Party History, the Cold War, and the Sixties

Iowa Results

Partisanship and Bipartisanship

• The bill establishing the Interstate Highway System passed 89-1 in the Senate, voice vote in the House.  Note the name: " "The National System of Interstate and Defense Highways."
• Even civil rights

Taft v. Eisenhower

National Review and the conservative movement (Rosenfeld 76-86)

The John Birch Society and the fringe

1960

"The Treaty of Fifth Avenue"

Nixon and JFK:  domestic policy as foreign policy

Soviets and Civil Rights  -- the Kennedy Administration sees segregation as a front in the Cold war

The Sharon Statement v. The Port Huron Statement

Goldwater and a Claremont connection:




The politics of congressional consensus:  the 1964 Civil Rights Act

But LBJ understood that victory is fleeting:

When you win big you can have anything you want for a time. You come home with that big landslide and there isn’t a one of them [in Congress] who’ll stand in your way. No, they’ll be glad to be aboard and to have their photograph taken with you and be part of all that victory. They’ll come along and they’ll give you almost everything you want for a while and then they’ll turn on you. They always do. They’ll lay in waiting, waiting for you to make a slip and you will. They’ll give you almost everything and then they’ll make you pay for it. They’ll get tired of all those columnists writing how smart you are and how weak they are and then the pendulum will swing back. 

Dramatized here (1:30):