Tom Hayden - Long Sixties: From 1960 to Barack Obama

THE LONG

SIXTIES

FROM 1960 TO BARACK OBAMA

BY

TOM HAYDEN

Chapters 22 and 23 are reprinted with permission from The Nation (March 24, 2008, and April 23, 2008, respectively).

First published 2009 by Paradigm Publishers

Published 2016 by Routledge

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hayden, Tom.

The long sixties : from 1960 to Barack Obama / Tom Hayden.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-59451-739-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-59451-740-2 (paperback : alk. paper) 1. United StatesHistory19611969. 2. United StatesHistory1969 . 3. United StatesSocial conditions19601980. 4. United StatesSocial conditions1980 . 5. United StatesCivilization20th century. 6. Social movementsUnited StatesHistory20th century. 7. Social changeUnited StatesHistory20th century. I. Title.

E839.H39 2010

973.92dc22

200902687

Designed and Typeset by Straight Creek Bookmakers.

ISBN 13 : 978-1-59451-739-6 (hbk)

ISBN 13 : 978-1-59451-740-2 (pbk)

A S we arrive at the fiftieth anniversary of everything that happened in the sixties, I want to thank my research assistant, Emily Walker, for her talent and focus in working on the dateline included in this book, as well as doing research on several chapters. She was preceded by an able graduate student, Rachel DiFranco, who began the effort several years ago. I apologize and take responsibility for any omissions. My intention is to battle amnesia with remembrance as the decades pass. Many of the fiftieth-year milestones will be reported by the media, but the question is, Whose stories will be remembered? Memory is the final battlefield.

I also want to thank Dean Birkenkamp and the good folk at Paradigm Publishers for embracing this book and its companion, Movements against Machiavellians, a longer look at our history, to be published by 2011.

As always, I live in the present, with my sweet artist wife, Barbara, and our nine-year-old, Liam. I research, write, teach, and advocate for better policies toward Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East, Venezuela, Cuba, and Latin America; toward inner-city youth here at home; and toward our wounded environment. But there is no escaping the sixties for me, and so I feel a permanent responsibility to tell the stories and legacies, not in order to live in the past, but to preserve the living past against the vultures of history.

The sixties were a time of dreaming like no other, when the very contemplating of someone like Barack Obama was a criminal desire in many states and places. His triumph is one of the postsixties generation, but the postsixties grow out of the sixties, not out of thin air. Without the civil rights reforms, without the opening of the Democratic Party after Chicago, without the spirit and tools of participatory democracy, without the experience of the Vietnam generation, there likely would have been no Obama presidency.

When Obama won the Iowa Democratic primary, my thirty-four-year-old son, Troy, had to remind me of something:

It amazes me that the DNC [types are] supporting Hillaryites claims that the Iowa caucus is severely flawed, that too many peoples jobs prevented them from attending, blah blah blah. Never mind the fact that record numbers turned out, almost doubling the last elections total. It amazes me that all these talking heads cannot even fathom the idea that perhaps Barack is simply a better, more qualified, more in touch candidate. Why cant they celebrate Baracks definitive victory? Why cant they celebrate the fact that a monumental shift in our nations identity is occurring? Why cant they celebrate that for the first time in a generation young people stood up to be heard? I wish, that for one moment, these baby boomers would turn off the arrogant noise in their searching heads and listen. Look and listen to the changing fabric of this country. In the midst of dark times an incredibly beautiful spirit is awakening. A spirit that we were told about by you, our parents. A spirit that so many fought for. It was a dream for you, an idea that you almost attained before it was violently taken away. That dream has matured, it has come full circle, it walks with your children. In fact, this is no longer a dream but an actual happening. I hope you see your self in this new spirit.

He was right. My generational experience, I realized, weighted me with so many memories of death, assassination, and betrayal that I no longer carried the pure spirit of my early twenties, and it would take that spirit once againincluding an inevitable dose of navetto achieve the unexpected miracle of Obamas election. It is not that my worries about Obamathat he favored an escalated war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, that he would surround himself with the very people responsible for Wall Street deregulation and military quagmireswere misplaced. But the appearance of a new social movement with the determination to usher in the Obama age surprised and overwhelmed me. Whatever the outcome of his presidency, the Obama generation will be the cradle of social activism in America for the next thirty years.

When Obama won, hundreds of thousands of people rallied joyously in Grant Park, the scene of the bloody confrontation between antiwar forces and the Chicago police forty years before. I sat at home wondering if anyone remembered. A few days later, a letter came from a friend passing along a message from David Axelrod, Obamas campaign manager. It quoted Axelrod as saying it was a conscious decision to hold the rally in Grant Park, because they wanted to do something that would symbolically overcome the damage that had been done to American idealism forty years beforethere, in Memphis, and in Los Angeles.

The new president was immediately faced with an economic crisis, one that hardly existed in political debate when his campaign began in 2007, and yet one that made his victory possible. Once in office, he was confronted with two dangers to his tenure: first, the obstinate refusal of the economic oligarchy to accept deep economic and energy reform through government intervention, and second, the lurking possibility of a right-wing populist revolt if his neo-Keynesian approaches failed. As in the thirties, the new president would need a popular movement on the Left to achieve such reforms as the reregulation of Wall Street, universal health care, or bottom-up economic development. No sooner had a social movement elected him than it was time for a new social movement to bring about a new New Deal. Lest his domestic initiatives sink in the quagmires of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, a new peace movement must rise as well.