Casing the Country

America in Our Time, by Godfrey Hodgson. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday. 564 pp.

Godfrey Hodgson is an Englishman who first came to the United States as a graduate student in 1955, served as a Washington correspondent of the London Observer from 1962 to 1965, and has returned frequently for long stays in the past decade. America in Our Time is a superior example of the genre of contemporary history written by journalists who covered the events they describe and attempt to recreate them for a readership that also lived through them.

The book records the period from Kennedy’s inauguration through the first Nixon administration. There is a bit of conventional evocation of the recent past in the “onl...