"It is easy to confuse correlation with cause, especially if one has been personally involved in the events under analysis" (p. 6), Garfinkle warns in his penetrating re-examination of the antiwar movement. A resident scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, Garfinkle argues that the "great crescendo of radical antiwar protest between 1965 and 1970" (p. 6) did not convince Americans to oppose the war in Vietnam, nor did it convince their government to withdraw. If anything, the radical nature of the protests prolonged the war. The antiwar movement became most influential after the war, as politicians, journalists, and scholars invoked the "sixties" to indulge in "chestthumping or breast-beating" (p. 221). The echoes of this conflict continue to bedevil the United States, Garfinkle believes, much as the imagined poundings of a corpse under the floorboards haunted the murderer in Edgar Alan Poe's 1843 short story, "The Tell-Tale Heart."

Garfinkle criticizes the flood of self-justifying scholarly works that "movement" graduates like Todd Gitlin have produced. Garfinkle's is not a "personal reflection" nor a definitive history of the period. Rather, he offers "an interpretation of a broad swath of interconnected material" (p. xii). Based on secondary sources, the book functions more as an extended review article than a work of original research. But what a marvelous review it is. Garfinkle has a healthy, even overdeveloped, sense of irony, and he relishes his central theme: that the antiwar movement was so extreme it alienated millions. Polls from the period suggest that the linkage of the antiwar movement with broader social movements distracted the protestors and diminished their popularity. As a result, the antiwar movement's biggest accomplishment during the 1960s may have been electing the left's archenemy Richard Nixon. More broadly, the New Left helped destroy Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal coalition between working-class Americans and liberal elites.

The backlash the radicals provoked was particularly unfortunate because it wedded Americans to a failing strategy. Despite conservatives' claims that the "liberal media" and other dissenters undermined the military effort in Vietnam, leaders in the White House and the Pentagon seem to have done most of the damage themselves. The Vietnam war was not inherently unwinnable. Flawed policies doomed the effort. In fact, Garfinkle argues, the United States nearly defeated the Vietcong. The Tet offensive in 1968 was perceived as a failure despite America's military victory. As a result, the United States failed to engage the North Vietnamese regulars in the second, less difficult war which ended with the fall of Saigon. Opponents of the war failed to forge a broad antiwar consensus partially because they were distracted. Although the Vietnam war united the movement, it did not cause the protests. The protests reflected the "baby boomers"' alienation from their "technetronic" society (p. 3). A search for meaning amid affluence propelled many students toward proto-religious intellectual movements. The war allied these searches for meaning with a deeper tradition of pacifism and leftist dissent. The result was a colorful, diffuse, contradictory, and ultimately selfdestructive movement only incidentally opposed to Vietnam.

Although the antiwar movement failed to win its war against the war, it succeeded in winning the "hearts and minds" of a generation. Garfinkle shows how the relatively fleeting and ineffectual antiwar movement achieved a lasting impact on American society by convincing millions that it had been important. As the movement splintered, the myth of success legitimized various intellectual fragments including a new isolationism in foreign policy, deconstructionism in the academy, and feminism in the workplace and the home. The result has been a country lacking in confidence, in values, and in an ideological "center" (p. 297).

The depth of Garfinkle's argument about the origins of the antiwar movement undercuts his assessment of the collateral damage it caused. Movements like feminism that emerged during the 1960s themselves had deep roots. It is just as easy to exaggerate the impact of the antiwar movement after the 1960s as it is to exaggerate the impact of the movement during that tumultuous decade.

Clearly, the "sixties" are badly in need of historical re-evaluation. Young scholars less invested in justifying their excesses will sift through the many claims from the period. Garfinkle has done yeoman's work in slaying so many sacred cows while warning about contemporary abuses of history. This stimulating, suggestive book should foster the kind of balanced historical interpretation of the 1960s the United States desperately needs. McGill University