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Was Howard Zinn a legitimate historian? What about Eric Hobsbawm?

What did you say in your speech entitled “Twilight in America: The Birth of Ronald Reagan and Contemporary Conservatism”? Oddly enough, I can find the title but the content is not available.

I was in college in the late '60s and early '70s. At the time, I was not aware of any conservative movement. In fact, I did not perceive any conservative/liberal distinction in the politics of that time. E.g., everyone I knew regarded both Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon as warmongers; and I saw Johnson's "Great Society" and Nixon's wage/price controls as equally "statist" (to use modern Mark Levin terminology).

Bear in mind that, due to the nature of the news media and college curricula of the day, I would have had no way of knowing about any conservative (i.e., limited government) movement.

It wasn't until I started watching Louis Rukeyser several years later that I became aware of a small-government, free-market faction in American politics. This, plus experiencing a cavalcade of bad presidents of both parties (Johnson through Carter), lead me to eventually register Libertarian.

Back to your original question, the YAF was infamous on campus. They were the only known group of young people who were pro-draft; and as near as I could tell (given the media of the time), this was their only issue. If whatever conservative movement there was associated itself with the pro-draft camp, this would explain why conservativism went nowhere during this time—at least with young people.

I missed all the fun of the 1969 National Convention. I joined YAF shortly afterwards but was inactive. In those days, conservatism wasn’t all that popular on the slopes of Fiji Hill. There was a Young Republican group, most of whose members were of the John Lindsay/Hugh Scott/Nelson Rockefeller faction of the GOP, and there was a Libertarian Alliance that was mostly concerned with legalizing drugs.

I eventually became active in a John Birch Society chapter that was more interested in promoting conservatism than in spreading conspiracy theories about President Eisenhower being a Russian spy. We engaged in some guerrilla activities such as putting up posters protesting Earl Warren when he came to speak at the campus and hoodwinking the administration into approving an appearance on campus by Charlie Smith, a black civil rights activist turned conservative evangelist.

I finally rejoined YAF in 1975 as a graduate student at USC. My first National Convention was at New York City in 1977, and I was also at the ones at DC in ‘79, LA in ‘83 and DC in ‘91.

One of my fondest memories was from the 1979 convention when former Senator Eugene McCarthy got up to address the crowd. The YAFfers started chanting, ‘Joe! Joe! Joe!”—evoking the name of another Senator McCarthy.