Now and Then

The year it all came together was the year it all fell apart. The body count in Vietnam hit its peak, the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations symbolized the death of summers of freedom and love, and the youthful idealism that launched a generation’s defining movements was losing ground to something equally American: violence.

On the streets of Chicago, America’s young people were getting their collective asses kicked by Mayor Daley’s police. But the combat zone of generational warfare wasn’t limited to America — in Paris and Prague, youngsters were sticking it to the Man as though it were their job. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement was giving way to black power. The student-led anti-war movement was splintering into factions drunk on Regis Debray, all too willing to set their scopes on the state. Nixon was re-elected, as was Charles de Gaulle in France. And the war in Vietnam raged on as if nothing else mattered.

Distilling the ’60s into a single text is no enviable task. (Just consider how many Oliver Stone epics the decade has inspired.) But in 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, Mark Kurlansky — the best-selling author of Salt and Cod — has tried to filter the decade through the lens of a single year.

In 1968, Kurlansky was a 20-year-old college student with Vietnam very much on the brain. The war wasn’t something he had stumbled upon in a poli-sci course but a demon that had been breathing down his neck since high school, when he realized that he might soon be forced to fight in it.

“Better get those grades up, or you’ll be in the Mekong,” one of his dark-humored deans liked to quip while students were enjoying the temporary respite of college.

“We didn’t find that very funny,” Kurlansky tells the Pitch.

Traveling around the country to promote his book, Kurlansky says he’s noticed that college students have a marked interest in the ’60s.

“I suppose it’s the children of my generation,” he says. “I think some of it is a curiosity about what their parents were up to, but I also think we live in a time in this country in which a lot of people are very unhappy. They don’t like a lot of things that are going on, including the war in Iraq, and they feel kind of helpless and don’t know what to do about it.”

With all the apparent similarities between then and now, the two wars remain radically different because of one thing: the draft. To drive home this point, Kurlansky asks, “Do you know anyone over there?”

We confess that we don’t.

That’s not how it was for Kurlansky’s generation. “I don’t think there was ever a time during the whole war when there wasn’t someone I knew personally over there,” he says. “It wasn’t just other military types of people that were doing it. It was my friends. Today it’s like there’s a whole separate class of people fighting.”

As much as he might enjoy the attention, Kurlansky thinks that young people look backward with excessive reverence. During a recent panel discussion, one student asked several activists from back in the day, “What should we be doing?”

“That’s something we never would’ve done,” Kurlansky says. “Ask a bunch of old guys what to do.”