John Jenkins: Summer of '71 — Five Months That Changed America
Award-winning journalist John Jenkins explores the pivotal summer of 1971 — Pentagon Papers, wage controls, the dollar off gold — and its lasting consequences.
Why we picked this
Summer 1971 is one of those compressed periods when several unrelated crises converge and permanently alter the landscape — Jenkins shows that the confluence wasn't coincidental, and the structural consequences are still with us.
In the summer of 1971, several things happened in rapid succession: Nixon imposed wage and price controls, ending decades of post-war economic consensus; Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, triggering a constitutional confrontation over press freedom and government secrecy; the United States ended the dollar’s convertibility to gold, effectively dismantling the Bretton Woods system that had governed international finance since 1944. Each of these events was consequential on its own. Together, they mark a turning point that shaped the next fifty years of American economic, political, and cultural life.
John Jenkins’s “Summer of ‘71” treats these months as a hinge — a moment when the postwar settlement broke down simultaneously on multiple fronts, and when the political and institutional responses to that breakdown set the terms for everything that followed. The book is attentive to the human stories behind the policy shifts, but it is fundamentally a work of structural history, interested in how systems change and why.
A free event at Politics and Prose on the last day of June, timed appropriately: just as summer ends, a book about a summer that didn’t.