The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

John F. Kennedy was then promising to do considerably more by the end of the 1960s than put a man on the moon. In a graduation speech to the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, then less than a decade old, the president announced to the young airmen a public-private initiative to build commercial jets that would move at twice the speed of sound: “Some of you will fly the fastest planes that have ever been built,” he said. “We are talking about a plane in the end of the ’60s that will move ahead at a speed faster than Mach 2 to all corners of the globe.” A year later, Lockheed was projecting a supersonic transport that would go at three times the speed of sound. That never happened. American capabilities in the area of transportation steadily declined. Great Britain and France collaborated on a short-lived experiment in supersonic flight, the Concorde, but fewer than two dozen were ever built. The United States, more focused on military applications, never participated. Its SR-71 “Blackbird” reconnaissance plane, developed in secret after 1964 in the Lockheed “skunk works” by engineer Kelly Johnson, set the world air speed record in 1976—a record that was still standing four decades later.