THE 60s REVISITED: James Bowman reviews Steven F. Hayward's recent book, The Age Of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order:

In a larger sense his book is an argument with the Standard Heroic Account of the last 40 years. As such it is another shot in the battle over the historiography of the 1960s, which is what really lies behind the so-called “culture wars” of America today. Most academic historians and the media consensus, still dominated by now-aged reporters who were getting their start in the 1960s, hold to the view that the decade was a period of heroic liberations — most notably from colonialism, from racial segregation, from traditional sexual restraints and traditional male dominance or “patriarchy” — and that its twin achievements in America were the civil rights and the anti-Vietnam War movements. Hayward concentrates his fire on these two triumphs of the American left and purports to show how the first’s wrong turning after the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964 produced today’s racial “balkanization” while the second was fundamentally misconceived from the start — though not without the help of the inept and foolish Johnson administration — and gradually grew dishonest as well.

Not surprisingly, the media come in for rather a lot of bashing, not only in connection with Watergate, which is supposed to have been their finest hour, but also for the reporting, or mis-reporting, of the Goldwater candidacy in 1964, the Reagan phenomenon in the 1960s and again in the 1970s, the Tet offensive and the New Hampshire primary of 1968, which between them reversed the tide of public opinion on Vietnam (though both arguably because of misperceptions of what had actually happened), and the Nixon presidency as a whole. Hayward notes one after another the important facts that the Standard Heroic Account leaves out with respect not only to American successes in Vietnam and the real nature of Nixon’s failure but a host of other markers along the way from 1964 to 1980 — for example, the McGovern commission’s changes in the rules of the Democratic party nominating process after the fiasco of Chicago in 1968. These were “intended to ‘open up’ the Democratic Party, but in fact the effect of the rules changes adopted in the aftermath of Chicago was to lose the party to many of its traditional core constituencies and capture it for a new set of mostly left-leaning factions”.