Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties [Hardcover]

W. J. Rorabaugh (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 16, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0521816173 | ISBN-13: 978-0521816175 | Edition: 1St Edition

This book explores life in America during that brief promising period in the early sixties when John F. Kennedy was the U.S. president. Kennedy's optimism and charm helped to give promise to the times. At the same time, Cold War frustrations in Cuba and Vietnam worried Americans, while the 1962 Missile Crisis narrowly avoided a nuclear disaster. Early in the decade, the Civil Rights movement gained momentum through student sit-ins and Freedom Rides. Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as a powerful spokesman for non-violent social change and gave his powerful "I Have a Dream" speech at the March on Washington in 1963. The Civil Rights movement proved to be the seedbed for many other movements in the decade. The American family was also undergoing rapid change and Betty Friedan launched what became the Women's Movement in 1963. Culture, too, underwent transformation. The Beat authors Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsburg gained respectability, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan revived folk music, and Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol produced Pop Art. Ginsberg, Aldous Huxley, Timothy Leary and Ken Kesey began to promote psychedelic drugs. The Sixties was a decade of marked political, social, and cultural change. Since 1976 W.J. Rorabaugh has taught at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the author of The Alcoholic republic (Oxford, 1979), The Craft Apprentice (Oxford, 1986), and Berkeley at War: The 1960s (Oxford, 1989). Professor Rorabaugh has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Newberry Library, the Huntington Library, and the John F. Kennedy Library. He has served on editorial boards for the Journal of Early Republic and the History of Education Quarterly.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

W.J. Rorabaugh offers a social history of the early 1960s through the lens of John F. Kennedy's presidential career. JFK, writes Rorabaugh, "was both a unique figure and a true representative of his times." He governed during the bleakest years of the Cold War, which coincided with the emergence of the civil rights movement, the rise of feminist ambition, and, through the Beats, the invention of postmodernism. The myth of Camelot has led many Americans to believe that these were a final few idyllic years before the disastrous arrival of political assassinations, urban riots, and failure in Vietnam, but Rorabaugh shows how these explosive developments all had roots in social commotion taking place less visibly under Kennedy's watch. Americans may have been "hooked on hope" during these years, Rorabaugh writes, but they were also setting themselves up for a hard fall: "A general mood of optimism is necessary to launch any period of reform, but the prevalence to that very mood causes reformers to push for changes that go well beyond the society's capacity for change in a short period of time." It is impossible to understand modern America without understanding what happened during this period, and Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties is an excellent introduction to it. --John J. Miller

From Publishers Weekly

University of Washington history professor Rorabaugh (Berkeley at War, etc.) argues persuasively that John F. Kennedy personified a narrow slice of American history that was both brazenly optimistic and wantonly self-deceiving. Rorabaugh paints Kennedy as a mirror of his age and Camelot as a highly romanticized fiction of a golden moment that never was. Golden it wasn't, writes the author, promising it was. Rorabaugh sees Kennedy's tenure as a unique in-between time, coming just after the more conservative, cautious and complacent 1950s and just before the more frenzied, often raucous, and even violent late '60s. (In 1962, Rorabaugh notes, the conservative Young Americans for Freedom boasted a national campus membership of over 20,000, while the New Left Students for a Democratic Society carried a roster of just 500. These proportions would be reversed within six years.) And he shows how many of the optimistic seeds sewn by Kennedy, who believed, among other things, that he could confidently defend all free-world borders against Communism, were quickly strangled by weeds of cynicism and doubt as the '60s progressed. In the final analysis, Rorabaugh sees Kennedy's America as a place of clearly delineated rights and wrongs, good and evil, the defining lines of which began to dissolve not long after (though certainly not because of) Kennedy's death. Upon closing this fresh analysis of an era, one is left wondering whether JFK would have even recognized the United States where his brother Bobby campaigned for a second Camelot, and where he himself became a martyr in 1968.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 342 pages
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1St Edition edition (September 16, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0521816173
• ISBN-13: 978-0521816175
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,481,157 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Postmodernism Begins, December 26, 2002

By 

Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties (Hardcover)

In KENNEDY AND THE PROMISE OF THE SIXTIES, Rorabaugh does a good job of supporting his thesis that the Kennedy administration, though short, was a critical era during which today's postmodern politics, culture, art and literature were born. In politics, it was Kennedy's reliance upon image marketing and private (his father's) money that undid the old backroom deals of the earlier political structure. Also, the civil rights movement came into new prominence in the March on Washington, the women's movement was reborn in its train, Pop Art replaced Abstract Expressionism, and Beat literature and the Folk music boomed.

Rorabaugh credits the Kennedy administration for encouraging a break with the introverted, conformist world of the 50s -- giving tacit permission to a new extrovert culture where how one felt could be more freely expressed. It was an "inside out" time, he argues, which unleashed great optimism and creativity, but chaos and uncertainty as well. He neatly traces the early 1950s rumblings of political and social dissatisfaction against the bland bourgeoisie pursuits of money-making and family raising, showing how that earlier era set the stage for the early 60s explosion of the civil rights movement, and identity politics. He shows how the pursuit of social justice combined with the pursuit of radical non-conformity were tacitly endorsed during that era as an antidote to the anti-communist panics as practiced most famously by McCarthy and Nixon.

But of course there was a darker side to the new "inside out" world Kennedy helped create: image politics were born -- a politics of money and marketing. He points out that Kennedy's platform was not a platform as much as it was a positioning against the previous administration. Kennedy merely promised he would "get the country moving again," talked provocatively of a (non-existent) missile gap. The Kennedy's used the media brilliantly and the media, especially television, used them. For the media recognized in Kennedy a perfect mythic story - Camelot - and could not get enough of Jackie, the kids, and the young president himself. In the photo spreads in LIFE, the White House tours on TV, the era of celebrity politics began.

Rorabaugh is at his best in showing how the myths of the Kennedy image machine served to shield it from criticism then and now. Starting with the Bay of Pigs disaster followed by the Cuban Missile Crisis, Rorabaugh shows how an administration hypnotized by its press-clippings never had any real policies, but reeled from one crisis to the next. Rorabaugh suggests because of the administration's embarrassment in its dealings with Castro and Khrushchev, Kennedy talked tougher and committed more money to supporting the corrupt South Vietnamese government than was necessary or appropriate, and thus laid the groundwork for the disaster in Vietnam as well.

The author also does a good job also of showing how Kennedy's love of intellectual brilliance and as his concentration on surface appearances got him into other kinds of trouble as well. For example, in bringing in from private business such bureaucratic luminaries such as McNamara and the other Whiz Kids, Kennedy set a new tone of technocratic brilliance and efficiency. Ultimately, the Whiz Kids gave bad advice to Kennedy during his two big crises with the communists, and terrible advice to Lyndon Johnson on Vietnam. Rorabaugh notes that Sam Rayburn commented at the time that he found it difficult to work with people who'd never so much as run for sheriff. The Washington of today is similarly filled with powerful unelected actors -- another vexed legacy of the Kennedy era. The difference is now perhaps that these powerful actors are more likely to be lobbyists, less likely to be government employees.

Rorabaugh, though he doesn't spend a lot of time on it, is particularly good on the cultural backdrop of the Kennedy years. Especially impressive is his brief history of the rise of Johns, Warhol, and Rauschenberg against the previous generation of Abstract Expressionists. Celebrating the surface like their president, the pop artists fully embraced the world of mass production and consumerism, celebrating it and taking it for granted in a way that the Abstract Expressionists, steeped in the strictures of the Modernists, never could.

At its best, the book serves to help demystify and put into perspective an era that seems to be recalled these days almost exclusively as hopeful and upbeat, as a kind of prelude to the storm of the "real 60s". Rorabaugh shows that while it was an era that was filled with hope, much of that hope was mere aura created by the myth makers in the White House and an all too willing media. Yes, most of the American people were ready for a new birth of social justice. Yes, the Peace Corp energized a lot of young Americans. But the high tenor of hope generated by the administration, Rorabaugh suggests, was so popular and dominant precisely because it balanced its very real and compelling opposite: the very real fear of nuclear annihilation - a fear which the Kennedy administration's ineptitude almost managed to make real.

On a personal level, I recall as an elementary school kid in the early 60s that both importance of physical fitness and mathematics were strongly emphasized for young people by the administration during those years. Kennedy told us not to ask what our country could do for us, but to ask what we could do for our country. And we wanted to do something for our country. At the same time we learned to clasp our necks (to keep the flying glass from a nuclear explosion from severing an artery) as we balled ourselves up like pill bugs under our little desks. I also recall that more than anything I wanted us to be a family that had a bomb shelter. I recall that somehow I thought that in digging a shelter I would not only help thwart the Russians, but that it would be good exercise, too.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars AN OPENING CHORUS CLOSED?, May 7, 2003

By 

G. L. Rowsey (benicia, ca United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties (Hardcover)

This is a short, well-written and most welcome history of prominent social, cultural and political developments during JFK's almost-1000 days, most welcome to persons like myself who graduated from college to "come of age" from 1960 through 1964, and who have seen our coming-of-age-time, over all, largely considered an un-event. The book was for me a memory lane experience and thank you, Mr. Rorabaugh, for unearthing us.

Only tiny minorities of "us" were SDS or SNCC activists or right-wing radicals in college. Probably 98% of us were too torn by the hopes and disappointments you describe to commit to choices we correctly perceived would affect the rest of our lives. Even before November 22, 1963, the course the U.S. was following in Indochina was clear and either solidifed or undermined college students' career, or lack of career, choices. Graduating from a prestigious law school in 1966, I was in a (miniscule?) minority that temporised in effect and joined the black (and AIM) inspired, anti-war, sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll, counter-culture. Not communists, then, certainly many of us became even more disillusioned than those millions five years younger whom we joined; we were probably more appalled, for example, when a Chicago Seven defendant became an insurance salesman.

The only problem with your popular history, as I see it Mr. Rorabaugh, is that its Conclusion goes nowhere. Evidently you, or more likely your editors, were precluded by historical orthodoxy from asserting that the counter-culture of the middle sixties was a logical development from radicalism in Kennedy's times; and it was a Good and Necessary Thing; and if this GNT hadn't occurred, in 1968 we likely would have got not Nixon but Reagan.

5.0 out of 5 stars "Ah, yes, I remember it well...", January 10, 2012

By 

Arthur H. Hahn "voracious reader" (North Charleston, SC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties (Paperback)

Book deals more with life in the US back during JFK's presidency. Brought back many "good old tapes" for me. The author's writing is very smooth & interesting.