Griffin’s Reviews > Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus > Status Update

The Vietnam War was a pretty bad idea

"On May 13 Wallace dispatched Al Lingo's troops to smoldering Birmingham. 'Those guns are not needed,' pleaded Birmingham's police chief. 'Somebody's going to get killed.' 'You're damned right it'll get somebody killed!' Lingo responded, and then he led 250 men in a charge down the street clubbing any black man, woman, or child they could find."

"Every year the [John Birch] Society published a 'scoreboard' of how far down the road to complete Communist subversion each country was; the United States was 50 to 60 percent, Iceland 80 to 100 percent."

I do love the kinda free indirect discourse style Perlstein brings to history