ABSTRACT
The spirit of the Sixties cuts perpendicularly across the simple line of progression of national and world events. The period's denials affected the officially recorded political logic of events profoundly. By those denials, the New Left would change the character of the struggle with Soviet Russia and give the United States unexpected new strengths. It would transmute its self-conscious perversity and become a constructive episode in American and world history. The new movement expressed the urges of a minority of a minority, only one of many contradictions. The American operations of the New Left's whites and the less specifically politicalized blacks also stirred Europe to spasms of associated demands and protests, indeed intimations of revolution. The protests curved back against the land of their origins. Increasingly powerful and transgressive, the United States invited them in its Cold War maneuvers, the new situation gave point through the Sixties by the war in Vietnam.
