very much at the top. but not really in the middle or certainly at the bottom. the great majority of americans, this is the point that often, i think, people need to be reminded of, the g.i. generation and those, the enlisted of world war ii, the greatest generation, and their sons and daughters, the boomers, mainly thought alike. certainly in terms of foreign policy. lyndon johnson had enormous support for the vietnam war right up through the 1968 tet offensive in january and february of 1968, when johnson turned against the war and gave up. and sued for real negotiations, the american people turned against the war. so, it was johnson who, if you want to say blinked first, he blinked first. and also, i always like to point

out a little fact about 1968 and independent presidential candidate george wallace, who was certainly no friend of civil rights and campus protests. wallace, who promised a run over any hippy who threw himself down in front of a car, wallace said these intellectuals who can't park their bicycles straight, limousine liberals, well, this figure of the -- of redneck america, as you see, his greatest base of support were voters under the age of 30. so there, when you look at the generation gap, it's not so much of a gap as a consensus among the white working class. so, i would say this is a demographics of protest that really helped to play a large role. there's also the matter of the cultural impact of protest.

one of the great sayings -- one of the sayings i really love is that the middle class had its '60s in the '60s, and the working class had its '60s in the '70s. having gone to high school in the 1970s at a blue collar institution of learning, i can personally attest but will not go into details on that point, there was a trickle-down of the counterculture. drug consumption does increase in the 1960s. that we see drugs mainly going from the underclass, the inner city, bypassing most of the white working class and middle class and going up to the more of the middle upper middle class on college campuses. in around 1965 or so, only about 4% of college students had smoked marijuana. by 1972, 60% of college students, middle class, had smoked dope. then in the early '70s we began

to see the lag period catching up, from virtually very little drug usage among white working class in 1968 to 1972 in massachusetts, for instance, you're up to one quarter of white working kids having smoked marijuana or used drugs. so, it does matter. the drug usage will work its way, like i said, in a strange dynamic, from below to the top, and then to the middle and down. it's a very strange flow rather than straight up and down. well, i would also like to say why we remember the '60s, given that protests spurring mainly within the democratic party among the children, the democ t democrats. it's going to be a fact that protests in the '60s will destroy the party of the new

deal, the new deal cold war. as some have argued lead to the elections that triumphed richard nixon and then ronald reagan. the 1960s new left, sds, it's often been forgotten -- we remember sds, but remember there was a new right. there was a ronald reagan and there was a barry goldwater and there was a base of support for student conservatism, particularly in one group called young americans for freedom. those on the libertarian right, and those on the marxis left in the sds had a common enemy, and it was not each other. it was the center. it was the party of harry truman, roosevelt, kennedy, lyndon johnson and vice president hubert humphrey. to sds, the problem of the democratic party t permitted to have the southern racist white democrats in the party.

and johnson and humphrey and kennedy were not moving quick enough to deal with the white south. at the same time, white working class people, you know, they supported anti-communism, interventionist foreign policy. labor unions were not open to admitting many blacks. labor unions were hawkish, anti-communist. that was the critique from the left. the new right had a similar critique, though they pretended to be quiet about events in the south at the civil rights movement, the new right did not like labor unions this interviews with the right of businessmen to do their own thing. the libertarian right did not believe that government had any business regulating the boardroom or the bedroom. and this creates an interesting kind of synergy where there's some issues in which the libertarian right and the far left actually agree.

the radical libertarian right and the new left support the decriminalization of marijuana. the libertarian right is opposed to the draft and compulse sar service. so is the sds. at one point -- the campus of sds chapter. so, there is a -- there can be a literal merging of the right and the left against this common enemy, this common enemy could be called on the right it's social welfare, new deal liberalism. on the left, this new deal did not solve poverty. they both had this common enemy. now, what can one conclude from

all this? well, i will offer not so much conclusion as a couple of observations. the current generation of political leaders in the united states as well as many of the academic and media figures came out of the campus hot house environment of the 1960s. many of the leaders of the new left and the new right enjoy places of prominence and influence today. the difference as a few people have pointed out is that by the 1980s, the new right had captured, controlled the federal government and the new left had captured control of the college english department. perhaps we remember the 1960s precisely because we are living with its social consequences. every discussion of american foreign policy over the past eight months has been prefased

by vietnam, quagmire, exit strategy. both liberals and conservatives, both invoke the lessons of the 1960s, but of course they do not draw the same lessons. but they still continuously invoke the 1960s as both sides walk on egg shells awaiting the next turn of current events. so, we live in a polarized time at this very moment. we live with a sense of mission, and really a sense of unease. they do co-exist together. but i will conclude happily, i guess, that we do not really repeat the mistakes of the past, we find new ones to make. thank you, and i'm going to entertain questions. and i've been asked to allow time for the boom mike to come

over, so please -- [ applause ] thank you. please. raise your hands, please. any of the students? i want to give the students the first shot at me. yeahheineman, in your opinion what is the great tragedy of the '60s and why do you believe that is so? >> the question is what is the great tragedy of the '60s, i would say it is the destruction of the new deal cold war democratic party. for all the limitations of franklin roosevelt and harry

truman, the democratic party of the new deal and the cold war really launched an effort to recognize the rights of working people to join unions, promote itself civil rights within the limitations of having to deal with reluctant members of the coalition, particularly the white south. the new deal offered some sense of limited -- an idea of limited responsibility for each other, but also a respect that you simply cannot hand out welfare. welfare, as roosevelt said, is a narcotic and zaps the human spirit. and then the cold war, truman laid the basis for the containment and defeat of the soviet union which was finally realized under a republican administration. i think that's often forgotten. even though i was born in 1962, i miss franklin roosevelt.

and i -- and i also say this as an aside, my first political memory was 1968, going to the polls, wearing proudly my hubert humphrey button. my dad was a union member. the union got out the vote in michigan and carried the vote for humphrey. to me, that's -- that's great tragedy. yeah? >> your book you briefly identified that the seed that these revolts grew from was called -- i think you call it in loco parentis. i wonder if you could amplify those two. >> in loco parentis basically means the university supersedes the president. it's hard to believe how much

control the university had over its student body. you had separate male and female dormitories. up do the very day in the 1980s. if you were visiting a girlfriend or boyfriend, you had to have the dormitory room open. you had dorm mothers, keeping law and order in the dormitory, two feet on the floor at all times if you're sitting on a bed. curfews. and many universities maintained the right to actually inspect off-campus student housing, to make sure -- apartments to make sure there were not items that did not belong there, like birth control pills. and so there is a revolt. you know, it's one of the ironies that if you are 18, you cannot vote. you had to wait until 21, but you could be drafted. so you were old enough to fight but not old enough to vote. if you went to college you we

were -- how shall i say -- looked after probably a little bit too closely. one of the funniest protests i ever -- that i read about took place at michigan state in the mid '60s, when sds staged a kiss-in. which quickly devolved into something that got way out of hand. one of the protest leaders was banging his head up against the wall and said we didn't intend an orgy. this is a 1965 orgy, called both feet off the ground. i only know that story because i worked with this gentleman, he's a historian at the university of pittsburgh now. i would say universities got out of the business of in loco parentis, the birth control pill lets the jeanie out of the bottle that eliminated a lot of the nasty consequences of sexual behavior. there's too many students. way too many students to try to

control by the end of the 1960s. when i entered college in 1980 at michigan state, all msu was concerned about, pay your tuition bill. we don't care. pay up your money. if you want to have beer in your dormitories, they just gave up. now, that changed. just say no did eventually catch up with michigan state after i left. i'm not saying there was any cause and effect involved here. i'm saying that's what happened. yeah? yes. >> would the social unrest of the '60s been possible without the vietnam war? >> okay. would the social protests have been possible without the vietnam war? there would have been and there were actually protests -- for example the berkeley free speech movement did pre-date the u.s. military escalation of the war. whether or not protest over free speech, the right to engage in political protests would have extended beyond a berkeley or

have had traction beyond michigan and worked its way to a central michigan, i'm not so sure that it would have had that kind of traction. protests against in loc in loco parentis, sure. but i think the vietnam war is very much the vrallying cry. it creates an environment of angst, unease. and once the lottery -- the establishment of the lottery and once people knew what draft number was and president nixon was cutting down the number of u.s. troops, once vietnam ceased to be an issue, the protests mainly -- they largely stopped. yeah? sorry. yeah? frnlg>> a bit of testimony from someone who was there at the time. one of the things that you have not had time to mention, obviously you can't cover too much, has been the civil rights

movement as a whole. that preceded the war. >> right. >> that also changed attitudes. one of the factors that occurred with students in the '50s very often didn't know until brown versus board of education and other supreme court rulings that there was segregation, which you learned in high school was a very sanitized and very idealistic view of america. one of the things that happened after that became evident, among lots of people who didn't protest directly, however, was a very different view of american government and american society. it was a highly critical view of american society. simply applying the norms that you learned that were presented as being the america to what occurred. among other things, high school

history courses provided a basis for criticism. >> well, i think in my book i do deal extensively with the student non-violent coordinating committee which became kind of originally the black and white southern student wing of the southern christian leadership conference. and had its roots in a very moralistic, very christian attitude. i think that was the great strength of the civil rights movement, its religious base and the sense of innate justice. i think what happened among many of those on the left, in particular, was that they simply could not, as i said, abide by the idea that we're better than that. why do we have this southern white democrat -- why do we have southern democrats in our party? and it's -- the answer is so we can win elections. the new deal coalition was a coalition, a majority made up of minorities, paper thin. and you cannot afford the

defection. so how do you deal with the south? and king's solution or his answer was, well, we'll redeem the south. force them to behave badly to show this, eventually their conscioco conscience will come through. eventually that happened. there were many southern white politicians who were redeemed morally. one of the examples i use where there is a generational gap is senator a. willis robertson of virginia. robertson had signed the 1950s southern manifesto pledging massive resistance to racial integration, only three u.s. senators refused to sign. estes of tennessee, al gore senior, and lyndon johnson of texas.

robertson's son, senator robertson's son, pat, had had a dramatic religious conversion after yale law school, pat robertson is a very unusual pentecostal, in terms of his class origins. pat robertson established -- is an early form of the christian broadcast network. he refused in 1966 to campaign for his father. he told his father he had been wrong. he was continuing to be wrong. and it created a tension. so there are -- you know, normally one -- you know, one does not think -- in that context of pat robertson, but there is some redemption and some changing of the guard that does occur. >> you say that in 1968 johnson kind of threw in the towel when he essentially gave up, that's when the american people became disloyal. later on in your book you do a thing on the mass media, great

chapters there. do you think that walter cronkite's visit to vietnam was one of the things that kind of pushed johnson in that direction of giving up the war? it's been said many times that itself that kind of turned johnson's vie view that way or was it the counter culture and what was going on at the campuses? >> i would say both. but the media is a very tight little world. the broadcast networks read the "new york times," and certainly in the 1960s, that is where the three networks got their news stories, their spins, what they were going to focus on. and then the washington establishment, republican and democrat reads the "new york times," "the washington post" and it's a closed inner sunk sanctum and how much a reality intrudes on this close inner circle. and this would be true today. you could spend all your time watching the fox news channel, which i do, or msnbc, and you're

going to get a close world read -- "the washington times" these are close circles. lyndon johnson perhaps was overly sensitive to walter cronkite. although cronkite did hedge his bets. i simply saw no sense to where are we headed. which actually is a legitimate question. but the more legitimate question would be, what is the state us of the vietcong? well, they're decimated. but now what? well -- so i see that. the -- johnson did pay -- on the other part of your question, president johnson paid a lot of attention to campus protest, especially, you know, columbia university, in the backyard of the major media, was inevitably going to receive disproportionate cover. this is changed. i think president bush today is largely ignoring academia. ignoring campus protests.

recognizes that it's a percentage. now, whether or not that small percentage will grow is something -- that's why i say, we hold our breath with unease, waiting. nothing worse than living in a historical moment. you know? and much rather like live in the future and have the present be done. at least you know the answer. so i would say that. would be my answer. >> in the '60s, with all the publicity the rioters received and vietnam war received, is it -- is it fair to say that the families who lost sons in the war, were they publicized, you know, disproportionate to, you know, these rioters? were they just ignored, or was the public sympathetic? >> most of the media -- and remember, the "new york times" actually supported the war effort, for most of the 1960s. the "new york times" does not become the great conservative

arch enemy until, well, mainly the current publisher who himself was an anti war protester and hippy. most of the media was pretty hostile. if you actually read through the coverage of protests, they're called viet nicks. and seet nick is not like an approving term there. you'll especially see outside of the washington and new york city, l.a. media centers a lot of discussion in newspapers complaining about where are kids. our kids are getting shot. you know, we resent -- you'll see that especially around may 4th, 1970 in the aftermath of kent state. and i always like to remind students that governor james rhodes, his popularity increased after kent state, and had -- he had entered a very bitter

primary election for the senate against robert taft, our current governor's father. and most pollsters believed that if the election had taken place another week later, a little bit more time for the news at kent state to sink in, governor rhodes would have won the senate. so -- and that's especially true in central and southern ohio. so you have a -- you know, we talk about america divided, ohio was divided. it's cuyahoga county against just about every other part of the state. >> hi, ken. who would you say was controlling the distribution of drugs mid -- that sub channel -- not the users, the distribution. who was controlling that mid '60s, did it change late '60s, early '70s. and i know they weren't part of campus activity, but when does the mafia -- and the growth in

the '60s and '70s -- did you see any connections there early? >> well, my impression is, and i'm certainly no expert. well, one could argue that heroin was a family arrangement, you know. right out of the corely owns. many of the drugs, particularly marijuana, had -- it's home-grown. at the university of kansas, ditch weed will become a local crop. parts of ohio, megs county gold, as we call it. so those types of narcotic crops are hard to control. it actually makes it much harder to crack down on it. now, of course, in my book i discuss oddsly, as he's called, the founder of the first major -- the henry ford of lsd at the university of california berkeley, who established the manufactured, 2 million tabs.

all you need is a knowledge of chemistry to make acid. and word of your product will spread by mouth. well, ingested by mouth, certainly. so i see narcotics as becoming more of a decentralized, more of an entrepreneurial, opened up, if you will. >> franchise label. >> exactly, yeah. and that makes it harder to crack down on. >> you mentioned that most of the new left is college students. and they're being influenced by their professors, obviously. i guess my question would be, why are these students who came out of the '50s and hearing stories of their fathers' generation and have not seen atrocities in the communist party and totalitarianism and the whole bit, how are they so influenced by people they're meeting for the first time in a freshman class? >> oh, yeah. i think that's an excellent question.

i would say the vietnam war is an impetus to a great deal of protest. that does set the '50s apart from the 1960s. so i think -- definitely the context, the moment in time and what is occurring are very important. along with that, the civil rights movement and awakening a protest. and probably one of the most important developments in 1960, the creation of the birth control pill, which will certainly change a lot of young people's attitudes towards relationships, becoming more involved. and i think it's very much the context. and as for numbers, i would not overestimate how much influence professors have is over their students. i think some professors think they have enormous influence, and i think that can be a disease of arrogance or delusion. i would say that you have a

coterie, a small core of students who are actually reading and taking notes. and their ideas are being divfused among the larger student body. but i would not say it's like a direct message. you know, here's our marxist lennonist, post stalinist interpretation of american foreign policy. it's more like, well, these corporations are really bad, i see it more as an indirect and smaller influence. other people? yeah. >> on page 210 -- >> oh-oh. >> you say that nixon's indochina policy had a few short-term successes, but in the long run, turned into an abject failure. it seems to me that he had some short-term failures and it turned into a long-term success. he got us out of the war.

vietnam has embarrassed the chinese, and vietnam has turned into a quasi capitalist country. and it seems to me that you said it backwards. >> hmmm. well, that's an interesting point. where were you when i was writing? i'm not -- i do not see vietnam as quasi capitalist or quasi democratic. they have been hoisted upon their own petard, as they say. they're -- if they reform themselves, a lot will have to do with the fact that they're a granddad -- owe sugar daddy, soviet union has collapsed, and there went a lot of their subsidies. so i'm not so much optimistic on that point. long-term, i tend to give more credit to ronald reagan for spending the soviet union into the ground. a lot of what nixon did depended upon him never getting caught doing little things like wiretapping the