The 1960s might be called the burnt-over decade; strife over civil rights set American cities alight; women demanding greater rights torched their bras; and the draft cards of many antiwar protestors went up in flames. The youth revolt assaulted all the bastions of tradition; the sense of innocence that pervaded American culture gave way to a cynicism that polarized- and still does- American society. While West Point appeared as an oasis of order and discipline, it could not entirely escape the turmoil and demands for change. The cadets, after all, were products of that same overindulged baby boomer generation.

One of the strangest things about these five downhill years of the Nixon presidency is that despite all the savage excesses committed by the people he chose to run the country, no real opposition or realistic alternative to Richard Nixon’s cheap and mean-hearted view of the American Dream has ever developed. It is almost as if that sour 1968 election rang down the curtain on career politicians. This is the horror of American politics today - not that Richard Nixon and his fixers have been crippled, convicted, indicted, disgraced and even jailed - but that the only available alternatives are not much better; the same dim collection of burned-out hacks who have been fouling our air with their gibberish for the last tenty years. How long, oh Lord, how long? And how much longer will we have to wait before some high-powered shark with a fistful of answers will finally bring us face-to-face with the ugly question that is already so close to the surface in this country, that sooner or later even politicians will have to cope with it? Is this democracy worth all the risks and problems that necessarily go with it? Or, would we all be happier by admitting that the whole thing was a lark from the start and now that it hasn’t worked out, to hell with it.

The 1960s were revolutionary times. Across the world, people demanded national independence, racial equality, women's rights, and more humane societies. Their actions gave birth to radical changes in politics, culture, and social relations that influence our lives to the present day. Specific events and individuals moved the hearts of Puerto Ricans living in the United States. The African American struggle for freedom and justice led the way. Malcolm X's powerful speeches about self-determination and self-defense taught us that revolutionary change was in our hands. When Malcolm was assassinated in 1965, we mourned the loss of a great spokesman and leader. Two months later, don Pedro Albizu Campos, Puerto Rican freedom fighter, died after being imprisoned for twenty-six years in the United States where he was subjected to radiation experiments. Again, we cried and grieved a national hero. The war in Vietnam dominated global attention. In 1968, the Tet Offensive a series of attacks by North Vietnamese forces on South Vietnamese cities, including on the US Embassy grounds in Saigon-shocked the world. The American command retaliated swiftly causing heavy casualties, and live television coverage brought the war's reality into our homes. Worldwide protests intensified. A year earlier, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken out against the war, calling it an enemy of the poor among other things. Emphasizing the relation between the war machine and poverty, Dr. King organized the Poor People's Campaign urging black, white, brown, and Asian people to camp out in front of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. until either a job or a living income was guaranteed for all. When Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, thousands took to the streets in more than two hundred uprisings in 172 cities. Many had lost faith, and no longer believed, that America could be reformed via elections or demonstrations. A new wave of grassroots militancy surged.

Forty-four years ago, the United States and the conservative movement were in dire straits. Both had been betrayed by the Washington establishment and were uncertain whom to trust. Both were internally splintered and strategically adrift. Worse still, at that moment of acute vulnerability and division, we found ourselves besieged by existential adversaries, foreign and domestic. The late 1970s were by any measure a historic low point for America and the political coalition dedicated to preserving its unique legacy of human flourishing and freedom.
Today, America and the conservative movement are enduring an era of division and danger akin to the late 1970s. Now, as then, our political class has been discredited by wholesale dishonesty and corruption. Look at America under the ruling and cultural elite today: Inflation is ravaging family budgets, drug overdose deaths continue to escalate, and children suffer the toxic normalization of transgenderism with drag queens and pornography invading their school libraries. Overseas, a totalitarian Communist dictatorship in Beijing is engaged in a strategic, cultural, and economic Cold War against America’s interests, values, and people—all while globalist elites in Washington awaken only slowly to that growing threat. Moreover, low-income communities are drowning in addiction and government dependence. Contemporary elites have even repurposed the worst ingredients of 1970s “radical chic” to build the totalitarian cult known today as “The Great Awokening.” And now, as then, the Republican Party seems to have little understanding about what to do. Most alarming of all, the very moral foundations of our society are in peril.

No feature of American—to some extent of Anglo-Saxon—politics is so certain as the tendency of politicians to become first the captives, then the agents, of their opposition. ...In the 1960s, liberal Democrats... urged peace and international amity but continued the Cold War and plunged the country into Vietnam. ...partly because they feared being called appeasers and crypto-Communists by the right. Richard Nixon, having impeccable credentials as a Cold Warrior, moved towards peace or accommodation with Moscow and Peking and withdrew... from Vietnam. Thus on foreign policy he outflanked his liberal opposition. When Professor Milton Friedman proposed a guaranteed income for the poor, it was considered (quite correctly) an act of creative imagination. When a Republican administration proposed it to Congress, it was a mark of conservative statemanship. When George McGovern, running for President, advanced a close variant... it was condemned by conservatives as the dream of a fiscal maniac. As known and stalwart defenders of the dollar, the Republicans were able, in the early 1970s, to devalue it... twice. For anyone suspected of a more flexible attitude towards the integrity of the dollar, such action would have been exceedingly perilous.

I enjoyed the late 1960s as much as anyone, and I regarded much of the political ferment of the time as vital to the survival of our society—the Vietnam war might have gone on for many decades more without it. But the era did have its silly side, and the search for the immediately relevant at the expense of the less immediately practical side was, to me, one of the sillier aspects of it. Throwing most of past human knowledge overboard for the sake of bringing about instant social reform did not strike me as an effective way of achieving anything but ignorance. Evidently it seemed that way to others, too: after a while the traditional sciences and historical subjects returned to the curriculum, Shakespeare and Sophocles were allowed back in also, and not a great deal was heard from the earnest, deadly young decreers of non-negotiable demands who had had such power over academic life for a time. (Although a lot of them grew up and became university professors, and they are behind the modern craze for political correctness that has spread so much terror through our academic institutions.)

A lot has been written about college students and other young people who rebelled against society during the 1960s. But there was another, quieter revolution sweeping across the land during the same decade. It was a rebellion of ordinary people. A generation of middle-class Americans who had worked hard to make something of their lives was growing mistrustful of a government that took an average of thirty-seven cents of every dollar they earned and still plunged deeper into debt. There was a growing sense of helplessness and frustration across the country over a government that was becoming a separate force of its own, a master of the people, not the other way around.

Where there had been hope, there was now hopelessness. Where there had been courage, there was now cynicism. Where there had been life, there was a living death. During Nixon's reign, much of life was transformed into a nightmare.

The progress of the last 40 years has been mostly cultural, culminating, the last couple of years, in the broad legalization of same-sex marriage. But by many other measures, especially economic, things have gotten worse, thanks to the establishment of neo-liberal principles — anti-unionism, deregulation, and intensified, unconscionable greed — that began with Richard Nixon and picked up steam under Ronald Reagan. Too many are suffering now because too few were fighting then.

That is where we stand today. And what lies ahead? Will we be able to solve our social and economic problems, clean up our environment, maybe even improve our technology to the point where we can land a manned spacecraft on Trump? Unfortunately, we cannot know what will happen in the future. If this book proves anything, it's that we don't even know what happened in the past. But we do know this: America is a strong and great country, and her people have withstood many trials and tribulations (More tribulations, actually, because many never went to trial.). And whatever problems lie ahead, we may be sure of one thing: that if we all work together and "hang tough," there will come a day when this nation- maybe not in the next few years; maybe not even in our lifetimes; but someday- will see the end of "Dick" Nixon's political career. But we wouldn't bet on it.

“I’m the fellow that ended the draft. I’m the one that stopped the nuclear testing in the north Pacific. I’m the one that brought about the Alaska pipeline. I’m the one that released the Pentagon Papers and had to go to the Supreme Court because Richard Nixon was trying to throw me in jail. That’s what I did 28, 29, 30 years ago. That was leadership then. And I was excoriated by the media at that point. I was a loose cannon. Well, right today, I’ve had the good fortune to live this long, and people look back and say, “My God, were you a courageous leader.” Well, that’s the leadership you’ll get when I become president of the United States. Now, can the American people stand that kind of leadership? That remains to be seen.”Huffpost Debate

Yet students of history will note that, notwithstanding all those challenges, the late 1970s proved to be the moment when the political Right unified itself and the country and led the United States to historic political, economic, and global victories. The Heritage Foundation is proud to have played a small but pivotal role in that story. It was in early 1979—amid stagflation, gas lines, and the Red Army’s invasion of Afghanistan, the nadir of Jimmy Carter’s days of malaise—that Heritage launched the Mandate for Leadership project. We brought together hundreds of conservative scholars and academics across the conservative movement. Together, this team created a 20-volume, 3,000-page governing handbook containing more than 2,000 conservative policies to reform the federal government and rescue the American people from Washington dysfunction. It was a promise from the conservative movement to the country—confident, specific, and clear. Mandate for Leadership was published in January 1981—the same month Ronald Reagan was sworn into his presidency. By the end of that year, more than 60 percent of its recommendations had become policy—and Reagan was on his way to ending stagflation, reviving American confidence and prosperity, and winning the Cold War.
The bad news today is that our political establishment and cultural elite have once again driven America toward decline. The good news is that we know the way out even though the challenges today are not what they were in the 1970s. Conservatives should be confident that we can rescue our kids, reclaim our culture, revive our economy, and defeat the anti-American Left—at home and abroad. We did it before and will do it again.

The era called the sixties can be said to run from 1955 (the Montgomery bus boycott) to 1975 (when the mass movements had died down and most activists were moving on to new forms of struggle or non-political priorities). But many of the authors of those two dozen books end the era in 1970, not because the decade formally ended then but largely because that was when male-led, white student protest sharply declined. This dating negates high points of struggle by peoples of color (such as the Native American armed occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973) and by the women's movement, which reached its heights after 1970. By their dating of the era, our authors impose an overwhelmingly white male definition on it.

The old-timers from the Forties and Fifties predicted the "Coming Red Dictatorship". Those of us around and active in the Sixties were taught to dread the "Black Revolution" and that of the "New Left", the Yippies, etc. - none of which ever took place. Or did they? I'll just put it this way: all of their vile and sick demands either already have been implemented or are well on their way. The kind of sick filth that prevails today and much of which has long since been coded in law books is the sort of stuff that is so insidious and destructive that Joseph Stalin himself - that "Arch Red", right? - would have, and very often did go all out to root up and get rid of before the whole structure of society was devoured by it. While we've been on guard against threatening menaces, things far worse have overtaken us. Things so foul and deep rooted that it's even hard to put a finger on them. One thing for certain however, taken together, it all adds up to a national death sleep. Rockwell called the situation in the Sixties that very thing, except he believed enough White Men knew the score, hated it, and were ready to fight if only given the proper leadership. Things have gone far beyond that today: most people don't know the score; they don't give a damn; and they wouldn't fight under any circumstances... This crazy and rotten mess cries out to be ruthlessly corrected and the only way to prove that you are not part of the problem is to become part of the solution.