ABSTRACT
By now, the subject of “the sixties” should have been laid to rest. There have been many books, articles, films, and songs about that tumultuous decade. I am a baby boomer, raised “in modest comfort,” as Tom Hayden said of our middle-class generation at the beginning of Students for a Democratic Society’s (SDS) 1962 Port Huron Statement, which launched the New Left. We baby boomers are obsessed with ourselves, including our own pasts. But my interests are neither nostalgic nor antiquarian. This is not a definitive history. Rather, I look forward by looking back, learning from that time forty years ago in order to grapple with our present difficulties and opportunities. In particular, I want to “tell” the sixties to young people for whom the sixties are but a rumor of marijuana and album rock. They need to know that we were young once.
