"Framing the Sixties" examines conservative political myths
http://www.montereyherald.com/entertainment/ci_14774147
Former Stevenson teacher, historian, says narratives were built to
discredit liberalism
By MIKE DE GIVE
Posted: 03/28/2010
If you think the '60s are over and done with, Bernard von Bothmer
invites you to turn on a cable news channel, tune in to a talk radio
station or visit a political blog at random.
From the right, politicians assail President Barack Obama's domestic
agenda as the return of the "big government" programs of President
Lyndon B. Johnson. Pundits ask if Afghanistan will be Obama's Vietnam.
From the left, the civil rights movement of the '60s is invoked in
the current fight for gay rights. And Obama was again compared to LBJ
this time in a favorable light as part of the nation's polarizing
health care reform debate.
"The '60s are alive and well today in presidential politics," said
von Bothmer, who taught history at Stevenson School in Pebble Beach
from 1997 to 2000 (others may also remember him as the soccer coach).
"The decade is a lens we use to define politics."
"Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald
Reagan to George W. Bush" hit No. 13 in the presidential politics
category on Amazon.com last week, a pleasant surprise for von
Bothmer, who now teaches history at University of San Francisco and
at Dominican University of California in San Rafael. He originally
wrote the book as a Ph.D. thesis.
Tom Brokaw, author of "The Greatest Generation," and "Boom! Talking
About the Sixties," calls von Bothmer's book "a smart, important and
impressively researched account of the decade that far too often is
reduced to cliches by the left and the right."
In researching the book which describes how an often false
narrative about the '60s was developed by conservative presidential
campaigns von Bothmer interviewed 120 leading presidential
advisers, speech writers and other presidential political players,
including Edwin Meese, Robert Bork and Casper Weinberger on the right
and Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn on the left.
"I wanted to run the gamut of political players in the last four
decades," von Bothmer said.
What he found is that passions around the '60s still run high among
insiders today. Several advisers who granted von Bothmer access,
including Weinberger and Bork, said they could only give him 10
minutes of their time. An hour later, the subjects were still avidly
talking, all on the record and on tape, von Bothmer said.
"Both the right and the left still talk very passionately about the
'60s. Everyone has an opinion on the decade, which I think is why the
book has really taken off."
As part of his research, von Bothmer looked at presidential speeches
made since the Reagan administration, and then went back to the
original drafts of those speeches and even interviewed speech writers
to see how the speeches evolved. What emerged from extensive
research, he said, was a distortion of history for political gain.
The '60s were framed by conservatives, he said, as a time when the
country's social fabric was destroyed by liberalism a narrative
that said the left made a mockery of patriotism, and that the
emergence of big government foreshadowed the undoing of American values.
Von Bothmer said President Ronald Reagan was among the first to "run
against the '60s," making claims about LBJ's "War on Poverty" that
weren't true.
"Reagan said over and over again that we had a war on poverty and
poverty won," von Bothmer told the Marin Independent Journal last
week. "That is factually false. Poverty decreased from 20percent to
12.5percent in the '60s, during Johnson's Great Society. Poverty went
down. But Reagan repeated that over and over and nobody called him on it."
The country is still divided today along the same lines drawn in the
'60s, with conservatives seeing that time as the beginning of the
erosion of family values, disrespect for the military and the start
of a downward slide toward socialism, while the left sees it as the
birth of the environmental movement, the rise of civil rights and the
beginning of social programs that are still popular today. Both sides
are looking at the same decade and both are honest about their
beliefs, but each are seeing a completely different America that
emerged from the 1960s, he said.
In one of his earliest speeches as a presidential candidate, Obama
said it was time for the country to "get over the '60s." Von
Bothmer's response: "Good luck, Senator. It's not going to happen.
The '60s are still going on."
In between commutes to San Francisco and San Rafael to teach four
classes, von Bothmer is making appearances to promote his book. He
uses a 45-minute PowerPoint presentation to take audiences through
his research and tell stories not included in the book, such as his
experiences interviewing high-profile presidential advisers. He's
also doing radio interview that air across the country, and has plans
for appearances in New York and the Midwest between semesters.
Nothing is on the calendar yet for his old haunts in the Monterey
area, but "I would love to come down if I was invited."
--
Mike de Give can be reached by e-mail at mdegive@montereyherald.com
--------
Von Bothmer, a Dominican professor and author, busts myths about 'liberal' '60s
http://www.marinij.com/lifestyles/ci_14737446
Paul Liberatore
Posted: 03/22/2010
Bernard von Bothmer, a history teacher at Dominican University in San
Rafael, has revived the emotional debate over the most explosive
generation of our time - the 1960s.
In his highly opinionated new book, "Framing the Sixties: The Use and
Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush" (University
of Massachusetts Press, $28.95), von Bothmer paints a clear picture
of how the conservative movement has defined the '60s - often falsely
- for its own political purposes.
For example, von Bothmer writes about President Ronald Reagan, a
member of the World War II generation, and his lies about President
Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty" in the '60s.
"Reagan said over and over again that we had a war on poverty and
poverty won," von Bothmer said. "That is factually false. Poverty
decreased from 20 percent to 12.5 percent in the '60s, during
Johnson's Great Society. Poverty went down! But Reagan repeated that
over and over and nobody called him on it."
The 43-year-old historian is believed to be the first to explore the
notion of a "good" and "bad" '60s, the good being John F. Kennedy,
Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, all in the early
part of the decade. And the bad being Vietnam War protests, student
unrest, the counterculture, black power and urban revolts - spanning
the late-'60s to the early '70s.
According to von Bothmer, Reagan was the one who really invented the
concept of "the '60s" in order to bash liberals with everything he
considered wrong about the decade.
"If you look at Reagan's rhetoric, he starts to talk about the '60s
early on, and it's all bad," he said. "He can feel growing liberalism
coming and wants to discredit it. It's kind of funny actually that he
was angry about the '60s because they gave him his political career.
Without the '60s, the right would not have risen. It might have been
relegated to the ash heap of history, so to speak. But the '60s
produced a counter-revolution that I would argue we're still in now."
Leading that counter revolution was none other than President George
W. Bush, a draft-card-carrying baby boomer member of the '60s generation.
"Bush was accepted into Yale in the spring of 1964," von Bothmer
notes. "He was the last hurrah for the prep school kids who could get
into Yale without a lot of academic achievement. While he was at Yale
that changed. And part of his animosity toward the '60s is his
hostility toward the new admission criteria at Yale, which stressed
academics rather than your social connections.
"It was no longer the Yale of the '50s and early '60s, and he was
upset by that," von Bothmer continues. "My thesis is that what
propelled his rise into politics later on was his anger toward the
'60s. Even while he was president he had a hostile relationship with
Yale and with intellectuals and, of course, with liberals in general.
And it all dates back to Bush at Yale in the '60s."
In "Framing the Sixties," von Bothmer busts the myth that the
majority of young people espoused liberal views and ideas in the '60s.
"Liberals like to say, 'Oh, why wasn't George W. Bush more involved
in the '60s?,'" von Bothmer said. "Well, he was in the majority by
being the frat boy he was, even in an activist place like Yale. Let's
not forget that the greatest percentage of votes by young people in
the 1968 presidential election were not for (Democrat) Hubert
Humphrey. They were for (Republican) Richard Nixon or (Independent)
George Wallace. We have this myth that the boomers were this liberal
group, when actually, in the 60s themselves, they voted conservatively."
Tom Brokaw, author of "The Greatest Generation," and "Boom! Talking
About the Sixties," calls von Bothmer's book "a smart, important and
impressively researched account of the decade that far too often is
reduced to clich s by the Left and the Right."
And Georgetown University history professor Michael Kazin, co-author
of "America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s," said, "This fine
book illustrates the truth of the maxim that history is what the
present wants to know about the past. To understand why the meaning
of the 1960s remains a critical matter for both conservatives and
liberals, von Bothmer's careful study is the place to start."
--
Contact Paul Liberatore via e-mail at liberatore@marinij.com
.
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