The Eve of Destruction

Reviews / Votes

Michael Beschloss "One of America's greatest historians makes a powerful argument that the most important historical pivot of the revolutionary 1960s was not President Kennedy's assassination or the tumult of 1968, but the fateful moment when Lyndon Johnson, at his zenith, turned from his Great Society to escalate the war in Vietnam, and when his passage of the Voting Rights Act was quickly followed by riots in Watts. So evocatively does James Patterson take us back into the vanished world of 1965 that many readers will wish they could travel back in time and somehow change the tragic arc of history." Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University "Based on rich learning and resonant with thoughtful interpretations, this incisive and lucid book does more than identify a point of inflection. Its fascinating chronicle captures and explains how a configuration of racial and social change, popular culture, robust legislative action, and a fierce and often brutal war as well as unrest at home decisively altered the vectors of American life in ways that simply had not been anticipated just before 1965." Steven M. Gillon, Scholar-in-Residence, The History Channel "The Eve of Destruction is impossible to put down, an exciting but also disturbing look at 1965, the year when what we now think of as 'the sixties' really began. For those of us who admire the great liberal achievements of the civil rights movement, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the 89th Congress, James Patterson has written a cautionary tale, showing how and why a conservative reaction that's still with us began building at liberalism's zenith. And the fateful, gradual escalation of the Vietnam War haunts this account, as it came to haunt LBJ. Those who lived through 1965 will want to read this book; those who didn't ought to read it to understand today's political world." John Dittmer, author of Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi"While in many respects 1965 was a very good year--the Voting Rights Act, Head Start, and Medicare come quickly to mind--trouble lay ahead. The civil rights coalition was starting to unravel just as the specter of Vietnam loomed large on the horizon. In this illuminating, absorbing, page-turner of a book, James T. Patterson makes the case that 'After 1965, for better and for worse, the United States would never be the same again.'" "Smart, thoughtful, fast-paced, engaging, and insightful--these are just a few of the adjectives that describe James T. Patterson's masterful new book, The Eve of Destruction. Patterson makes a convincing case that you cannot understand America today without coming to terms with this eventful, and in some cases, tragic, year." David M. Kennedy, Professor of History Emeritus, Stanford University"Philip Roth once called the immediate post-World War II decades 'the greatest moment of collective inebriation in American history.' James Patterson's The Eve of Destruction chronicles the origins of the awful reckoning that followed. Focusing on the single, fateful year of 1965, Patterson's masterful account details the incipient fissures in American society that grew into gaping chasms by the decade's end. A sobering and essential read about a world we have lost and the troubled birth of our own." E. J. Dionne Jr., author of Our Divided Political Heart Alan Brinkley, author of John F. Kennedy "James Patterson, one of the most prolific and thoughtful historians of our generation, has written a brilliant book that shows us how the 1960s became such a destructive period in our recent history. It was not because of the youth revolt, nor even because of the civil rights movement, but because of Lyndon Johnson's embrace of the Vietnam War." Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post "Reading Patterson's chronicle, I am all too painfully put back in that terrible year [1965], with all the shock and disenchantment it brought... The Eve of Destruction should be read... as a cautionary tale about the dangers of hubris and, by no means incidentally, the dangers of misreading election returns as mandates." Wall Street Journal "Patterson argues--correctly, I think--that 1965 was one of those "hinge years" when history turns and goes in another, unexpected direction. The history of a single year isn't easy to write, but Mr. Patterson handles the task well... All in all, The Eve of Destruction is an illuminating look at a remarkably significant year by a master historian." Boston Globe "[The Eve of Destruction] is no romantic romp of nostalgia. It is a searching look at a year that spawned Lyndon Johnson's Great Society legacy of legislation on education, civil rights, and health and produced a high tide of American liberalism even as bloody confrontations at Selma, bombings in North Vietnam, and a credibility gap in the capital showed cracks in the American edifice... Meticulously described and deftly analyzed." San Francisco Chronicle "Our yearlong pivot from self-congratulation to national turmoil and near-rupture is the topic of The Eve of Destruction, an engaging chronicle by James T. Patterson, author of the Bancroft Prize-winning Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974... By focusing on the widening gyre of crisis -- Selma, Pleiku, Saigon, Watts -- Patterson persuasively argues for the inclusion of 1965 in an elite roster of transformative years. His narrative imparts the dizzying speed of events that left so many Americans wondering what was happening to their country -- and whether government really could meet the era's daunting new challenges." Commonweal "Political liberals may find comfort in the disarray of today's Republican Party. But it wasn't so long ago that their own troubles set the stage for the Reagan Era. Historian James T. Patterson skillfully chronicles that period in The Eve of Destruction." Irish Times "[An] elegantly written and finely nuanced work on the US in the 1960s... Picking up more or less where Robert Caro left off in the latest volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Patterson makes a convincing case that the US was a fundamentally different place at the end of 1965 from what it had been a year earlier... One of the many strengths of this graceful book... is that the author never overstates his case. In fact, and rather pleasingly, he is always keen to challenge it." American History Magazine "Voting rights acts, Medicare and Medicaid, Vietnam, protests, riots--it was a helluva year, and it set in motion the sea change that created today's relentless confrontational politics." Publishers Weekly "A thoughtful look at a tumultuous period... Writing in an informative, accessible manner, Patterson creates a strong narrative, his recitation of facts helping to build his case that 1965--rather than 1968 or 1969--marked a political, cultural, and military turning point for America."