Witcover (Mad as Hell, LJ 8/93), a columnist for the Baltimore Sun, was an eyewitness to many of the tumultuous events of 1968. He chronicles here the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, increasing public unrest over America's involvement in the Vietnam War, college campus upheaval, and the chaotic Democratic National Convention in Chicago, concluding it was during this year that America turned its back on the progressive social and political changes that marked the 1960s. These events culminated in the election of Richard Nixon as president, and in the years to follow the country would become increasingly cynical about politics and government. Because he was present at many seminal events of that year, Witcover is able to provide a rich and compelling narrative of the time. Highly recommended.Roseanne Castellino, D'Youville Coll. Lib., Buffalo, N.Y.
An overblown snapshot of a tumultuous year.
Witcover (Crapshoot: Rolling the Dice on the Vice Presidency, 1992, etc.), a nationally syndicated political columnist for the Baltimore Sun, draws on reminiscences by Al Gore, John Ehrlichman, Allard Lowenstein, and George McGovern, among others, to chronicle the year in which "the dream" gave up the ghost. Which dream is unclear: Robert Kennedy's? Martin Luther King's? Richard Nixon's? Curtis LeMay's? Witcover's account is shot through with a lack of clarity, and the author seems mostly content to recall the days of tear gas and free love with tired (and often ungrammatical) truisms: "Through the medium of television that was a babysitter for many of them through their formative years, these young Americans saw the Vietnam War up close and they despised it"; "The names [of rock groups] alone, aside from the music often so discordant and confusing to older ears, drew a distinct generational line between the now generation and its parents." Witcover's narrative acquires depth only when he recalls his own experiences as a reporter, reliving the good old days of seemingly unlimited expense accounts and one-on-one interviews with the politicos of the day, most notably a carefully suntanned Nixon. Had Witcover written his book as a reporter's memoir of events he himself covered, it would surely have been to better result than this exercise in pop history, which closes with silly speculations on, for instance, what might have happened had Robert Kennedy lived to run against Nixon.
As an overview of 1968, several books, notably Stephen Spender's The Year of the Young Rebels and Todd Gitlin's The Sixties, cover the same ground, and much better.
