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The Dynamics of Party Support: Cohort-Analyzing Party Identification. By Converse Philip E.. (Beverly Hills, Calif.: Sage Library of Social Research, Vol. 35, 1976. Pp. 175. $11.00, cloth; $6.00, paper.)

This volume, one of ten that have been published in the Contemporary American History Series since 1969, fulfills the author's stated purpose to describe "Kennedy's role in promoting this modern attempt to remove racial barriers to equal opportunity in American life" (p. ix). In recounting the evolution of Kennedy's views on civil rights, the administration's response to the racial crises in the South in the early 1960s, and the struggle later in the administration for legislation, Bruaer weaves an important story with great attention to detail. However, for the experienced scholar of the presidency or of civil rights, the volume adds nothing startling, nor does it break new ground in the interpretation of these events. The author's main contention that the initiatives of the Kennedy administration constituted the critical first stage of a Second Reconstruction is not defended against possible alternative interpretations. Might not Truman's initiatives have been the "critical first stage?" Brauer does suggest that Harry S. Truman pioneered in the employment of presidential power on behalf of racial progress, but that Kennedy, by contrast, "turned Truman's trails into wide avenues" (p. 315). While he argues that civil rights became a focal point of public policy and political debates under Kennedy, he does not address the charges of the critics of Kennedy's record on civil rights (such as Miroff, Navasky, and Zinn) who contend that Kennedy did not take the initiative on civil rights, but claimed credits for forward steps in a movement directed by others. One wishes for more interpretation of the data accumulated so meticulously, as well as explicit attention to the methods used to determine "Kennedy's motives" and "the critical first stage of the Second Reconstruction."