policy - The Black Vault

THE BDM CORPORATION
and south. The old elite had 'n composed primarily cf men from the
eastern seaboard with legal, corp-rate, and banking connections.
Together,
they had laid the foundation ot the pragmatic liberal consensus that
governed American foreign and domestic policies in the 1940s and 1950s. In
the 1960s and 1970s the power of the old elites was to be challenged in
both political parties by groups that had their political, social,
economic power rooted in a new American order.
In 1960, the apparent direction of American social and economic development
seemed set. There was a consensus that America had every right to
be proud of its social and economic system. Illustrative of this consensus
was the 1960 presidential campaign during which both Richard Nixon and John
Kennedy lavished praise on the American system.
be whether the system could be made even better than it was.12/
and
The major issue seemed to
The record of the speeches of that campaign is evidence of how unprepared
politicians and the American public at large were for the social and
political conflicts that would emerge in the 1960s when influential and
articulate elements in the United States would attack the very system that
both Nixon and Kennedy had defended so strongly. Those elements would
challenge the wisdom of pursuing the course of technological development
that had been set in the 1950s,
would castigate the achievements of the
American economic system as creating a mass society of possessive, manipulated
cinsumers, and would deny the premise that the American political
system was essentially classless. In the 1960s, challenges that rose
against the new technological civilization came from three sources: black
Americans, the collegiate youth, and the intellectual community. Some
leadership elements within those three subgroups sought to rally these
constituencies as political forces of social change. On the other hand,
. some leadership elementý; in the American labor movement, which constituted
the fourth major subgroup under study sought to rally their followers as
forces for social and political stability. It is important to examine the
calls for social change as they evolved in each of these four
constituencies.
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