Customer Reviews

The Last Innocent Year: America In 1964--the Beginning Of The 'sixties'

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"The Last Innocent Year" is an interesting and fast-moving account of events in the U.S. in 1964, with a heavy emphasis on national politics, and above all the unexpected presidency of Lyndon Johnson. Margolis' portrait of Johnson's strong and often prickly personality, and his detailed recounting of Johnson's behind-the-scenes jawboning in support of the Civil Rights Act and his own presidential candidacy, often make this book more of a biography than a history. Although Margolis does recount some of the important events of 1964 that took place outside Washington, such as the "Freedom Summer" in Mississippi and the murders that accompanied it, the rise of Barry Goldwater, the Beatles' American debut, and the Free Speech Movement of Berkeley, this book is mostly about presidential politics. The narrative doesn't really support the title's description of 1964 as being "innocent," and it's hard to see why we should consider 1964 to have been "the beginning of the 'Sixties'."

"The Last Innocent Year" is quite similar in its coverage and tone to Jules Witcover's book about 1968, "The Year the Dream Died." Each book is probably the best account yet published of the events leading up to the year's presidential election. However, Margolis' book provides better detail on events beyond national politics, while Witcover's book, a first-person account, is richer in portraiture and analysis. If asked to recommend only one of the two books, I'd give a slight edge to Witcover, in part because he simply had more interesting material to work with. (Now that I think of it, maybe the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the candidacies of Eugene McCarthy and George Wallace, riots in the cities, the withdrawal of Lyndon Johnson in despair over the Vietnam War, and chaos at the Democratic convention in Chicago, all of which featured in the 1968 campaign, do make 1964 look innocent!)

"The Last Innocent Year" contains a lot of mistakes, some of which other reviewers have already noted. Someone needs to sit down and correct the text, or future students and enthusiasts of the Sixties risk being misinformed by a book that in other respects is an excellent addition to the ever-expanding shelf of books about that fascinating decade.

This is a fine read for those of us of a certain age who remember the events but not the background and secrets behind them. I find the title to be quite appropriate, considering what the following years were about to bring us. Unfortunately, two things mar the book. It is only partially documented, so many statements of fact have to be taken on faith. Why there are footnotes for some facts but not others is a mystery to me. The second weakness is the editing (proofreading). Without trying, I have seen several mistakes: A.M. instead of P.M., Governor "John" Rhodes of Ohio (instead of James), and worst of all, he has Barry Goldwater saying "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no VIRTUE" ! Of course, Ole Barry set off an up-roar by saying VICE. These are errors that any competent editor should have caught.

It's rare to use the word "earnest" in describing a work of history, but it perfectly applies here. Margolis writes at a breakneck pace, which is in keeping with the subject matter. After all, the driving forces of the Year 1964...LBJ, RFK, Barry Goldwater, Civil Rights, Viet Nam, the Beatles...were by no means vehicles of caution! It's full speed ahead, and damn the torpedoes...even if that means more than a few errors crop up in the course of reporting.

Some are minor typos (referring to Staunton Military Academy as "Stanton"), others are just plain old confusion (citing "A Hard Day's Night" as the first US hit for the Beatles, when even the most casual of fan probably knows it was "I Wanna Hold Your Hand"). If you can forgive the sloppy editing, this won't bother you much.

I'd be more than a little surprised to find out that Margolis wasn't deeply influenced by Jeffrey Hart's "From This Moment On: America in 1940," which performs much the same task in an even more seminal year. But whereas Hart wrote in the prose style of the magazine feature writer he was, Margolis hammers out his information in the manner of a news wire reporter. It can be a little disconcerting at times, but it also makes this book nearly impossible to put down.

What a treat! Memories of the 60's roam randomly through the consciousness of those of us who lived them. But Jon Margolis brings 1964 all together--from civil rights to Vietnam to Timothy Leary. It's a seamless story of a turbulent, exciting time.

This is a disappointing book. It is full of hundreds of little snapshots of events, each crying out for greater context and explanation, neither of which is provided. It is also top-heavy with the high politics of Washington, and thus doesn't really keep its promise of giving a panoramic view of the nation's life in 1964. It's interesting but ultimately reads a bit like a script for a not too intellectually taxing TV documentary.

Margolis takes the reader on a rich journey of an unforgettable time in our history. He does so with a poet's touch and an historian's critical eye. It was a joy to read his book.

The year 1964 - well, the events that would shape the nation, anyway, from the funeral of JFK in November '63 to the election results in November '64, as told by the political correspondent for the Chicago Tribune.

It's a large story, encompassing Timothy Leary's early experimentation with LSD, the civil rights movement, the politicization of the campuses, the advent of the Beatles, the early intensification of the police action in Vietnam - there's a lot of material to cover here, so complaints that so much of it were only lightly covered are perhaps unfair. As one could expect from a political correspondent living in DC, most of the book focuses on politics in 1964 - the Johnson/Kennedy relationship is not at all slighted, though Goldwater seems to get much less focus.

In focusing on political maneuvering, there is necessarily a cast of hundreds, and it's sometimes difficult to follow just who everyone is. Written in short vignettes, it jumps from JFK's funeral procession to Andy Warhol to Jack Weinberg in Berkeley (pages 16-17) as the reader is presented with a series of snapshots that do, eventually, become a mural showing a year.

The lack of depth in some areas contrast a bit with the solid depth of others, and every reader will find different parts that they'll wish had been filled out better. An understandable flaw, and probably unavoidable in a book of this length (369 pages plus notes, bibliography, and index in the hardcover edition).

Much more jarring is the author's clear bias - while he talks about Goldwater's campaign, he only touches Goldwater's issues tangentially. He makes it clear that Goldwater was not opposed to the Civil Rights Act because of racism, but never mentions Goldwater's stated reason - that while the law should be colorblind, requiring private businessmen to do business with people they did not wish to do business with was wrong, and not the place of the Federal Government. He even goes so far as to misquote Goldwater's most famous line, reporting "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" as "extremism in the defense of liberty is no virtue".

The author's bias is even more blatant in reporting on business events and the electric industry, referring to Congress' failure to repeal a bill that prevented them from regulating how the utilities would spend a tax savings from the (largely unexamined) tax cut as a 'gift' to the utilities, representing an unearned windfall for them. The author is centrist, solidly supporting the New Deal - and this history reflects it, frequently very obviously.

All in all, an interesting read, but it left me wishing that someone with less bias and less focus on LBJ (who often is psychoanalyzed in these pages, as are other political figures) would cover the same material.