Brokaw - Boom!: voices of the sixties: personal reflections on the 60s and today

Copyright 2007 by Tom Brokaw

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

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Text permissions and photo credits can be found beginning on Back Matter.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Brokaw, Tom.

Boom! : voices of the sixties : personal reflections on the 60s and today / Tom Brokaw.

p. cm.

1. United StatesHistory19611969. 2. United StatesHistory19611969Biography. 3. United StatesSocial conditions19601980. 4. Social changeUnited StatesHistory20th century. 5. National characteristics, American. 6. Nineteen sixties. 7. Brokaw, Tom. 8. JournalistsUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.

E841.B738 2007

973.92dc22 2007028253

www.atrandom.com

eISBN: 978-1-58836-647-4

v3.0_r2

To the memory of
Robert F. Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
and Captain Gene Kimmel, USMC

And, as always, to Jean Brokaw, my mother,
and to Meredith, the most important influences
in my life, whatever the times

INTRODUCTION

What Was That All About?

The times they are a-changin.

BOB DYLAN

The thing the Sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasnt the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.

JOHN LENNON

When I began to tell members of that large, raucous generation born just after World War II, the baby boomers, that I was thinking of writing a book on the aftershocks of the Sixties, a number of them laughed a little nervously and said, What are you going to call this one? The Worst Generation?

Their references to my book about the generation that grew up in the Depression and fought in World War II were a little defensive and a little defiant. More than a few baby boomers had told me over the years that they represented the greatest generation. After all, they said, they were the largest, the best educated, and the wealthiest generation in American history. More important, many believed they had stopped a war, changed American politics, and liberated the country from the inhibitedand inhibitingsensibilities of their parents.

I assured my boomer buddies that I dont think they represent the worstfar from itbut I also teased that I didnt think many of them were as great as they thought they were.

They did give us the Sixties. Theres no doubt about that. But the bottom line has yet to be drawn under those turbulent times. Conclusions have yet to be established. Thumbs up or thumbs down?

Former president Bill Clinton, who was a bearded student and famously avoided the draft during the Sixties, says in these pages, If you thought something good came out of the Sixties, youre probably a Democrat; if you thought the Sixties were bad, youre probably a Republican. The evidence is still coming in and the jury is still outand forty years later we dont seem anywhere near being able to render a verdict.

In fact, here we are, nearing the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and as you will discover in this book, many of the debates about the political, cultural, and socioeconomic meaning of the Sixties are still as lively and passionate and unresolved as they ever were. Moreover, those debates and the issues involved are a critical and defining part of our contemporary dialogue about where this nation is headed now and how it gets there. The presidential election of 2008 in many respects may be an echo chamber of the election of 1968, with the lessons learned or ignored in Vietnam applied to the war in Iraq.

So I decided to organize a virtual reunion of a cross section of the Sixties crowd, in an effort to discover what we might learn from each other, forty years later. Just like your high school or college reunion, not everyone showed up for this one. Some who did will surprise you with what they have to say about then and now. Youll meet some famous names from the Sixties, but also those who went through life-changing experiences entirely comfortable in their anonymity.

Personally, as someone who lived through the Sixtiesa time I count as beginning with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and ending with the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974I have many personal memories of that turbulent, exhilarating, depressing, moving, maddening time that simply do not come together in a tidy package of conclusions.

Nineteen sixty-eight was the volcanic center of the Sixties, with landscape-altering eruptions every month: political shocks, setbacks in Vietnam, assassinations, urban riots, constant assaults on authority, trips on acid, and a trip around the moon.

Nineteen sixty-eight was the year when Kris Kristofferson says he did a one-eighty turn in his life; it was also the year Pat Buchanan realized his dream of a conservative victory in the presidential election.

There are many voices and many different judgments in these pages, but there is at least one common conclusion. Everyone agrees that the Sixties blindsided us with mind-bending swiftness, challenging and changing almost everything that had gone before.

Boom! One minute it was Ike and the man in the gray flannel suit and the lonely crowdand the next minute it was time to Turn on, tune in, drop out, time for We Shall Overcome and Burn, baby, burn. While Americans were walking on the moon, Americans were dying in Vietnam. There were assassinations and riots. Jackie Kennedy became Jackie O. There were tie-dye shirts and hard hats; Black Power and law and order; Martin Luther King Jr. and George Wallace; Ronald Reagan and Tom Hayden; Gloria Steinem and Anita Bryant; Mick Jagger and Wayne Newton. Well, you get the idea.

Boom!

Few institutions escaped some kind of assault or change. The very pillars of the Greatest Generationfamily, community, university, corporation, Church, lawwere challenged to one degree or another. Nothing was beyond question, and there were far fewer answers than before. A Time magazine cover story on a Southern theological philosopher stopped America in its tracks with the frontcover question Is God Dead?

Boom!

Authority lost its privileged place almost overnight. Authority figuresfathers, mothers, cops, judges, teachers, senators, and the president of the United Stateswere suddenly spending as much time defending their conduct as they were exercising their power. University presidents and deans were physically thrown out of their offices. Flags were burned and cops were routinely called pigs.

Boom!

Crew-cut veterans of World War II looked up at the dinner table andboom!they saw a daughter with no bra, talking about moving in with her boyfriend, and a son with hair down to his shoulders, wearing a T-shirt with a swastika superimposed over an American flag, discussing his latest plot to avoid the draft. In those same families, however, Mom came to realize her life did not have to be defined by the walls of the kitchen and laundry room.