1965 Ad

Public Interest, Fall, 1995 by George F. Will

There never has been an uneventful year in American history. How could there be? This nation, continental in scope and creedal in nature, is congenitally restless and constantly improvising. But rarely has there been a year eventful in the way 1965 was. That year was the hinge of our postwar history. The prestige of government, and government's confidence, not to say hubris, were at apogees. They were higher than at any time since 1945, and arguably higher than at any time since government came here with the first colonists on their errand into the American wilderness. In the autumn of 1965, that year that was the incubator of so many of our current controversies, The Public Interest was born. In the nick of time. There was a whirlwind in the White House and whirl was about to become king.

The first issue of this journal appeared in the first week of October. The front pages of the New York Times that week reported Fidel Castro's revelation that the Guevara had left Cuba earlier in the year for what Castro called "a new field of battle in the struggle against imperialism." Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara announced that U.S. forces in Vietnam - there had been no combat troops there when the year began - numbered 130,000 and might be increased. Republican leaders, still smarting from the anti-Goldwater landslide of the previous November, denied any connection between their party and the John Birch Society. At the Statue of Liberty, President Johnson signed a bill liberalizing immigration: A society assured of a future characterized by surplus could afford to be welcoming. In Crawfordville, Georgia, state troopers turned away black children as they tried to board buses bound for all-white schools.

The most popular movie was The Sound of Music and the most watched television program was "Bonanza": folk singers and cowboys practicing what would come to be called family values. One of the year's most popular songs was Frank Sinatra's ballad "It Was a Very Good Year." For those for whom the going was especially good, a six-room duplex on Fifth Avenue in the 1960s could be had for $575 a month. Even an IBM keypunch operator could make as much as $90 a week. Another very popular song - decidedly no ballad - was the Rolling Stones' "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." But that song was about girls, not politics.

LBJ's opportunity

It was a year in which the 8 percent growth of GNP drove the Dow Jones average to 969, with negligible inflation (1.6 percent) and essentially full employment (the unemployment rate was 4.5 percent). It was a year of immense satisfaction to the president who bestrode Washington and was causing that city to supplant New York, where The Public Interest was published until 1987, as the focus of national attention. After The Public Interest moved to Washington, Irving Kristol, its co-editor, wrote, "New York may not be what it used to be, but we understand that Washington is not yet what it might be." If in 1965 Washington was not the nation's steering wheel and accelerator, that wasn't for want of trying by Lyndon Johnson.

In 1965 Lyndon Johnson was in a hurry. On the fourth of January, 16 days before his Inauguration, he stood, at the rostrum of the House of Representatives announcing "the excitement of great expectations." Woodrow Wilson, the first president to provide a theory for the modern presidency as uniquely qualified interpreter of the public's unarticulated yearnings and unrecognized needs, had, fittingly, been the first president since Jefferson actually to go to Congress to deliver a State of the Union message. Johnson, characteristically, would do more than that. Stephen Gettinger of Congressional Quarterly notes that in 1965 Johnson became the first president to deliver a State of the Union address to a national prime-time television audience. There was a time when virtually all presidential communication was addressed to the legislative branch, not to the public at large. But that had changed, especially since the coming of broadcasting, and the use made of it by Franklin Roosevelt, who was president when Johnson first came to Washington as a Capitol Hill staffer. The legislative branch was no longer enough of an audience.

Besides, the legislative branch arrayed before Johnson that night was, he had every right to think, his poodle. It had been decisively shaped by the 1964 election, which presumably had forever settled the hash of a certain strand of conservatism - the Southern and Southwestern sort that spoke anachronistically of a federal government of limited, delegated, and enumerated powers. That conservatism had been ridden into the sunset and out of history by Barry Goldwater, the "cheerful malcontent." His was the ideology of a minority that was not at all cheerful. That minority believed that the government was becoming oppressive. But Johnson's 61 percent of the vote indicated that that minority did not much matter. Sixty-eight of 100 senators and 295 of 435 representatives were Democrats. House Democrats took away the seniority of two of their Southern colleagues who had supported Goldwater. Best to nip in the bud any Southern flirtation with the Republican party. (The punishment may have fit the crime, but it was not a success as a deterrent. In the South, in every election since 1964. Republican candidates for House seats have received more votes than in the preceding election, and Democratic candidates have received fewer.)