The ’60s play the same role in modern conservative thought that the Fall of Man does in Christian theology. Prelapsarian America was an idyllic time before the Present Ugliness. Accusing the ’60s is a game with many variants–The Wall Street Journal recently regretted the killing of abortionists by right-wing zealots but added that the ’60s make them do it. No one ever thought of violence before the Weathermen. Certain marginal ’60s people like David Horowitz and Peter Collier now make a good career of denouncing their own past, like professional ex-communists in the ’50s. Horowitz and Collier are the Louis Budenz and J. B. Matthews of our day. (Matthews, wrote Murray Kempton, was “condemned to despoil the graveyard of his youth.”) The ’60s, still carried like a virus in the system, have become the Enemy Within. Is there a crime problem? Drugs? The breakdown of the family? The collapse of our schools? Blame the ’60s.
It is hard to exaggerate the disorienting pace of change in that period. People were swirled up in tornadoes of wrath and deposited in places they never expected to see–in communes, for instance, scattered around Canada, Spain and the Netherlands. A sedate Boston editor told me, as much to his own surprise as mine, that if he saw his Harvard-student son in a riotous demonstration, he would shoot him. It was wild talk–but wild talk was the currency of the day. Professors learned to live with bomb threats. A vestige of student politeness made one demonstrator ask a friend of mine to leave his office in an administration building so they could set it on fire.
My own experience was not an uncommon one. In 1960 I was a conservative graduate student on a conservative campus, studying ancient Greek, a subject I expected to be teaching for the rest of my life. Before the ’60s ended, I had ridden in police tanks and helicopters, had my suit jacket set on fire by a demonstrator, had a gun pulled on me by a man I was interviewing, and had gone to jail twice for blocking the entrances to the Senate and House chambers. Not, as I say, an unusual trajectory. Karl Hess began the ’60s as a speechwriter for Barry Goldwater, and ended them in a jail cell with me after the Capitol arrests. Hillary Rodham began the ’60s as a Goldwater Girl, and ended them helping to impeach Nixon. (The cultural ’60s, as opposed to the calendar ’60s, ran into 1973.)
What whirlwind smashed the idyllic world of the ’50s–the campuses with their “parietals” and dress codes, the family with its “togetherness” and propriety, the churches with their patriotism and fund raising, the corporations with their gray suits and keys to the executive bathrooms? What took us overnight from Billy Graham to Dr. King, from Jerry Lewis to Jerry Rubin, from Hula Hoop to the Molotov cocktail?
A confluence of many forces was at work. The serenity of the Eisenhower years and the excitement of the Kennedy years rode an unparalleled surge of prosperity. A well-fed glut of baby boomers put strain on the containing walls of colleges and universities. The middle class felt its horizons expanding. A youth culture, based on expensive tastes, had become a key factor in the economy. There was room, it was felt, for both idealism and hedonism. The same urge that took people abroad in the Peace Corps to solve other people’s problems made students drive their own cars south to work for civil rights. Doing good and having a good time seemed natural partners. They rarely are. Optimism was running high.
But the height of the optimism became the measure of fear and disgust when things turned sour. Small things, at first, like long hair. The “kids” who were sprung loose to go to rock concerts, or to political conventions, decided they could imitate the Beatles as well as applaud them. The intensity of the reaction to long hair is hard to recapture now. A friend who is gay told me recently that his parents were more upset when he let his hair grow than when he told them he was homosexual. Children were kicked out of school, or kicked out of their homes, for the length of their hair.
We never realized how much we were a society in uniform until some people showed up “out of uniform.” The prosperity of the ’60s was a war prosperity, because we had not really demobilized after World War II. We were under military discipline–by defense regulations, air-raid drills, security-clearance procedures, loyalty oaths. Even the gush of money onto campuses had been a war measure, voted by Congress in reaction to sputnik’s challenge to our scientific supremacy.
Had there been no war in Vietnam, much if not most of what we call the ’60s would have occurred–campus unrest, civil-rights activism, feminist stirrings. The war intensified and accelerated things it had not caused. The changes were already underway, and the reaction. And the killings. Children bombed in Birmingham. Civil-rights activists like Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman killed with impunity by racists. Black students killed at Jackson State (as white ones were at Kent State). John Kennedy Robert Kennedy. Martin King. Malcolm X.
When people think of the violent ’60s, they tend to forget that most of the illegality, the coercion, the violence, was official. The police murdered Fred Hampton, a Black Panther leader. The FBI schemed at Dr. King’s death. The CIA murdered abroad. The FBI repressed at home with its massive COINTELPRO program. The Nixon administration broke laws, beginning with the Constitution, in its secret bombings, in the illegal May Day arrests of hundreds of citizens, in the break-ins and bribes of Watergate. Richard Nixon said he would replace Ramsey Clark with a law-and-order attorney general–and he replaced him with a crook. John Mitchell tried with tainted evidence to imprison peaceful demonstrators like Philip Berrigan, but Mitchell was the one who went to jail. It was a typical pattern. J. Edgar Hoover opened my FBI file for some less-than-respectful words I wrote about Carl C. Turner, after interviewing him on the Pentagon’s plans to quell demonstrations. General Turner, the provost marshal general of the United States Army, was later convicted of stealing rare guns for his private collection. I, in the ’60s, was arrested twice to his once; but I voluntarily, he involuntarily.
Yet most of the official crooks went free. When we are told that the ’60s poisoned our society, it is said that disrespect for authority was the offense. But it was misuse of authority that emerged under challenge; and poisonous doubts about things like the assassination of President Kennedy linger because we are still learning about FBI and CIA mischief that predated the ’60s but showed its face then.
.It was the domestic “best and brightest,” who had countenanced the official repressions of the cold war, who were quickest to take offense at challenges to their own authority. Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California, was the most rigid and provocative enemy of free speech when it was.demanded as a right, not asked for as a favor. Then, when the Vietnam -War became an issue, he furnished student protesters with their finest ammunition. He had boasted that 75 percent of university research funds came from the federal government -and that the figure was even higher for the Berkeley campus. This meant that students did not have to go to Washington to confront the coldwar state. They could oppose it anywhere, since it was everywhere–but especially in Clark Kerr’s office.
There were certainly excesses and tragedies among the activists–but more excesses of hedonism than of zealotry. More drug burnouts than ROTC buildings torched, more broken marriages than draft-board break-ins. The wreckage of lives lived with too intense a flame littered much of the post-’60s landscape. But only the historically myopic would really want to go back to the pre-’60s world. It was a place, remember, where segregation still reigned, where Emmett Till could be murdered with official connivance, where women were second-class citizens on many college campuses and absent from the boardrooms, federal benches and political office.
The civil-rights movement made profound changes in our lives, and not only in black-white relations. It set the pattern for others to demand their rights–women, gays, Native Americans, MexicanAmericans, Puerto Rican-Americans, Asian-Americans. But for the ’60s, Colin Powell would not be who he is where he is today–nor would Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barney Frank or Ruth Bader Ginsberg. If the pace of change had not been so great then, the slow pace that has brought two women onto the Supreme Court would have been even slower. The greatest change in our lifetime–the women’s movement, freeing the talents of half the human race–got its greatest boost from the people who became activists in the ’60s.
It is odd to hear conservatives say that the ’60s caused disrespect for authority-this from people who applauded Ronald Reagan as he said, while in government, that government is the problem not the solution, that it must be starved and mocked. This position used to be called anarchism.
The ’50s were not a golden age–there is no golden age. Much of the moral contentment of that time was based on moral obtuseness. Some of the moral anguish of our time is based on moral alertness, an awareness of others’ rights. Insofar as the ’60s are still a force in our present, we need more of them, not less–more civil rights, more women’s rights, more gay rights, more citizens’ say in government" less censorship and less hypocrisy. The ’60s, too, were not the good old days–there are no good old days. But much of what is good around us took its origin from that troubled and troubling period.
If there are no memorials to the ’60s, at least let there be memory. We made long strides in a short time: ending segregation, reforming presidential primaries, the 18-year-old vote, the birth of the environmental and women’s movements. It may have caused the Nixon reaction, but it also made Clinton-Gore possible.
Then our idealism rusted. We were better at questioning authority than replacing it. We opposed Vietnam and the cold war, but what is our foreign policy? We opposed puritanism, but mostly with a permissive tolerance that left many moral questions unresolved. It is a time of irony. The reforms we achieved mean that many of us are absorbed in the system we protested. Yet we know the system still fails to provide good work, personal meaning, sustainability. Have we become the problem? Will the young march on us? The ’60s are not over.
