TOM BROKAW

Boom!

Talking about the sixties

Click here to see pictures of Tom Brokaw in the 1960s and images from inside Boom!

PREFACE

As anyone who lived through the Sixties knows, it was a time of tumult, many-layered, contentious, and consequential. Long-standing wrongs were righted and calcified conventions were challenged. National leaders were martyred and political coalitions were realigned. Generations clashed and families were divided. The popular culture became a kaleidoscope of colors, sounds, images, and hallucinations. Society was exposed to endless waves of startling stimulation. With that in mind, when I wrote Boom! I was fully aware that readers would come to the book with their own, well-defined prisms through which they saw the time and remembered their own experiences. What I learned in writing Boom!, and in talking with people after its publication, was an affirmation of my personal and professional experience: The Sixties was a provocative time, and the consequences are still rippling through our lives. It was gratifying to hear from many who lived through the Sixties about what that time meant to them, and how reading Boom! prompted them to examine their lives and their beliefs anew, to calculate what is worth building on and what should be discarded, and to give me their views on the book and on the era it describes. In writing Boom! I concentrated on what I thought were the five major pillars of the era: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, national politics, women, and the popular entertainment culture. As sweeping as those categories were, they of course did not reflect all the significant societal, political, and individual changes that began in the Sixties. The farm workers’ movement, which was so important in California politics in the Sixties, has since evolved into a powerful new national force in American politics and culture: the Hispanic or Latino voter.

In June 1969, gay men and women living in New York rose up against police in their favorite hangouts in Greenwich Village, including a club called the Stonewall Inn. The Stonewall riots, as they came to be called, are widely credited with launching what we know today as the gay rights movement. It was not until the late Seventies, the Eighties, and the Nineties that gay liberation gained real traction nationally, through long-overdue changes in laws, workplace practices, and popular acceptance.

Like civil rights and women’s rights, gay rights remain a work in progress, and controversial in some quarters. But indisputably the movement began that late spring night in 1969.

The American evangelical movement and the rise of mega-churches to accommodate the vast population of Christians with fundamentalist beliefs and generally conservative political inclinations also had their roots in the Sixties. Pat Robertson, who later ran for president, started his popular 700 Club, a daily television show on his Christian Broadcasting Network, in 1966, and quickly became an influential voice in Republican party politics.

Jerry Falwell, a pioneer in the establishment of mega-churches, founded Liberty University in 1971 as a sanctuary for Christian families who didn’t want their children exposed to what many of them considered "anything goes" behavior on mainstream campuses. By 1979, Falwell, an aggressive advocate of conservative politics and the place of Christianity in American political life, had formed the Moral Majority, which proved to be a powerful ally for the Republican party.

In the Sixties, all the nerve endings of American society were exposed, from left to right and all the points in between on the political and cultural compass. It was a time of electrifying, often life-altering physical, intellectual, and moral stimulation. If this book has in some small way reactivated those sensations so they can be acted on with the benefit of passing years and lessons learned, it will be one more reward from this satisfying experience of recalling—Boom!—the Sixties.