The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The two conflicts that did most to define the American 1960s—those over racial integration and the war in Vietnam—were already visible. In October 1962, rioting greeted attempts to enforce a Supreme Court decision requiring the segregated University of Mississippi to enroll its first black student, James Meredith. The last summer of Kennedy’s life ended with an unprecedented March on Washington by 200,000 civil rights activists. Three weeks before Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem was ousted and then murdered in a coup that Kennedy had authorized. Kennedy’s death, though, gave a tremendous impetus to changes already under way. Often peoples react to a political assassination, as if by collective instinct, with a massive posthumous retaliation. They memorialize a martyred leader by insisting on (or assenting to) a radicalized version, a sympathetic caricature, of the views they attribute to him. The example most familiar to Americans came in the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865, when the country passed constitutional reforms far broader than those Lincoln himself had sought: not only a Thirteenth Amendment to abolish slavery but also a broad Fourteenth Amendment, with its more general and highly malleable guarantees of equal protection and due process.