Anniversaries sponsor tributes, self-assessments, recognition of past deeds and, sometimes, a revival of old ideals. They can also trigger weepy nostalgia as well as regrets, shaky generalizations as well as obsessions with specific detail. When the dust settled around the books and essays written for the twentieth anniversaries of movements and events in the 1960s, a pattern emerged. The Sixties had become a battleground once again. This time, the struggle concerned memory. ‘There is history’, Christopher Lasch once observed, ‘that remembers and history that originates in a need to forget’. And the history that emanated from the need to forget fuelled what became known by the following decade as the culture wars. Yet the culture wars did not begin in the 1990s; they simply took on a particular form then, frequently as battles that raged around the politics of identity. The culture wars actually began in the 1960s, as a revanchist right regrouped and sought to assert itself on the national stage. Following defeat in Vietnam, this ‘new right’ developed the theory of the ‘Vietnam syndrome’, whereby America supposedly had been left gutted, powerless and unable to operate on the international stage. The Carter presidency accelerated this process and a new type of executive authority was needed.