1968 in America Book

As the title indicates, this is a book about America rather than a book about 1968 as a whole. It's impossible to make that a firm line and Kaiser does pay a bit of attention to Paris and Prague, but the strength of the book is its nuanced treatment of Democratic Party politics, especially the ever-changing cross-currents of the Eugene McCarthy campaign. The sections on LBJ, Humphrey and Bobby Kennedy are very good, but it's the portrait of McCarthy's conflicted insurgency that sunk in most deeply. I've read a lot about the Sixties, especially over the last couple of years, and I'm familiar with the standard anecdotes, so it was a pleasure to regularly encounter new details that illuminate the central figures and events.

There's much less of that when Kaiser moves beyond electoral politics. He glides a bit when he writes about music, placing white rock--Dylan, the Beatles and the Stones especially--at the center. He doesn't ignore black music, but its clear that he's listening to soul from a bit of a distance. He's a pretty good synthetic writer when he's looking at Civil Rights and the political Right. But there's been a lot of new research since he was writing in the 1980s, so the book has just a bit of a dated feel.

Like 1968, 1068 in America runs out of gas somewhere around the Chicago Convention, gliding very rapidly over the last four months. To some extent that's understandable, but it does mean that the treatment of Nixon's election--in retrospect maybe the event with the most lasting impact on American history--is relatively superficial. It may also reflect Kaiser's choice to place a very strong emphasis on Eugene McCarthy. Again, that's understandable since so much came to a head around his campaign, but it does create a slightly distorted sense of a year that was much more complicated.

Finally, and this is't criticism so much as reflection, it was sad to read Kaiser's assessment of 1968's last impact, which he frames in terms of the anti-war movement's success in keeping America out of Vietnam-style military adventures. Guess we didn't internalize that as deeply as one might have hoped.