Laid-back California authenticity?

Historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., was a sort of archetype of the Establishment liberal in the 1950s and early 1960s. He served as an adviser in the Kennedy administration, and his history of that administration, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, has sometimes been derided as a "court history". I happen to think that the latter charge is at best misleading. Bob Woodward's first two books on the Bush administration, now that is "court history".

But developments in the 1960s found Schlesinger a partisan of Bobby Kennedy's politics, part of what came to be called the "new politics" in the Democratic Party, highly sympathetic to civil rights, committed to ending poverty and expanding economic opportunity, and opposed to the continuation of the Vietnam War. He even managed to restrain the impulse to knee-jerk rejection that even many of his liberal colleagues indulged in their reaction to the youth and student movements of that time.

In The Crisis of Confidence: Ideas, Power and Violence in America (1969), he gives an example of the desire among many young people for, in the lingo of the time, "openness and authenticity in personal relationships". He quotes a young woman who he identifies only has having graduated (college I suppose) in 1968:

I think in personal conduct people admire the ability to be vulnerable. That takes a certain amount of strength, but it is the only thing which makes honesty and openness possible — it means you say the truth and somehow leave open a part of your way of thinking — of course you cannot be vulnerable with everyone or you would destroy yourself — but it is the willingness to be open, not just California cheerful open, which is almost a mask, since it is on all the time, and therefore cannot be truthful — it is a little deeper than that. ... It means being strong enough to reveal your weaknesses. This willingness to be vulnerable — and those you are vulnerable with are your friends — coupled with ability to be resilient — to be strong but supple — those are good qualities, because inherent in them are honesty and humor, and the good capacity to love.

I love that: "not just California cheerful open". Some things remain, even after 40 years.

Tags: 1968, california politics, sixties