You, DDeBar, wrote:
>Thank you. I also remember the "60's" quite well. I was even somewhat
>politically literate at the time. I have only heard of this putz since the
>Times, et al have been helping him hawk his book
There is a mini-industry set up around rewriting the 60s. The always-witty Katha Pollit takes up the latest such book in her current column in the Nation. Folks can also visit the new Nation Online site (http://www.nol.shareworld.com/ ) for a 30-day free trial and subscribe if they like what they see:
May 12, 1997 Volume 264 Number 18
History as You Like It
Spring again, I notice -- time for the annual bashing of
the sixties. The death of Allen Ginsberg got ceremonies
off to a rocky start: hard to turn the life of this
prolific, genial, much-loved, and by the end even
prosperous, poet into a sermon on the evils of sex,
drugs and radical politics. But now here's Roger
Rosenblatt with Coming Apart: A Memoir of the Harvard
Wars of 1969, and we're back on track, with antiwar
students as Visigoths storming the temples of learning,
destroying "civility," scholarship, respect for
authority, liberalism and the Democratic Party. Cross
reference: baby boomers, selfish, self-indulgent,
anti-intellectual, storm troopers. Never mind: Vietnam,
napalm, strategic hamlets, Nixon, Kissinger, body
counts. "Remarkable memoir of development," writes
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in The New York Times.
"Revealed new subtleties about all our pasts."
Well, not my past. And (to judge from my phone, which
has been ringing off the hook with calls from long-lost
Visigoth friends) not the pasts of others who actually
organized and took part in the takeover of University
Hall and other events of that spring. I don't recognize
myself or my fellow Students for a Democratic Society in
these pages. Which isn't surprising, because we're not
there. Rosenblatt may once have been a junior professor
of English and resident tutor at Dunster House. And he
may be a prominent journalist now, with berths at Time,
The New Republic and The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer. But
he's written a book that fails the standards of either
profession. I know for a fact that he was given plenty
of names of serious activists, people who were deeply
involved in the workings of S.D.S. and in the two-year
series of protests that culminated in the takeover of
University Hall. He never called them. Except for brief
snippets from Michael Kazin and Miles Rapoport (whose
name, among several others, he misspells), we get yet
another trip down memory lane with Michael Kinsley,
James Fallows, Frank Rich, James Atlas and other media
figures in Rosenblatt's ambit -- curious-to-sympathetic
onlookers, although some of them (ahem!) have given
themselves a promotion since.
But then, Coming Apart is a "memoir," which means the
writer gets to say whatever he wants about past events,
no questions asked. Thus, no one is going to challenge
Rosenblatt's presentation of himself as a central,
much-admired figure in the events he describes, although
I must say it does not accord with my own admittedly dim
memory of him as a cat's-paw of the administration or
with the inability of any of my S.D.S. interviewees to
remember him at all. Shouts of approval rang from the
mass meeting in the stadium when Rosenblatt's name was
announced for the committee that would look into
punishing the strikers? Nigh on thirty years later,
who's to say no, although this self-serving anecdote
would be more persuasive if there weren't quite so many
of them -- Rosenblatt seems to remember every bit of
flattery he ever received (or gave), down to the great
write-up his modern poetry classes got in the student
guide. As for his attempt to float the absurd rumor that
students planned to burn down Widener Library -- I fully
expect to see this non-event recounted in great detail
in Dinesh D'Souza's next opus.
Well, what did I expect? Historical revisionism is the
order of the day: Is there an opponent of affirmative
action over the age of 40 who doesn't claim to have
personally offered Rosa Parks his seat on that
Montgomery bus? Reading Coming Apart made me feel like a
member of some losing faction in the Soviet Union,
watching history being rewritten, to general applause,
before my very eyes. There's the liberal spin, which
Rosenblatt tries on for a bit: "confused" young people
upset about the war, lashing out at innocent Harvard
simply
because it is there. And there's the conservative one,
which he eventually adopts: hard-core radicals gleefully
wrecking the university, which responded with
high-minded lenience. You wouldn't know from these pages
that Harvard sent two students to jail for six months
for assault and battery for touching a dean's elbow
while evicting him from University Hall.
But what about seeing the strike as the strikers saw it?
The Last Marxist dug up his yellowed copy of "How
Harvard Rules," a pamphlet he helped write, which
impressively demonstrates that the university was
intimately tied up in war research, C.I.A. work and the
corporate economy that benefited from the war. Henry
Kissinger, McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, Samuel
Huntington (of strategic hamlet fame) were all Harvard
professors. R.O.T.C. did train officers for the war. The
strikers fought for good things: an African-American
studies department, the preservation of working-class
housing, the abolition of R.O.T.C., an end to the war
and Harvard's involvement in it. And contrary to
revisionist myth, lots and lots of people who were
leftists and activists then still are -- as teachers on
non-elite campuses nobody would publish a book about,
community and labor organizers, inner-city doctors,
public health workers, civil liberties lawyers.
The student strikes of the sixties occupy a funny,
complicated place in today's political symbology. Many
participants who are still connected to the left in some
way feel they have to apologize for, or even condemn,
those famous "excesses" that supposedly alienated the
white working class from the Democratic Party. Here I
agree with my old friend Cheyney Ryan, who was not only
expelled from Harvard for his role in the strike but was
sent briefly to jail when he "trespassed" by walking
through Harvard Yard the following year: "Anyone who
feels guilty about protesting the Vietnam War has to be
an idiot." But then there are those of my generation who
are moving ever more rapidly to the right, for whom a
real or imaginary connection with the student protest
movement, an appropriation of the style with a mockery
of the content, functions as (I'm quoting another
striker friend, Josh Freeman, here) "a certificate of
regular-guyness, the wild youth from which one has
recovered."
As the ad has it--"Dewar's: When you realize you're
still liberal, in a conservative don't-raise-my-taxes
way."
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Best,
Tresy
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