INTRODUCTION

“If you remember the Sixties,” quipped Robin Williams (and quite a few others), “you weren’t there.” He was referring, of course, to the haze created by all those mind-expanding drugs the beautiful people popped, mainlined, and smoked. In truth, however, time has proved an equally effective hallucinogen. As years go by, real events have given way to imagined constructs. The decade has been transformed into a morality play, an explanation of how the world went astray or, conversely, how hope was squandered. Problems of the present are blamed on myths of the past.

Memory acts like a filter, yielding a clearer image of the past. The impurities are removed, producing a distillation both logical and meaningful. We forget, for instance, that back then the music business made a lot of money from silly songs like “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy,” or that Sergeant Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets” outsold “Give Peace a Chance.” We remember the Students for a Democratic Society but forget the Young Americans for Freedom. We recall Che Guevara’s success in Cuba but not his humiliation in Bolivia. Power, we decide, was exercised by radical students, not right-wing workers. The decade belongs to Kennedy and Dubek, not Reagan and de Gaulle.

This book is the history of a decade, not of an idea. The Sixties is, strictly speaking, a period of 3,653 days sandwiched between the Fifties and the Seventies. It is also, unfortunately, a collection of beliefs zealously guarded by those keen to protect something sacred. Idea has been turned into ideology, with the effect that the Sixties has come to be defined not by time but by faith. Believers object violently to any attempt to redefine the decade, dismissing rebel analysts as reactionary, revisionist, or neoconservative. For forty years, a battle has raged over ownership of the decade, with those who dare to question hallowed truths bombarded with a fusillade of consecrated dogma. In no other period of history has canon been allowed so freely to permeate analysis.

Ownership is often asserted with reference to age. “You weren’t there; you can’t possibly understand” passes for effective rebuttal, even among those who think themselves serious historians. Apply that logic further and my colleagues in medieval history would be out of a job. In fact, I was there. My earliest memory is the morning after John Kennedy’s defeat of Richard Nixon in November 1960. I can vividly recall gazing into the sky, desperately hoping to see Yuri Gagarin’s space capsule passing over San Diego. Granted, my age (I was born in 1955) made me an observer of the decade more than a participant in it. But none of this is remotely relevant. The important point is that I have formed my opinions on the basis of recent research rather than on golden memories of a life once lived.

The past is what happened—history the way we view it. For too long, the Sixties has been a sacred zone. The spotlight has been shone upon those people or events we would like to believe were important. But cast aside the rose-tinted spectacles and we see mindless mayhem, shallow commercialism, and unbridled cruelty. China’s Cultural Revolution was one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century. The Six-Day War made victims of every nation in the Middle East. In Indonesia, one million people were slaughtered at the temple of greed. An accurate timeline of the decade is packed with events not normally identified with Sixties iconography. How many people, when considering those times, think about Sharpeville, the Gaza Strip, Vatican II, Tlatelolco, Biafra, Jakarta, Curt Flood, or the cannibals of Guangxi? People remember where they were when Kennedy was shot, but most cannot recall the year Reagan was elected governor of California. Yet that election was far more important in shaping the world we live in today.

Nostalgia for the Sixties is strong precisely because so much did not survive. The decade is important for reasons most people do not understand, or care to admit. Revolution was never on the cards. The door of idealism opened briefly and was then slammed shut, for fear of what might enter. Chauvinism and cynicism got the better of hope and tolerance. The Sixties was the time when the postwar consensus began to disintegrate, when society polarized and liberalism went into steep decline. Perhaps the most enduring bequest of the decade is the convenient gallery of scapegoats it provided. To this day, people have been eager to blame their problems—moral decay, crime, violence, and the plight of the family—on a permissive generation of misfits, delinquents, and revolutionaries more powerful in myth than they ever were in life.

The Sixties was a drama acted out on many stages. The extent to which it has coherence relies in large part on the efforts of subsequent analysts to assign it meaning and structure. The act of writing a book can unfortunately provide the illusion of order; random, chaotic events are linked together in narrative, whose structure implies a continuum that never actually existed. Disparate actions examined under one analytical microscope often suggest a harmony not present at the time. Significance is manufactured through retrospective examination, and connections are easily assumed.

The central point of this book is that most of what happened in the 1960s lacked coherent logic. In order to convey this, I have resisted the temptation to impose order. I have instead presented a tour of the 1960s, an impressionistic wandering through the landscape of a disorderly decade. The tour includes many stops not usually on the Sixties itinerary. 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. Though there is a vague chronology, causal assumptions are not allowed to intrude upon the journey. This approach might annoy those who like their history linear, who crave a concrete thesis, and who want all the dots connected, all answers provided. But thesis is too often a mask for agenda, a tendency especially noticeable in Sixties scholarship. My thesis is very simple: I feel that too much has been left out of the Sixties portrait, and the omissions have given rise to a misleading, reductive image. What is made of my new revelations, whether they are incorporated into a fresh synthesis or simply ignored, is inevitably up to the reader.

Imagine a kaleidoscope, a brilliantly simple invention capable of conveying complex patterns. It consists of a tube, a lens, some beveled mirrors, and a collection of colored pieces of glass. Look through the lens, and a distinct pattern appears. Twist the end cap and a totally different pattern, a reality equally logical, emerges. That is the effect I have tried to achieve with this book. My short sections, sixty-seven of them in all, were designed to stand alone, and are not linked by continuous narrative. They are the shiny pieces of glass capable of being arranged into myriad realities. How they are arranged depends in large part on the way the reader manipulates the kaleidoscope.

The Sixties Unplugged is not an international history of the decade. I’m not sure such a venture is possible within the confines of a manageable book. Spreading the coverage uniformly across the period and around the globe would result in analysis too thin. My first draft had more than 100 sections and was over 350,000 words, much to the horror of my editors. I removed the equivalent of a good-sized book in order to arrive at this slimmed-down version. It is easy to produce 1,500 pages on the Sixties, as some authors have demonstrated. But legitimacy is not a by-product of length, or of width. While this is not an international history of the decade, it is certainly more global than any book previously produced. It is also, as such, an effective antidote to the hundreds of books so far published which would have us believe that “the Sixties” was a phenomenon confined to the United States. The insularity of so much Sixties scholarship has hindered an understanding of the global implications of the decade.

Books are often judged by what they neglect. I am fully aware of gaps in my chronicle. I could find no room for Angela Davis, Enoch Powell, England ’66, the Profumo Affair, the Human Be-In, Andy Warhol, Jean-Paul Sartre, Günter Grass, Stanley Kubrick, or Monterey Pop. I also realize that my ambitious scope occasionally leads to unavoidable generalization. Equivocation and nuance are, I fear, easier with 1,000 pages than with 500. Finally, I am aware that I stand to be criticized for not giving due weight to the subtle achievements of the decade’s rebels and movements. For that I plead guilty—I did not feel a need to add to the chorus of praise for individuals whose profile was impressive but whose achievements were frail. Readers will notice that I have my own list of heroes, which includes Rachel Carson, Cesar Chavez, Bob Dylan, Robin Morgan, Peter Coyote, Robert Jasper Grootveld, Mary Quant, Robert Kennedy, and Mario Savio. The eclectic nature of that list will, I hope, convince readers that my analysis is driven by no distinct political agenda.

Louis Menand once wrote that the great problem with Sixties scholar ship is that it is written by those who care too much about the decade. He called for a history written by someone who doesn’t give a damn. On that score, I’m not sure I qualify, certainly not after spending years with a diverse collection of Sixties personalities who inevitably challenge equanimity. I do give a damn, but in a way that I hope will be seen as refreshing.