SHRIVER AND TUCSON: A TALE OF TWO ERAS

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . ." The death of Sargent Shriver last week brought to mind this opening quote from Charles Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities," London and Paris at the time of the French Revolution. Shriver's death, like Dickens' linking of the two cities, intertwines with the shooting in Tucson just over two weeks ago. Both events kindled further thoughts about a major issue on our national political agenda -- the need to tone down the anger in our political discourse.

The Tucson shooting was hastily linked by some of the media as being a consequence of the shrillness and vitriol that have become part of our political environment. While any tie between the shooting and the meanness of our politics was cut with the evidence that the tragedy was simply the non-political act of a deranged individual, the issue of political civility remains. This is where the death of Shriver and the Tucson shooting are linked.

Although much has been written to the contrary, there is still a general tendency to view our toxic political rhetoric, however bad, as something recently on the scene. Shriver's death rekindles the history of a time when as Dickens said, it was the best and worst of times. Shriver, brother-in-law of President Kennedy, came onto the public stage in the l960s as the first director of the Peace Corps and a few years later as the head of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty program, and in l974 as the running mate in Senator George McGovern's failed quest for the presidency. It was a time when we trusted government and believed it could solve our deep social and economic problems, a trust that started to shift with the Vietnam war and Watergate and ended in the l980s when President Reagan pronounced his belief that government itself was the problem. That Reagan-era belief has persisted and is at the heart of the Tea Party/right wing rhetoric today.

As to the l960s "best of times", it began with President Kennedy's changing the national tone about citizen involvement in public affairs. Although I am not a Kennedy fan nor a believer in the Camelot mythology, he did bring a new tone to political discourse and, in the process, gave the younger generation a sense of greater commitment to public service. With Kennedy's assassination and the Johnson presidency, aided by an influx of a new wave of liberal lawmakers in Congress with the l964 election, there was an outpouring of legislation that changed the nation. Included were such landmark laws as the Civil Rights Act of l964, the Voting Rights Act of l965, medicare, medicaid, the first significant program of federal aid to education, and major immigration reform. And to deal with the problems behind the urban riots, we had the War on Poverty, the now defunct Model Cities program, and various housing development and anti-discrimination programs. Thus, to this blogger who shared that era, it was the best of times. But it was also the worst of times that makes today's political clash and clang less ear and mind shattering.

The "worst of times" began with the Kennedy assassination in l963 followed five years later by two more assassinations--Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. The assassinations alone would be sufficient to call the period our time of troubles. Add to that the the Vietnam war itself and the sometimes violent anti-Vietnam war demonstrations that began in the second half of the 60s and carried over into the early l970s until our involvement in the war ended in l973. The anti-war crescendos came in the summer of l968 at the Chicago riots outside the Democratic presidential convention, and again in l970 on college campuses when President Nixon expanded the war with military incursions into Cambodia. On top of that were the destructive urban riots that began in l964 and reached a climax with the King assassination in the spring of l968.

The anti-war movement could be viewed, at least in part, as a generational conflict with the younger generation making its demands directly and confrontationally on the "establishment" rather than through any traditional "let us reason together" process. Likewise the urban riots which occurred primarily in northern cities. The civil rights acts dealt with state and local legal discrimination against blacks in the south, but did little for the urban blacks of the north who faced a variety of forms of daily de facto discrimination. Like the younger whites who took on the establishment over the war, the younger blacks took the lead in violently confronting the system on bread and butter issues such as job and housing discrimination.

The combination of the anti-war movement and the urban riots forced Johnson from office and the window of opportunity for liberal legislation which opened with the l964 election closed two years later when more conservatives were returned to Congress. It should also be noted that the GOP had its own ideological shakeup at its l964 national convention with a bitter fight between followers of liberal Nelson Rockefeller and backers of arch conservative Barry Goldwater who went on to win the nomination but lost a landslide election.

So Shriver's death and the Tucson shooting provide an opportunity to give another perspective on the issue of political civility. I suppose there might be some kind of grand conclusion that could be drawn here. But suffice it to say that comparing the then-and-now, today may not be the "worst of times" but our current ideological/cultural divide seems likely to prevent a renewal of "the best of times".