J. Harvie Wilkinson III is a lawyer whom President Reagan appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. As a judge who writes for his court, Wilkinson is, of course, a legal writer; but here he has written for a general audience. His topic is the 1960s, a decade he knows well, having lived through all of it as a teenager and young adult. The judge is now 72.
Obviously, it’s hard to write about the 1960s without discussing the civil rights revolution or the Vietnam war, and Wilkinson briefly treats them both. He credits the “rebels” of the ’60s with getting two things right: “They saw the civil rights revolution as long overdue and the Vietnam War as a tragic mistake.” But Wilkinson sees those big headline stories in a larger context of change. Often drawing on his own experiences, he emerges as a sharp critic of the sixties and its enduring influence.
Life draws meaning from something “more than me,” he writes, “from the family that nourishes us, the school that educates us, the conventions that guide us, the laws that govern us, the patriotism that inspires us, . . . and the faith that sustains us.” But these forces were weakened in the 1960s, “and the individuals depending on them were in the end wounded too.” America became less a nation of “rooted institutions” and “more a place of rootless individuals.”
The “decline of education” contributed to this development. Wilkinson was at Yale during 1963-67, when the “politicization of a great college took place. We [undergraduates] were given license to place law, science, humanities, and the arts at the service of politics and ideology.” What happened at Yale took place on other campuses—indeed, to such an extent that Wilkinson regards the field of higher education today as more politicized than any other. He is doubtless correct.
As for law, it was not a good decade either. Wilkinson, who entered the University of Virginia Law School in 1967, says that “the end justifies the means” is the very opposite of what the law is to be. Yet “in the Sixties the end became the means, thus undermining the rule of law.” Apparently the rules existed to be broken.
In other ways, the country became rootless. Wilkinson writes about the city he grew up in, Richmond, which he describes as “a stodgy place where social conventions kept sexual disruptions to a minimum.” Repressive, the judge calls it. Yet stodgy Richmond also understood the meaning that “social support” imparted to personal relationships and the value that “longevity” imparted to commitment. The sixties questioned those insights, to the effect that in Wilkinson’s case,
At his expense, Wilkinson tells the story of his girlfriend “Anne,” who wished in vain for her boyfriend to commit. “Don’t you know your real love, Jay?” she asked. She said it was not her but him—indeed, his own “wanderings. I’m no more than today’s material. You’ll work me dry. You’ll see me as I am, before your mind embroidered me. I’ll stand before you plain, imperfect Anne and watch you walk away.”
And so she did. Writing about his home and rearing, Wilkinson allows that “segregation was the shameful part of my childhood, but it was thankfully not all of it.” A string of simple words—”duty, honor, country, character, courage, trust and truth”—became our “rocks.” There was no ambiguity in those words, only strong belief in them. Yet the sixties broke up those rocks, which came to be seen as “laughably simplistic or at least less a credo for our more fast-paced and relativistic time.” Wilkinson writes that “I lost my home in the 1960s,” and thinks many of his generation did, too.
Wilkinson served in the Army, only to discover that “the spirit of patriotic sacrifice and universal service is not what it once was.” Moreover, “Vietnam made common bonding during foreign conflict immeasurably more difficult to achieve—witness the dissolution of our fleeting shock-induced camaraderie in the aftermath” of 9/11. Nor was religion the force it once had been, when America was seen as “God’s land.” God “would have taken a beating had the sixties never come along,” says Wilkinson. “It’s just that the decade gave Him another rude push. . . . Its insistent presentism . . . left little time for awe or contemplation of where we might have come from or where we all shall go.”
Wilkinson says that what was good about the sixties came “at so heavy a cost that it became impossible to discern what tradition, institution, or belief the disillusioned did not want to desecrate.” Anything could be taken down, it seemed; yet, as he points out, “you can’t build a nation on nihilism: it takes vision and values to do that.” And those values now have “altered meanings.” The sixties left “no star to steer by.” Effectively stolen, he explains, the values “were not the property of any race or party or philosophy or creed. They reside rather at the heart of human nature and at the core of nationhood as well. Without them we today lack personal or national identity.”
Whether America can recover them is the question raised by All Falling Faiths. Here Wilkinson has little to say. Yet he is certain of one thing, and rightly so: Recovery will not take place if America remains “the Sixties’ land of disbelief.”
J. Harvie Wilkinson has written an elegant, deeply felt essay/memoir about America in the 1960s. “We came close to losing our wonderful country,” he says, “and that must never happen again.” That it could happen again is the thought that haunts our politics.
Terry Eastland is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
