Making Peace with the 60s.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

As someone who came of age in a post-Beatles, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, I initially bristled at the very title of David Burner's Making Peace with the 60s. Growing up in the 1970s meant living through a "national malaise" spread by any number of downer contagions: stagflation and oil shocks; openly evil or incompetent presidents and legislators; brief stabs at wage and price controls and "double" daylight saving time; the threat of imminent nuclear war and, widely held to be even more sinister, nuclear power; booming divorce and crime rates; the possibility of Skylab crashing through the roof at the worst possible moment; the moral equivalent of war against setting thermostats above freezing; migrating killer bees and the occasional killer rabbit; and so much more.

As if such mini-apocalypses weren't enough, there was another annoyance aimed specifically at us kids: constant, invidious comparisons to the '60s generation by the '60s generation. They were idealistic, we were cynical. They were active, we were apathetic. They smoked dope and had sex to open their minds, we merely indulged ourselves. "You kids today, you don't do anything, you don't know where it's at," regularly ranted one of my high school history teachers, a bearded ex-hippie whose high point in life was hitchhiking to Woodstock. (His low point, I assumed then and hope for his sake now, was teaching at my high school.) "We were out in the streets, man, out in the streets!" he would say, exhorting us to some vague notion of revolution while demanding we raise our hands before speaking in class.

To be sure, Burner's book includes echoes of such invective - at one point he decries the "fad of self-cultivation...that followed the sixties"; at another, he bitterly writes off the '80s as "lost American years" focused solely on "consumption." Such comments are unsurprising, given that Burner, a historian at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is both a veteran of the '60s (he was born in 1937 - making him typical of the pre-baby boomers who actually led the supposedly generational movement) and an unapologetic "social democrat."

But Making Peace with the 60s is no valentine to its subject. It is more like a post-mortem inquiry on an accident victim. One can almost see Burner, as the pathologist, probing the corpse, shaking his head, and muttering, "It didn't have to be this way." Given Burner's politics, Making Peace with the 60s is perhaps even more damning than the relentless Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts on the '60s, by leftists-turned-rightists Peter Collier and David Horowitz. While Burner ultimately offers very little peace, he does tease out some interesting insights regarding the apocalyptic trajectory of the 1960s. Chief among these is an acknowledgment that when it comes to public policy and political processes, there is often an unbridgeable gulf between intended consequences and actual results.

For Burner, "the history of the 1960s is the history of the breaking apart of the liberal mentality," particularly with reference to the two intersecting mass actions of the decade, the civil rights and anti-war movements. To understand that breakup, Burner "examines forces of the era that might have been allies but succeeded in becoming enemies: a civil rights movement that severed into integrationist and black-separatist; a social left and a...