Her theory was that citizens would be more sexually responsible if they learned the facts of life frankly and in the open, otherwise the vacuum would be filled by the kind of talk that children picked up in the streets.

Calderone, herself a Quaker, would say, “home, school, church, and community all working cooperatively.” The American Medical Association, the National Education Association, and the American Association of School Administrators all published resolutions in support of the vision. “The churches have to take the lead,” Dr. Her supporters saw themselves as the opposite of subversives. A typical exercise for kindergarten was watching eggs hatch in an incubator. By the 1964–65 school year SIECUS’s “Guidelines for Sexuality Education: Kindergarten through 12th Grade” had been requested by over a thousand school districts. “The former medical director of Planned Parenthood, Calderone had come up with the idea for her organization, the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, at a 1961 conference of the National Association of Churches. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America And faith, and the uncompromising passions attending it, was key to their political makeup.” President.’” It was their article of faith. Buckley harrumphed, doctored “to say, ‘Yes, Mr. They also believed the vast majority of ordinary Americans already agreed with them, whatever spake the polls-“crazy figures,” William F. For them, the idea that calamitous liberal nonsense-ready acceptance of federal interference in the economy Negro “civil disobedience” the doctrine of “containing” the mortal enemy Communism when conservatives insisted it must be beaten-could be described as a “consensus” at all was symbol and substance of America’s moral rot. This was part and parcel of their ideology-that Lyndon Johnson’s “consensus” was their enemy in a battle for the survival of civilization. Experts, claiming the Republican tradition of progressivism was as much a part of its identity as the elephant, began talking about a party committing suicide. “The Republican Party spent the year of the liberal apotheosis enacting the most unlikely political epic ever told: a right-wing fringe took over the party from the ground up, nominating Barry Goldwater, the radical-right senator from Arizona, while a helpless Eastern establishment-that-was-now-a-fringe looked on in bafflement.

Nixonland book review