Nineteen Sixty-Eight in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation

by Charles Kaiser

Overview

1968 was the year that defined the decade—Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, unprecedented antiwar riots disrupted the Democratic National Convention, and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam changed the course of the war. With this political unrest came a breakthrough of American counterculture into the mainstream led by students and protesters alongside the voices of Aretha Franklin, Simon and Garfunkel, and Bob Dylan.

Charles Kaiser’s 1968 in America is widely recognized as one of the best historic accounts of the 1960s. Largely based on unpublished interviews and documents (including in-depth conversations with anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy and Dylan), this is compulsively readable popular history. Now, fifty years later, and with a new introduction by Hendrik Hertzberg, it is even more clear that this was a uniquely terrible, wonderful, and pivotal year in the story of America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780802128034
Publisher:	Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Publication date:	04/17/2018
Edition description:	Anniversar
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	630,337
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Charles Kaiser has been a reporter at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Newsweek. He is a principal contributor to the documentary 1968: The Year That Changed America and is the author of the award-winning The Gay Metropolis and The Cost of Courage.

Read an Excerpt

When I saw him perform again at the Albert Hall in 1966, the atmosphere had changed from a church service into a battlefield. This time the veneration lasted only as long as Dylan performed without accompaniment. When he came back after the intermission with what would become the Band, reverence was replaced by something just short of bloodshed. Audience members screamed, shouted, walked out—even threw things at the stage.

The subliminal message may have caused the larger subterranean turmoil. Dylan’s simultaneous abandonment of the simple style and a straight­forward political message added up to an eerie early warning that an already intricate decade was about to unravel into the unimagined intensity of 1968. But no one articulated such a notion at the time. This was Dylan's typically labyrinthine response to the question that plagued him wherever he went in 1966—“Mistake or not, what made you decide to go the rock­and-roll route?”

“Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I started drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a thirteen-year-old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns the house down. I go down to Dallas. I get a job as a 'before' in a Charles Atlas 'before and after' ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this thirteen­year-old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy—he ain't so mild: he gives her the knife and the next thing I know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I'm robbing my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble onto some luck and get a job as a carburetor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a high school teacher who also does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until the delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy that picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. What could I say?”

Twenty years later, I asked if that was “still the answer.”

“Well,” he said, “that's part of it.”

The truth was much simpler: He was in a fierce struggle to make the most influential music of his era, and it was beginning to look as if the Beatles might beat him to the punch. As early as the fall of 1964, he saw the limits of writing “for people” and being a “spokesman.” Specificity was narrowing his audience unnecessarily. “From now on I want to write from inside me, and to do that I'm going to have to get back to writing like I used to when I was ten.”

Table of Contents

A Crack in Time vii

Preface xiii

Introduction: Bringing It All Back Home xix

1 Four Democrats, Three Ghosts, One War 3

2 Blowin' in the Wind 23

3 Like a Rolling Stone 46

4 Tet: The Turning Point 59

5 The Truth Comes Home 106

6 The Chimes of Freedom 130

7 Tears of Rage 150

8 It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry 167

9 Rock of Ages 190

10 Desolation Row 215

11 This Wheel's on Fire 230

12 The Long and Winding Road 245

Epilogue: If Tomorrow Wasn't Such a Long Time … 254

Acknowledgments 260

Notes 264

Index 291

Editorial Reviews

Praise for 1968 in America

“Charles Kaiser aims to convey not only what happened during the period but what it felt like at the time. Affecting touches bring back powerful memories, including strong accounts of the impact of the Tet offensive and of the frenzy aroused by Bobby Kennedy’s race for the presidency.”—New York Times Book Review

“A chatty, personal view of the pivotal time . . . This account will bring back memories.”—Booklist

“Kaiser’s book is an evocative chronicle, a paean to the ‘Sixties’ generation by a member of the clan . . . His indictment of Eugene McCarthy—a chief theme—is persuasive.”—Library Journal

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