Johnson reframes the pessimism of the early 1970s — Watergate, Vietnam, social upheaval — as something far more familiar in American history: not collapse, but renewal. She quotes her late husband Lyndon's words from one of his last public addresses: 'We are not living in times of collapse. The old is not coming down. Rather, the troubling and torment of these days stems from the new trying to rise into place.' She traces the pattern from Jefferson's revolutionary generation through her own youth in the transformative 1930s to the graduates of 1973, who now hold the new clay of all that was wrought in the 1960s. The message: don't despair of America — it has always been unfinished, and that is precisely the point.