A DECADE ago, the U.S. entered on the longest continuous noninflationary expansion in its historymore than four years of golden growth. It was a time when Henry Ford could pass off a sales dip with the quip: "Business is merely terrific instead of phenomenal." Today's businessmen, disillusioned by the current economy, have been looking longingly back at those good old days. How was that prosperity managed? Could the measures used in the early '60s have a salutary effect now?
Some of the problems facing the Democratic Administrations of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson from 1961 to 1965 were markedly different from those confronting...