In the 1960s three major sociopolitical movements, the New Left, Black Power, and feminism, arose in the United States. All three represented assaults on older ideas about the nature of authority, especially as expressed in a hierarchical fashion, all attached a premium to a sense of community, which was defined narrowly to include only members of each group, and all actively sought empowerment for themselves. The present essay examines this matrix. It begins by considering briefly the common historical background and early civil rights activity that influenced and to some extent linked all three movements. The essay then traces in turn each movement's beginning, development, and situation at the end of the Sixties. It explores how these movements shared certain values, expressed those ideas in different settings, and were interrelated in myriad, shifting ways. The overall complex interaction of these three movements suggests a common social critique that was greater than the sum of its parts.

Although there is an enormous literature on presidential leadership, only a handful of books on the subject shape the terms of debate regarding the place of the presidency in the American political order. Edward Corwin's classic, The President: Office and Powers, written during the New Deal, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s Imperial Presidency, written during the Watergate era, are examples of such constitutive texts. Each reconceptualized the understanding of presidential leadership and connected that understanding to problems in the political order as a whole: they were synoptic, as well as constitutive texts.

Karen Orren's critique wages more war with itself than it does with my main arguments and evidence, most of which she does not engage directly. The bulk of my essay was devoted to textual critiques of Tocqueville, Myrdal, Hartz, and a number of more recent authors. I argued that their assumptions that liberal democratic traditions formed the core of American political culture led to inadequate accounts of major systems of ascriptive hierarchy, especially racist, nativist, and patriarchal ones. Orren mentions none of the authors I critiqued except Carol Pateman, whom she invokes in a paragraph ending, like a third of her paragraphs in her first two sections, with a rhetorical question about my view, not a forthright contrary proposition. Her failure to address my specific critiques, and her recurring reliance on questions to do the work of affirmative arguments, make it unclear precisely how far she is defending the authors, challenging the criticisms, and disputing the evidence to which my essay was largely devoted.

The year 1966 is often cited as the start of the “second wave” of the organized women's movement, marked by the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW). However, 1966 also marked the formal inception of another, less enduring group of women activists, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), linked to a separate but related social movement focused on welfare rights. From 1966 to 1975, NWRO coordinated welfare mothers' activism to shore up public assistance for the poor and to establish a federally guaranteed annual income. At its height in 1968, NWRO claimed twenty thousand members nationwide and dozens of local chapters from California to New York.

Robert S. McNamara recently raised a stir about America's involvement in the Vietnam War. In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, his personal apology for his role as Secretary of Defense (1961–68) during the first phase of the war, shot to the top of the best-seller lists. But the author was surely more interested in uncovering some forgiveness, some sympathy for his plight, than he was in royalties. If so, he certainly must be disappointed. What McNamara uncovered beneath the surface of current events were several generations of Americans who still have powerful emotions about the war and still hate the leaders—McNamara included—who guided the nation into that debacle.