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A Year That Changed Much

ApolloSpeaks18 Wrote: Jul 20, 2009 9:16 AM
Walter Cronkite (the most trusted man in American liberal politics who fanned the flames of the anti-Vietnam War Movement) and Robert McNamara (the man who lost the Vietnam War and crippled the presidency of LBJ) were both born in 1916 and died within 11 days of each other. Do their close deaths in the early days of the Obama administration signal a coming catastrophe for American foreign policy in the Middle East?

WASHINGTON -- Fifty years ago, on July 21, 1959, Grove Press won permission to publish D.H. Lawrence's novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover." Two days later, G.D. Searle, the pharmaceutical company, sought government approval for Enovid, the birth control pill. These two events, both welcome, were, however, pebbles that presaged the avalanche that swept away America's culture of restraint and reticence.

That change is recounted by Fred Kaplan, an MIT Ph.D. and cultural historian, in "1959: The Year Everything Changed," an intelligent book with a silly subtitle. There never has been a year -- or a...

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