But what came after it did change the decade of the ’60s and the era that followed. The media didn’t herald it as a major event, and it didn’t create immediate ripples. It took advantage of the youthful energy and idealism of that generation in order to push for change.Īt the time, the SDS didn’t make much of a splash.
The SDS itself stemmed from campus socialist organizations. Because during the era of the Cold War, and in the wake of the New Deal, the two parties were pretty close together.”īy contrast, the New Left, as the SDS represented, was populist, youth-led, and radical. But in 1960, you’ll have a hard time drawing distinctions between the Democratic and the Republican parties on many policies. “You go to a year like 2016? They are radically different. “One of the things I often do with my graduate students is show them the 1960 platforms of the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States,” he says. Mohler points out that there wasn’t a ton of difference between the Old Left and conservatives in the first half of the 20th century. The Old Left was dynastic - think Roosevelts and Kennedys - and aristocratic. If a New Left emerged in 1962, that means there had to be an Old Left.
With the upcoming 50th anniversary of Watergate on Friday, here’s a related anniversary as well: 60 Years Ago This Week: the Birth of the New Left. Even Woodward has disavowed the heroic-journalist interpretation, once telling an interviewer that “the mythologizing of our role in Watergate has gone to the point of absurdity, where journalists write … that I, single-handedly, brought down Richard Nixon. Nonetheless, the heroic-journalist myth became so entrenched that it could withstand disclaimers by Watergate-era principals at the Post such as Graham. They publicly tied prominent Washington figures, such as Nixon’s former attorney general, John Mitchell, to the scandal.īut they missed decisive elements of Watergate, notably the payment of hush money to the burglars and the existence of Nixon’s White House tapes. Woodward and Bernstein did disclose financial links between Nixon’s reelection campaign and the burglars arrested June 17, 1972, at headquarters of the Democratic National Committee, in what was the signal crime of Watergate. However popular, the heroic-journalist myth is a vast exaggeration of the effect of their work. JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Woodward and Bernstein didn’t bring down a president in Watergate – but the myth that they did lives on.