THE ANXIOUS YEARS: America in the Vietnam. Watergate Era

by Kim McQuaid ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 15, 1988

American malaise, 1960's-70's, here chronicled by McQuaid (History/Lake Erie College; Big Business and Presidential Power, 1982), who declares the seven years encompassing 1968 to Nixon's resignation as an ""Age of Anxiety."" McQuaid's political slant is not easy to perceive, as he manages to lambast the New Left critics of the Vietnam War as much as he does the war's sponsors. If there is any villain in his story, it is the continuing myths that enabled the country to get embroiled in an Asian jungle war and the government to involve itself in constitutional trickery in order to counter a New Left threat, which was effectively squelched by 1971. McQuaid finds, on both ends of the political spectrum, an oversimplification--""The assumption was still that politics was a simple bi-polar contest between right and wrong, a grand ideological football game rather than a many-sided struggle. . ."" It's an assumption, he feels, that ultimately destroyed the legitimacy of the war effort, the moral posturing of the war's critics, and the Nixon presidency--undermined, McQuaid insists, by what was really a secret war against the nation's antiwar elements. Thus, in the author's view, ""Watergate. . .flowed from Vietnam. Guerrilla war abroad became Guerrilla Government at home. This was the kernel of what happened in American during the Anxious Years."" McQuaid makes telling points, but perhaps also oversimplifies, as he fails to dig out fully the roots of American's seven-year-itch from the soil of the entire post-WW II era, with its attendant Cold War tensions and its nurturing of an imperial presidency.

Pub Date: Feb. 15, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Basic Books

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1988

Categories: NONFICTION