[Peace-discuss] The high-water mark of 'the Sixties' was the mid-1970s

[C. G. Estabrook]

Alexander Cockburn wrote in 1987 of "...the intimations of the Reagan era in the mid-1970s. Here was a moment rich in opportunity for a journalist to get everything wrong. A president had been driven from office and the mainstream press was preening itself on its resourceful vigilance and investigative powers. The covert activities of the CIA were under congressional scrutiny. Liberals and even radicals in the United States could gesture towards avenues of social progress beckoning the incoming Carter administration.

"This, after all, was a period when a bill to break up the oil companies was only narrowly defeated in the US Senate, when it seemed that legislation guaranteeing full employment would pass, along with laws making the Federal Reserve accountable to Congress, introducing progressive tax reform and a national health service and ratifying arms control agreements with the Soviet Union. It took about a year to scuttle these notions and by 1979 the spirit of liberal reform was dead in mainstream American politics..."