Matusow recounts the decline of the Great Society through poor management and escalation of the Vietnam ment and the escalation of the Vietnam count of the counterculture which grew in the late '60s. He sees fundamental flaws there as well. Students for a Democratic Socity, the Yippies, the Black Panthers--all went through periods of romance with Third World revolutionism, and then turned to guerilla tactics, reinforcing their isolation from the American mainstream.

Nothing seemed to symbolize the disarray and divisiveness more than the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968. Bloody battles erupted in the streets between brutal police and young radicals, and the party nominated Hubert Humphrey, who privately was a critic of the war but who remained the public heir to Johnson's policies.

Liberalism had entered the '60s with soaring hopes and unbridled confidence; but its policies had only led to the "unraveling" of America. What went wrong? This question is still open to debate. In Matusow's view, economists who misjudged the effect of higher taxes are partially to blame:

By inducing less work and less investment, more drastic income redistribution would result in less economic growth. Less growth would mean fewer jobs and a slower rise in living standards, important to poor people above all. It was indeed a hard world when redistribution, which alone could reduce the extent of poverty, might in the long run hurt the poor.

And this dilemma was compounded by the establishment's successful attempt to thwart the empowerment of the poor.

THESE PROBLEMS are still with us. The income gap between Blacks and whites is the same as it was 20 years ago. Integration, especially in the North, is still a troublesome issue. This illuminating book has much to say about why liberalism failed and America turned to Ronald Reagan. But the old problematic questions remain, and unhappily, answers and solutions still seem distant.