This same arrogance that believed that an untried overblown program could eliminate poverty, believed that it could win a war against an enemy it knew virtually nothing about, and using far more carrots than sticks in the process. Martin Luther King famously said that "the War on Poverty died on the battlefields of Vietnam", and in a sense he's right. As Hayward points out, the two are unified in their conception, execution, and disastrous denouement.
Conservatism's Low Point
If the birth of the Great Society was the apogee of liberalism, then it's not surprising that it was similarly the perigee of the conservative movement, which was pronounced DOA by the media after Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater by an enormous margin in 1964.
For writing about such a central figure in conservative politics, Hayward is fairly audacious in only briefly introducing Reagan when he campaigned for Goldwater in 1963, and then taking over 95 pages before he appears again, during his 1966 campaign and subsequent election to the governorship of California. By doing so, Hayward leaves no doubt what the moral, political and sociological tone of the 1960s was, and how far removed from the norm conservatism was.
As Hayward points out in its introduction, his book is not a biography of Reagan. (For those, turn to Peggy Noonan's recent book, or even Edmund Morris's infamous post-modern experimental effort, Dutch.) Rather, as his title (borrowed, Hayward freely admits in his introduction, from Arthur Schlesinger's The Age of Roosevelt) implies, Hayward's goal is to place Reagan in the context of his times.
The Bad Old Days
If the tone of Democrats was optimism, albeit bordering on hubris and arrogance, at the beginning of the Johnson administration, by the end of the 1960s, it had a far different character: pessimism and defeatism, as the failure of the Vietnam war, the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and inner city and campus riots caused the ofenthusiastic and pro-American liberals of the first half of the 20th century to be replaced by the hard, cynical anti-American Left that would come to define their party for the remainder of the 20th century.
Ironically, Richard Nixon was elected by a razor-slim margin in 1968 as a counterweight to the New Left. But as Hayward does an excellent job of highlighting, Nixon, often misinterpreted by the left as a conservative, is only now slowly being properly understood as governing-especially in his first term-as a liberal-indeed, as even more of a liberal, in many respects, than Lyndon Johnson was.
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