The Age of Moynihan
The film Almost Famous, while set in the 1970s, has numerous touches designed to appeal to a modern audience, including joking references to first generation fax machines (that take ten minutes a page), and lines like, "You guys don't think Mick Jagger will be singing rock and roll when he's 50 do you??!!". Similarly, at several points in the book, Hayward shows what numerous modern day politicians were doing thirty and forty years ago:
Nineteen sixty-four found Richard Nixon practicing law in New York, and traveling the world burnishing his political reputation while mulling another possible presidential run. Nixon shrewdly recognized early on that Johnson would likely prove unbeatable, and that his best course was to bide his time for 1968. Thirty-nine-year-old peanut farmer Jimmy Carter was midway through his first term in the Georgia legislature. William Jefferson Clinton was completing his senior year of high school in Hot Springs, Arkansas; he lost the election to be student body secretary (because of a peculiar school rule, he was ineligible to run for class president), but he would head off to Georgetown University in the fall. Captain Colin Powell had returned from his first tour of duty in Vietnam late the previous year-where, he concluded, "It'll take half a million men to succeed"-and was assigned to Fort Benning, Georgia. A native of New York, Powell was shocked at the segregated hotels and restaurants he experienced during his drive to his new post. Another northern-born transplant to the South, Newt Gingrich, was a graduate student in history at Tulane University.Along the way, Hayward uses Pat Moynihan almost as a Greek chorus as the voice of reason among liberals: pointing out the limits of welfare and a dovish military policy, and defending Israel in the face of the UN's ambivalence in the 1970s. There's a moment in Hayward's book where Moynihan's stock is never higher: as the UN declared that "Zionism was racism" (and they should know, as they were lead by ex-Nazi Kurt Waldheim), Moynihan walked over to the Israeli ambassador and softly whispered a defiant "F**k 'em" in his ear.
Had he chosen to, Hayward could have easily have used much of the same material and titled his book "The Age of Moynihan" and made it far more palatable to liberal readers. Except that Reagan was listened to by his party, and Moynihan's plaintive cries of caution were generally ignored by his.
It was also during the 1970s that the free market began to be taken seriously again: the first serious thinking on supply-side economics began to be undertaken simultaneously by members of the Wall Street Journal and the Ford Administration.
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