets around black churches and communities contributing to Kennedy’s narrow 113,000-vote margin.
When King begins organizing his march on Washington in the spring of 1963, the Kennedys worry that it could erupt in violence, be all-black, and backfire. But the president and attorney general relent in the face of implacable determination by black leaders at a White House meeting, with two enormous results. First, on June 11, 1963, President Kennedy federalizes the Alabama National Guard to escort two admitted students to the University of Alabama who have been blocked by Governor George Wallace because, says Kennedy, they “happen to be born Negroes.” That evening, the president addresses the nation from the Oval Office in order to introduce what becomes the 1964 civil rights bill: “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue . . . This nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.”
Two months later on August 28, the march—massive, interracial, peaceful—is a marker on America’s journey to justice. And King’s mesmerizing cadence and words become as much a part of American history as Lincoln’s and Kennedy’s inaugural addresses. A year later, President Lyndon Johnson understands that the martyrdom of Kennedy should stand for something—and invests that moral and political capital in civil rights. In the ultimate melding of outside and inside, it’s Johnson, the president himself, who evokes the movement’s mantra of “we shall overcome” in his historic address to a joint session of Congress in 1965 on behalf of voting rights legislation. Over the course of a tumultuous year and a half, Johnson signs the 1964 Civil Rights Act, forbidding discrimination in public accommodations, and then the 1965 Voting Rights Act, banning restrictions like literacy tests and poll taxes. By the end of that year, 250,000 additional black voters are registered to vote and black state legislators in the South grow from 3 to 176 by 1985.
On the other side of the Sixties racial ledger, however, are the Watts riots of August 1965, when an arrest from a traffic infraction lights the kindling of housing discrimination, poverty, lack of jobs, and LAPD abuses, which in turn leads to 34 deaths and $40 million in property damage. Polls and votes reflect an enormous backlash to this event, with Democrats suffering the loss of 47 House seats in the 1966 elections. Subsequent riots in Detroit, Newark, and nationally after King’s assassination leave scores more dead. The decade’s racial timeline concludes in 1968 with the Kerner Commission report that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black and one white.”
The Anti-War Movement
The leaders of the great powers meet at the Quai d’Orsay in January 1919 to decide the fate of Germany and the borders of scores of nations. One thin, small leader, a former teacher and cook from Indochina, can’t even get President Wilson to acknowledge his urgent request to recognize his homeland. After returning empty-handed to Vietnam, Nguyen Tat Thanh changes his name to Ho Chi Minh, which means “He who enlightens,” and devotes his life to uniting his country. That effort indeed does attract the attention, later, of several American presidents.
In early 1954, the Geneva Accords divide Vietnam temporarily at the 17th parallel into a communist North under Ho Chi Minh and an anti-communist, Catholic South, with promised elections two years later. But the South reneges. Wisely refusing to intervene militarily to save the French at Dien Bien Phu, President Eisenhower then unwisely explains his regional concerns at a press conference: “You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.”
Using a Cold War lens to view a localized conflict, the United States tragically misses the big picture. The first two American deaths in Vietnam occur on July 8, 1959, when Chester Ovnand and Dale Buis are ambushed at Bien Hoa. Then, after Kennedy’s own humiliation at the Bay of Pigs, he decides not to again look weak in the context of another communist insurgency. So he sends in (ultimately) 16,000 “advisors” to make sure that Vietnam doesn’t become a “domino”—he adopts Eisenhower’s word—that might begin the cascade of Marxist states owing allegiance to China.
When the dovish deputy undersecretary of state, George Ball, tells the president that any commitment of forces would mean that “within five years we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again,” Kennedy responds with irritation, “George, you’re crazier than hell, it isn’t going to happen.” Speaking of the South Vietnamese government, he publicly repeats that ultimately it has to be “their war” and privately tells Walt Rostow and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. that after his reelection he’ll start drawing American advisors there down.
But there will be no reelection. Looking back after the Gulf of Tonkin, Tet, the secret bombing of Cambodia, My Lai, Kent State, and a fractured America, has there ever been a worse foreign policy mistake than America’s political and military elites losing a war and 58,151 servicepeople—and up to 4 million Vietnamese dead—because of an easy-to-grasp though stupid metaphor?
Outside pressure on inside politicians begins with some street demonstrations in 1963 and 1964, cresting on October 21, 1969, when upward of a half million protestors march on the Pentagon. I travel there and stay over at a girlfriend’s family home in Alexandria, Virginia, much to the displeasure of her father, a crew-cut, no-nonsense Air Force colonel. The march is massive, joyous, raucous, peaceful, and President Nixon says he’ll ignore such protestors no matter what their numbers.
Journalist James Fallows (later to be President Carter’s speechwriter and coauthor with me of Who Runs Congress?), writes a moving and influential piece in the Washington Monthly entitled “What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” He explains how, as a Harvard student, he evades the draft only to realize with anguish that lower-class kids from Southie will instead fight and die.
Divisions peak during the last week of August 1968 at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Protestors and police clash violently in Grant Park while inside the International Amphitheater, Senator Abe Ribicoff (D-CT) denounces “gestapo tactics” and hometown mayor Richard Daley in the audience shouts, “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch.” It’s at that moment that Vice President Hubert Humphrey essentially loses the presidential election—although it is Humphrey who aches for peace while Richard Nixon is purposefully ambiguous—as protests ironically elevate the Republican backlash into a governing majority.
The Sixties peace movement contains two big takeaways. First, outside activists can move inside politicians. Second, as revolutionaries from George Washington to Ho Chi Minh have shown, the record of an external power trying to suppress local nationalists is not a good one since the very insertion of troops can antagonize local populations and undermine the ultimate battle for “hearts and minds.” But George W. Bush later ignores how counterproductive counterinsurgent war is when he replaces the word Vietnam with Iraq.
The Women’s Movement
It was Abigail Adams who reminded her husband and his fellow delegates at the Continental Congress in 1783 to “remember the ladies,” with thinly veiled threats that otherwise “we will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” Nearly 70 years passed before Seneca Falls created a public demand for the right to vote and another 70 years before the Nineteenth Amendment established it. And then, fulfilling New Jersey justice Arthur Vanderbilt’s axiom that “reform is not for the short-winded,” the next 60 years accelerate the movement toward gender equality, led by three feminists especially—first Margaret Sanger and then Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem.
Sanger was indicted in 1914 (for violating obscenity laws by distributing literature on birth control), jailed in 1916 (for opening America’s first birth control clinic), and derided as a “menace to society” by a judge at her sentencing. Decades later she partners with an heiress friend, Katherine McCormick, to sponsor trials for a drug that McCormick had first conceived of—a simple pill whose use is entirely controlled by women. As soon as the FDA approves Enovid-10 in 1960, excessive expectations are attached to the pill’s promise—a cure for divorce, an end to poverty. But what it does do is allow women and men to plan their families and permit women to join the workforce if they choose—and millions do.
Despite the Nineteenth Amendment, the American public in the following decades overwhelmingly opposes married women entering the workforce. George Gallup says the opposition is unlike anything he’s ever seen in polling. This is the America in which Bettye Goldstein grows up, in Peoria, Illinois, “marching to tunes that others had not yet heard,” according to her brother. She changes her name to Betty Friedan and becomes a suburban wife and ad agency copywriter. Then in 1963 she names “the problem with no name” in her seminal work, The Feminine Mystique.
Her hugely popular book documents stories of women who make their own path but then, standing on the precipice of new lives, turn back. One student interested in exploring cancer research switches to home economics deciding she’d rather work in a department store after college. Friedan explains to Life magazine, “Some people think I’m saying, ‘Women of the world unite—you have nothing to lose but your men.’ It’s not true. You have nothing to lose but your vacuum cleaners.”
Friedan’s writings and followers attract national attention and, consequently, the White House, which convenes a largely symbolic National Conference of Commissions on the Status of Women in June 1966. Stymied by the inability to pass resolutions—“it was a weekend of lip service,” Friedan observes—women pass napkins around the lunch tables at the Washington Hilton outlining their demands. That lays the foundation for what becomes the National Organization for Women “to take the actions needed to bring women into the mainstream of American society, now . . . in fully equal partnership with men.” Friedan achieves her goal to create, in her words, an “NAACP for women.”
Gloria Steinem eyes tap dancing as her ticket out of Toledo, out of a dreary childhood in a family burdened by heavy debts. She lives in a house-trailer during winters, crisscrossing the country while her father sells antiques, and doesn’t regularly attend public school until she’s 12, sparing her the socialization of school that would likely have constricted her expanding worldview. Steinem enters Smith College in an era of limited options—and fewer role models. “In my growing up years there was Eleanor Roosevelt, but to be her you had to marry a president,” she says wryly to the author in a 2014 interview.
She comes to New York to be a writer but is confined to “women’s interests,” such as writing about a candidate’s wife, not the candidate. But her reporting on a 1969 meeting in the basement of a Greenwich Village church on the state’s abortion laws changes her life. “It was the first time,” Steinem recounts, “that I had ever heard women standing up and telling the truth about something that can only happen to women. I had an abortion myself and never talked about it. Suddenly it just dawned on me—it’s crazy that one in three women has had an abortion . . . Why is it so dangerous, why is there all kinds of sexual harassment in order to get one, not to mention physical danger?”
Inspired and radicalized, she starts moving into circles with other leaders, like Bella Abzug, whom she adores, and Betty Friedan, whom she doesn’t. Then her brainy critiques, media-friendly looks, signature aviator glasses, and aplomb bring her celebrity, which she shrewdly invests to further her cause. Starting in the early Seventies, she leads the fight for an Equal Rights Amendment, a greater challenge than the women’s movement anticipated. “We assumed that it was such simple justice that it wouldn’t be difficult to win,” she recalls with regret in her voice. But the right-wing forces of Phyllis Schlafly, along with reactionary state legislatures, slow, stall, and then stop the amendment three states short of ratification. Yes to Roe v. Wade in 1973 but no to the ERA.
What lesson does Steinem learn? “We were probably much too nice, much too well mannered, not enough demonstrations and courting the press to counter the distortions about bra-burning.” (“Nobody ever burned a bra, that’s made up,” she says.) But as the movement’s public face, she maintains her public composure, which she attributes to her roots. “It’s Midwestern,” she laughs.
The Environmental Movement
It started with fire ants.
They came aboard cargo ships in Alabama’s Gulf coast around the 1930s and each decade came farther inland, reaching North Carolina and Arkansas, devastating many plants and animals, eating even electrical equipment. An increasingly alarmed U.S. Department of Agriculture brought pesticides into the fight, spraying 1 million acres with dieldrin and heptachlor by 1958. Missing its intended target, the pesticides began killing off quails, wild turkeys, armadillos, and meadowlarks.
Rachel Carson—a 55-year-old biologist from Pennsylvania battling cancer and donning a wig following her chemotherapy treatment—is horrified by the indiscriminate spraying of pesticides and begins exposing its dangers. The pushback is intense. Monsanto prints 5,000 copies of a parody brochure entitled “The Desolate Year” of a world without pesticides, a world dominated by insects, vermin, and famines. President Kennedy, however, orders his science committee to investigate her findings and then in September 1962 Carson’s Silent Spring—referring to songbirds that had stopped singing—is published to instant success. Though she dies less than two years after its release, her account of the dangers of DDT leads to its prohibition in America and, within a decade, a global treaty banning 12 pesticides (“the dirty dozen”).
Questions about pesticides lead to questions about other pollutants. Thanksgiving 1966 sees the weather conspire to unleash a temperature inversion—in which warm air traps polluted air—over Manhattan. Bombarding the atmosphere of New York are more man-made contaminants than any other big city in the country—almost two pounds of soot and noxious gases for every man, woman, and child. The city shuts off all of its 11 incinerators, but hospitals report a surge in deaths from pulmonary emphysema and chronic bronchitis. The smog hanging over the city exacerbates heart and lung conditions and leaves 168 people dead.
Such events prod Congress to enact the 1967 Air Quality Act, which passes the Senate unanimously. Three years later, the Clean Air Act of 1970 passes Congress, again with no nay votes, this being an era when environmental harm is seen as afflicting people irrespective of whether they have Republican or Democratic lungs. Then the Cuyahoga River in Ohio catches fire. Since rivers are supposed to flow, not ignite, this event draws public attention to why it’s legal to dump toxic chemicals in our streams and rivers.
Drawing from the era’s anti-war protests, Senator Gaylord Nelson (D-WI) comes up with the idea for a massive grassroots “teach-in” about environmental issues. He chooses April 22 as the first-ever Earth Day. If only 40 or so campuses hold teach-ins, he thinks, he’d consider it a success. By day’s end, 2,000 colleges, 10,000 high schools, and 2,000 communities join in—in all, 20 million participate in what is, still, the largest mass mobilization in American history.
“The reason Earth Day worked,” Nelson says later, “is that it organized itself. The idea was out there and everybody grabbed it. I wanted a demonstration by so many people that politicians would say, ‘Holy cow, people care about this.’”
Wary of aligning with the same activists who denounce him as a war criminal in demonstrations, President Richard Nixon tells a top advisor, “Just keep me out of trouble on environmental issues.” On December 2, 1970, Nixon signs the executive order that creates the Environmental Protection Agency because he’s also an astute politician aware of the bipartisan popularity of an issue that so intimately affects the health of all American families.
Conservationist John McCormick concludes that no other mass movement over the past century “wrought so universal or so fundamental a change in human values.” Carson and Nelson spawn a new environmental revolution that looks to government regulation to reduce dangerous pollution, and sees a surge in growth of existing groups like the Sierra Club and the birth of new ones like the Natural Resources Defense Council and Greenpeace. Of course there is corporate backlash arguing that job growth and environmental health are incompatible.
The fight is joined.
The Health-Care Movement
After Otto Von Bismarck sewed together his safety net in Germany, ex-president Teddy Roosevelt ran a third-party candidacy based on the chancellor’s national health insurance model. TR’s Bull Moose candidacy died but not his cause. His fifth cousin and namesake tried to make it a key element in his New Deal edifice. But when the American Medical Association opposition to his “cradle to grave” health insurance plan threatened to sink Social Security legislation, FDR—a pragmatist far more than an ideologue—dropped the insurance provision.
Then it’s President Harry Truman’s turn to try and fail when the AMA replays its “socialized medicine” card during the height of the Cold War. After a determined President Kennedy re-raises the issue at a huge Madison Square Garden speech, the AMA slaps him down in a prime-time infomercial that warns that decisions about a patient’s care may be made by “some intangible, callous government committee” (presaging “death panels” a half century later).
Finally, fulfilling Voltaire’s famous axiom about “an idea whose time has come,” this cycle of failure is broken. When Lyndon Johnson crushes Barry Goldwater by 16 million votes and with 61 percent of the vote—and 37 of the AMA’s best friends in Congress are defeated in that same November election—the AMA realizes its vulnerability and LBJ seizes his opportunity.
For years Wilbur Mills, always called the “powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means committee,” had opposed comprehensive health insurance in part fearing that the AMA might threaten his safe seat. But given the election and Johnson’s agenda, Mills proposes a new idea: combine some proposed AMA voluntary programs into LBJ’s expansive proposal with parts that cover hospital insurance through the Social Security tax; pay for the cost of doctors by a monthly premium matched by government funds; and create Medicaid, a program for those unable to afford health care yet ineligible for Social Security.
This one omnibus bill supported by Johnson and Mills breaks the 60-year logjam that held up national health care. Medicare and Medicaid reimagine government’s role and assure America’s elderly and indigent of their right to health care. It passes each chamber by better than 2–1 and is signed by President Johnson on July 30, 1965, at a ceremony in Independence, Missouri, home of Harry Truman, who had been so maligned in his pursuit of national health insurance.
The decade witnesses a second health revolution destined to save millions of lives over decades—the pro-health war on tobacco.
When the Sixties begins, half of American men smoke, with another 21 percent being former smokers. Ashtrays are a ubiquitous part of everyday life—on planes, in offices, in restaurants. Cartoon staples like Fred Flintstone endorse cigarettes. Lucky Strike and Viceroy even advertise the healthful effect of their products. Among the celebrity salesmen, actor Ronald Reagan.
The link between smoking and cancer has been developing for decades. A heavily circulated Reader’s Digest article, “Cancer by the Carton,” in 1952 leads to the biggest drop in smoking in 20 years. The tobacco industry quickly conducts their own studies, which amazingly enough refute medical studies, and, with the release of filtered and low-tar cigarettes, win back many of these customers.
Seeking to settle the debate, President Kennedy appoints a panel led by Surgeon General Luther Terry to weigh the evidence. Terry assures an anxious tobacco industry that his panel will be impartial and even allows industry officials to vet committee members; indeed, half of the committee’s ten members—like the surgeon general himself—are not only smokers but even smoke during their meetings.
Though bearing the anodyne title “Smoking and Health,” the report is perhaps the most influential ever published in the U.S. on a health issue. Released January 11, 1964—a Saturday so as not to spook the markets, and so that it would blanket the Sunday papers—it provides inconvertible proof that smoking causes lung cancer: “Cigarette smoking is a health hazard of sufficient importance [to require] appropriate remedial action.”
From 1963 to 1964, smoking dips 3.5 percent. Most press accounts conclude that while smoking may temporarily decline, over time it will again increase. The coming half century will prove them wrong.
The Terry report joins Silent Spring, The Feminine Mystique, Unsafe at Any Speed, and The Other America as publications that shift the axis of policy in America. Thirty-five years later Joe Camel ads came down and a half century later use of tobacco has fallen by more than half. The Journal of American Medicine estimates that since the report’s release, 8 million American lives have been saved.
The Drug Reform Movement
When Time magazine chooses those “25 and under” as its Person of the Year in 1966, it writes, “He has clearly signaled his determination to live according to his own lights and rights.” In few areas is this transformation as clear as the rise of drug use.
Drug use stays largely underground with the Beats and jazz musicians in the 1950s, as Louis Armstrong explains that “it relaxes you, makes you forget all the bad things that happen to a Negro.” Then marijuana enters the bloodstream of the mainstream in the Sixties.
It begins mid-decade in San Francisco, initially inspired by Timothy Leary, a Harvard doctor thrown out with a colleague for his experimentations with drugs. Scott McKenzie’s “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” hits the radio in the spring of 1967, and thousands start flooding the city looking for weed.
By the end of summer, Haight-Ashbury is lost to darker drugs like LSD and speed (methamphetamine). The drug of choice on college campuses remains marijuana, with nearly half of all students having tried it by the end of the decade. It becomes a symbolic badge against the war but is also easily confused with the more dangerous LSD in the public mind. From 1965 to 1970, marijuana arrests jump tenfold. Decades-old laws, like those in Virginia that mandate 20 years in prison for possession of any amount of marijuana, remained on the books.
Alarmed by growing numbers of servicemen returning from Vietnam addicted to heroin, President Nixon worries that this epidemic threatens his title as the “law and order” president. This fear, however, turns out to be unfounded: 95 percent of addicts in Vietnam do not stay addicted upon their return to the United States. But Nixon simply transfers his contempt to marijuana users. Aide John Ehrlichman admits, “We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn’t resist it.” Operatives on the RNC payroll disrupt the Democratic National Convention in 1972 by flying banners reading “Pot Peace Prosperity—vote McGovern.” Arrests related to marijuana use soon exceed the number of all the nation’s violent crimes.
The president’s other top aide, H. R. Haldeman, writes in his diary how Nixon “emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.” These are the mind-set and actions behind Nixon’s rhetorically vibrant “War on Drugs”—which begins a perversion of criminal justice that haunts American life still in 2016.
Partly in reaction to the disgraced president after Watergate, penalties for marijuana are reduced in 28 states for possession as the magazine High Times starts appearing on newsstands in 1974. But Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 and federal sentencing guidelines—as well Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s notorious drug laws in New York—explode the prison population, as largely young men of color overwhelm jails. In New York drug offenders total one in three inmates. According to Governor David Paterson in 2009, “I can’t think of a criminal justice strategy that has been more unsuccessful than the Rockefeller Drug Laws.”
A century ago, the war on liquor created Prohibition, which had to be undone by constitutional amendment. In 2016, the war on drugs is inspiring a bipartisan countermovement to be more smart than merely “tough” on drugs.
The Gay Rights Movement
For most of the twentieth century, gays in America were seen as emotionally disturbed, an opinion fully sanctioned by the American Psychological Association. For decades, California’s Atascadero State Prison subjected gays to torture and lobotomies, earning the notoriously cruel prison the nickname “Dachau for queers.” When petitioning for their rights, activists strained to point out that they weren’t seeking to win the right to marry or adopt children, only that their love no longer be considered criminal. “You weren’t just in the closet,” poet Quincy Troupe wrote in the late 1940s, “you were in the basement. Under the basement floor.”
Things began to change when an inspired Harry Hay, a Marxist activist, raced home from an LA party late one night in 1948 and, while his wife and children slept, scrambled to write down a gay manifesto. It contained a demand that was a profoundly radical notion for a puritanical America 80 years after enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment: gays and lesbians deserve the same rights as everyone else. The Mattachine Society is born.
The Sixties opens with the first-ever reversal of an “Other Than Honorable” discharge for a gay woman in the U.S. Air Force. Illinois governor Otto Kerner in 1962 makes consensual same-gender sex legal—the first state to do so. Pickets start popping up across the country. Starting in 1965, at Philadelphia’s Independence Hall on the Fourth of July, comes the Annual Reminder—a march of gays telling the country that “15 million homosexual Americans [are] being denied their rights under the law.” The marches receive little attention in the press, save for mockery: one magazine headlines a story “Homos on the March.” A bookstore opens in Greenwich Village featuring gay and lesbian authors, the first of its kind.
Then in the spring of 1967, just before the so-called Summer of Love begins, CBS Reports airs “The Homosexuals.” Despite having a star of the stature of Mike Wallace, the program comes across almost like a Reefer Madness for gays, dripping with fear-mongering, stereotypes, and hyperbole. “The average homosexual, if there be such, is promiscuous,” Wallace intones. “He is not interested or capable of a lasting relationship like that of a heterosexual marriage. Even on the streets of the city—the pick-up, the one night stand, these are characteristics of the homosexual relationship.” Police raids of gay bars are then commonplace, like the one at the Stonewall Inn on a hazy evening in 1969.
Operating without a liquor license and backed by Mafia investors, Stonewall is a den of watered-down liquor and poor service protected by police officers being regularly paid off. Still, it’s a refuge, one of the few places where men can embrace in a slow dance. But 20 minutes after 1 a.m. on June 28, eight police officers enter the bar, announcing, “Police! . . . The place is under arrest. When you exit, have some identification and it’ll be over in a short time.”
But it’s not. Instead, a cross-dressing Stormé DeLarverie angrily pushes back, lighting a fuse that would explode old values and assumptions. “The cop hit me, and I hit him back. The cops got what they gave,” she says. Years later, one man who was there excitedly recounts in a documentary: “In the Civil Rights Movement, we ran from the police; in the peace movement, we ran from the police. That night, the police ran from us, the lowliest of the low. And it was fantastic.” In a seminal Village Voice piece, Lucian Truscott IV puts the city and the country on notice: “Watch out. The liberation is under way.”
Today it’s called either the Stonewall Riot or the Stonewall Rebellion, depending on your politics. Whatever the label, a cultural revolution is born that night which, speaking of “fantastic,” over time leads to marriage equality nationally by 2015.
The Consumer Movement
The aphorism caveat emptor—literally “let the buyer beware” but figuratively “good luck, fella” in a seller-dominated marketplace—begins to change meaning in 1966. That’s when two women likely paid by General Motors separately approach Ralph Nader in Washington, D.C., supermarkets to try to compromise him and, consequently, his advocacy. That ham-handed effort leads to a sensational Senate hearing, an auto safety law and agency in 1966–70, and a new way of holding corporations accountable for the hidden dangers they impose on consumers and workers, as will be detailed in the next chapter.
When asked his opinion of the French Revolution, Chinese president Chou En-Lai memorably replied, “It’s too soon to tell.” When Tom Brokaw wrote Boom! in 2007, he similarly concluded that it was too soon to issue a verdict on the impact of the multi-faceted Sixties. From my vantage point, however, as an outside consumer advocate and inside progressive politician who lived through them and then applied their values to public policy, it’s past time for an accounting. Then, a generation wouldn’t stay quiet about the cavernous gulf between American ideals and American practices. Now, tensions over racial justice, access to health care, women’s and gay equality, diplomacy and war, and economic and political inequality are reemerging as new chapters in the continuing story of America.