Mantle, and Yogi Berra by the way they approached home plate, but I would
not have recognized Tom Hayden, Stokely Carmichael, or Robert S. McNa-
mara on a bet. I could sing along with almost every Top Forty hit, but I was
ignorant about Hayden Port Huron Statement, Martin Luther King Jr.
"I Have a Dream" speech, or President Lyndon B. Johnson's nationally tele-
vised address in March 1968, announcing he would not run for reelection.
Four months after LBJ conceded that Vietnam had gotten out of hand, I was
called for a pre-induction physical examination. I came this close to being
drafted and likely doing a tour of duty in Vietnam. My future hung in the
balance, and I was indifferent to the possibility. The war was there; I was
here. Life was simple. I share this cathartic revelation with readers because
my experiences--or lack of them--were more representative of my genera-
tion than the sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll label often applied to boomers in the
1960s.

More than any other event, the tragic American experience in Vietnam is
how most people remember the sixties, and it is the singular event that most
people use to define the decade, probably because it was one of the most
tragic American experiences ever. Each time I have visited the Vietnam Me-
morial, at the foot of a sitting Abraham Lincoln at the end of the Mall in
Washington, D.C., I am nearly mesmerized by the seemingly endless list of
names emblazoned in the black marble wall. All the while I gaze over those
58,000 names, the same nagging question runs through my mind: "Why?"
No matter how noble or how ignominious the rationale for American in-
volvement in Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War polarized the nation more
than any other event since the Civil War and left us with so little to show for
so great a sacrifice.

Perhaps because it was such a chaotic time, the 1960s have been over-
stated and underrated. They have been glorified and debunked. However we
might view the 1960s, there is little question that the decade left an indelible
cultural imprint not yet expunged. The sixties were a kaleidoscope of events--
contentious and complicated, occasionally ordinary, but rarely mundane.

Three distinct movements--the New Left, the antiwar movement, and
the counterculture--which are the focus of this book, define and, I hope,
dramatize the cultural revolution that was the 1960s for readers unfamiliar
with the decade as well as those who recognize passages as part of their
past. The purpose of this study is to provide a balanced, objective account of
events and the people who shaped the sixties.

Seldom has an era been simultaneously exaggerated and oversimplified,
reviled and revered. The sixties. History in motion. At warp speed. We may
never be the same.

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