Matusow - The Unraveling of America

Matusow, Allen J. The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s. New York: Harper & Row, 1984.

Argument
JFK and LBJ brought liberalism and the welfare state into broad new areas, where FDR didn't go because WWII intervened and where Ike was indifferent to approach. They succeeded in educational desegregation - despite "white flight" education improved for black children. The North managed to resist desegregation. But the War on Poverty ground to an end without reaching a solution to the problems of equal opportunity, amidst liberal divisions over affirmative action. The economy stumbled because of the unbalanced budgets and inflation caused by LBJ's attempts to have both guns and butter - to fund the war and the social programs. Vietnam revealed the generation gap. The counterculture led to the unraveling of America, peaking at the 68 DNC, and collapsing under the Weathermen and the Black Panthers. The backdrop of the period is one of continued economic prosperity, part of the period from 1950-70, ending in the failure of liberalism.

Review
Kirkendall - AHR
"...to blame the war is to embrace a liberal explanation for liberalism's failure to transform American life, and that is niot tlis author's point of view. For Matusow, the chief obstacle in the way of lar-ge-scale change was liberalism itself. Here the crucial defect was not a tendency to promise too much but weaknesses in perception that rendered the liberals unable to deliver on promises, such as the assurances that liberal measures would create an orderly society. The liberals, according to the author's interpretation, were too soft. They as- sumed that significant changes come easily. They did not understand the problerns they faced, includ- ing poverty, or the solutions to them, including the redistribution of income. Also, they did not think hard enough about the distribution of power and the need to change it. They were too willing to compromise with the corporations, the political bosses, and other power groups."

JAH - Heath
"The book's basic thesis is well summarized on page 127: "By his heroic poses, his urgent rhetoric, his appeal to idealism and the nation's great traditions, Kennedy inadvertently helped to arouse among millions a dormant desire to perfect America.... Only later, during Lyndon Johnson's term as president, would the limits of liberal good will become apparent and the flaws of liberal reform be exposed. "

Parmet - The Democrats

Parmet, Herbert S. The Democrats: The Years After FDR. New York: Macmillan, 1976.

Argument
The book begins with the funeral of LBJ. Though it was published in 76, Parmet is fully aware that LBJ's demise represented the decline of the New Deal coalition. This book tells how that coalition changed and maintained after FDR.

Truman - Moved right in foreign affairs (Cold War), and never able to put his Fair Deal into practice because of foreign distractions. Parmet also argues that the splintering of the Democratic party in 1948 actually helped Truman. Wallace's Progressive party actually placated moderates, making Truman look moderate. Thurmond's Dixiecrats made Truman look good in Civil Rights.

Eisenhower years - Adlai appealed to intellectuals and liberals, and while the Democrats managed to retake the House and Senate, the public showed a preference for the apparently non-politician President who was willing to work with the Democrats and didn't take on the New Deal.

JFK - Upon election, seen as the Democratic version of Nixon: the product of a slick political package, rather than a true Liberal. Style over substance. Even his inaugural address was mostly style with very little specifics

New Frontier - education, Civil Rights, housing

LBJ - Thought to be conservative but turned out to be quite Liberal, in Civil Rights and Great Society.


Review:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2208037
Doenecke - Journal of Southern History

Parmet portrays Stevenson as a conservative, a man whose "stature
impressed just about everybody but a majority of the electorate" (p. 102).
The Illinois governor had a probusiness bias, endorsed FEPC with obvious
reluctance, refused to take a militant pro-Israel stance, and stressed education
as the primary solution to racial tensions. During the Eisenhower
years the party leadership-concentrated in the Congress-shied away
from attacking McCarthyism, presented few alternatives to the President's
programs, and avoided the liberal Democratic Advisory Council.
The Kennedy leadership, so the author continues, was personal, not
partisan, as the party machine had little to do with policy making. Unlike
historians who stress the inertia in America during the early 1960s, Parmet
sees the new administration as remarkably successful, and he cites as
evidence congressional acceptance of a series of proposals ranging from
liberalized trade to the Peace Corps. Problems lay rather in JFK's overreacting
to such international crises as Cuba and Berlin and in a political
style that stressed rhetoric over reality.
In his coverage of the Johnson years Parmet stresses that the executive
department assumed patronage and fund-raising activities, thereby virtually
dismantling the Democratic National Committee. Turning to the
party defeats of 1968 and 1972, he calls Robert F. Kennedy's bid to power
"one of the most . .. clumsy moves in American political history" (p. 249)
but notes that Eugene McCarthy was "regarded as a moderate liberal at
best . . ." (p. 265) and that George McGovern was "certainly not a
radical" (p. 297). After Nixon's second presidential victory the party
hardly possessed anything resembling a program.
The book is particularly strong in its coverage of the South. Like V. 0.
Key, Parmet finds that the South was never monolithic. He shows that
poll-tax proponents were afraid of "undesirable" whites as well as of
blacks and that regional fears of racial equality emerged from a desire to
preserve the economic status quo. He notes how many prominent southern
politicians helped keep most of the South for Truman in 1948, how
Stevenson's detente with the South secured his nomination in 1956, and
how Kennedy depended upon the South to get important bills through
Congress.

Halberstam - Best and the Brightest

Halberstam, David. The Best and the Brightest. New York: Random House, 1972.

Argument
Halberstam uses his reporters' eye and writing skill to set the personalities of the JFK and LBJ Presidencies over the written evidence (particularly from the Pentagon Papers, which emerged a year before this was published) to answer the question: How and why did such intelligent, thoughtful men get involved in the quagmire (as Halberstam's '65 book title called it) of Vietnam?

More specifically, their faith in bombing's chances of success was misplaced and could have been anticipated, and they never fully grasped why France had lost so they were doomed to repeat those mistakes.

The How - From as early as 1950 through JFK Presidency, intelligence and diplomatic correspondence from Vietnam, as well as from policy experts state-side (George Kennan, for example) was filtered before it reached the White House to paint a positive and optimistic picture and support the vision of a winnable intervention in Vietnam. At the same time, various military officers were presenting truthfully pessimistic reports from the field, but they too were filtered out to give the White House what commanders thought they wanted to hear.

The Why - Halberstam suggests that had the post-WWII anxiety about communism not been so thick in the U.S., America would have supported Vietnamese nationalism. Set against Korea (a relatively traditional geopolitical war rather than the nationalist war of Vietnam) and the fall of China, however, the U.S. opted to support France, and eventually step into France's place. Culturally at that moment in time, most U.S. leadership could not see Vietnam for what it truly was: a nationalist war, not a Cold War war.

Culpability of Individuals
JFK - JFK may have erred in putting Dean Rusk in Sec State; he wanted a weak Sec State and got that, but a stronger Sec State might have pushed more policy recommendations in front of JFK instead of telling him what he wanted to hear. When the few honest, pessimistic reports reached him, he was furious. Halberstam implies JFK might not have proceeded with the war escalation LBJ did.

LBJ - Persevered in Vietnam partly because he felt he owed it to JFK's legacy, partly out of his personality.

McNamara - "even if he was brilliant, [McNamara] was not wise." Mac's success in reorganizing the defense budget came from collecting data and making a thorough analysis on his own, outside of the recommendations of military. In Vietnam, he took the reports of others at face values from the beginning.

Westmoreland - Intentionally lowered estimates of troops needed. "Lyndon Johnson was a great salami slicer, and no one was smarter than Westmoreland at knowing how much salami to order at a given time, how much he would be allowed to carry home."

Useful link
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/15/home/halberstam-best.html
Critique: assumption implied by Halberstam, that the history might have been different if the people who understood Vietnam, as well as the people who understood LBJ, had been in the positions of power. This seems to undermine the thesis: the best and the brightest weren't good enough, and were victims of history, bureaucracy, and the Cold War.

Deception of the elite military and bureaucrats: the American public, each other, and themselves

"What shortly becomes clear is that no single military turning point, no single or two or three arch villains explains anything. "Dean Acheson was the architect of our commitment to Vietnam." The Europeanists got us in there to support the French. The Kennedys got us in there because "it gave them opportunities for grace under pressure." The Bay of Pigs really did it because ironically, its aftermath saw "the strengthening of State's tough-minded realists," and the weakening of those less inclined to use force, like Bowles. Maxwell Taylor and the military mind are really responsible because as late as 1961 he mistakenly saw Korea as the parallel war, whereas as Halberstam points out, "The former was a conventional war with a traditional border crossing by a uniformed enemy massing his troops; the latter was a political war conducted by guerrillas and feeding on subversion." Walt Rostow...is the culprit because of his infectious enthusiasm, as a member of the L.B.J. White House, for air war. Machismo, says Halberstam, "was no small part of it." [particularly for LBJ] ...Westmoreland and McNamara are guilty because of their misplaced confidence in ground troops. L.B.J. was the real war criminal when he deceived the American people in July, 1965... Dean Rusk ("color him neutral or color him hardline. Which side was he on? . . .") ought to take the rap because he never spoke up; he never fought; he let McNamara take over State. Take your pick the list is endless. What's interesting, though, are not any key decisions or decision-makers, but the pattern that emerges, a phenomenon we might call The Fallacy of the Misplaced Center. " - From NYT review