Debatable Conjecture

A key theme in Andreas Killen’s “1973 Nervous Breakdown” (Bloomsbury, 256 pages, $24.95) is the acceleration of America’s fascination with celebrity at the beginning of the 1970s and the idea, predicted by Andy Warhol, that anyone can become temporarily famous given the right circumstances. Mr. Killen, a professor at the City College of New York, is an apt example: Today, as demonstrated by the depressing list of book titles published annually, it doesn’t require extraordinary talent to become an author.Admittedly, that’s a harsh assessment of Mr. Killen’s prowess as a historian, but his book is deeply flawed. In the introduction, Mr. Killen asserts, “The seventies are, indeed, the decade that refuses to end.” That’s a novel concept, since most of Mr. Killen’s liberal academic colleagues are stuck in the previous decade. But aside from citing the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, which obviously still reverberates in 2006, most of “1973 Nervous Breakdown” is highly debatable conjecture.Not surprisingly, President Nixon is central to Mr. Killen’s thesis. His emphasis on the televised Watergate hearings that began in 1973 is greatly exaggerated, however; he contends Americans were engulfed by the disclosure of Nixon’s numerous scandals and that the Watergate “spectacle” was “culminating in the symbolic killing of the nation’s ‘father.'” In fact, while the almost daily drumbeat of headlines about the Nixon White House was, depending on one’s politics, exciting or depressing, the country’s citizens did manage to go about their daily lives. It was a diversion, as was another of Mr. Killen’s prime examples of 1973’s epic importance, the PBS documentary “An American Family.”It’s a rather quaint notion that anyone in the modern era considers the country’s president a father figure. Nixon is denigrated not only for Watergate and his Vietnam War policies but also for beginning to “[dismantle] the social programs of the sixties.” In reality, despite his image as a sneaky “law and order” politician who exploited racial and cultural tensions, Nixon was economically quite liberal, abandoning the gold standard and setting ill-considered wage and price controls. And it was President Clinton, not Nixon, who “dismantled” the welfare state.Vietnam and the 1973 return of hundreds of POWs to great fanfare is also one of Mr. Killen’s indicators of how that period continues to define America today. He writes that in 2004 “[John] Kerry’s record of service followed by his antiwar activism proved no match for a president elevated by the New York Daily News to Rambo like status.” Why the author singles out the Daily News is a bit strange, since that newspaper wasn’t alone in endorsing President Bush in the last election, but most of Mr. Killen’s other source citations are from the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the New York Review of Books.One of the major problems of “1973 Nervous Breakdown” is the sheer exaggeration of the events and emerging trends from that year. The chapter on the rash of plane hijackings – from a high of 84 incidents in 1969 to just four in 1974 – is well-researched and makes for interesting reading about a phenomenon largely forgotten today, but his conclusion is suspect. “The preoccupation with air travel and its risks,” Mr. Killen writes, “that overtook the nation in 1973 reflected anxieties about the larger catastrophes overtaking the American ship of state.”In truth, the airline industry didn’t grind to a halt because of the relatively rare hijackings but rather flourished, as more and more people were able to afford what a decade earlier was still considered a luxury. And while the “catastrophes” that Mr. Killen alludes to – a flagging economy, the Middle East oil crisis, Nixon’s political meltdown, and “white flight” from cities – were very real and perhaps peculiar to that year, every era has its share of troubles and triumphs.Similarly, Mr. Killen overstates the importance of the arrival of Korea’s Reverend Sun Myung Moon to the United States in 1973 and the small cult he established. It was a bizarre cultural blip, and attracted a lot of press attention, but was ultimately a footnote in American history.Another example of Mr. Killen’s odd take on the 1970s is his description of life for gay Americans. He writes, “And for gays, the decade between the Stonewall riots and the onset of the AIDS epidemic represented, at least in retrospect, a golden age.” This is difficult to understand. It’s true that the gay liberation movement made huge strides in the 1970s, but the “golden age” was mostly confined to large cities like New York.Mr. Killen’s choice of 1973 as the single year that began “post-’60s America” seems to be chosen at random. At the end of the book, he writes, “America in 1973 was a starkly altered place from the country of a decade earlier.” Yes, it certainly was, but the same can be said about any 10-year interval in this country’s history. While relaxed sexual mores, higher divorce rates, political violence and corruption, and urban unrest helped to define that period, does Mr. Killen believe the changes that occurred between 1923 and 1933 (the roaring ’20s to the Great Depression), 1943 and 1953 (World War II to economic expansion), or 1993 and 2003 (the end of the Cold War to the war on terror) were any less momentous?Mr. Killen closes “1973 Nervous Breakdown” with a warning: “[T]he crises of the 1970s are not so easily buried; indeed they have reemerged with new intensity in our own time.” Perhaps that’s meant as an equation of Nixon to Mr. Bush, but Mr. Killen offers no evidence to make that case.Mr. Smith last wrote for these pages about Bud Selig.

Debatable Conjecture

Debatable Conjecture

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