Days of Confusion
By Karl Zinsmeister
When I was in college in the late ’70s I picked up something called The Commune Cookbook, written in 1969 by a quintessential hippie named Crescent Dragonwagon (honest). In addition to presenting lots of nutrition tips and some decent recipes, the cookbook preaches the whole nine yards of ’60s causes: whole foods, communal living, free love, black power, draft-dodging, anti-capitalism, Eastern philosophy, and "revolution."
I’ve always found the book amusing, but also troubling, in ways that provide a great metaphor for what was wrong with the 1960s. Here, after all, is a 200-page work packed with warnings about chemicals in the air, poisons in meat, and the grave risks of red dye—that is also laced with references to personal drug use. (Hey, I may jam an exotic array of narcotics into my mouth, nose, and veins, but corn grown with man-made fertilizer does not pass these lips!) And at the same time that it preaches idealism, kindness, and honesty, there is also a whole section in this book instructing people how to live cheaply by thievery.
Alternatively called stealing, lifting, or ripping off, I like the somewhat more optimistic name for this practice—liberating. If you want to get into this, and you should, examine yourself closely. Raise your consciousness. Question your views of morality. I honestly believe that if I need something it should be mine, or my family’s, and that I shouldn’t have to pay for it.... Your belief is your main weapon. I really believe that I should be able to ride the subways free, do anything I want without paying for it, be able to smoke dope anytime and anywhere, and I will. I really believe there will be a revolution, and there will, but for that one, a whole lot of people have to believe.
When you read this passage, what do you think of? I think of some dreamy, indulged teenager from a comfortable home in Westchester County in the throes of adolescent rebellion—which is exactly who Crescent Dragonwagon (and many others like her) was in 1969. I think of what P. J. O’Rourke—whom we interview later in this magazine—has referred to as "the awful power of make-believe." ("It was a kind of hoggish appetite for romance that sent my spoiled and petulant generation on a journey to Oz," he writes of the ’60s, "a journey from which some of us are only now straggling back, in intellectual tatters.")
Of course teenagers have been throwing high-blown and moralistic fits of childishness since the dawn of time. So what was new about the ’60s? What was new was that in the ’60s the children were allowed to get away with it. Instead of rebutting their exaggerations and silliness, the adult culture told the kids they were idealists and visionaries. Then suddenly whole bunches of people started growing their hair, inventing their own rules, and railing against limits, responsibility, and adulthood. A couple million Peter Pans said "I really believe that..." and wham! many of the grown-ups running the country were dressing, thinking, and acting in confused sympathy.
On page 14 we reprint a story that Peter Collier tells about Jane Fonda. Having become bored with life in France with her husband, Fonda flew to the U.S. to "get involved" with the "revolutionary movement." She bopped over to Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, where some radical Indians were staging a "takeover," and within hours was advancing the cause by smoking dope with them in the old prison yard. Over the next couple years she acted out an opéra bouffe parody of the revolutionary—signing her letters "Power to the people!", and discoursing gravely on capitalism’s war against the gentle people of Vietnam. The wonder of all this is that anyone could listen to such a person and do anything other than snicker out loud.
On more than a few occasions, the fundamentally adolescent nature of America’s ’60s blow-up became apparent. At one point when a riot nearly occurred on the Yale campus, student Kurt Schmoke (who is now Mayor of Baltimore) was selected to voice student demands to the faculty. The writer John Hersey, who was on the Yale faculty at that time, recalls the moment: "Kurt walked to the podium.… What kind of abusive rhetoric would we hear? In a trembling voice, Kurt spoke only five or six brief sentences, to this effect: ‘The students on this campus are confused, they’re frightened. They don’t know what to think. You are older than we are, and more experienced. We want guidance from you, moral leadership. On behalf of my fellow students, I beg you to give it to us."
That is one of the most honest statements of ’60s angst I know of. Personally, I suspect that a lot of ’60s rebellion could be traced back to a lack of family guidance—very often, I imagine, to distant or weak 1950s fathers. The mouths of these kids may have been saying "leave me alone," but their actions were often saying "please show me the boundaries."
In his essay on page 72, Bill Bennett notes that having so many adults go awol when the ’60s kids came looking for meaning and direction caused big cultural problems. He points out that "throughout history it has been the propensity of the young to rebel and push the limits. It has always been the responsibility of adults to push back. What was new starting in the 1960s was that many adults no longer pushed back.... [They] became intellectually and morally disarmed."
When that happened, the country began to experience something more serious than just a rash of infantile hedonism, something bigger than large-scale adolescent rebellion. At that point, the 1960s turned into a national nervous breakdown.
In its initial, adolescent, phase, the ’60s ruckus often had nothing to do with politics, or "idealism," or making a better world. What we saw in action was plain old-fashioned self-indulgence. "A lot of it was just kids having fun," says former radical Lynn Scarlett, author of one of the articles in this issue. "Rioting was fun. Running around in the street at night venting your spleen was fun." Drugs, easy sex, and other feel-good
aspects of the experience were the main lure.
As David Horowitz illustrates in our lead feature, there were true believers in the upper vanguard of ’60s radicals who were every bit as monstrous and scary as any totalitarians in history. Given half a chance, these individuals would have competed with Stalin in the record books of ideological atrocity. But genuinely dangerous power-freaks and utopianists never get far on American soil, and it was a much softer and more self-interested participant who became the decade’s garden-variety "radical." These people bore no resemblance to Russia’s "man of steel"; they were mostly coddled goofs, as writer Ben Stein reminisces from his days at Yale Law School:
We could rush out to demonstrate on the New Haven Green against war and racism, and hear speeches by Huey and Bobby and Eldridge and Gene Genet. Then we would come back to be served lunch on white linen tablecloths in the law dining room, by waiters in uniform. Peter Broderick, now a producer in Hollywood, and I would walk across the leafy campus, so far from Vietnam, putting up posters for the Yale Law School Film Society benefits for the Black Panthers and think of ourselves as brave revolutionaries just for taking a walk and using a staple gun.
Ben adds, reinforcing my point about weak grown-ups in the ’60s, that "the teachers were cowed and hardly dared to ask anything difficult in class. For major anti-war or Black Panther demonstrations, class was canceled altogether." In the notorious April 1969 campus incident at Cornell, a famous philosophy professor announced the faculty’s complete capitulation to gun-toting radicals by whimpering an assurance to the mob that "you don’t have to intimidate us." You could say that again.
The common effort to excuse the many riots, destructive incidents, and violent protests of the ’60s on the grounds that they grew out of runaway idealism is absolute bullhockey. Runaway narcissism is more like it. When the Englishman Edmund Burke wrote 200 years ago that "the greatest crimes do not arise from a want of feeling for others but from an over-sensibility for ourselves and an over-indulgence to our own desires," he brilliantly anticipated America in the Age of Aquarius. The petty selfishness masquerading as high purpose of most ’60s "radicals" was eventually exposed by Richard Nixon, notes professor Allan Bloom. "With his unerring instinct for the high moral ground," Bloom observes wryly, Nixon "assessed his student antagonists, and ended the draft. Miraculously the student movement came to an end, although the war continued for almost three years thereafter." Give the monkey his banana, in other words, and suddenly his higher causes evaporate.
But while selfishness was on parade in the ’60s, the more admirable sides of human nature were also there. The untold story of the era is that though protesters and counterculturists got all the ink, most Americans kept their sense of balance and did the right thing. Our articles by James Webb and Glenn Loury, and the collection of pieces titled "Right in the ’60s," demonstrate that the majority of the country never bought the radical agenda. Not by a longshot. A great many citizens, in fact, consciously resisted the nihilistic passions of the day. In some cases (I’m particularly thinking of soldiers who served willingly in Vietnam despite abysmal execution of the war by politicians), they did this literally at risk of life and limb.
We must never stop being grateful that so many Americans traditionally react this way in times of national stress. As the great critic of romanticism Irving Babbitt once pointed out: "To accept responsibility is to follow the line of maximum effort, whereas man’s secret desire is to follow...the line of lesser resistance. The endless twisting and dodging...that results is surely the least reputable aspect of human nature." Conversely, when a man or woman resists self-interest and prevailing fashion to do the right thing, that is the very definition of heroism. Though they were rarely profiled (much less celebrated) on the news, there were plenty of real American heroes in the 1960s.
The ’60s brought the popularization of a whole new social posture that combined bold professions of anti-conventionalism with slavish attachment to the toys and personal comforts of affluence. Tom Wolfe called it "radical chic," and illustrated it brilliantly with his (true) story of the cocktail party Leonard Bernstein hosted in his high-security, multi-million-dollar apartment as a benefit for cop-killing, property-heisting Black Panthers. By the time the ’60s opened, the New Yorker magazine had become a guidebook to blatantly counterfeit posturing of this sort—where paeans to welfare mothers and misunderstood muggers are matched with ads on facing pages for emerald pinky rings and crystal catfood bowls. "No other journal so elegantly combines the comforts of privilege with the glamour of dissent," wrote Stan Evans in 1961, and it was precisely from silk and velvet ranks like New Yorker subscribers that the radical movement (then as now) drew most of its activists (see the sidebar on page 39).
Play radicalism of the sort that took root in the ‘60s had obvious appeal for kids (and supposed adults) who found to their surprise that they could get away with it. And truth be told, the toll exacted on a typical Yale Law or New Yorker firebreather was probably not so awful. Certainly Jane Fonda has rebounded nicely. A famous father, a trust fund, and some plastic surgery can do wonders to save you from the vengeance of personal stupidity.
But there were lots of less-cushioned kids from Virginia and Chicago and Oklahoma who went off to Vietnam and paid a horrible price for the paralysis our play-acting revolutionaries inflicted on America in the late 1960s. (Here again, see the Webb and Loury articles in this issue.) And back home, there were thousands of midwestern boys and girls like Charlie Geisler who got swept up in the ’60s daydream only to awake in a nightmare of personal and family destruction (pages 50-51).
Worst of all, wherever the societal actions and personal advice of establishment liberals touched poor people—on questions of crime, work, family structure, drug use, and personal responsibility—Americans were sentenced to languish and die in ever-more hellish ghettos. (A few causes and effects are documented in indicators, page 19.) As critic and former radical Joseph Epstein summarizes, the ’60s were "a time of horrendous dislocation, a disaster nearly averted, a damn near thing...for which we are still paying and shall continue to pay."
The later feature articles in this issue are devoted to chronicling some of the precise ways and places where decisions made in the ’60s continue to exact a price on American society in the 1990s. Andrew Thomas discusses how the troubling marijuana boom among today’s teenagers is linked to the ’60s histories and attitudes of their baby-boomer parents. Joel Kotkin warns that the U.S. labor movement has recently been taken over by former ’60s radicals, a development which will have many important consequences for our society. In a series of consecutive articles, we show that American public schools and universities are now dominated by ’60s ideas and ’60s people, and that this accounts for much of the educational droop now afflicting the nation.
Other articles sketch some of the ways that 1990s electoral politics is being affected by echoes from the 1960s. Today’s annoying mix in the political realm of highly sanctimonious rhetoric with starkly sleazy behavior is a classic ’60s pattern. This, as Armstrong Williams points out on page 57, is a problem that afflicts ’60s kid Newt Gingrich. And it is a characteristic that utterly defines the Clinton White House (a veritable clearinghouse for former ’60s radicals).
Recall Mrs. Clinton’s stringent attacks on "’80s greed"—when we now know that she is herself a woman who will gouge anywhere she can to make money. Recall how the indirect involvement of President Bush’s son in a failed S&L became fodder for vicious Clinton campaign attacks on "S&L bandits"—this righteous protest being launched just months after Bill and Hillary had secretly finished participating in a real S&L looting. Recall the promises that this would be the "most ethical" administration ever. Ha. Consider the hubris it takes to demand additional campaign finance laws just weeks after carrying out massive and flagrant violations of the existing laws. Reflect on the insincerity and baldfaced duplicity that have characterized this administration since its earliest days. These are the works of quintessential ’60s kids.
The Clintons have offered perfect updates on the ’60s tactic of demanding economic justice while publishing manuals on how to live cheaply by stealing. They are the ’90s equivalents of protesters who expressed their insistence on "peace" by throwing bricks through windows. Today’s political hypocrisies are being carried out by the very same men and women who 30 years ago filled their lungs with marijuana smoke while simultaneously demanding organic purity from grocers. The sanctimony, confusion, and devious calculation of America’s ’60s radicals, dressed in more acceptable clothing, have now been routinized in our highest levels of politics.
The research and interviews presented by Fred Barnes on pages 52-55 shed some light in this regard. Read Ira Magaziner’s messianic ’60s history, for instance, and see if you mightn’t have predicted that he’d be the one to cook up HillaryCare—the Clinton medical reform that arrogantly proposed to remake a seventh of the U.S. economy with the swoop of one 1,300 page government bill.
In our last issue we explored the importance of traditional ideas and institutions in sustaining a culture. In many ways, the ’60s are a cautionary about what happens to any society that throws away tradition when it has nothing better to replace it with. They are a warning that where "the laws of our fathers are forgotten" (as a recent novel by Scott Turow puts it), human pain and destruction will follow.
The ’60s were precisely that sort of time. Though I was young, I remember the era as a blur of protests, race riots, assassinations, hostile confrontations, announcements of social decay, military setbacks, drug deaths, violent concerts, takeovers, foreign bullying, impeachment hearings, and ghetto disturbances. I remember finding national life so relentlessly grim that I literally could not force myself to read the newspapers during those years. It was simply too depressing.
We continue to suffer from lingering ’60s damage today, and one of the inspirations for this issue of The American Enterprise was to help speed reversal of that damage wherever possible. The other goal of our glance backward is to try to rescue some overlooked verdicts of ’60s history. Since our last trashing of the laws of our fathers was so traumatic, it’s essential the country avoid repeating the same mistakes. Understanding more accurately what happened to our national nervous and immune systems one generation ago is critical to this.
That’s why you are about to go time-travelling with contributors like Horowitz, Loury, Rohrabacher, Scarlett, Barone, Webb, Geisler, and Barnes. This is living history. And much of it (for instance, our coverage of right-wing ’60s activism, our exposure of anti-Vietnam war treachery, and our documentation of true conservative silent majorities in the ’60s) we have worked hard to rescue from hidden and even deliberate obscurity.
The nation dare not rely on standard academic channels for its explanations and analysis of ’60s history—for our colleges and universities are now theme parks of ’60s fashion. Yesteryear’s bomb-builders are now the tenured establishment on campus, and they do not look kindly on critical interpretations of their coming-out decade.
As David Farber, a 39-year-old freethinker teaching at Barnard College, warned in The Chronicle of Higher Education in 1994, "a young scholar is...bucking the already long odds of finding and keeping a decent job if he or she challenges certain myths of the ’60s." Richard Ellis, another post-’60s revisionist, recently described to the academic journal Lingua Franca how this fox-guarding-the-henhouse problem works. When he submitted a paper on the left-wing ’60s student group sds to the Journal of American History, the three evaluating readers all turned out to
be former members of sds who did not want his critique published. "I don’t think the author is asking the right questions and I disagree with her/his answers. I do not think her/his thesis is borne out by what I know.... I think it is a fundamental misreading of the New Left," complained one—without offering any specifics. "It’s as if you were writing on the Reagan administration and the journal sent your paper to Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ed Meese, and Caspar Weinberger," complains Ellis.
Which is why we are here.
