American Hero: The Life and Death of Audie Murphy (Americans Fighting to Free Europe)

by Charles Whiting

It was the dawn of the “swinging sixties.” The decade brought tremendous and unprecedented prosperity to the West; and freedom of choice — unhampered by the restraints of poverty or of conventional morality — unknown to the average man and woman hitherto. There was virtually full employment everywhere. Indeed, labor had to be “imported” from the Third World to keep pace with the demand. There was a new concern for the rights of groups that up to that time had had precious few rights, or none at all. There were rights for blacks, rights for the Indian, rights for gays, rights for single parents (i.e., unmarried mothers), rights for battered women, rights for senior citizens, rights for everybody. But together with many useful changes and a general pleasing air of liberation came many developments to which some might give the dubious honor of having corrupted what was left of the twentieth century. There was a general negation of values — including hard work and self-discipline — by which many older Americans had lived and there were new and disturbing forms of hedonism. Full employment and the confident knowledge that if one “dropped out” there would be no need to starve critically weakened the sense of personal responsibility on which societies are based.