SUzANNE FIELDS: Being There

...Behind the scenes of adulation he was escalating the Vietnam War...

...Obama may have been only eight years old when Bill Ayers was plotting domestic mayhem, but he was turning 40 when the old terrorist told the New York Times: “I don’t regret setting bombs...

...b o o K s I n R e v I e W For everything remembered through the haze of selective nostalgia, there’s an unremembered contradiction that is invisible in the rose-tinted spectacles of Baby Boomers who look backward to affirm their youth...

...DeGroot DeGroot bears the needed witness...

...suzanne Fields is a syndicated columnist for the Washington Times...

...Think Susan Sontag’s description of the United States as the source of evil in the world...

...Had Kennedy lived to be exposed in office, he might have been impeached for sharing a mistress with a Mafia don...

...It was, in the words of Allan Bloom, “the closing of the American mind...

...When protesters carried signs that said “Make Love Not War,” the Gipper observed with an off-the-cuff quip that endeared him to the voters: “The only trouble was they didn’t look like they were capable of doing either...

...In fact they were buying a tank...

...A Hell’s Angel hired to impose security killed a black man waving a gun...

...Obama said he was only eight years old when Ayers and his confederates were stalking cops...

...I was tied up at the time...

...They thought they were buying a shiny new sports car,” writes DeGroot...

...Gerard from a drowning girl at Chappaquiddick...

...Andrews, rebuts such perversity in The Sixties Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade...

...they were left nist icon Robin Morgan, “if she didn’t want to be could be declared uptight or a poor sport,” said femia father to help, console, and support...

...In Hillary Rodham’s commencement speech to the Class of ’69 at Wellesley, she urged them to restore the meaning of two simple words, “integrity and trust...

...But there are some things we feel, feelings that our prevailing acquisitive and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us,” she told those audiences four decades ago...

...tive adolescence that reduces shibboleths to the urgency of glands...

...No boomer, he...

...Th e ose u con ly - the tenured radicals won control of the universities and broke down the academic canon into mindless multiculturalism, but the conservatives won control of the White House...

...In many ways, of course, Europe has never recovered from that event...

...The Woodner Hotel on Sixteenth Street NW, not the Mayflower on Connecticut, was the rendezvous of choice by pols waiting for their doxies...

...William Ayers, an unrepentant terrorist of the Weather Underground who became a campus lion, came up in a debate question for Barack Obama...

...He astutely exploited the growing public disenchantment with student rioters...

...Tripping the light but also to impress upon those who had power that they were here today and gone tomorrow and responsible to those below and Him Above...

...George Stephanopoulos asked why he had let Ayers, who has never apologized or shown remorse for his participation in the ring that bombed the Pentagon, the Capitol, and other public buildings, host the J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R 9 5 b o o K s I n R e v I e W meeting in his home that launched Obama in politics as a candidate for the Illinois state senate...

...The traditional canon has disappeared from the elite campus and even the last bastion of the core curriculum at Columbia University is diluted to make room for greater “diversity...

...No one is expected to stand by words spoken in the full blush of a college commencement exercise, but she demonstrated her own unrepentant yearning for the sixties when as senator she earmarked a million dollars of taxpayer money to pay for a museum commemorating Woodstock...

...The metaphor of a kaleidoscope is apt, because he turns his lens of history in many different colorful patterns...

...He creates style and structure to accurately reflect the frenzied nature of that benighted time...

...The sixties children were sired by “the Greatest Generation,” 9 6 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8...

...Each chapter suggests order out of chaos, but with a turn of the page a completely different pattern emerges...

...puts finis to the sixties at Altamont, the free music festival in California, where mellow became murderous...

...Much has changed since...

...But she would take big cash from Washington lobbyists representing those corporate interests...

...While the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) organized around a leftwing agenda, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) w l a t n v E . y a d t l e d n e l a e r a s i v i t c e v t va r se ere o i rga a nizing st a rou nd iv th a e fre w e m l a o rket...

...As one hippie who wandered into the San Francisco Summer of Love observed, “You can’t find God and love in Sodom and Gomorrah...

...He only reluctantly supported the 1963 March on Wash ington, where Martin Luther King, Jr...

...If you tuned in, you dropped out...

...John McCain wryly called Woodstock “a cultural and pharmaceutical event” and drew a killer comparison of his and Hillary’s experience of the sixties: “I wasn’t there...

...I feel we didn’t do enough...

...This approach enables him to present his exhaustive research without constraining it in artificial themes...

...His suntan was not acquired on the deck of a yacht or on a ski slope, but from steroids he took for Addison’s disease...

...King knew the unity on display that day was illusory, reflecting growing impatience with nonviolence, an impatience that would explode in riot and rage when he was shot down in Memphis...

...Nor was he an authentic hero of the civil rights revolution...

...Writes DeGroot: “The dreamers who insisted on seeing the festival as a millennial vision were forced to ignore the fact that a large proportion of the crowd had to leave paradise early on Monday morning, long before [Jimi] Hendrix finished his set...

...Many who If you remember the sixties,” Robin Williams fantastic sent a rush through time and space as the Beatles sang “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds...

...Che’s idolaters never did anything riskier than ordering a double scoop of Cherry Guevara...

...The Spockmarked boomers enjoyed the sexual revolution and didn’t pay the same price as the poor who imitated them and who were trapped in ruined lives...

...DeGroot, born in 1955, was too young to participate in the sixties, but not too young to observe...

...It was easier to romanticize Che Guevara on a T-shirt than to join him in the jungles of Bolivia...

...What in heaven’s name does ‘academic freedom’ have to do with rioting, with anarchy, with attempts to destroy the primary purpose of the university, which is to educate our young people...

...It ends on a tragic note— the decision of the Europeans to go to war with one another, dragging their churches along with them...

...Here Burleigh takes straig l g n i s i r r t o , i s n e n m m o s r f u o he t o o ne it co c untry o in s this e s s ur n vey s u tha p t stand h y s t , turned on, you were someplace else...

...That was on September 11, 2001...

...A woman holding the bag (of diapers) and their babies without We witness the counterculture in a collecraped...

...The great irony of the 1960s,” writes DeGroot, “was that radicals—New Left student protesters, hippies—thought they were conducting a social revolution...

...The Kennedy family tried to keep the the honor they deserved, but the insult of ingratitude mythology alive even after Ted Kennedy drowned so eloquently expressed in the decade that stands as his presidential aspirations when he swam away the expression of runaway indulgence...

...aim at a whole legion of left-wing historians like TGreat Britain...

...And in fact, as he shows in great detail, during the Victorian era religious people tried to maintain a distinctive approach to social evils, “based on a combination of evangelism and social work, tampering laissez-faire liberalism with humanitarian intervention...

...He played his inexperience in politics to his advantage, campaigning as the outsider...

...Gerard DeGroot, a professor of modern history at the University of St...

...Better living through chemistry,” proclaimed a psy chedelic poster, parroting the old Du Pont advertising slogan...

...As he points out in one tart passage, many of the conditions Marx and Engels depicted in British industrial towns— based in some cases on reading of factory inspectors’ reports—were out of date by the time their own studies appeared in print...

...Barry Sadler’s “Ballad of the Green Berets,” limning courage and sacrifice in Vietnam, outsold John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance,” the mawkish hymn of the San Francisco summer...

...If you acid your mind didn’t expand, it exploded...

...Earthly Powers does exactly what a book of history should do—remind us that we are still living the backwash of events a hundred or more years ago...

...Dtrash and trivia did not survive, but thi e h t f o h c u m o s e s u a c w g n o r s s n u r egro ot t insists n o that b e nostalgia for the sixties s underestimates how much the sixties are still very much with us...

...DeGroot’s most valuable insights are in his bold contradictory juxtapositions...

...Methodism, he Earthly Powers does exactly what a book of history should do—remind us that we are still living the backwash of events a hundred or more years ago...

...D e h t e v i g o d d y e g o r r i e h T . e s e e v i e v ha d e l a c h t y m e t h i w g n i n n i g e b , c i t i l o p testify s in g to a false con t scio h usness of libe l ral ficed l aga s in of so a tha t their p sons n and i da n ug t hters cou m ld - i c a s d n a , n i s e r e D e h t f o n i t a i r p e d a r g e t egroot knocks down one myth after another, w h ho m e ad t e grea v t sa o crifices in th p e w s ar o that follow r ed Camelot...

...The most successful political revolution of the 1960s was not conducted by students, nor was it left wing,” he writes...

...Think Jane Fonda sitting on an anti-aircraft battery in Hanoi, aiming at American war planes...

...It was a decade of political protest, remembered mostly as marches for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, some peaceful and some violent, some mindful and others mostly mindless...

...The seeds of peace and hope planted by naïve flower children bore poisonous berries of moral decay...

...But there are other ways of interpreting the decade of trash, trivia, and sometimes violent vulgarity...

...continues, “was never simply a creed designed to discipline an industrial workforce...

...9 4 t H e a M e R I c a n s P e c t a t o R J u l y / a u g u s t 2 0 0 8 Being There The Sixties Unplugged: A kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade By Gerard J. DeGroot (HarvarD university press, 508 pages, $29.95) Reviewed by suzanne Fields It didn’t take long for the antiwar movement to become a propaganda auxiliary of the Viet Cong...

...The John F. Kennedy who emerges here is an image of smoke and many mirrors, an image much like those the hippies saw, looking through a glass darkly with the help of their bongs...

...They want their version to dominate history, as if to say, “You weren’t there...

...The separation of sex from love hurt women most of all...

...But the pampered and privileged did not go unscathed...

...Surprise, it works...

...Sweet dreams turned into nasty nightmares...

...The Kennedy of myth was sewn out of the whole cloth...

...In fact, the most profound revolution that occurred was the emergence of a consumer society...

...Radical students carried Mao’s “Little Red Book” as their bible for a Marxist revolution, as if they had never heard of the cruel, sadistic, and genocidal Cultural Revolution...

...The young father and dashing husband was a notorious womanizer, aided considerably in the search by pimps on his staff...

...The sixties have often been defined as an interlude between the “conformist fifties” and the “selfish seventies...

...The sixties of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll...

...Sound familiar...

...told the multitude that “I Have a Dream...

...The sixties actually encompassed more than a decade, but 15 years of bombastic attitude, closing with the humiliation of the United States on the last day in Saigon, with Vietnamese men and women who believed us when we said we would never abandon them fought with each other to join the last helicopter taking the last Americans from the roof of the American embassy...

...Ronald Reagan was mocked and ridiculed, c haracterized by the San Francisco Chronicle as “a flagrant example of miscasting” when he had the temerity to run against Pat Brown for governor of California...

...If you dropped say they remember the sixties treat their history as if Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson, arguing it were a personal hallucinogen with brightly colored that “the political function of religion [in Britain] abstract images punctuating a fog of pot smoke...

...Too bad for her, she was exposed in her race for the presidency that she hardly practices what she preaches...

...No review can fully do justice to a narrative of this heft and detail...

...jokes, “you weren’t there...

...b o o K s I n R e v I e W he emphasizes, to excuse the reactionary forces in the Russian court and church, merely to emphasize the dialectical relationship between them and their supposedly revolutionary adversaries...

...Discussion of theory in the ivory towers shut out the cries and whispers of Chinese counterparts, intellectuals who were being hunted down and rehabilitated to rescue China from “bourgeois pretensions...

...he asked...

...Idealism fused with cynicism, fantasy begot fanaticism, liberty became license, and freedom morphed into a form of tyranny...

...It was instead a populist revolution from the right, which had Ronald Reagan as its standard bearer...

...We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living,” she explained...

...Consumerism trumped Marxism...

...Culture peddlers beat out the revolutionaries...

...The was not merely to keep the lower orders quiescent… medium is the message, literally...

...While Woodstock was heralded as a new nation under pot, dedicated to the proposition that peace, love, and pleasure would survive through youthful power, it was more like a decadent interlude before the work week resumed...

...Among subjects treated in a new and original way are Vatican politics and diplomacy, the Dreyfus case, Bismarck’s Kulturkampf in Germany, the rise of Social Catholicism in France, Germany, and Austria and its often poisonous symbiosis with anti-Semitism...

...you can’t possibly understand...