Reeling in the Year

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

If “1968 With Tom Brokaw,” a two-hour special airing Sunday night on the History Channel, attempted to be anything more than the television equivalent of a coffee-table book on a pivotal year in America’s ongoing culture wars, it would be a serious disappointment. Fortunately, its aspirations are modest and its pleasures abundant.

Its chief asset is its host, whose Midwestern amiability never flags. Whether he’s doing a goofy, gushing interview with singer Arlo Guthrie on the meaning and myth of “Alice’s Restaurant” or having a semi-serious look at the civil rights struggle, it’s very hard to hold anything against Mr. Brokaw. Sure, he’s essentially sending a valentine to the summer after the Summer of Love, and he is seriously wet on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam (Walter Cronkite be damned, we creamed them on the battlefield). But let’s not get too lathered up when Mr. Brokaw goes misty-eyed down memory lane at Haight-Ashbury as “Buffalo Springfield” plays on the soundtrack.

In fairness to Mr. Brokaw and the History Channel, there is a clear effort to provide balanced commentary from the left and the right. This viewer would have preferred a lot more Dorothy Rabinowitz and a lot less Pat Buchanan. But the latter did coin the phrase “silent majority,” which has certainly stood the test of time, and 1968 was long before he went off the deep end on free trade and foreign policy. Ms. Rabinowitz is simply superb, nailing every fool and knave in sight. To say that she knows a narcissist when she sees one would be a gross understatement of her insight into the orgy of self-indulgence represented here. If the History Channel ever wants to do a serious program on the 1960s, Ms. Rabinowitz is their go-to lady.

It would be difficult to choose a favorite among the airhead entertainment figures who pop up repeatedly to strut and blather. Bruce Springsteen does a really bad James Dean impression, Mr. Guthrie appears truly extraterrestrial, and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas is a hoot talking about the “personal growth” she achieved with recreational drugs. Appearing on camera in what looks like housewife attire from the 1950s, Ms. Phillips looks and talks as if she knows her way around some fairly downmarket trailer parks.

Several of the most evocative entertainers from the period, including the singers Janice Joplin and Jim Morrison, happen to have died from ingesting drugs — a point made rather succinctly by Dr. David Smith, the San Francisco physician whose clinic specialized in treating drug victims of the period. Mr. Brokaw is too good a reporter not to include a fair amount of ballast from people such as Dr. Smith, but then the soundtrack picks right up and boomer eyes everywhere mist up in Pavlovian response.

And that, in the end, may be the most important point here. This project is rooted in the book Mr. Brokaw recently authored, “Boom! Voices of the Sixties, Personal Reflections on the ’60s and Today,” which focused on that decade and the changes it wrought in politics, culture, and economics. The television program narrows the focus to the calendar year 1968, flashing forward and back to capture relevant trends and observations. (And, yes, there are plenty of references to the Iraq War and what a difference a military draft makes in terms of anti-war activity.)

Occasionally, when the soundtrack quiets down, there are some significant interviews with left-wingers from the period. Mark Rudd, the dashing student radical who led the shutdown of Columbia University, returns, literally, to the scene of his campus crimes and rightly indicates that the “peace movement” he helped lead did more than the Viet Cong to end the Vietnam War. He does admit that his subsequent fervor for violent revolution may have been misguided. He isn’t asked about his travels to and enthusiasm for Castro’s Cuba. Bearded and graying, Mr. Rudd looks entirely self-satisfied, albeit tired and a little short on legacy. As he holds forth on “the movement,” the camera pans to a contemporary student body more intent on hedge fund opportunities than hashish.

In sharp contrast, Robin Morgan, who helped organize the burning of bras and other instruments of feminine subjugation at the 1968 Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City, is able to provide more evidence of real cultural impact. She notes the election of a woman, Nancy Pelosi, as speaker of the House of Representatives, and heralds the presidential campaign of the junior senator from New York. She, too, looks pleased — but far more alert than either Mr. Rudd or the ditzy Ms. Phillips. Programs of this kind are always wider than they are deep, and summaries of truly momentous events such as the civil rights struggle and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King tend to lose salience amid cover shots of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s “Two Virgins” album and stills from “2001: A Space Odyssey” or “Rosemary’s Baby.” But whenever the whole enterprise threatens to stall, Mr. Brokaw’s earnest presence and comforting tones come to the rescue. He even finds a safe, unifying, apolitical note on which to end — the Apollo Eight mission that sent three well-groomed military men around the moon.

This may not be the “Greatest Generation” of the World War II era that Mr. Brokaw made millions with last time out. But any book, or show for that matter, that features nutty Timothy Leary proclaiming, “tune in, turn on, drop out,” with a straight face has a certain entertainment value that cannot be denied.


The New York Sun

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