William Lovelace, Express, Getty Images
In March 1965, policemen look on during a march for black voting rights in Montgomery, Ala.
“The notion that you can carve up history by decades” is increasingly suspect among historians, says an eminence of the discipline, James T. Patterson.
“Sometimes,” he says from Providence, R.I., where he is an emeritus professor of history at Brown University, “it works quite well, like the Dirty Thirties, as they are called, or the Roaring Twenties, although they weren’t so roaring for a lot of people.”
The Bancroft Prize-winning historian favored a broad sweep in his Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (Oxford University Press, 1997), a book of 829 pages. Similar was Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (Oxford, 2005), which, like Grand Expectations, was in OUP’s History of the United States series.
By contrast, Patterson’s new book, The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America (Basic Books), employs a narrow gauge. It argues that that one year was pivotal in postwar American politics, society, and culture.
It revisits the year he investigated in Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle Over Black Family Life From LBJ to Obama (Basic, 2010), which placed the galvanizing government report not just in the year of its release, 1965, but also in the context of the United States’ long history of troubled race relations.
Patterson’s new book suggests that in no other year in the 1960s was the national mood as elevated as it was at the beginning of 1965. Lighting the 1964 White House Christmas tree, President Lyndon B. Johnson had proclaimed that in “the most hopeful times in all the years since Christ was born,” the country faced “no irreconcilable conflicts.”
But 12 months later, hope of such harmony had faded.
How, asks Patterson, could such a turnaround occur? Johnson, a masterful manager of Congress who was riding high from the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a landslide election win against Barry Goldwater, and a booming economy, set about securing many more advances in his liberal “Great Society.” Indeed, 1965 would see a powerful Voting Rights Act, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, Medicare and Medicaid, and overdue immigration reform.
But by midsummer, engagement in the Vietnam War had escalated. American troop numbers leapt from 23,000 to 184,000, and round-the-clock bombing had begun. And that was ushering in draft-card burning and other forms of domestic resistance. The South erupted in racial violence after the brutal suppression of protesters in Selma, Ala. Then, five days after President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act, the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles exploded, too. Not surprisingly, younger black leaders lost faith in civil-rights figures’ nonviolent, interracial engagement. Reading the mood, rock musicians decried materialism, militarism, and racism.
And a “rights revolution” was gathering force: “a volatile mixture of restlessness, rights-consciousness, and discord,” writes Patterson. It extended to many issues of race and socioeconomic class; thanks to figures like Cesar Chavez, those included the plight of farmworkers and other exploited sectors of the labor force.
Even more dramatic than 1965, Patterson allows, was the year 1968, as many historians have noted. But, he says by phone, “my argument is not that 1965 is the most dramatic or exciting in the 60s, but it’s what I and a lot of other historians, now, believe that what we think of as the 60s really got a quick start.” Before that year, he argues, most Americans went about their lives much as they had in the 1950s, although sobered after 1963 by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
The annus horribilis, 1968, saw the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the election of Richard M. Nixon after the debacle of a protest-ridden Democratic National Convention, and the shocking bloodbath of the Tet offensive in Vietnam.
But, Patterson writes, “the major events of 1968, awesome though they were, mainly exacerbated shifts of mood—and of politics, culture, and foreign policies—that first became significant during 1965.”
One concession he does make is that the title of his book, The Eve of Destruction, may be too dramatic by comparison with its subtitle. Certainly its working title, “1965: The First Year of the ‘60s,” was more in keeping with the straightforwardness of his earlier books’ titles. Destruction was only part of the legacy of 1965, he says. For example, it was “the most dramatic year ever in the modern history of domestic legislation,” because even though “many pieces of legislation were oversold and became controversial, many were permanent and pivotal events.”
Patterson’s goal in selecting one year, he says, is to create a focused synthesis of an era, taking in not just 1965 but also its aftermath. He intends The Eve of Destruction to inform “people who just hear about the 60s as opposed to those who read about them and know that the notion of them running from 1960 to 1970 is not a very helpful way of looking at it.” That may include high-school and college students as well as general readers.
He had hoped to engage such readers with greater coverage of popular culture, but he acceded to his editors’ request for a tighter book. One painful cut had another source: copyright restrictions. They prevented him from including lyrics from the song from which the book takes its title, Barry McGuire’s surprising 1965 hit, “Eve of Destruction,” composed by a 19-year-old, P.F. Sloan.
Patterson writes: “Its lyrics, accompanied by sounds of bombs going off, were bitter, blunt, and devastatingly bleak about contemporary events, predicting that all manner of terrible developments—war in Vietnam, racial tensions, nuclear weapons—were propelling the United States (and “the whole crazy world”) toward the apocalypse.”
