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Tom Brokaw’s Boom!: Lessons from the 1960’s

Tom Brokaw’s Boom!: Lesson from the 1960’s is a pretty solid book that covers the years of 1963-1974.  For those of you wondering why he covers the first portion of the 1970’s in a book about the 1960’s Watergate and the whole aftermath of that was due to many of the actions of people who came to prominence in the 1960’s.  Tom Brokaw also starts with 1963 because it was the year that the President from “Camelot” John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald.  This was essentially when people started losing their way, many began to lose faith in their government and the direction of the nation.

The year that Brokaw focuses on the most was across the tragic and yet monumental in some ways year of 1968.  Tom Brokaw does an interesting job of showing his personal journey as a young reporter and tying it to the events of the time.  He started out as a reporter in Omaha when Kennedy was shot, but would go on to Atlanta to cover some of the great leaders of the civil rights movement such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Congressman John Lewis.

Brokaw essentially admits what was long known as a liberal bias on his part.  He speaks about being a great admirer of former Minnesota Senator Gene McCarthy.  Brokaw and his wife would attend dinner parties with the likes of McCarthy and other prominent intellectuals of that area.  The book itself is set up as a set of interviews with the newsmakers and some regular folks who directly or indirectly had a rather affect on how society came to be shaped.  Despite Brokaw’s liberal bias he does give equal time to compelling conservatives such as Dr. Shelby Steele who was at one a “black power” militant who was later to become a staunch conservative and great thinker of issues dealing with race.

The interview in the book that I personally enjoyed the most was that of Arlo Guthrie’s who was one of those folks who came to be very critical of the drug culture that came out of the 1960’s.  Despite these misgivings he still spoke passionately about some of the causes and activism that came out of mediums like the folk music scene.  The quote that Guthrie gives in regards to the fights of the 1960’s with the counterculture still battling the silent majority and how that’s a good thing because that means nobody won yet is scary because I would like to see us move past these issues.  Unfortunately in order to move past these issues sadly there probably has to be a victor in this entire mess.

The reason why the book is so relevant to today’s problems is because the arguments used against either liberals or conservatives back then are often the same labels and rhetoric we use today.  So many people have made their living off of using division whether it be Karl Rove or the left wing activist Tom Hayden.  The most interesting interview in the book for me was Rove’s however because he did point out that sixty percent of the electorate did vote for a pro-war candidate in 1968.  Whether it be the former Vice President Richard Nixon or conservative Alabama Governor George Wallace.  It is also debatable as to whether Hubert Humphrey could truly be classified as an anti-war candidate as well.  So despite all this anti-war sentiment on college campuses, certainly pro-war Presidential candidates won the day in regards to the Vietnam War.

One thing that is touched upon in the book and Brokaw does a good job of noting that there was a divide amongst the old and new leaders of the liberal feminist movement.  I knew Betty Freidan and Gloria Steinem were not fans of one another, but it was interesting to see Steinem and people like writer Nora Ephron admit this in print.    So even amongst people who are generally cut from the same cloth ideologically can have rifts.

Brokaw’s book includes interviews with authors like Joan Didion, singer/songwriter James Taylor and politicians like Newt Gingrich.  All of it is an interesting mix as he tries to piece together what much of the 1960’s really meant.  Brokaw wonders whether the 2008 elections will truly heal some of the wounds of that era or whether things like the Iraq War will just create more.

By: DeanSmithLegend
Published: 10/10/08


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