Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush.

Anderson, Terry H.

Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush. By Bernard yon Bothmer. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010. 290 pp.

You know a decade has made it to a new level of significance when historians not only write a library of books about its main themes and events, but also write ones about what people later thought about the era and how politicians used the 1960s to further their own political goals.

Framing the Sixties "examines the ways in which four presidents ... used their own selective versions of the 1960s for political gain in the years from 1980 to 2004" (p. 2). Specifically, the book focuses on the presidents' conscious manipulation of five topics: John E Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the civil rights movement, Vietnam War, and the sixties era. The author contends, and then demonstrates convincingly, that each president from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush offered his own conception of the decade.

The sources that the author used are impressive. Presidential communications and speeches, radio and television addresses, comments and statements to reporters, and memoirs of the presidents and of numerous staff members. Moreover, yon Bothmer interviewed 122 politicians, speech writers, cabinet members, advisors, journalists, historians, and activists across the political spectrum. Both liberals and conservatives expressed strong views on the five topics. "Indeed, the majority did not want to stop talking ... the tensions of the 1960s have not cooled" (pp. 4-5).

There are a few problems with this book--as the author admits in his Introduction. He was able to interview only ten women and two African Americans; many others turned down interviews. And others are voiceless. The opinions of activists in the streets in the turbulent decade, of the massive counterculture, of the various empowerment and liberation movements, are not in this book, resulting in a narrative mostly based on the views of white liberal and conservative politicos. As the author admits, what results on these pages is the views of "insiders and elites: the view from above" (p. 5).

Most of the results are not surprising to anyone who lived through and studied these presidential administrations. Ronald Reagan had been running against the sixties when he was governor of California and continually spoke out against the excesses of the era when he was president. In response to nationwide increased sexual activity and drug usage, the First Lady began the "Just Say No" campaign. To Reagan, there was a distinction between Kennedy and the "good sixties" and the excesses of LBJ's Great Society and Vietnam and the "bad sixties." Reagan and his Republican advisors created the "noble war" myth about Vietnam to support his large expansion of the defense budget. At the end of his presidency, Reagan claimed that he "brought American back," and yon Bothmer contends that meant from the 1960s. The author demonstrates that in the 1988 presidential campaign George H. W. Bush "skillfully tarred Dukakis with the brush of the 'bad sixties'" (p. 94) and that victory in the Gulf War "kicked the Vietnam syndrome" (p. 102). Bill Clinton, on the other hand, spoke out in favor of the "good sixties," meaning Kennedy idealism, the Peace Corps, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the civil rights movement. As president he noted that Little Rock in 1957 "made racial equality a driving obsession in my life" (p. 145) and the "profound impact" that King's "I Have a Dream" speech had on him: "my country would never be the same, and neither would I" (p. 146). Racial reconciliation would be a main theme of the Clinton administration. George W. Bush drew no distinction between the good and bad sixties, according to the author. "Consistently he characterized the 1960s as an era that destroyed all the good his father's 'Greatest Generation' had achieved" (p. 179).

The author's interviews resulted in some interesting findings. He notes that liberals usually begin the 1960s with the campaign of John Kennedy and the Greensboro sit-in, while to conservatives, those events were an extension of the 1950s; they begin the 1960s with the Great Society and expansion of the war in Vietnam in 1965. Both seem to see the end of the era with Watergate. Moreover, the author found that neither Democrats nor Republicans contested the gains that women and minorities made during the sixties. Finally, Reagan was the first to use the term "Vietnam Syndrome," and the author provides a fascinating etymology of that term.

This is a fine book, well researched, lucid, and a fun read about the turbulent decade.

--Terry H. Anderson

Texas A&M University