[BLANK_AUDIO] Hi, welcome back.

This is the week in which the Cold War

decays. It's already beginning to decay in the
middle of the 1960s, as the Cold War settling into
its second decade seems to become increasingly routine. Both sides seem to be
settling down for a
long conflict. They've stepped back from the brink in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and
now there's
almost a sense of superpowers want to regularize
the conflict, make it just a constant ordinary part of
everyday life. It's interesting to see the way popular
culture is reacting to this by the early 1960s: books coming out beginning of the
�60s like
1962, movies coming out in 1964. Take this one for example:
a movie from 1964 from an earlier book. This is about a nuclear crisis, but in the
crisis the Soviets aren't the villains. The American's aren't the heroes or the
villains. Instead, both superpowers find themselves
trapped by the malfunctions of their own
thermonuclear machines. Here's another angle, taken from a 1962
book that was made into a 1964 movie called Seven Days in May. This one stars Burt
Lancaster, playing an
Air Force chief of staff, inspired by the example of the charismatic
and aggressive general Curtis LeMay, in which Lancaster, in some ways the most
formidably competent in the whole movie,
is plotting to try to take over the United States with a military coup in order to
keep the
president from signing an arms control treaty with the
Soviets. Or this movie, this classic satire, which
also comes out around 1964-1965, in which the nuclear buildup is almost
seen as a form of collective insanity, really only a fit subject for satire and the
darkest of dark humor.
In Europe, a settlement is emerging. As I said last week, the Soviets have
given up efforts to change the status quo in
Europe. There's a slow thaw there, that by the end
of the 1960s and early 1970s, a set of agreements, agreeing to persevere
the new status quo of a divided Europe.
And in this routine Cold War, the dominant role is being played by the national
security states of both sides. And these national security states, with
their large Cold War bureaucracies, increasingly seem
to blur into the managerial state, in a way that kind of managerial state
that James Burnham was writing about back in
the 1940s. The managerial state in which giant government bureaucracies, giant
corporate bureaucracies, hierarchies are in charge of everything. This is certainly
the way it feels like to
a lot of people in the affluent society of the United
States and Western Europe. So if you were an American in 1953, you
could pick up this issue of Time magazine and there on the cover is
the CEO of Procter and Gamble: Neil McElroy. You see the caption: He Duz... That's
a laundry soap made by Procter and
Gamble. The dishes with Tide, laundry detergent, of Joy dishwashing liquid.
And Procter and Gamble is sponsoring radio and television shows and so on.
So, flash forward five years later. It's 1958. You pick up another issue of Time
Magazine, and wait, there's Neil McElory again, but now, he's
the Secretary of Defense, with the mighty shield of
American arms displayed in the background of this
painting. Or Americans might have read, at the end of
the 1950s, about a bold, enterprising head of
the Ford Motor Company, one of the big three auto manufacturers, a man named Robert
McNamara. Then, a few years later, here's the same
Robert McNamara, he's now the Secretary of
Defense in 1961. But flip over to the socialist countries, they also see a
managerial state. Here for example is a standard depiction
of the leadership of the Soviet Union in the
1960s. Any Soviet citizen from that era would recognize a photograph like that
instantly. The gray, almost faceless individuals of
the Soviet Politburo. Indeed you almost don't even need to know which communist
government is being
depicted here, photographs like this could stand in for
all of them, all providing guidance to various
government ministries on behalf of the party. This managerial state is being
challenged
in the 1960s, from several angles. It's being challenged on the communist
side by the more revolutionary communism represented
by someone like Mao Zedong. Mao Zedong often feels like he's leading a
war, not only against the recalcitrant
countryside, he's leading a war against his own
powerful ministries who are sapping zeal from the revolution, that zeal
captured in a poster like this one. You see all the archetypes here of Chinese
Communist progress, the engineer,
the soldier, the worker holding his Red Book with all
the sayings of Mao Zedong. The woman worker. The graduate student or young
scientist.
The young student. The bridge to the future.
The jet aircraft flying ahead. Meanwhile a lot of the government of China
is actually being managed by men like this
one, Liu Shao-Chi. In this Time Magazine illustration of
1959, you see the caption: Work, Purges,
Disillusionment. Liu Shao-Chi, pensive, in the background of overseeing a whole lot
of different worker ants with their wrenches and red
flags. But that wasn't the only kind of
challenge. There is also a challenge against the
stifling hierarchies, conventions, norms of this
age of managerial conformity, a desire for liberation, personal
liberation, cultural liberation, a renewed push for the
liberation of women, from conventional social roles. For instance, this best seller
of 1962,
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. Heller was veteran of World War II. He'd been in a B-25
bomber squadron
serving in Italy. This is, in a way, a novel based on his
World War II experience. But it's, not a conventional war novel at
all. The enemy never really appears. Indeed, the enemy is the military
Bureaucracy: insane, plotting, throwing the bomber crews into more meaningless
missions in which they might get killed. The real enemy of Heller's book is the
managerial state itself. Or take this book, also published in 1962, Revolutionary
Road by Richard Yates.
Here the young husband, young wife, wonderful couple full
of dreams in college, romantic ideals. They find themselves settling in suburbia.
The man's got his job working for an ad
agency in Manhattan. Meaning seems to be draining out of their
lives. It turns into personal crises as the structures of their society are
crushing the life out of this marriage. By the way, this book was made recently
into a movie starring
Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. When I talk about books like Joseph
Heller's Catch 22, or Yates' Revolutionary Road, we're talking about social,
literary, and intellectual challenges to that
managerial state. Now I'd like to go past that a little bit. What I'd like to focus
on now is what I'm
calling a Rights Revolution, one that really starts taking off in the
1960s and then becomes much larger, expanding
into the 1970s. Sometimes historians will talk about a
Rights Revolution, talking about human rights
and the rise of that in the 1970s. My argument is different. My argument actually
is that the origins
of the Rights Revolution is both domestic and
international at the same time. The United States plays a catalytic role
in it. And it partly has to do with all the civil
rights turmoil in the United States in the 1960s, that then changes the way people
think about rights in ways that spill over into world affairs too. So stay with me
and let me explain a
little bit more about what I mean. So you all know there was a big push to
get civil rights for African Americans, especially in the 1950s and then coming
to a climax during the 1960s. One of the results are laws that are
passed that say that government cannot discriminate
against black people based on their race. Well what do we mean by government
discrimination? Well, segregation of the public schools. That's government
discrimination.
Segregation of the bus system. That's government discrimination. You're all clear
then, civil rights and
government discrimination. But what happens in the landmark Civil
Rights Act of 1964 is the passage of a law saying that private firms,
individuals, cannot discriminate against African Americans in employment
just based on race. You can't refuse to hire someone because they're black. You
can't refuse to hire someone because
they're Hispanic. Think now about the extension of
government power that's implied by such an ambitious
law. Now you've passed a law saying that
private individuals in their businesses, their restaurant, their barber shop, their
accounting firm, their brokerage house, their unit of a big corporation, none of
them can discriminate based on race. You can scrutinize their hiring decisions,
their promotion decisions,
their wage rates, to see if there's been
discrimination. You're covering now millions of people in
many situations, extending civil rights to what they have to do in
their social relations with each other, the social relations that make up a lot of
their lives, day in and day out. This is enormous extension of the scope of
government power, it's an enormous
extension empowering private individuals to litigate in courts to
protect their rights. These American anti-discrimination laws
will set precedents that are followed in much of the world, beginning
in Europe, spreading through the 1970s. For example, Britain adopts its own
anti-discrimination and employment laws pretty extensively in the 1970s, and then
beyond even to parts of Asia and
so on around the world. Just to show you how broad this became, in the American
precedent, the Civil
Rights Act of 1964, there was also a provision that said that you can't
discriminate based on
gender either. Based on sex.
Actually, that provision was put into the Civil Rights Act of 1964
somewhat mischievously. A senator who was opposed to the bill, a
Southern senator, hoped he would sabotage the bill by expanding it
to prohibit gender discrimination too. He thought that that idea was so absurd
that it would doom the bill to defeat in the
Congress. [LAUGH] He was mistaken.
The bill passed. The anti-discrimination provision against gender discrimination in
employment passed
as well, extending the scope of this much further. My point is not just about the
literal
scope of a particular bill in America. It's about the symbolic power of doing
that. The sense of here are what my rights are.
Here are the way I can defend my rights. Precedents that are being set and followed
around the world begin to change peoples� expectations
about what government should do to defend their
rights. That's part of what I think is the Rights
Revolution. And you can see why I see this as a kind
of challenge against the concept of a managerial state in which the
big state is allied with the big business, because here's now a whole set of
expectations in which individuals think that they can use the power of the state
as a bludgeon against big business, to force businesses to honor their rights. Now
there was a huge backlash against
this extension, of state power and this
assertion of rights, and that backlash was felt in American
politics in the 1960s and in the 1970s and even frames a lot
of American politics today. Which side are you on in the Rights
Revolution? Do you think government has extended its power and its regulatory scope
too
broadly? You think individual rights are being
adequately respected? Are you grateful for the changes in society that the Rights
Revolution has
brought about? These are the kinds of things people argue
about. My purpose as a historian is not to take a
side in this argument. It's to show you though that this argument
is an enormously significant development, not just in the
history of the United States but in the history of the world. Another challenge to
the managerial state
are more formal calls for freedom, including struggles with the
assertion of civil rights. Not just from black Americans but from
minorities of all kinds who feel that the managerial state,
whether that's corporations or big unions, are all pushing them to the
margins, discriminating against them, favoring the people who are
already on the inside. What's interesting is to notice the scope
of this argument, this is not just a political argument, it's an
argument being waged about society and its norms. About culture, about everyday
life.
And versions of this argument, seem to be playing out all over the world,
especially in the famous year of disruption: 1968.
Let's look at some scenes from 1968. This one, Prague 1968. The Czech people are
trying to throw out
Soviet dominated communist rule. Instead Soviet tanks invade
Czechoslovakia, crush the dissident government, and reinstate the rule of orthodox
communists. Or over here, in Paris, in the spring of
1968: a rebellion against the structures of the
French Fifth Republic, of President De Gaulle, but it's also a rebellion against
the big institutions of French life, Inspired, too, by rebellion against the
Cold War itself, America and Vietnam. And America in Vietnam is certainly a
cause for all the Americans protesting in this
picture. And the protests are spreading against the
Mexican government as well, the sense that its promise of democratic
socialism has just decayed into another kind of government of cronies
helping each other out, students organizing in the street, armored
cars coming in to put them down. Or here, in China, Mao himself is leading the
revolution against Chinese
institutions, inspiring his Red Guards, his armies of mobilized youth, to attack
the aging intellectuals and managers who are now, he argues,
obstructing the course of the revolution. Here you see some of these individuals
being paraded and humiliated before the
crowds. So as you look back at all this turmoil in the late 1960s, and
especially in 1968, well what are the questions about all of
this? For example, I could give you an exam with
this question: Describe the leading common
causes of the Great Disruption. If you were going to answer this exam
questions, you might have to think about this causal problem,
local versus transnational. For instance, you could have a story about
why there's unrest in the United States: great story in American history, all about
civil rights, Vietnam war protests, unhappy youth, but what about Paris, and
Prague, and London? Or are we saying those are all just
completely independent phenomena and that 1968 is just a series
of coincidences? So, what portion of these causes are local, what portion of them
are
common and transnational? It's a tough problem. Here's another tough problem. If
they are transnational, if there is
some connection between Prague and America, well, what is
that connection? How do we define it? So let's develop some hypotheses, playing
with these why questions. For instance, Hypothesis #1: We could say, you know, the
situation in
China, that really is different. Mao's leading this really extraordinary
kind of revolution against his own government. So you have one set of causal
explanations
for China and then another set that applies to some of
these other countries. Or try out this hypothesis: Millions of people had, as I put
it
here, been living on the slopes of the quiet volcano.
That is, they'd been living under the shadow of potentially imminent world war
for decades. Just think about the effects of that, just
kind of the existential unease that would give you, and as time passes, as that
becomes more routine, a reaction
against that, a reaction against that kind of world of permanent conflict. Here's a
third hypothesis we could bring
into play: students. Oh, but notice, in a lot of these
different countries, students are key actors in the
revolutionary unrest. Well what is it about students that makes
them such a source of unrest in the late 1960s? Well, think about that. First of
all, there's just the infrastructure of a lot of new
universities. Many of these universities are only a
generation old. For the first time, a lot of young people are being gathered
together in the
tens of thousands, given the opportunities to mobilize in
that structured environment. They are also being empowered with a
vocabulary of mobilization. They're being exposed to a lot of ideas
about alienation, about the problems of the
managerial state, that allows them to form an ideology to
challenge the managerial state, combined with the infrastructure that
allows them to get together and do it. And it's hard for some of these societies
to attack their own young people. Try out another hypothesis,
a fourth one. There's a lot of turmoil in the United
States: The civil rights struggle, which then
develops in the mid-1960s into urban riots in major American cities, New York,
Detroit,
Los Angeles, a sense a public order breaking
down. The Vietnam War going on all along with
this. So, American turmoil. The Vietnam War becoming a catalyst that sets off
broader challenges to the managerial
state. People around the world, inspired by and noticing what's happening in the
United
States, reacting to Vietnam as a catalyst because their
countries are also involved, in greater or lesser
degrees, in the Cold War struggle, too. So you can look at all these hypotheses,
and maybe the overall conclusion is some
mixture of these, or maybe a couple of others that you're going to think of and
write about that I haven't thought of. But the most interesting next chapter is
that the protestors do not overturn
society. In fact, what happens is that a lot of society reacts with fear to the
breakdown
of public order. What then happens is the societies become
more polarized, as the forces of order strike back.
The forces of reaction gain power. So, for instance, in China, their secret
years of terror begin to get out of hand. You remember that fellow I told you
about,
Liu Shaoqi. The man who was doing so much to actually
manage China's government. Here he is beginning of the 1960s. Here is the way Liu
Shaoqi is depicted in
a Cultural Revolution poster. If you're having trouble finding Liu
Shaoqi in this poster, that's Liu Shaoqi right
there. And what the message of this poster is
saying is: Expel the renegade, traitor, and scab Liu
Shaoqi from the Party. Liu Shaoqi will be expelled from the
party, and then he'll die, crippled by the injuries he suffered as a result of
the abuse he's received. But Mao himself begins to realize that by
tearing the government apart, everything is
spinning out of control. Indeed, China is veering to the point of war with the
Soviet Union, clashes on the border with the Soviet
Union. The Soviets, alarmed by what they see going on in China, are even
contemplating the possibility of a
preventive war before China, which has now tested its own
nuclear weapons, gets too many of them. In the United States, there's some big
decisions made about Vietnam, too. In 1968, the Johnson administration finally
decides it's reached the breaking
point. It can't escalate the war anymore. The requests of the generals to deploy
200,000 more soldiers to Vietnam are
turned down. The Johnson administration leaves office,
anti-war dissidents do not replace it. Instead, it's replaced by Richard Nixon. The
dilemma Nixon faces, is how does he
try to bring the war to a close. In 1969, he looks really hard at two
options. One is to escalate the war, maybe even by
bringing American troops up north to make the North stop its
encroachments into South Vietnam. Another option, though, is to slowly
Vietnamize the war: get the American troops out, turn over the
war as much as possible to American-supplied troops of
the South Vietnamese army. That's what his defense secretary, Melvin Laird,
wants, and, at the end of 1969, that's what Nixon
wants, too. He keeps trying to find some ways to get
some leverage, to get the North Vietnamese to quit. He launches an invasion into
neutral
Cambodia. He launches intensified air attacks. But at this point, in the early
1970s, he's
just trying to salvage a peace the doesn't look like a
humiliating retreat for the United States. His is an administration of
retrenchment,
consolidation. The same goes for the administration of this man, Leonid Brezhnev in
the Soviet
Union. During the 1960s the Soviets hugely
increased their military power. They increasingly feel that they are now
roughly equivalent to the United States in
military power. They want recognition as a full equal. But Brezhnev increasingly,
in super power relations,
wants to preserve a status quo of super power
status. So Nixon adopts a Nixon Doctrine, which
means that in Asia, and elsewhere, increasingly, he wants to turn over the
responsibilities of local defense to local
armies backed by American assistance. Brezhnev, meanwhile, is adopting his own
version of the Brezhnev Doctrine: That which is part of the Soviet Bloc
will remain part of the Soviet Bloc, places like Czechoslovakia that want to
secede from the Empire will be forced back in. Mao too begins moving towards
retrenchment. He receives a bad shock in 1971 when
one of his closest revolutionary allies, a man named
Lin Biao, actually seeks to defect to the Soviet Union. His aircraft mysteriously
crashes in
China, killing him and those on board, in 1971. Mao increasingly worried about the
Soviet
Union, as being a more dangerous enemy than the United States,
which he see withdrawing from Vietnam, decides that he'll play the game of having
an opening with the United States, building up a relationship
through the United States that can offset the threat he feels from the Soviet
Union. I know that in American history, this is usually portrayed as Nixon's
opening to
China, but the real variable in creating that
opening came from the Chinese side. It was Mao's choice more than Nixon's.
By the early 1970s, it looks like the forces of reaction, of restored order, are
struggling to gain the upper hand. We'll see how they do with that in our next
discussion. See you then.