Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties.

By W. J. Rorabaugh. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. [xxiv], 317. $29.00, ISBN 0-521-81617-3.)

W. J. Rorabaugh emphasizes that during the abbreviated presidency of John F. Kennedy there were already foreshadowings of the events that would make the later 1960s a tumultuous period in American history: the civil rights movement, changes in family life and sexual behavior, and challenges to traditional values expressed in art, literature, and popular music. Rorabaugh discusses the contributions of such diverse individuals as Timothy Leary, Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Betty Friedan, Andy Warhol, and Martin Luther King Jr. What they had in common was opposition to the status quo in postwar America. Rorabaugh juxtaposes all this against the background of the Cold War and the well-publicized activities of the charismatic Kennedy family. President Kennedy himself is portrayed as a somewhat ambiguous figure. In most respects he represented the conventional culture of the 1940s and 1950s, but his skeptical, questioning proclivities and his sense of irony could be seen as anticipating--at least to a limited extent--the new era that was emerging in the sixties.

Although Rorabaugh has made use of numerous archival sources, his book is essentially a synthesis of selected social and political aspects of the period. Much of this has been discussed extensively by other writers, particularly the civil rights story and the Cold War. Still, Rorabaugh's book is a useful and relatively brief contribution to ongoing scholarly efforts to place the early 1960s in historical perspective. It would be of value in undergraduate courses because Rorabaugh clearly demonstrates that the seeds of cultural rebellion were planted several years before Kennedy's assassination. "The times, they [were] a-changing'--and this would have been the case no matter who had occupied the White House between 1961 and 1963.

Yet because his successors in the presidency continued and expanded his opposition to the communist threat in Vietnam, it was ultimately Kennedy's concurrence in the extension of the Cold War to Southeast Asia that set the stage for the domestic upheavals that came later. Rorabaugh correctly argues that the turmoil of the late sixties was rooted in a reaction against the mainstream conservatism of post-World War II America. But it was the prolonged conflict in Vietnam that furnished the specific catalyst for that turmoil. The antiwar movement became a funnel through which a wealth of pent-up discontents were expressed. One cannot help but wonder how President Kennedy would have reacted to it all, of whether the rebellion would have been so vehement had he lived. Those questions, however, lie beyond the ability of any historian to answer.

RODNEY M. SIEVERS

Humboldt State University