Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties

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