A generation divided : the new left, the new right, and the 1960s /

After interviewing 74 former activists, Klatch compares the members of a New Left organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and a New Right group, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), both of which were founded in 1960. Within YAF, Klatch distinguishes between a libertarian minority, who had much in common with SDS, and a traditionalist majority, who did not. Many of the leftists lived in poverty, got beaten up by police, and went to jail. When they got older, they went into education or social service; they often did not make much money, yet felt guilty about living too easily. The libertarians had similar experiences, except they did not feel bad about making money and living a good life. The traditionalists were the opposite of SDS. In YAF they worked in comfortable offices and faced no bodily hardship or harm. They supported the Vietnam war by staging demonstrations but not by joining the army. Eventually they went into politics and government, which they now largely control, except for some women who became full-time homemakers. All of them are doing well financially. Thus the traditionalists got the money and the power, leaving the leftists and the libertarians with nothing but a place in the history books. All levels. J. A. Hijiya; University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

A thoughtful study of some forgotten players in the Time of Torment: the young ideologues of the dawning radical right. Radical, sociologist Klatch (Univ. of Calif., San Diego) observes, is the operative word. The young men (and a few women) who made up the conservative Young Americans for Freedom (YAF), a group inspired by Barry Goldwater's 1964 bid for the presidency, were the children of privilege; in this respect they mirrored their counterparts on the left, the young members of Students for a Democratic Society. But rather than preserve the Republican status quo, they broke from the politics of their elders at many critical junctures. Notable among them, in the later 1960s, was YAF's growing criticism of the Vietnam War and especially of military conscription, which they believed 'violated the most fundamental principle of individual liberty.' When their older conservative peers demanded that they endorse the Republican commitment to military victory in Vietnam, many of the YAF's members shifted to a libertarian, even anarchist position. In doing so, they found, they had more in common with the extreme elements of the left than they did with the likes of William F. Buckley, Jr. and Richard M. Nixon. Whereas, when the war finally ended, many leftists entered academic or professional careers, continuing the fight for social justice by becoming child psychologists, family-practice physicians, or teachers, the young radical rightists took their fight straight into the political realm. Some of them, Klatch writes, scored great successes by organizing the state-by-state movement that defeated the Equal Rights Amendment. Others went to Washington-area think tanks, where they orchestrated the so-called Republican Revolution of 1994. And a surprising number of them, Klatch notes, went into journalism, putting the lie to the charge that the press is a liberal conspiracy. Solid research and good writing make this a book of interest to veterans of the '60s, as well as to students of social science and history. (38 b&w photos, not seen)