The Last Innocent Year --

How turning points began

The Last Innocent Year, America in 1964, by Jon Margolis. Published by William Morrow and Company, New York. $25 in hard cover.

reviewed by Chris Braithwaite

In 1964 Barry Goldwater sought, and won, the Republican Party’s nomination for president. His effort troubled many prominent Republicans, including Senator George Aiken of Vermont, who urged Goldwater to "disassociate himself from his weird and vulgar supporters."

Goldwater lost the election to Lyndon Johnson, in large part because of his suggestion that low-yield nuclear weapons could be used to defoliate the jungles of Vietnam.

Also in 1964:

The Beatles landed in America for the first time. "How about the Detroit campaign to stamp out the Beatles?" a reporter asked them at the airport.

"First of all, we have a campaign of our own to stamp out Detroit," Paul McCartney replied.

The movie Dr. Strangelove invited America to laugh at the prospect of nuclear annihilation.

A graceful 22-year-old prizefighter named Cassius Clay stunned the sporting world by beating Sonny Liston for the world title, then stunned the rest of the world by announcing that he was not a Christian, but a Muslim.

Ford Motor Company introduced the Mustang.

President Johnson, who had inherited his office with the assassination of John F. Kennedy the prior November, announced the coming of The Great Society.

Three civil rights workers — two white activists from New York and an African American from Mississippi — were murdered by a conspiracy of Mississippi police officers and the Ku Klux Klan.

The Civil Rights bill was passed and signed by the President, finally denying white Americans the right to exclude African Americans from restaurants, bathrooms, and public facilities of all kinds.

Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, empowering Johnson and his administration "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States." Earlier in the year, military officials told the president that 220 Americans had died in combat in Vietnam since 1961.

The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, formed by African Americans who had been excluded from electoral politics in that state, took a bus to Atlanta and challenged Mississippi’s official delegation at the Democratic National Convention.

The President signed the Economic Opportunity Act, essentially providing the legislative ammunition for his War on Poverty.

The Free Speech Movement was founded at the Berkeley campus of the University of California, and one of its leaders issued a warning to his peers: "Never trust anyone over 30."

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent the Reverend Martin Luther King a tape of the worst tidbits of material collected by tapping his phones and bugging his hotel rooms, with the suggestion that he commit suicide before Christmas.

Johnson was elected to his first (and last) full term as President of the United States.

OK, 1964 was a busy year.

But why write a book about it?

Jon Margolis, who was at the Barton Library Friday night to read from The Last Innocent Year, America in 1964, provided the short answer.

For this veteran journalist, who has retired from reporting but not from writing, it was a monumental assignment.

William Morrow and Company, a New York publishing house, wanted a book about 1964. Mr. Margolis’s agent suggested him for the job.

Mr. Margolis, who wrote for the Chicago Tribune for 22 years, primarily as its chief national political correspondent, turned to journalism for his preliminary research. He was delighted, he said Friday, to find back copies of the New York Times, Newsweek, and Time at the Lyndon State College library. That’s where he spent a good deal of 1997.

But his researches also took him to the Johnson Library in Texas, where he could not only obtain word-for-word accounts of the President’s meetings and telephone conversations, but also hear the words on tape and capture the flavor of the man.

Among the remarkable fruits of those labors are friendly, innocently flirtatious phone conversations between Johnson and the recently widowed Jacqueline Kennedy. He called her "honey" and threatened to have the FBI pick her up, if she didn’t come visit.

Mr. Margolis also interviewed key players who had survived the intervening 33 years. And he read a lot of books. His book’s bibliography runs to four pages.

Jon Margolis has written an important book, and done a lot of talking about it around the country. But even among a small group of his neighbors Friday night, he was a bit uncomfortable with his new role.

"I used to listen to speeches for a living," he said as a preamble to his own. And, a few minutes later: "Not that I’m an expert on anything. I’m just a newspaper reporter."

But if newspaper reporters learn how to do anything, it’s how to keep the reader’s attention.

Mr. Margolis learned that skill well, and has managed to extend it from a few paragraphs on the front page of a daily newspaper to a 369-page book.

Here, for example, is the conclusion of his discussion of a key social trend of the sixties, the middle-class exodus to suburbia:

"By 1964, a majority of America’s white middle-income teenagers had grown up in a neat, orderly, well-maintained artificial setting.

"Some of them were bored out of their minds."

That observation comes early in the book, and helps establish the thread of coherence the author discovered in what was, for those who lived through it, a pretty confusing year.

Again and again in 1964, the established seats of American power were called into question. Again and again, their pat pronouncements were challenged and ultimately dismissed as irrelevant.

It was, Mr. Margolis notes, at least as much the spirit of the new right as of the new left. On the left, the young people who founded Students for a Democratic Society were just getting rolling.

It was the Young Americans for Freedom who helped Barry Goldwater take control of the Republican Party, unseating such weighty establishment names as Rockefeller, Lodge, and Scranton.

"In common," Mr. Margolis writes, "right-wing and left-wing youth delivered this message: Don’t tell us what to do."

It needs to be said that this only becomes obvious to those who read the book. Almost anybody who lived through the sixties, this writer included, would pick 1968 as the key, pivotal year. The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Johnson’s abandonment of the presidency, the self-immolation of the Democratic Party at its Chicago convention, the election of Richard Nixon, all haunt our memories of that dark year.

To understand 1964, one might borrow the harsh phrase Malcom X used late in 1963, on the death of President Kennedy: "chickens will come home to roost."

If 1968 is the year America’s chickens came home to roost, Mr. Margolis makes us understand that a remarkable number of the eggs were laid in 1964.

Another journalistic skill the author brings to the book is a reporter’s objectivity.

He neither laments the passing of the establishment nor celebrates the unruly youngsters who were tearing it down. He simply reports.

He reports, sympathetically, on "the discovery that political activity — the association of yourself with your generation — could provide an emotional home more stable than a suburban subdivision had ever been."

But he can write, a few pages later, "A detached self-indigence in which style was at least as important as substance was part of what was motivating both Barry Goldwater’s movement and SNCC."

(Despite its peaceful name, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was on the radical side of the civil rights movement.)

Mr. Margolis also provides a remarkably sympathetic portrait of 1964’s president, Lyndon Johnson. This came as something of a surprise, the author said Friday night.

"I remember hating LBJ," he told his audience in Barton. "By 1968 he was so awful!"

The LBJ of The Last Innocent Year is a man determined to make radical improvements at home as he presided over a war that was going to tear his country apart.

He inherited America’s Vietnam policy from the dead president he replaced. Worse luck, he inherited Kennedy’s team of high-powered advisors, and was never able to reject their advice in the difficult arena of foreign policy.

"Johnson, the kid from West Texas, could never stand up to people who went to Harvard and Yale," Mr. Margolis said Friday.

In his book, he offers this view of Johnson’s early Vietnam policy: "Contrary to his own instincts, then, or at least some of them, the president soldiered on, fortified by the advice of the smartest folks around, comforting himself that, if nothing else, he was doing what John Kennedy would have done."

There is, of course, no way of knowing what John Kennedy would have done. We know what Johnson did.

On the positive side, Mr. Margolis writes in an epilogue, LBJ’s legacy has not disappeared. "In fact, it is so pervasive that it blends into the landscape, rendering it hard to see."

However, he writes, Johnson’s Great Society "came a cropper thanks to the petty design he inherited, the Vietnam War. The war and the protest against it tore the Democratic Party into pieces, and they have not been reassembled three decades later."

To anyone who was around, and conscious, in 1964, The Last Innocent Year will be fascinating reading — sort of a guided tour through the caverns of your own memory.

I would be curious to know how it reads to those for whom 1964 is ancient history.

Would it hold its interest, or become merely a long list of confusing and ultimately trivial events? (If someone of suitable age wants to answer that question, the Chronicle’s paltry book review fee is available.)

I can only say that for this reader, who got his first newspaper job a few months after Mr. Margolis entered the trade with a suburban New Jersey paper in the fall of 1963, his book is anything but trivial.