In the early 1960s, that received world ended just beyond the suites and suburbs. Given America's moral and material omnipotence, its exemplary excellence (so evident on the North Shore), the remainder of the planet required no particular exploration, knowledge, or historical-political understanding, nor did such men need to have the slightest recognition of America's own non-mythologized past. Alert decision-makers, busy with the numbered bottom-line results, had no time for such "academic" ephemera.

Close up, the bond was even deeper. Across an age gap of almost a decade, despite the distance between charged and calm, North Shore and Casper, Princeton and Wyoming, country club Congressman and lumpen-proletarian repairman, they shared something rarely then so openly admitted on the right: an abhorrence of the liberations sweeping the 1960s, not just the right's pet scourges of bureaucracy, crime, drugs, social fragmentation, and (however suitably coded) racial integration, but the unsettling ferment of newfound freedoms and honesty, the defiance of cultural and institutional oppressions -- especially by minorities and women. They detested Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the way it seemed to advance beyond the New Deal and Progressivism at the expense of settled money and power.