Here is one more perspective on the book:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/lif ... 36281.html
You say you want a revolution?
Historian Gerard DeGroot explores the Sixties, an era that didn't quite change the world
By ROBERT ZARETSKY
In Stendhal's novel The Charterhouse of Parma, the hero Fabrice del Dongo, like so many young men in Napoleonic Europe, loves the idea of revolution. Joining Napoleon's ragtag forces in 1815, Fabrice soon finds himself in the midst of a battle. Or is it a battle?
There's much sound and fury but little that resembles the notion of war Fabrice had gleaned from novels and histories. As the narrator asks, "Had what he seen been a battle?" As it turns out, it happened to be Waterloo.
After reading Gerard DeGroot's The Sixties Unplugged, I feel a bit like Fabrice: It turns out the 1960s were a lot like Waterloo. Not only was the decade as incoherent to its participants as Waterloo had been to Fabrice, but it also marked the defeat of a notion of revolution that was popular and romantic but also false and toxic.
Like DeGroot, I was born in 1955: We were both slightly too young for a Day-Glo world already too old. And like DeGroot, I am a historian. But his introduction left me puzzled, both as a fellow historian and baby boomer. DeGroot makes several initial claims, many of which strike me as odd, wrong or both. For 40 years, he states, "a battle has raged over the ownership of the decade." Where was I? How could I have missed this food fight? "In no other period," DeGroot continues, "has canon been allowed so freely to permeate analysis." Admittedly, that's canon with one, not two n's. But historians who study the French Revolution or World War II would take exception to that exceptional claim.
"Most of what happened in the 1960s," DeGroot announces, "lacked coherent logic." Or as Henry Ford famously said, history is just one damn thing after another. The problem, though, is that Ford was wrong. The past, not history, is one damn thing after another — which is precisely why we do history.
The historian takes the past and pounds it into a story. Yet DeGroot, who happens to be an excellent historian, rebels at this prospect: "I have resisted the temptation to impose order. I have instead presented a tour of the 1960s, an impressionistic wandering. Inclusion has been decided on the basis of whether an event happened during the decade, not whether it harmonizes with the idea of the decade."
In short, DeGroot's methodological claims seem both unachievable and undesirable. We impose order as naturally as we breathe: Ask any child looking at clouds, or any historian rummaging through archives. And as far as habits go, this is one of our better ones. Imposing order and coherence is just another name for giving our lives sense and significance. At the end of the day, whose perspective would you prefer: Fabrice's or Stendhal's?
Happily, in practice if not theory, DeGroot plumps for Stendhal. So much so that he violates his own methodological axioms. He begins his book with a pre-1960s event — the meeting of Russian and American troops along the Elbe River — and despite the "kaleidoscopic" approach promised in the book's subtitle, depends on chronology as much as any traditional historian. DeGroot begins with the end of World War II — mushroom clouds billowing over Japan while Europe enters its ideological Ice Age — and, albeit in crablike fashion, recounts the 1960s in a roughly linear fashion.
While he focuses on events in America, he also looks abroad at Europe, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. This approach is welcome — the '60s were a global phenomenon — but inevitably means that historical gaps will be more plentiful.
For example, he discusses France's 1968 student revolt but not the massacre of Algerians by Parisian police in 1961, the threatened military coup against De Gaulle's government in 1962 or the release of Marcel Ophuls' searing documentary The Sorrow and the Pity in 1968.
There is a compelling essay on the Six Day War but no mention of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961 or the coup that brought Saddam Hussein to power in Iraq in 1968.
But these are quibbles. While I am puzzled by DeGroot's methodological claims, I envy his gift for writing spare and smart prose. His book's 67 sections — essays, really — glitter with sharp insights and wry humor. For example, on Woodstock he notes Joni Mitchell's emblematic song "suggests a paradise. The reality was something closer to carnage." (Mitchell, by the way, canceled her appearance at the festival, worried she would miss a TV appearance the next day promoting her new album.) Or on the sexual double standard in radical movements like Students for a Democratic Society, which reassured women that "by doing the dishes, they would hasten the advent of the socialist millennium."
And who can forget the made-for-TV group the Monkees? "Instead of fab, they were prefab." Or the space race, where we sent the right stuff to the wrong place: "the standard of achievement became the ability to put a living being into space, even though doing so had as about much importance as shooting a scantily clad woman from a circus cannon."
A narrative sleight of hand shapes each of his essays — a kind of "now you see the event, now you don't." Take DeGroot's account of the high point of the civil rights movement, the March on Washington in August 1963. There are few events that have a greater hold on the American imagination. Yet, with a few rapid strokes, DeGroot suggests that John Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were not so much actors as onlookers, trying to keep up with a surge of history beyond their control.
We know that J. Edgar Hoover fruitlessly tried to stop the march but forget that black radicals were impatient with the moderate tone of the speeches. And we are stirred by the cadences of King's "I Have a Dream" speech but overlook the text's tragic tension. King warned time and again about the "whirlwinds of revolt" — whirlwinds that, in the end, the United States reaped. The march, DeGroot rightly concludes, "seems a triumphant moment, but King did not see it that way. His speech was an expression of worry as much as hope."
The 1960s began in a flourishing of optimism and idealism that, by decade's end, turned to ashes, cynicism and souvenirs. Jerry Rubin, the prankster who turned legitimate protest into puerile performance art, overwhelms the awkward eloquence and democratic ideals of Mario Savio, founder of the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley. From the sweeping vision and personal courage of King, we finish with the violent and misogynistic posturing of Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver.
The "battle for Dylan" — DeGroot's phrase for the struggle over Dylan's music between folkies and rockers — that began in 1965 at the Newport Folk Festival, when Dylan marched onto the stage carrying his "Stratocaster like a Kalashnikov," was buried by the mud and confusion of Woodstock, where the "stage had hardly been dismantled before the exploiters invaded." (The murder and mayhem at Altamont four months later provided a tragic coda.)
The decency and idealism of César Chávez, who dedicated his life to securing decent wages for farm workers, could not compete with the glitz, glamour (and staggering cost) of the Apollo mission. A decade that began with John Kennedy's mesmerizing inaugural address, calling on young Americans to a devote their lives to the nation, ended with Ted Kennedy driving a car off a bridge at Chappaquiddick, killing not just his female passenger but the hopes of an entire generation.
DeGroot's story is not new, but it is well told and has an important twist: Namely, even the idealism of the early years was not what it was cracked up to be.
For example, we remember Kennedy's inaugural address for its resounding call to democratic values at home and abroad. What we forget, DeGroot writes, is that Kennedy's speech launched a foreign policy of robust interventionism. Americans "thought they were being sold a shiny new sports car. In fact, they were buying a tank." It is not difficult to draw a line from 1961 to the thousands of dead and maimed soldiers, broken economy and polarized politics wrought by the Iraq war.
At times DeGroot's analysis turns glib. Prior to the Six Day War, he claims, Israel's "embattled image was a carefully constructed myth." Why "myth"? Just a few lines later DeGroot himself cites the countless Arab threats to "liquidate" Israel. (Given two earlier wars challenging Israel's right to exist, moreover, such threats easily found an attentive audience in a nation founded in the ruins of Auschwitz.)
His discussion of Timothy Leary's experiments with LSD at his home in Millbrook, N.Y., is justifiably harsh, but was it truly a "totalitarian" movement ruled "by the despotism of drugs"? I suspect that most people would distinguish between life in Nazi Germany and suburban Millbrook.
In his account of 1968 Paris, DeGroot describes France in the early 1960s as a country "where national pride impeded modernization." To the contrary, France had been in the throes of modernization since the late 1940s, and Gaullist paternalism, not national pride, brought the students to the barricades.
Even DeGroot's stylistic brilliance dims in this chapter: There were, he writes, more political factions than "cheeses in the market," and students "sampled ideologies like tarts from a bakery."
Yet even Jimi Hendrix hit wrong notes. The Sixties Unplugged is an impressive achievement, one that leaves us feeling woozy about an era in which, we've been told, we were feeling groovy.
Robert Zaretsky teaches in the Honors College at University of Houston and is a frequent contributor.
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