5 Feet of Fury

‘American Experience: 1964’ — My NEW PJMedia post (video)

You can watch it at PBS.org for free. Certainly worth seeing if only for the rarely seen archive footage, not the usual stuff you can dig up on YouTube — and the bit with Casius Clay meeting The Beatles…

I braced myself for two hours of received liberal wisdom and stale faux history.

So I was pleasantly surprised at how much respectable attention was paid to, say, Barry Goldwater’s doomed-from-the-start presidential campaign.

Two actual contemporaneous conservatives — Richard A. Viguerie and Phyllis Schlafly — performed more than ably as designated “right wing” talking heads.

Kudos to the creative team for selecting plenty of rarely seen footage, such as young Goldwater volunteers at work and play, and lengthy film of the Berkeley Free Speech protests.

Some of this film was startling: those thousands of New Year’s Eve celebrants in Times Square looked awfully cheerful for people whose president had just been assassinated.

And how odd to see only two or three obese people, at most.