The most explosive conflicts of 1964 remain entirely intact in America today: race, war, and the ideological battle over the role of government. The struggle for voting rights that led to the murder of three civil-rights workers in Mississippi that summer � and to the Voting Rights Act of 1965 � continues to be fought in 2014, state by state and court by court, as if the bloody victories of a half-century ago were only provisional skirmishes in a never-ending civil war. Confrontations between white police and minority populations remain on a parallel continuum. Among the countless antecedents of this summer’s Ferguson unrest is a now half-forgotten incident from July 1964 � a days-long Harlem riot set off when an off-duty white police officer shot a black teenager. (This crisis was itself a replay of a 1943 Harlem riot that left five dead and 500 injured after a police officer shot a black soldier.) Yet faith in racial progress in 1964 was pervasive, at least among white liberals, despite such prominent dissenting voices as James Baldwin, whose The Fire Next Time was published a year earlier, and the new heavyweight champion, Cassius Clay, soon to be known as Muhammad Ali. Shocking as Clay’s victory over the favorite, Sonny Liston, was to the sports press, even more puzzling was his solidarity with Malcolm X and his contempt for Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil-rights movement. �I’m a citizen already� was how Clay put it.

Such sour notes could be dismissed by whites who saw racial progress conspicuously at hand. In 1964, King received the Nobel Peace Prize and Sidney Poitier became the first African-American to win an Oscar for Best Actor (for Lilies of the Field). Once LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act in July, the Times happily reported that �despite some bitter resistance, compliance is generally good� in the South. (The Mississippi murder victims’ bodies would be found a month later.) The legendary Times reporter Homer Bigart, on the ground in Savannah, wrote that Gold�water’s opposition to the civil-rights law notwithstanding, �most observers gave him scant chance� of winning Georgia, with its reputation for moderation in racial matters. In fact, Goldwater would win the state by a margin of 54 to 46 percent and sweep the rest of the Deep South by a landslide more lopsided than Johnson’s in the rest of the nation.

Resistance to desegregation was hardly limited to the old Confederacy. You will search mostly in vain for blacks (or other racial minorities) in newspaper and magazine advertisements of 1964, the heyday of the Mad Men era. There was �not a single Negro or Puerto Rican� among some 200 administrators at the World’s Fair, Robert Caro writes in The Power Broker, his biography of the fair’s vainglorious impresario, Robert Moses. In a new history of the fair, Tomorrow-Land, Joseph Tirella observes that �the glittering pavilions of Flushing Meadow’s manicured Fairgrounds and its utopian slogans had little�if anything�to do with the political turmoil of the city around it.� Third World countries were widely represented in Queens, but Moses vetoed Transit Authority plans that would have made the fair more accessible to low-income and minority visitors from the other boroughs. Still, the Illinois �Land of Lincoln� pavilion at the World’s Fair extolled the Great Emancipator, in the form of a Disney audio-animatronic robot, much as Broadway in 2014 would suit up Bryan Cranston to portray LBJ as Lincoln’s successor in All the Way. Then as now, a happy ending to America’s racial drama can always be had for the price of a ticket.

At least race was recognized as a battleground by Americans in 1964, albeit one where a truce was mistakenly seen on the horizon. The war in Vietnam was not seen as a real war, or a subject of debate, except to some scattered, under-the-radar draft protesters. When murky confrontations between U.S. destroyers and North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin moved Congress in August to give President Johnson a blank check to respond, the public yawned. The Tonkin resolution passed the Senate 88 to 2 after nine hours of debate following a 416-to-0 ratification in the House. The Times’ Washington wise man James Reston was baffled by the apathy of a populace unruffled by �a president who announces that he is willing to risk war with a quarter of the human race in China in order to save Vietnam� and �even more indifferent to cries from the Republican opposition for a policy that is even bolder.�

But Johnson’s vanquishing of the super-hawk Goldwater in November 1964 quieted fears that America would be caught up in a wider war in Southeast Asia. Anxieties about greater racial turmoil could also be put aside thanks to Johnson’s decisive victory. Analyzing the election returns, the Times found no sizable white backlash outside the old Confederacy; Reston wrote that �even the Middle Western Bible Belt� had turned against Goldwater. Johnson’s Great Society and War on Poverty had been vindicated by the voters, too. The election was �as fundamental in its way as the ratification of the New Deal 28 years ago,� according to the Times. The public had firmly rejected the right’s �assault on �big government’ and the social and welfare programs of the last thirty years.� No doubt Republican moderates who had outperformed the national ticket, rising stars like George Romney and John Lindsay, would end the GOP’s �revolutionary break with the centrist tradition of American politics� and lead the GOP �back into the sunlight of modernism.�