6 sessions, 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM
September 28 through November 2, 2017
Hanover Senior Center - Hanover, NH
Course Fee: $60

For many observers there wasn’t a lot of difference between the two presidential candidates in the 1960 election. The political correspondent Richard Rovere wrote that John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon “tend more and more to borrow from one another’s platform and to assume one another’s commitments.” Those similarities soon vanished. During the 1960’s the Republican Party began a steady move to the ideological right which climaxed with the election of Ronald Reagan, the hero of conservatives, in 1980.

This course will follow the Republicans through those two decades of change. We will track the shift of Republican power from the East to the South and West, watch the emergence of the Christian Right and the collapse of the moderate and liberal wings of the party. We will evaluate the effects of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal and give full attention to Republican leaders like Barry Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller, Gerald Ford, and, of course, Nixon and Reagan.