Introduction to "BOOM! Voices of the Sixties (Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today)" Part II

Before the twentieth century, most of history’s movers and shakers had been young (and almost exclusively young men) because the average life span was so short. In colonial America, if a man made it through the Revolution, he was living on borrowed time once he reached thirty-five. Survivors of the Civil War could expect the grim reaper to come calling before they were fifty. World War II vets could expect to blow out the candles on their sixty-fifth birthday. 

This unprecedented longevity and the fecundity that accompanied it (the babies started booming), combined with the increasingly affluent lifestyle enjoyed on the home front during the Fifties, resulted in a demographic phenomenon. 

Adolescence became for most young Americans a period of learning and leisure from youth to young adulthood. This extended adolescence accounted for a new market, as the young were eager for clothes and gadgets, sporting goods, sweets, and fast foods, and, most of all, entertainment that said, “We’re here and we have our own ideas.” 

As Jann Wenner, an enterprising boomer as the founder of the Rolling Stone magazine empire, says, “It was a cheeky, fun time—with the Beatles and all that great music. We were making our own rules.” There was also so much money around, he says, that “all you had to do was go to the post office and get a check from your parents.”  

That wasn’t true for everyone, of course, but the rapidly expanding American middle and upper middle classes were cashing in on all that prosperity of post–World War II America.  

Increases in the standard of living, complemented by advances in technology, were almost dizzying in the postwar period. The FCC started granting television licenses at the beginning of the 1950s, and by 1955 more than half of the homes in America had a black-and-white TV set. By 1960, almost 90 percent had more than one—and many of them were wired for “living color.” 

The development of the 45 rpm single record, at the end of the 1940s, just in time for the arrival of rock and roll, at once made popular records unbreakable and easily portable. Bill Haley and the Comets released “Rock Around the Clock” in the spring of 1954, and the modern pop culture was born. The kids now had their own artists and their own sound. That grown-ups thought it tasteless and vulgar and probably downright dangerous was icing on the cake. Two years later, on September 9, 1956, Elvis Presley suddenly appeared amid the usual boring acrobats and hand puppets on The Ed Sullivan Show—television’s monument to middle-class mass entertainment.  

Everyone knew that Sullivan wouldn’t allow the cameras to show anything below Elvis’s waist; but everyone knew what was going on down there. He sang his hit “Don’t Be Cruel” to some sixty million viewers—the largest single audience in history to that date. 

Hollywood quickly discovered the enthusiasms and the angst, not to mention the hormones, of this large new adolescent audience with time to waste and money to spend. Rebel Without a Cause, starring James Dean (“the first American teenager”), appeared in 1955 and signaled another new phenomenon.  

Many of these youngsters were able to extend their adolescence past high school and into college. Their fathers had used the GI Bill to get an education, and they wanted their children to have every advantage they’d had and more.  

In my age group, we were often the first in our families to attend college. We approached the opportunity with a sense of awe and obligation to get on with our lives in the workaday world. Five years later, boomers took college for granted and converted campuses into staging grounds for their campaigns against anything that smacked of the establishment. 

So in the reunion I organized I asked, “What seemed so important at the time that seems a little foolish or wrongheaded now? Who were the winners and who were the losers? Can we tell yet?” 

How do you sum up a time when change rolled across the country in hurricane proportions, when there were so many contradictions and so many paradoxes? A time when Elvis gave way to Dylan, when Richard Nixon arose from the political dead after two Kennedys were murdered, when Ozzie and Harriet were replaced by Archie and Edith Bunker? When men in military uniform went from being respected figures in society to targets of vilification?  

At this reunion, you will hear from Arlo Guthrie but also from Karl Rove. You’ll meet young women struggling with “the mommy track.” You will hear from civil rights veterans who worry that their cause has lost its way, from Vietnam vets who came back and from their contemporaries who fought against the war, not in it.  

For the most part, I am like the old class president at this reunion. I call on others and then let them have their say. I am here as a journalist but also as a citizen, a grandfather now and a young man then. 

I began my marriage and my career as a journalist in 1962, a straight-arrow product of the Fifties. By the time the decade was over, I’d had my first taste of marijuana, I had long hair, and on weekends I wore bell-bottoms and peasant shirts when, as a family, we went to hippie arts festivals in the hills north of Los Angeles. But Meredith and I were raising our children essentially as we had been raised by our Great Depression and World War II parents back in the Midwest.  

Weekdays I was covering the political fallout of the counterculture for NBC News, dressed in the correspondent’s uniform of suit and tie, looking more like a narc than one of the crowd, as I wandered through the neighborhood of Haight-Ashbury, holy ground of peaceand-love hippies and druggie runaways from across the country.  

I often thought of myself as a generational straddler: one foot in the psychedelic waters of the Sixties and the other still firmly rooted to the familiar terrain of the Fifties.  

Everyone who went through the Sixties sees it through his or her own distinct prism. The conventional view is that it was a time mainly of flower children and angry protestors, of black power and militant feminism. But it was also the beginning of the resurrection of the political right, which had been soundly defeated in 1964. 

The Sixties were a time when the nerve endings of the body politic were constantly stimulated with new sensations, but it was also a time of mindless fantasy, groundless arrogance, spiritual awareness, callow youth, and misguided elders.  

Reunions are funny things. Not everyone chooses to attend them. And you can never be sure that you’ll like everyone who turns up. But for this virtual fortieth, I am confident that the people attending have something to say that is worth hearing, about then and now. I also believe that on many of the most important levels, the meaning of that amazing decade is still emerging, and that for the rest of my days, when my mind wonders back to the Sixties, I will probably think: Boom!—what was that all about?