The revolution will be analyzed: America changed in 1969, but our history isn't quite complete.

AuthorKelley, Norman
PositionWitness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul - Book review

Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost Its Mind and Found Its Soul

By Clara Bingham

Random House, 611 pp.

Nineteen sixty-eight has often been cited as the year when America and the world went crazy. It was, after all, the year Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, and American cities, the nation's capital included, were set ablaze by black Americans enraged by King's assassination. Paris exploded in a bloody student revolt; the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia; the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam galvanized North Vietnam to fight on. Demonstrators raged outside of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Richard Nixon was elected president.

Not so, says journalist and writer Clara Bingham, the time of psychosis really began in 1969. Her 600-page oral history Witness to the Revolution describes 1969 to 1970 as modern America's most radical, and possibly most transformative, period. It was a time in which nearly two million Americans dropped acid and the nation experienced eighty-four acts of arson and bombing, and when a major social transformation took place, an era in which various subordinate communities--blacks, Latinos, gays, women--began to emerge and challenge the status quo.

Bingham has divided her book into twenty-six chapters that cover the draft, the psychedelic revolution, the women's liberation movement, and radicals and resisters. From 2012 to 2015, she traveled the country interviewing some 100 individuals--(some) black and (mostly) white, (mostly) male and (some) female, primarily early Baby Boomers who "played an important role in bucking the system," including Bernardine Dohrn, Greil Marcus, and Julius Lester. Many of those she interviewed, like Carl Bernstein, Daniel Ellsberg, Morton Halperin, Michael Kazin, Tony Lake, and Richard Reeves, went on to have a lasting effect on American politics and culture.

Bingham designates 1969 as the year the sixties generation "awakened"; she argues that the decade designation "the sixties" is arbitrary. For some, that specific sense of time---what the novelist Raymond Williams described as "a structure of feeling"--began with President John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963. For the writer and poet John Perry Barlow, "the sixties" didn't begin until 1966. "Prior to that," he writes, "it was Eisenhower's America."

"From the start of the academic year in 1969 until the classes in September 1970, a youth...

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