Mark Kurlansky's book on the 1960s is rich in detail but in the end is more commemoration than history.  A review of 1968: The Year that Rocked the World.

1968: The Year That Rocked the World
by Mark Kurlansky 
published by Ballantine Books (December 30, 2003)
Hdbk., 546 pgs.
ISBN-10: 0345455819
ISBN-13: 978-0345455819

There are two ways of writing on the events usually grouped together under the rubric “the Sixties.” One may “commemorate them,” by accepting the claims of their participants at face value. Or one may treat them critically, examining the participants’ claims in the context of history. Much writing on “the Sixties” (and the Vietnam war, for that matter) has been of the commemorative type. Historians and journalists have spent far too much time “celebrating” clichés about the Sixties and not enough time analyzing them.

Mark Kurlansky, author of the imaginative, popular history works Salt and Cod, has attempted to write a global account of the tumultuous events of the year 1968. He has surveyed a great deal of secondary literature on the subject and summarized his findings into an eminently readable four hundred pages.¹  Kurlansky’s broad thesis is that people in 1968 “were rebelling over disparate issues and had in common only that desire to rebel, ideas about how to do it, a sense of alienation from the established order, and a profound distaste for authoritarianism in any form.” Kurlansky identifies himself in the Introduction as being “of the generation that hated the Vietnam War [and] protested against it . . ..” “[T]here was a time,” he declares, “when people spoke their minds and were not afraid to offend — and that since then, too many truths have been buried.”

The strength of Kurlansky’s book is that it brings to the reader’s attention many important global events of which most Americans are not aware. There are chapters on the Polish and Mexican student movements. In one of the most interesting chapters, Kurlansky describes how the Communist Polish government crudely scape-goated protesters as “Zionists,” and used this as an excuse to harass Jews. There is a chapter on the Biafran war and a chapter on Castro’s Cuba in 1968. Kurlansky is able to integrate these events with the book’s focus, the political and social upheaval in the United States. Some of 1968’s most interesting moments are Kurlansky’s accounts of how American student and counterculture leaders interacted with their international peers. Allen Ginsberg, for instance, quickly wears out the welcome of Castro’s Socialist Cuba by pressuring the Revolutionary leader to make drug use and homosexuality hallmarks of the Revolution. The French “Situationists,” a quasi Anarchist Group active in the May 1968 student revolts in Paris, quickly get on the nerves of their American hosts by parodying their compatriots’ speeches.

Kurlansky has an eye for details and another strength of 1968 is the many factoids he includes. In 1968, for instance, the term “Negroe” would be replaced by “black.” The term “Palestinian” would enter into popular parlance. Possibly the most important innovation of the late sixties was the use of videotape and direct satellite transmission. Before 1968 most television news reporters used sixteen-millimeter black and white film, usually taken from cameras mounted on tripods. The film was expensive and this restricted what might be shot. Events often had to be “staged” in order to compensate for the immobility of the cameras. The use of mobile cameras and cheap, reusable videotape changed all of this. With satellite transmission, it became possible for “on the spot” reporting. 

There are a number of major flaws in the book, though these are perhaps less Kurlansky’s fault than those of the historians whose books he has consulted. First, the theme of uniting global culture around the idea of “revolting against authority” is so broad as to be nearly meaningless. American leftists had little in common with their Eastern European counterparts. As Poland’s most famous intellectual of the sixties, Leszek Kolakowski said, “The freedoms we were fighting for in Poland were the things demonstrators in Paris were trying to have eliminated.” Efforts by the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre to create a common front with East European intellectuals failed repeatedly. The popular image of freedom in countries like Czechoslovakia and Hungary was hardly some sort of abstract “compromise” between socialism and capitalism, as Kurlansky would have it.²  American freedom and the material wealth that seemed to accompany it provided a very real image of the future for Eastern Europeans.³  This admiration for America among East Europeans remains strong.

Kurlansky writes openly that he “[is] of the generation that hated the Vietnam war, protested against it, and has a vision of authority shaped by the memory of the peppery taste of tear gas. . . . and the police . . . club.” It goes without saying that Kurlansky is also a member of the generation of Americans who, while paradoxically inheriting the greatest material resources of any generation in the history of the world, came to think of themselves as history’s greatest victims. Of this they were utterly convinced, and so the adage of “often wrong but never in doubt” might well prove to be their epitaph.

The generation of ’68 flocked to India allegedly in pursuit of “spirituality,” which presumably was absent in America. In fact, as Gita Mehta writes in Karma Cola, many were in fact pursuing guilt-free sex — and with their American dollars succeeded in taking advantage of an impoverished culture to fulfill sexual appetites still taboo in the West. College activists from the generation of ’68 protested against the war in Vietnam — and were often able to find means to be disqualified from the draft. The effect of their “disobedience” was that less privileged working class men simply took their places, often in the infantry. The war churned on.

The hippie culture of ’68 made a big deal over “doing your own thing.” What this meant, as far as women were concerned, was that they did what men told them to do — or risked being called “prudes.” Kurlansky spends a great deal of time discussing Tom Wolfe’s biography of Ken Kesey in the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. However, he makes no mention of Kesey’s wife, a shadowy figure in Wolfe’s biography, who dutifully endures Kesey’s various affairs (including impregnating the 17-year-old “Mountain Girl”) while she does the dishes and presumably cleans up after the men who are too busy having existential experiences. The ferocious hostility of many feminists towards men in the early seventies undoubtedly has much to do with the sexism of hippie culture — something that Kurlansky ignores.

While Kurlansky mentions Abbie Hoffmann as the “clown” of the sixties, he misses the opportunity to recognize the humor and self-irony as linking together some of the wider anti-authoritarian sentiment of the period. While Abbie Hoffmann and Jerry Rubin were part of an elitist element in sixties protest culture, they were also jokers and much of their efforts were as much acts of self-mockery as “anti- authoritarian.”  Humor was something mainstream popular culture could relate to and it was this attitude which enabled protest to go beyond campus elites and to enter into mainstream America. The melodramatic theme of “protest” Kurlansky uses to string together the events of 1968 is hardly the “spirit of the sixties.” Rather, it has its roots in the boorish, self-righteous and humorless behavior of bomb throwers such as Bernadine Dohrn and her cohorts in the Weatherman. These, along with militants within the civil rights movement, probably did more to subvert the culture of protest than Richard Nixon.

In the final tally, Kurlansky’s 1968 is a commemoration of 1968 rather than its history. He repeats the period’s myths⁴ and too often omits the events that don’t fit the story he wishes to tell.⁵  This should not be surprising. Posterity will read 1968 not as an account of those heady days, but as a last attempt of a generation to repeat in writing the ideals that the movement sought so dogmatically to achieve.

1968: The Year That Rocked the World is available on Amazon.com.

Endnotes

1. The book is not particularly well written. However, the author touches on so many exciting events that one can read the book in a flight from Los Angeles to Boston and back. 

2. It is true that some East European intellectuals — a very few — distinguished themselves by denouncing the material wealth in the “capitalist” West. These found their counterpart in the West among largely Marxist intellectuals who, in order to distance themselves from Stalinism, argued for a “third way” between “east and west.” Kurlansky portrays this attitude as if it were widespread in Eastern Europe. There were few members of the East German government who thought this way, let alone citizens. Disillusionment with socialism was nearly universal. See Charles Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton, 1997). 

3. This is one of Kurlansky’s most bizarre claims. Most left-wing European intellectuals spent much of their energy denouncing the alleged “materialism” of the West, seeing it as thwarting the revolutionary proclivities of the “proletariat.” One of the most famous of these, Herbert Marcuse, is cited several times in Kurlansky’s book. It does not appear that Kurlansky read Marcuse. The contempt left-wing intellectuals such as Marcuse and Theodore Adorno had for America (both fled to America to escape fascism — Marcuse would get a job working for American intelligence and Adorno would work at Columbia University before retiring to Southern California) will probably be eventually contextualized as reflecting the esoteric culture of, in Fritz Ringer’s formulation, the German Mandarins. Neither Marcuse nor Adorno distinguished between American liberalism and fascism. Kurlansky vastly overstates Marcuse’s importance to America’s Left.

4. For instance, the myth that Afro-Americans served disproportionately in combat units in Vietnam. This is disproven in Ron Spector’s After Tet: the Bloodiest Year in Vietnam. Kurlansky’s understanding of the conflict in Vietnam is not much better. He repeats the egregious misrepresentation of NBC reporter Eddie Adams, who photographed General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet Cong prisoner. Adams, providing no context for the execution, used the photograph to depict the Saigon government as barbaric. Despite Adam Garfinkle’s criticisms of the anti-war movement in Telltale Hearts, Kurlansky can find little if anything critical to say of those opposed to the war. Hence the often larger “counter protests” to those the media was covering are characterized as “jocks” or simply ignored. The at times violent anti-Semitism of left-wing student movements in Germany is ignored. He even attempts to portray Daniel Cohn Bendit as being a sort of comedian. Cohn-Bendit famously said of the left-wing Adorno, “So ein reaktionares Schwein wie Sie habe ich noch nie erlebt. Man sollte Sie kastrieren.” Some comedian. (see Theodor W. Adorno by Hartmut Scheible. Rowohlt, 1993, pp. 144)

5. Counter protestors at Columbia University are characterized as “Jocks.” Often counter demonstrators outnumber anti-war demonstrators, but almost never got any publicity. When University Hall in Harvard Yard was occupied by student protestors, those opposed to the occupation repeatedly demonstrated against it — and outnumbered those inside. Books have been written about the occupiers. Nothing has been written of note about those opposed.