Part One: Good Riddance

It was the summer of 1969, a moment when the auguries all seemed to point toward revolution. Tom Hayden, a leading movement figure facing conspiracy charges in Chicago, was calling for the creation of "liberated zones" in American cities. The Weathermen, the faction that had seized control of Students for a Democratic Society, were planning to begin guerrilla warfare before the year was out. But most radicals had fixed their attention on the Black Panther Party, which Hayden had called America's Viet Cong.

Others were talking; the Panthers were doing. Their membership had been involved in shoot-outs with the police that were widely regarded by the radical community as dress rehearsals for the coming Armageddon. Because the party leadership had been decimated (Huey Newton was in jail for killing a policeman, Eldridge Cleaver in exile and Bobby Seale under indictment), Field Marshal David Hilliard had taken charge of the effort to keep the party together and build support among whites. The celebrated French writer Jean Genet was infatuated with the Panthers and Hilliard persuaded him to come to the Bay Area to speak in behalf of the party.

One of the stops was an appearance at Stanford University and a cocktail party before the speech hosted by (continued on page 189)Good Riddance (continued from page 86) Gordon Wright, former diplomat and eminent historian. The Panthers arrived early in the afternoon in their black-leather jackets and sunglasses, looking like some lost Nazi legion whose skin color had changed during the Diaspora. Genet, a small Frenchman with bad teeth and shabby clothes, spoke through a young woman interpreter on loan from Ramparts magazine. He praised the Panthers' authenticity (a characteristic he said he also admired in the Marquis de Sade, whom he praised as "the greatest revolutionary of all, greater even than Marx"). The Panthers milled around in sullen incomprehension as he talked. Discovering that Wright's son, a law student, had brought a black friend home with him on leave, Panther Elmer "Geronimo" Pratt confronted the young black man in the kitchen and spat in his face, loudly calling him an Uncle Tom and "an agent." When Pratt reappeared in the living room, the white guests pretended not to notice.

Not long after the cocktail party began, an unexpected guest dropped in. It was author and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey, who hung around the fringes of the Stanford scene. Oblivious to the Panthers, Kesey, his eyes cloudy with drugs and an out-of-plumb smile on his face, said that he had come because he had heard that a great French writer was there, and since he was a great writer, too, it seemed a good thing that they should meet.

The guests sensed that a portentous moment was approaching as Sartre's Saint Genet, déraciné homosexual outlaw, and Tom Wolfe's Saint Kesey, picaresque hero of the acid test, shook hands. In what seemed an act of semiotics, Kesey flashed a smile that showed that one of his front teeth had a cap in the form of an American flag. Genet, self-conscious because of his own chipped and discolored teeth, was delighted by the desecration and laughed out loud. Kesey pointed down at his feet. "I'm wearing green socks," he said with a beatific look on his face. Genet frowned uncomprehendingly as Kesey kept on talking: "Green socks. Can you dig it? Green socks. They're heavy, man, very heavy." Trying to keep up, the interpreter rendered the remarks literally: "Les chaussettes vertes. Elles sont très, très lourdes." Genet looked down at Kesey's feet with the beginnings of sympathy. But before he could commiserate with him over the fact that he had somehow been condemned to wear heavy green objects around his ankles, Kesey's attention had lurched off in another direction. Pointing at the Black Panthers, he said to Genet, "You know what? I feel like playing basketball. There's nothing better than playing basketball with Negroes. I could go for a little one on one with some of these Negroes right now."

So taken aback by the boyish innocence of Kesey's manner that they momentarily failed to grasp the implications of his words, the Panthers stared at him. Then one of them moved forward threateningly. David Hilliard stopped him: "Stay cool, man. This motherfucker is crazy, and we're getting the fuck out of here."

The Panthers left, pulling Genet along with them. The diminutive Frenchman turned and glanced at Kesey, shrugging slightly as if to indicate that left to his own devices, he would just as soon stay with him and exchange bizarre comments through a translator. Kesey watched him go. "Wonder what's wrong with those Negroes," he asked as the entoùrage moved away. "Don't they like basketball? I thought Negroes loved basketball."

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In another era, this would have been seen simply as an odd moment—two men from different worlds trying to communicate across a vast cultural divide. In the Sixties, however, such an event was routinely regarded as an epiphany. We were fond of this term in the Sixties, because it tended to elevate the commonplace and infuse a sense of portent into situations whose heaviness, like that of Ken Kesey's socks, was not otherwise discernible to the inquiring eye. The Sixties were a time when every man was his own apocalyptician, when everyone in America seemed to have exhaled in unison to help inflate the era to epic size. Revolution, cosmic consciousness and other grandiose goals always seemed just an arm's length away. Although separate in other ways, political radicals and counterculturalists believed together that the millennium was at hand and just one small push was needed to pierce the last remaining membrane—of civility, bourgeois consciousness, capitalism, sexual uptightness or whatever other impediment prevented them from breaking on through to the other side.

From its earliest battle cry—"Never trust anyone over 30"—until the end of its brief strut on the stage of national attention, the Sixties generation saw itself as a scouting party for a new and better world. It was the master of ceremonies presenting a "cultural revolution" that would release the nation from the prison of linear thought. It was the social horticulturalist whose "greening of America" would allow the long-stalled postindustrialist age finally to break through the crust of the Puritan past. It was the avenging angel that would destroy the evil empire of "Amerika" and free the captive peoples of color around the world. The Sixties generation had created a new age, the Age of Aquarius, whose kingdom was surely at hand.

It was an era in which the ordinary was special. For those of us who lived through the Sixties (and we were editors of Ramparts, the New Left magazine), it was an era filled with moments such as that meeting between Genet and Kesey, moments stuck in the memory like a gallery of still photographs: Joan Baez singing Blowin' in the Wind as free-speech protesters filed into a Berkeley hall before being hauled away in the first mass arrest; Allen Ginsberg chanting mantras before a Vietnam-protest march and gentling the Hell's Angels in attendance; Hunter Thompson stopping by the office of Ramparts with a duffel bag filled with pills that our mascot, Henry Luce, munched on before being rushed to the vet; Jane Fonda returning from India after breaking up with Roger Vadim, saying she was afraid the Sixties were passing her by and could we help her, please, become a leftist?

It is little wonder that people who lived through the Sixties, or who felt the nostalgia for it that such films as The Big Chill conveyed, regard this decade as the last good time. The images that remain are of youth—kids arriving in buses from all over America to converge on Haight-Ashbury, kids sharing their dope and bodies with newcomers who dropped into their communes, kids with pictures of outlaw heroes such as Bonnie and Clyde on their walls. It was a time of eternal youth when even adults acted like kids.

That was the problem: In the Sixties, we never grew up, becoming instead addicted to irresponsibility and freedom from constraint. Has any other generation ever been so successful in promoting its claims of Utopia? Looking at the era two decades later, we see only an image reflected in the glass of Sixties narcissism. We are assured that it was the best of times and the worst of times; a time of great idealism populated by individuals who wanted nothing more than to give peace a chance; a time when dewy-eyed young people in the throes of moral passion sought only to remake the world. Were they driven to extreme remedies? It was because that world was governed by cruel power. Did they burn out quickly? It was because a dark world needed their glorious light.

The reality, of course, was less exalted. If not quite the low, dishonest decade of the Thirties, the Sixties was nonetheless a time when what began as American mischief matured into real destructiveness. It was a time when a gang of ghetto thugs such as the Black Panthers could be anointed as political visionaries; when Merry Pranksters of all stripes went into business as social evangelists spreading a chemical Gospel.

If God had died in the Fifties, the victim in the Sixties was the "system," that collection of inherited values and assumptions that provides guidelines for the individual and the nation. As one center of authority after another was discredited under our assault, we convinced ourselves that we murdered to create. But what we proposed to put in the place of destroyed authority—a new social order, a new system of human relationships—turned out to be dangerous Utopias infected with banality and totalitarian passion.

Nor did the baleful influences unleashed by this mischief remain quarantined in the decade itself. History doesn't work that way. Our own time remains trapped in the half life of the Sixties. An epidemic of drug abuse and violent crime, a new poverty, a national weakness and confusion of purpose—these problems, more than hope and idealism, are the real legacy of the Sixties. To a remarkable and depressing extent, the way we were then continues to determine the way we are now.

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During the Sixties, we became a culture of splinter groups, people who identified themselves according to ethnicity, gender, special interests—a galaxy of minorities, united only by a sensibility that regarded society at large as an enemy. Within the culture the Sixties created, these minorities exist in perpetual adversarial relationship to America, inspired by assumptions about its malign intent learned from the symbiosis between the black revolution and the war in Vietnam. This factionalization and division, this suspicion about our home ground is the enduring legacy of the Sixties.

Liberation was the watchword of the Sixties. Where did it lead us? The AIDS epidemic that now threatens a greater death toll than the war in Vietnam suggests one answer to this question. Basking in the reflected glow of the Sixties, gays established their own liberated zone and pursued an ideal of liberated sex for more than a decade. Their bathhouses became institutional symbols and political organizing halls, as well as the sexual gymnasiums of the gay movement. They also came to resemble Petri dishes culturing the dangerous diseases that began to afflict the gay community.

Public-health officials in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York watched with alarm as a succession of venereal epidemics swept through those communities. In the past, public action would have been taken; this time, there was no action. The liberated gay culture was doing its thing. Public-health officials were too intimidated to speak out, lest they trespass against a "minority lifestyle."

Even after AIDS appeared at the beginning of the Eighties, the situation did not change. In San Francisco, gay activists and their liberal allies in the political machine that controls the city prevented action to close the bathhouses and obscured life-and-death matters with fusty Sixties rhetoric about "pink triangles" and "final solutions." The political establishment caved in to this rhetoric and, during the crucial year when the virus first spread, stalled on warnings that would have educated the public about the sexual transmission of the disease (a fact then denied by many gay activists). Gay leaders and the public-health officials they so easily cowed refused to pursue strategies that might have slowed or even isolated the epidemic for fear of infringing on the liberated lifestyle. With true Sixties gall, they indicted the Government as homophobic for not providing more money for AIDS research. It is now too late for the public-health measures that are a community's first line of defense against a virulent epidemic. The AIDS virus is in place and has infected three quarters of San Francisco's gay men.

The same lesson about liberation can be learned from social epidemics. The unprecedented increase in violent crime that has infected America over the past two decades is an example. The Sixties defined itself by its efforts to delegitimize the police as an "army of occupation" while also celebrating crime in the form of existential rebellion and the outlaw as a perceptive social critic. There was a numbing barrage against what was derided as law and orderseen in slogans such as "Off the pigs," in the insistence that all prisoners were political prisoners and in the romanticization of murderers such as George Jackson, who deserved to be locked deeper in the prison system rather than becoming international symbols of American injustice.

The Sixties raised incalculably what we now regard as an acceptable level of violence and menace in our workaday existence. Once again, however, the most prominent victims were the intended beneficiaries of this liberation—the black communities of the inner cities, whose members watch helplessly as crime tears their lives apart. But the social theorists and Sixties-nostalgia artists are as uncaring as they were for those they delivered into the hands of the Communists in Vietnam.

Finally, there is the Eighties drug epidemic, the end product of Sixties consciousness expansion. For people such as Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary, drugs were the weapons of a folk revolution, a democratization of the sublime, America in Wonderland. For the political radicals, drugs were a short cut to potentially revolutionary alienation and a repudiation of the social mainstream. In 1969, during the People's Park uprising in Berkeley, Tom Hayden participated in drawing up the Berkeley Liberation Program, which, among other things, recognized "the right of people to use those drugs that are known from experience to be harmful." Before, drugs had been quarantined in the social underground; now they were part of an individual's bill of rights. This moral imbecility stood out even in the Sixties theater of the absurd. Yet the political ethos behind it survives to this day. Thus, The Nation, a leftist publication, recently condemned Reagan's antidrug politics as "an ideological mobilization, like the war against communism ... With its redolence of racism ... its anti—Third World and anti-1960s overtones."

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New decades rarely start on time. The election of John Kennedy, however, was such a calculated attempt to break with the past, substituting youth for Eisenhower's age and "vigor" for the old President's evident exhaustion with the ambiguities of the postwar world, that 1960 seemed like a watershed moment. Kennedy did lend the office an existential brio, but his 1000 days were spent playing out the themes of the Fifties. What we think of as the Sixties—that historical interlude that would have such a distinctive style and tone—really began the day the assassin went to Dallas. The "lone crazed gunman," a specter that would haunt the era, had been loosed. J.F.K. became a melancholy ghost rattling his chains for the rest of the decade—a symbol first of its betrayed promise and eventually of its corrupted innocence.

Even during his three years in office, Kennedy had been a bystander of the most crucial event of the beginning of the decade. This was the civil rights movement, which opened America to its black outcasts. The summary moment of the civil rights movement came three months before Kennedy's death, when Martin Luther King, Jr., stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered his "I have a dream" speech. It seemed at the time that the speech might have set the tone for the Sixties. What was surprising about King's movement, however, was not how quickly it arrived (it was pre-eminently a movement of the Fifties) but how quickly it passed.

By 1965, when the "high" Sixties was in gear, King was on the defensive, under attack by a new radical generation. With Stokely Carmichael as their representative figure, black militants rejected nonviolence and social integration, calling instead for "black power." They used threats of violence to exclude traditional civil rights leaders such as Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young from their protest and put pressure on King himself. The torching of the urban ghettos, beginning with Watts in 1965, provided the light by which the black-power movement wrote a violent and chaotic epilog to King's history of decency and courage.

King continued to speak, before diminishing audiences, about peaceful and creative change, about building a movement of love and hope. The black activists opposed to him rode his coattails at the same time they were privately deriding him as "Uncle Martin" and "de Lawd." In a gesture characteristic of the nihilism that was coming to be the most typical feature of Sixties politics, they made it clear that they wanted no part of King's American dream. They were not interested in being integrated into the system, which they had decided was irredeemably racist and wanted only to bring to its knees. King talked about brotherhood; Carmichael preached the doctrine that blacks were a "colony" and called for "national liberation" from America itself.

The guerrilla army of this liberation was to be the Black Panthers. While King had enriched the national dialog on race and civil rights, the Panthers completed the debasement of political language and process with totalitarian slogans such as "Oif the pigs," "Power grows out of the barrel of a gun" and "you're either part of the solution or part of the problem." As investigations revealed later, they were killing one another to resolve their internal struggles for power at the same time they were using rhetoric to titillate whites enamored of "revolutionary violence."

Except for the Panthers' murder of a few of their own and their gun battles with local police, black militancy was primarily talk. (In retrospect, it could be said that the only necessary implements of the Sixties were a soapbox, a megaphone and a suppository.) But even talk had practical consequences. A daunting example of the impact that the rhetoric of the Sixties had on policy can be seen in the way the black family—a time bomb ticking with growing ominousness today—got pushed off the political agenda.

While Carmichael, Huey Newton and others were launching a revolutionary front against the system, the Johnson Administration was contemplating a commitment to use the powers of the Federal Government to end the economic and social inequalities that still plagued American blacks. A Presidential task force under Daniel Patrick Moynihan was given a mandate to identify the obstacles preventing blacks from seizing the opportunities that had been grasped by other minority groups. About the same time as the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Moynihan published findings that emphasized the central importance of family in shaping an individual life and noted with alarm that 21 percent of black families were headed by females. "[The] one unmistakable lesson in American history," he warned, is that a country that allows "a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future— that community asks for and gets chaos. Crime, violence, unrest, disorder—particularly the furious, unrestrained lashing out at the whole social structure—that is not only to be expected; it is very near to inevitable."

Moynihan proposed that the Government confront this problem as a priority, but his conclusions were bitterly attacked by the black radicals and white liberals joined in a coalition of anger and self-flagellation. The White House retreated before this onslaught and took the black family off the agenda. As Moynihan said later, "From being buoyantly open to ideas and enterprises, [Johnson] became near contemptuous of civil rights leaders, who he now believed cared only for symbols." In his next State of the Union Address, the President devoted only 45 words to the problems confronting blacks.

It was a typical Sixties case history and outcome—rejecting real solutions in favor of demands that had been made with the knowledge that they could not be met. The consequences of this syndrome have, with time, become painfully clear. By 1980, poverty had become increasingly youthful, black, feminized and entrenched. Unwed mothers had become the norm rather than the exception in the black community.

It is a problem that the present-day apologists for the Sixties blame on the system, too. By as early as 1970, however, black families that were intact and living outside the South and in which both adults had a high school education had attained income equality with their white counterparts. These were blacks who had remained committed to the opportunity system King had embraced. But the radical leaders who had pushed King aside continued to condemn the system and counseled blacks to buy out of it so vehemently that a commitment to self-betterment almost had to be made against the grain of black life. In 1951, when America did have a racist system but did not have a self-anointed priesthood preaching about its evils, 8.7 percent of black teenagers (as opposed to 9.5 percent of whites) were unemployed. In 1980, after a decade and a half of Sixties rhetoric, some 38 percent of black teenagers were unemployed. Obviously, the bad-mouthing of America was not the only cause for this disastrous turn of events, but it was an instance of contributory negligence on the part of radicals. A part of the black community has made advances since 1960. But their accomplishments are in spite of such Sixties figures as Stokely Carmichael, who fled to exile in Guinea after a frightening run-in with the Panthers, or Huey Newton, who has been charged with one felony after another since returning from Cuba. Their success is a reward for following King's advice to commit themselves to the American dream, while others were remaining trapped in the self-pitying victimhood so adroitly exploited by radical demagogs.

Black radicals who reviled King during his lifetime as an Uncle Tom now kneel with cynical reverence at his shrine, though they still reject his vision. Blacks still face poverty and unemployment, but chief among their disabilities are Sixties . leftovers, such as Jesse Jackson, who have revived the anti-Americanism and infatuation with Third World totalitarianism exhibited by King's radical opponents 20 years ago. How would King have regarded Jackson's remarks about "Hymies"and his praise for a black extremist such as Louis Farrakhan? Probably in much the same way he regarded white demagogs in the Sixties who talked about niggers and praised white fascists in robes.

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Another reason for the degradation of the civil rights movement was the willingness of its radical leaders to buy into the notion, part of the vulgar Marxism in vogue during the Sixties, that blacks were victims not only of discrimination and prejudice but of the American empire itself, of Amerika. Like other destructive ideas that fastened themselves like an exotic jungle fungus on our national self-conception, this notion came directly by way of Vietnam.

If civil rights was the central movement of the Sixties, Vietnam was the central fact. It informed the life of an entire generation. The war was such a pervasive experience that even noncombatants felt as though they had been waist-deep in rice paddies and occasionally experienced a sudden stab of fear at the swooping sound of helicopter blades. The war continues to be fought well into the Eighties, in literature and film as well as in foreign policy. Should the U.S. have gone into Vietnam? Could we have won?

To argue these questions is to become involved in battles long after the war has been lost. It is also to lose sight of the most important fact about Vietnam: It was a cultural occasion as much as a historical event. The destructive anti-Americanism that eventually came to characterize the era had been off limits, intellectually and morally, at the beginning of the decade; the Vietnam war was the justification the movement needed to cross the line.

The first antiwar protests—by those who had been part of the civil rights movement as it developed under King—were responses to what was perceived as the inhumanity of the war. But this moral dimension in the antiwar movement was soon replaced by an irrational hatred of America and all it stood for. (The war corrupted everything—the people who protested against it as well as those who fought.) The movement soon determined that what it perceived as the lies of the U.S. Government must be fought by lies of its own. These lies ranged from the sentimental (Ho Chi Minh was simply a misunderstood nationalist, the George Washington of his country) to the strategic (North Vietnamese regular troops were not fighting in the south alongside the N.L.F.). Truth was the first casualty—in the war at home even more than in the one in Vietnam.

After it was over and movement "activists" (as the media generously called them) were looking for a way to make their revolt seem like a patriotic act, they created the myth that they had detoured into hard-line positions because that was the only way to stop the war. In fact, Vietnam, like Voltaire's God, would have had to be created if it didn't exist, because it justified the anti-Americanism that was part of the movement from its very beginning.

As the war escalated, the treason of the heart committed by the many became a treason of fact for the few. In 1969, SDS splintered into factions, the chief of which was the Weathermen. That year, the Weathermen leaders and others went to Havana to form the Venceremos Brigade. While they were there, they held discussions with the North Vietnamese and Cubans that led them to return home committed to a wave of terrorism cut short only because their high command blew itself up in a Manhattan town house.

Like other wounds suffered by Sixties radicals, this one was self-inflicted. Despite their incessant complaints of police brutality, Sixties radicals lived for the most part in a no-fault system, demanding their constitutional rights at the same time that they were denouncing the Constitution. They knew they had the option, which many of them ultimately used, of diving back into the system when they tired of being extrinsic. (For that reason, New Leftism, though discredited in politics, continues to thrive in the academic work of former radicals who returned for postgraduate degrees to the universities they had earlier tried to destroy.) It was an example of the cynicism that marked the decade—the radicals were counting on the fact that America was exactly the sort of flexible and forgiving society they were condemning it for failing to be.

Yet the war was hard to give up. Vietnam was a powerful drug. One of the self-revealing comments of the antiwar movement came when the Communists first agreed to negotiate. "We try, try, try, and then they sell us out!" was the despairing response of one radical leader. Vietnam was in our marrow. We were addicted to the sense it gave us of being invincibly correct and utterly moral—thus the feeling of emptiness that came over the Sixties generation when the withdrawal from the war began.

By the time the last U.S. personnel had ingloriously left, Sixties radicals were already searching for new connections (in Africa and Central America) that would restore the high they had lost. They turned their backs on Vietnam. Their moral outrage did not come into play when Hanoi took over in the south. The only "lessons" of Vietnam that interested them were those that confirmed American guilt. They weren't interested in the curriculum involving Communist genocide in Cambodia or the imperialism of Hanoi. Their moral amnesia allowed them to ignore the fact that more Indo-Chinese died in the first two years of the Communist peace than had been killed in a decade of the anti-Communist war.

At the same time that they ignored these realities, the Sixties radicals were making sure that the war, or at least their version of it, would linger in the nation's consciousness. Just as the Sixties had been dominated by the fact of Vietnam, so the postwar era has been dominated by the Vietnam metaphor. Until the Sixties, the dominant political image for American policy had been provided by Munich, which encapsulated the lessons of the Thirties as a warning to democracies to arm themselves against aggressors who talked about peace. But the Munich metaphor was repeatedly assaulted in the Sixties by those who claimed that it had lured us into the Southeast Asian war. In the Seventies, Munich was replaced by the metaphor of Vietnam, a concept with the opposite moral—that a vigilant democracy inevitably leads to "abuses of power" and that totalitarian Third World movements are actually manifestations of harmless nationalism.

The Vietnam metaphor dominates the politics of the Eighties as the Vietnam war did the politics of the Sixties. Whenever America even considers acting in its self-defense, opponents of such action merely invoke the specter of Vietnam. "Another Vietnam" is a curse on action whose effect no American political leader has yet been able to exorcise. Less an argument than an incantation, it has become an irresistible pressure for passivity, isolationism and appeasement.

The current battle cry "No Vietnam in Central America" is the Vietnam metaphor in action. The slogan smothers all distinctions of time and place that separate these conflicts and define their individual meanings. Playing on fears of another quagmire that would engulf this country, this slogan becomes a persuasion to do nothing about the expanding Soviet threat. For nostalgic radicals, however, it is an unfulfilled wish. These people are like Japanese soldiers wandering in a cerebral jungle, unwilling to admit that the war is over. They really want another Vietnam—another cultural upheaval; another defeat for the U.S.; another drama of moral self-inflation; another orgy of guilt and recrimination: a reprise, in short, of the Sixties.

In the Vietnam metaphor, we have the tunnel at the end of the light.

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While the nihilism that was part of the Sixties' advertisement for itself makes it tempting to blame the decade for everything that has gone wrong since, to leave such an impression would, of course, be uncharitable and untrue. There is a sense in which it was the best of times. There was an expansion of consciousness, of social space, of tolerance and of experience itself. It was exciting to be alive, to find oneself swimming in the rush of history's stream of consciousness. But while the beauty of the Sixties was that it was a decade of youth, its defect was an inability to grow up. It was constitutionally unable to see the other side of the ledger, condemned to ignore the fact that there are equal and opposite reactions in society as well as physics, social costs for social acts.

In the end, the works of Lennon decipher the truth of the era in a way that the works of Lenin, who enjoyed a brief but depressing vogue among radicals of the day, did not: "You say you want a revolution? / Well, you know / We all want to change the world.... / You say you got a real solution? / Well, you know/ We'd all love to see the plan." But when all the posturing and self-dramatization were over, there was no plan, no idea about how to replace what had been destroyed.

Schizophrenic to its core, the era was never clear whether its primary identity was that of creator or destroyer. Its ambivalence was suggested by the two groups that dominated the popular music that was the great, perhaps the only real artistic achievement of the time. Was the inner voice of the Sixties that of the Beatles, innocent minstrels on a "magical mystery tour"? Or of the Rolling Stones, the vandals presiding at its "beggar's banquet"?

For a while, these groups reigned jointly over popular culture, expressing the audacious delusion of the Sixties that it was beyond consequences, beyond good and evil, able to have it all. It was possible to assault the cops by word and deed but also be safe on the streets, to reject authority and yet live coherently, to be an outlaw culture and yet a humane and harmoniously ordered one.

Listening to the Beatles and the Stones, Sixties rebels registered these ideas with growing grandiosity, believing they had gone from counterculture to counternation once they planted the flag of discovery at Woodstock. A place consecrated by love, holy to the Sixties in the way the Paris Commune was to the Marxist tradition, Woodstock institutionalized the right to live outside the rules. Unlike the doomed inhabitants of Amerika, the citizens of this new nation could have joyous copulation, access to illegal drugs. If the drugs caused bad trips or the sex carried disease, the immigrants of Woodstock were there to care for their own.

But the Woodstock Nation was an illusion as ungrounded in reality as the hallucinations induced by the LSD that was its national chemical. A few months after its founding, the decade began to draw toward its apocalyptic close. As a portent of things to come, the Beatles were breaking up. The title song of their last album might be taken as a recognition of the destruc-tiveness of the Sixties crusade against the established order: Let It Be. The Rolling Stones answered this act of contrition with the title song of their album: Let It Bleed. Then came Altamont, the Krystallnacht of the Woodstock Nation. At Altamont, the gentlefolk of Woodstock met the Hell's Angels—not only criminals but suppliers of the drugs that were destroying the new nation from within. After the Stones had sung Sympathy for the Devil, a black man lunged near the stage with a gun in his hand and was beaten to death in front of everyone by the Angels. Devils and Angels: It all came together and came apart.

Appalled at what had happened and at the mayhem that ensued, Mick Jagger saw that the Sixties were over. It was time to go back to the dressing room, time to stop posturing as one of the "satanic majesties" of an era, time to grow up and simply become part of the rock scene again.

All of us had to do the same thing— learn to live with adulthood. And so the Sixties has faded into gauzy memory—the good old days when we were all so bad, a time of limitless possibilities and wild dreams made all the brighter by the somber and complex world that succeeded it. This is the paradoxical reason for the Sixties' growing appeal: It created the tawdry world that we now measure and find wanting by comparison with it.

There is truth in the nostalgia. It is the memory of the era that is false. The Pandora's box the Sixties opened is still unclosed; the malign influences released then still plague us today. The Sixties are the green socks around our ankles: heavy, man, very heavy.

"The Sixties were a time when everyone in America exhaled in unison to inflate the era to epic size."

We asked for two viewpoints on the Sixties—one from the political right, that of David Horowitz and Peter Collier, best-selling authors of "The Rockefellers," "The Kennedys" and "The Fords," whose histories include a stint on the radical magazine Ramparts; and one from the political left, that of Haiian Ellison (overleaf), a celebrated short-story and screenplay writer, winner of PEN, Writers Guild, Edgar and Hugo awards. The ground rules were identical: The essays were to be of similar length, and no peeking at the other side's article until publication.