The right moment

the long version

"Drawing on scores of oral history interviews, thousands of archival documents, and many personal interviews with participants. Matthew Dallek charts the rise of one great politician, the demise of another, and the clash of diametrically opposing worldviews. He offers a new portrait of the 1960s that is far more complicated than our collective memory of that decade. The New Left activists were offset by an equally impassioned group on the other side. For every SDS organizer there was a John Birch activist; for every civil rights marcher there was an anticommunist rally-goer; for every antiwar protester there were several more who sympathized with American aims in Southeast Asia. Dallek's compelling history offers an important reminder that the rise of Ronald Reagan and the conservatives may be the most lasting legacy of that discordant time."--BOOK JACKET.