Guess Who’s Coming to the White House

When you’re 27, you sometimes feel that things that seem very present to many people in the political world — the 1994 midterms, say — are like ancient history. But by the same token, Frank Rich’s column reminds us that some aspects of the American experience that are treated as ancient history actually happened quite recently — within the lifetimes of most people:

And so: just how far have we come?

As a rough gauge last week, I watched a movie I hadn’t seen since it came out when I was a teenager in 1967. Back then “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” was Hollywood’s idea of a stirring call for racial justice. The premise: A young white woman falls madly in love with a black man while visiting the University of Hawaii and brings him home to San Francisco to get her parents’ blessing. Dad, a crusading newspaper publisher, and Mom, a modern art dealer, are wealthy white liberals — Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, no less — so surely there can be no problem. Complications ensue before everyone does the right thing. [...]

Yet much has changed for the better since the era of “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” thanks to the epic battles of the civil-rights movement that have made the Obama phenomenon possible. As Mark Harris reminds us in his recent book about late 1960s Hollywood, “Pictures at a Revolution,” it was not until the year of the movie’s release that the Warren Court handed down the Loving decision overturning laws that forbade interracial marriage in 16 states; in the film’s final cut there’s still an outdated line referring to the possibility that the young couple’s nuptials could be illegal (as Obama’s parents’ marriage would have been in, say, Virginia). In that same year of 1967, L.B.J.’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, offered his resignation when his daughter, a Stanford student, announced her engagement to a black Georgetown grad working at NASA. (Johnson didn’t accept it.)

Imagine that — a Secretary of State thinking he needed to offer his resignation over the fact that his daughter was getting engaged to a black man. And of course President Johnson who, for all his flaws, showed enormous political courage and mettle on this and other closely related topics, rejecting the offer. Forty one years ago when Obama was a kid and John McCain was a fighter pilot in Vietnam.

CORRECTION: A reader points out that McCain wasn’t a fighter pilot:

Correction: August 12, 2008

An article on Sunday about Senator John McCain’s campaign management style described his role as a Navy pilot in Vietnam incorrectly. He flew bombing missions as an attack aircraft pilot, but he was not a “fighter pilot.” (The error has appeared in numerous other Times articles the past dozen years, most recently on April 9 and on Dec. 15, 2007.)

Apologies for the error, I must have picked up my bad information from the Times. I think the point stands.