The Last Test, and Why It Was the Best Decade Anyway

On November 4, 1979, a group of Iranian students, radicalized by decades of American support for the deposed Shah and freshly emboldened by the revolution that had just toppled his government, stormed the American embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six American hostages, fifty-two of whom would remain in captivity for four hundred and forty-four straight days, well into the following decade. It was, in almost every sense, a fitting final exam for a decade that had spent its entire run testing exactly how much institutional strain American confidence and American governance could absorb without shattering completely. Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer who had promised never to lie to the American people and had spent his presidency trying to govern with an almost monastic sincerity, found that sincerity almost entirely unequipped to solve a crisis that demanded something considerably harder-edged, and the failed rescue mission that April, in which American helicopters crashed in the Iranian desert before ever reaching the hostages, became the visual symbol of a presidency, and in some ways a decade, running out of answers right at the finish line.

And yet — and this is where I want to land this whole series, because I think it matters — even that failure doesn't undercut the actual argument that we have been building. The decade that opened with a Bentley crashing outside a Hertfordshire pub in January of 1970 closes with a country that had, by any honest measure, done something genuinely remarkable with the ten years in between. It held a lying president accountable through the ordinary, patient mechanisms of a free press, an independent judiciary, and a legislature willing to do its actual constitutional job, rather than through anything resembling a coup or a revolution. It ended a catastrophic, decade-long war, however painfully and however late. It built, out of a movement the culture still mostly remembers as a punchline, an entire regulatory infrastructure protecting the air and water that every American still breathes and drinks today. It gave the world a body of recorded music so deep, so consistently honest, and so structurally varied — from Marvin Gaye's grief to Joni Mitchell's confession to the Ramones' furious minimalism to Stevie Wonder's boundless generosity — that most subsequent decades of popular music are still, in one way or another, working in its shadow. And it gave American film its single greatest sustained run of serious, morally complicated, unflinchingly honest storytelling, a four-or-five-year stretch running from The Godfather through Chinatown through Nashville through Taxi Driver that the industry has never fully replicated since, not because filmmakers got worse, but because the specific cultural conditions that demanded and rewarded that kind of honesty — a country freshly and painfully disabused of its own comfortable illusions — don't come around often, and shouldn't be wished back into existence lightly, given what it actually cost to produce them.

That's the case this book has tried to make, one year and one chapter at a time, and I want to state it plainly here at the close rather than let it dissolve into vague nostalgia the way these arguments so often do. The 1970s were not the best decade because they were comfortable. They were almost never comfortable. They were the best decade because comfort was, for one specific and irreplaceable ten-year stretch, taken entirely off the table, for a whole country and for the artists living inside it, and what got made instead — the music, the films, the actual functioning proof that a government could lie and still eventually be forced to answer for it — is the kind of achievement that only ever gets built under exactly that sort of pressure. Easier decades get remembered more fondly. This one got remembered more truly. And fifty-some years on, with the hostages still not yet home and the calendar about to turn into a new decade nobody in 1979 could have fully anticipated, that was still, unmistakably, the better trade.