1968: The Year That Rocked the World
Mark Kurlansky
Ballantine
History
ISBN: 0345455819

It takes a brave publisher to commission a book about 1968.

One reason: It's a year many think they know all about --- it's the quintessential Baby Boomer landmark, with America's first cohort of post-war kids graduating from college in a year marked by two assassinations (Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.), wild politics (the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the election of Nixon) and enough great music to power a classic rock station for weeks.

Another reason: Survivors of that year gravitated toward media, often becoming writers --- and reviewers. Like me, for example. I not only graduated from college in 1968 (magna cum laude and disciplinary probation, thank you very much), I published my first book that year, an anthology of the underground press. My book goes unmentioned in Mark Kurlansky's 1968: THE YEAR THAT ROCKED THE WORLD. But that's not a slight --- for all that's stuffed into these 400 pages, there's a lot missing.

Let's start with what's here and what's good. A global perspective, most of all. It would have been so easy to focus only on America; as it happens, Kurlansky has a fine eye for European politics and culture. I was riveted to learn that German press baron Axel Springer was decades ahead of Murdoch's media when, over an article about beating up leftists at demonstrations, Bild Zeitlung ran this headline: DON'T LEAVE ALL THE DIRTY WORK TO THE COPS! The accounts of uprisings in East Europe are solid. And the reporting of the Mexican government's suppression of demonstrators in Mexico City --- with 100-200 protestors killed --- is a shocking reminder that unchecked authority pretty much does what it wants.

Where the book falls down, ironically, is in the story of America in 1968. There are terrific set pieces --- the sit-in at Columbia University, the police riots at the Chicago convention, Walter Cronkite turning against the Vietnam War --- but considering how many of the men and women who made history that year are still alive, there is a curious shortage of first-person reporting. Instead, there is an odd reliance on Establishment media.

Why odd? Because one of the biggest achievements of 1968 was that --- for the first time --- we could see the difference between official rhetoric and observable reality. "My God, how could human beings do such a thing!" commented Chancellor Kirk of Columbia, when he learned how protesting students had damaged his office. The New York Times editorial echoed that sentiment. The police overreaction to these minor acts of vandalism? Unmentioned. But just a few months later, at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, cameras caught the police in the act. Reporters could mouth anti-left pieties; we saw what happened. And as George Orwell had noted, decades earlier, "When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don't have to ask whose side I'm on."

Sometimes the skew between reality and media is --- unintentionally --- funny in these pages. Kurlansky writes that Bob Dylan began 1968 by releasing "John Wesley Harding" and that this record marked a return to his folk-singing roots. Not so. Dylan's back-up band was made of Nashville's finest studio musicians; this was the transitional record to "Nashville Skyline." But beyond the factual error is the curious choice of critic Kurlansky quotes: Time magazine. Anyone who knows anything about Dylan remembers his merciless skewering of a Time reporter in the classic documentary film, Don't Look Back. (And this kind of sourcing happens again and again. When Kurlansky writes about The Doors, he quotes … Life magazine.)

Kurlansky's choice of sources reveals, I would argue, the larger problem of the book. His subject is insurrection on a global scale but he prefers to tell his story through Establishment eyes. And that brings us to my real unhappiness with 1968 --- its refusal to take a point-of-view.

Is that necessary in a book of history? In most cases, no; a great story is sufficient delight. But 1968 isn't a year you can be neutral about --- it was an ugly, raw, ragtag time, and it grabbed you by the throat and demanded a response. I remember, on Election Night, going to see The Living Theatre at MIT. Elsewhere, the votes were rolling in for Nixon. On that stage, there was the smell of defiance and the threat of violence --- you couldn't be there and not feel like screaming, or ripping your clothes off, or worse. That passion, that sense of life as a daily crisis, is sadly absent from these pages.

Mark Kurlanksy was 20 in 1968. He began his writing career covering the waning days of Franco, the Spanish dictator, so he surely knows a thing or two about the darker side of power. But although the book begins, "There has never been a year like 1968, and it is unlikely there will ever be one like it again," he devotes only his three-page introduction to an exploration of the reasons why.

Rebellion was in the air, he tells us. Whatever the dominant system, rebels --- mostly the young --- rejected it. Reasons? The civil rights movement. An alienated generation. A hated war. The emergence of television as a powerful, in-the-moment medium.

And that's it. Very lucid, but hardly enlightening, not in the way, for example, that Michael Herr's DISPATCHES took you to Vietnam. 1968 is more like a Time-Life Year in Review --- heavy on overview, light on edge, emotion, controversy. Oh, Kurlansky has his feelings: "[My] vision of authority [was] shaped by the memory of the peppery taste of tear gas and the way the police would slowly surround in casual flanking maneuvers before moving in, club first, for the kill." But he describes these reactions as "prejudices."

Kurlansky might have used that memory as a starting point for a more radical analysis --- he might have said that 1968 was when privileged white college kids ripped the mask off their society and found, beneath dad's smooth corporate face, a cold machine dedicated to corporations and the rich. He might have said that Boomers spent the next 35 years figuring out how to deal with what they learned that year. Alas, he chose to write a lesser book: a chronology of great interest to those too young to have been there, a trip down memory lane for those who remember 1968 with nostalgia.

   --- Reviewed by Jesse Kornbluth

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