"Take a Look around You, Boy/ It's Bound to Scare You, Boy"

"When Lyndon Johnson lit the national Christmas tree in December 1964, he presided over a nation at once hopeful and complacent, largely trusting its institutions and feeling assured about its future path, even as certain deprived groups, notably black people, were complaining angrily of exploitation. Phenomenal economic growth and unprecedented prosperity, along with the absence of extreme inequality and of large-scale immigration, helped to explain why the United States seemed to be a remarkably stable and confident place to live. It was hardly surprising that a great many Americans, including millions of young people who were nearing adulthood, had developed high expectations. No people in the modern history of the world had had it so good."

Salon publishes an excerpt of James T. Pattinson's The Eve of Destruction: How 1965 Transformed America.