The 60s Read online

  Copyright © 2016 by The New Yorker Magazine

  Illustrations copyright © 2016 by Simone Massoni

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  All pieces in this collection were originally published in The New Yorker.

  The publication dates are given at the beginning or end of each piece.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Finder, Henry, editor.

  Title: The 60s: the story of a decade / The New Yorker; edited by Henry Finder; introduction by David Remnick.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016013617 | ISBN 9780679644835 | ISBN 9780679644842 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: United States—Civilization—1945– | Nineteen sixties.

  Classification: LCC E169.12 .A188 2016 | DDC 909.82/6—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/​2016013617

  Ebook ISBN 9780679644842

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Rachel Ake

  Cover photograph: © Ted Streshinsky/Corbis

  v4.1

  ep

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction · David Remnick

  PART ONE · RECKONINGS

  A Note by George Packer

  Silent Spring · RACHEL CARSON

  Letter from a Region in My Mind · JAMES BALDWIN

  Eichmann in Jerusalem · HANNAH ARENDT

  In Cold Blood: The Corner · TRUMAN CAPOTE

  The Village of Ben Suc · JONATHAN SCHELL

  Reflections: Half Out of Our Tree · RICHARD H. ROVERE

  PART TWO · CONFRONTATION

  A Note by Kelefa Sanneh

  It Doesn’t Seem Quick to Me (Desegregating Durham) · KATHERINE T. KINKEAD

  An Education in Georgia (Integrating a Public University) · CALVIN TRILLIN

  March on Washington · CALVIN TRILLIN

  Letter from Berkeley (The Free Speech Movement) · CALVIN TRILLIN

  The Price of Peace Is Confusion · RENATA ADLER

  The Put-On · JACOB BRACKMAN

  Letter from Chicago · RICHARD H. ROVERE

  Harvard Yard · E. J. KAHN, JR.

  PART THREE · AMERICAN SCENES

  A Note by Jill Lepore

  Letter from Washington (The Cuba Crisis) · RICHARD H. ROVERE

  An Inquiry into Enoughness (Visiting a Missile Silo) · DANIEL LANG

  Letter from Washington (The Great Society) · RICHARD H. ROVERE

  Lull (Walking Through Harlem) · CHARLAYNE HUNTER

  Demonstration (A Biafra Rally) · JONATHAN SCHELL

  Hearing (Feminists on Abortion) · ELLEN WILLIS

  Notes and Comment (Woodstock) · JAMES STEVENSON AND FAITH MCNULTY

  Notes and Comment (The Assassination of John F. Kennedy) · DONALD MALCOLM, LILLIAN ROSS, AND E. B. WHITE

  Views of a Death (J.F.K.'s Televised Funeral) · JONATHAN MILLER

  Notes and Comment (The Assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.) · JACOB BRACKMAN AND TERRENCE MALICK

  Life and Death in the Global Village · MICHAEL J. ARLEN

  Letter from Washington (The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy) · RICHARD H. ROVERE

  PART FOUR · FARTHER SHORES

  A Note by Evan Osnos

  Though Tribe and Tongue May Differ (Nigerian Independence) · EMILY HAHN

  Letter from Havana · HANS KONINGSBERGER

  Letter from Vatican City · XAVIER RYNNE

  On the Seventh Day They Stopped (Six Day War) · FLORA LEWIS

  Letter from Prague · JOSEPH WECHSBERG

  The Events in May: A Paris Notebook · MAVIS GALLANT

  PART FIVE · NEW ARRIVALS

  A Note by Malcolm Gladwell

  Portable Robot · F. S. NORMAN, BRENDAN GILL, AND THOMAS MEEHAN

  Telstar · LILLIAN ROSS AND THOMAS WHITESIDE

  The Big Bang · JOHN UPDIKE

  Touch-Tone · GEORGE W. S. TROW

  Sgt. Pepper · LILLIAN ROSS

  Apollo 11 · HENRY S. F. COOPER, JR.

  Ornette Coleman · DONALD STEWARD AND WHITNEY BALLIETT

  Cassius Clay · A. J. LIEBLING

  Glenn Gould · LILLIAN ROSS

  Brian Epstein · D. LOWE AND THOMAS WHITESIDE

  Roy Wilkins · ANDY LOGAN

  Marshall McLuhan · LILLIAN ROSS AND JANE KRAMER

  Joan Baez · KEVIN WALLACE

  Twiggy · THOMAS WHITESIDE

  Ronald Reagan · JAMES STEVENSON

  Tom Stoppard · GEOFFREY T. HELLMAN

  Simon & Garfunkel · JAMES STEVENSON

  Maharishi Mahesh Yogi · VED MEHTA

  The Who · HENDRIK HERTZBERG

  PART SIX · ARTISTS & ATHLETES

  A Note by Larissa MacFarquhar

  A Tilted Insight (Mike Nichols & Elaine May) · ROBERT RICE

  The Crackin’, Shakin’, Breakin’ Sounds (Bob Dylan) · NAT HENTOFF

  Paterfamilias (Allen Ginsberg) · JANE KRAMER

  Levels of the Game (Arthur Ashe, Clark Graebner) · JOHN MCPHEE

  Days and Nights with the Unbored (World Series 1969) · ROGER ANGELL

  PART SEVEN · CRITICS

  A Note by Adam Gopnik

  All Homage (Breathless) · ROGER ANGELL

  After Man (2001: A Space Odyssey) · PENELOPE GILLIATT

  The Bottom of the Pit (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) · PAULINE KAEL

  False Front or Cold-War Concept · LEWIS MUMFORD

  The Nineteen-Sixties: Time in the Museum · HAROLD ROSENBERG

  Television’s War · MICHAEL J. ARLEN

  The Bombs Below Go Pop-Pop-Pop · MICHAEL J. ARLEN

  Sweet Birdie of Youth (Bye Bye Birdie) · KENNETH TYNAN

  The Theatre Abroad: London · KENNETH TYNAN

  Off Broadway (Oh! Calcutta!) · BRENDAN GILL

  Newport Notes · WHITNEY BALLIETT

  Rock, Etc. (Packaging Rock and Post-rock) · ELLEN WILLIS

  Rock, Etc. (Woodstock) · ELLEN WILLIS

  Whither? · WINTHROP SARGEANT

  Our Invisible Poor (Michael Harrington's The Other America) · DWIGHT MACDONALD

  Polemic and the New Reviewers · RENATA ADLER

  The Author as Librarian (J. L. Borges) · JOHN UPDIKE

  The Fire Last Time (William Styron's Confessions of Nat Turner) · GEORGE STEINER

  The Unfinished Man (Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint) · BRENDAN GILL

  The Whole Truth (Joyce Carol Oates's them) · L. E. SISSMAN

  PART EIGHT · POETRY

  A Note by Dana Goodyear

  The Heaven of Animals · JAMES DICKEY

  Tulips · SYLVIA PLATH

  Next Day · RANDALL JARRELL

  The Broken Home · JAMES MERRILL

  The Asians Dying · W. S. MERWIN

  At the Airport · HOWARD NEMEROV

  Second Glance at a Jaguar · TED HUGHES

  Endless · MURIEL RUKEYSER

  Moon Song · ANNE SEXTON

  Feel Me · MAY SWENSON

  PART NINE · FICTION

  A Note by Jennifer Egan

  The Ormolu Clock · MURIEL SPARK

  A & P · JOHN UPDIKE

  The Hunter’s Waking Thoughts · MAVIS GALLANT

  The Swimmer · JOHN CHEEVER

  The Indian Uprising · DONALD BARTHELME

  The Key · ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

  Acknowledgments

  Contributors

  David Remnick

 
; IT’S DIFFICULT TO think of William Shawn, the reserved and courteous man who edited The New Yorker from 1952 to 1987, as a figure of the sixties. If he wore a tie-dyed T-shirt, he kept it well hidden. Most days, he wore a dark wool suit, a necktie of subdued color, and a starched white shirt, sometimes adding one or two sweater vests to the ensemble when it was chilly. He was soft-spoken and addressed his colleagues with the formality of an earlier time. Nearly everyone in the office referred to him, even when he was out of earshot, as “Mr. Shawn.” He was already well into middle age when that decisive decade came roiling in, and although there is no definitive way to fact-check this, I would bet the house that he did not partake of the hallucinogens that helped define the era.

  Yet this volume represents a magazine that, under his guidance, became more politically engaged, more formally daring, more vivid, and more intellectually exciting than it had ever been or wished to be. The world was changing, and Shawn was determined to change The New Yorker. In the early days of the magazine, Shawn’s predecessor, Harold Ross, had preferred to minimize politics in what he referred to as a “comic weekly.” When Dorothy Parker wanted to write a piece about the civil war in Spain that was sympathetic to the Loyalists, Ross told her wryly that he would print it, but only if she would come out in favor of Generalissimo Franco. “God damn it,” he told her, “why can’t you be funny again?”

  Shawn, who had been Ross’s longtime deputy, helped deepen the magazine with its coverage of the Second World War, but The New Yorker tended to steer clear of the most vexed of many political questions, including that of race. There were exceptions, including “Opera in Greenville,” Rebecca West’s 1947 account of a lynching in South Carolina; Richard H. Rovere’s occasional coverage of the movement to desegregate American schools; and Joseph Mitchell’s “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” which portrayed an elderly man living in Sandy Ground, one of the oldest communities founded by free African Americans. But such instances were infrequent.

  In 1959, Shawn gave James Baldwin an advance to make a trip to Africa and write about it for the magazine. Baldwin was then thirty-five, and celebrated for his novels Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, and for the essays that formed the collections Notes of a Native Son and Nobody Knows My Name. He was a consistent presence at civil-rights rallies, and he spoke with eloquence and penetration from stages and on television about the realities of white supremacy. Baldwin, accompanied by his sister Gloria, finally made the trip in the summer of 1962. He made stops over a period of a few months in Guinea, Senegal, Ghana, Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone. But, when he returned, he failed to concentrate for long on the writing he was meant to do about his journey. He was too absorbed by what was going on at home.

  A few years earlier, Baldwin had agreed to write an article on Elijah Muhammad’s separatist movement, the Nation of Islam, for Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary. Baldwin set to work on “Down at the Cross,” a discursive and powerful twenty-thousand-word essay on race, the church of his Harlem childhood, and the Black Muslims. He gave it to The New Yorker. Podhoretz never forgave Baldwin or Shawn.

  Baldwin’s essay confronted the “cowardly obtuseness of white liberals”—that is, much of the magazine’s readership—and acted as a kind of spur to the next phase of the civil-rights movement, black power. Shawn was well aware that such an intensely personal and polemical essay, which did not permit an easy complacency, was a mold breaker for a magazine that had thrived for so long on reportage, humor, fiction, and, for the most part, a generalized equanimity. As if to domesticate the essay, to keep it within the bounds of his readers’ expectations, Shawn retitled it “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” (It appeared the following year in the book The Fire Next Time.)

  Baldwin’s masterpiece was one of a number of ambitious works in the sixties that reshaped the tenor of the magazine, expanding its sense of the possible. Rachel Carson’s environmental manifesto, “Silent Spring”; Hannah Arendt’s coverage of the trial of one of the engineers of the Holocaust, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”; Dwight Macdonald’s assessment of American poverty; Jonathan Schell’s dispatches from Vietnam; Calvin Trillin’s and Renata Adler’s coverage of the student movements; and Ellen Willis’s essays on feminism and rock music were among the pieces that provoked the kind of rancorous debates that were part of the sixties soundtrack. For a magazine that had long had a distinct antipathy toward intellectual seriousness, Arendt, a German émigré philosopher with a Germanically heavy prose style, was an especially unlikely addition to the table of contents. Arendt’s assessment of the trial, her phrase “the banality of evil,” and her interpretation of Holocaust history, particularly her seeming disdain for the behavior of the victims, would be debated for years afterward.

  Perhaps the most sensational publication of the decade for the magazine was one that Shawn quietly came to regret. In 1959, Truman Capote, who had failed as a young assistant in The New Yorker’s art department before becoming famous for his short fiction, came across a brief clipping about the murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, a small town in Kansas. Shawn was under the impression that Capote was going to write a “Letter from…” describing how the people of Holcomb reacted to the grisly murders. Capote, occasionally joined by his friend Harper Lee, spent years interviewing countless sources, particularly the two suspects, and the manuscript he turned in, which was several times longer than John Hersey’s Hiroshima, was far more lurid than Shawn, who was averse to violence, could ordinarily stomach. Still, despite his misgivings, he published the series, and In Cold Blood was a newsstand phenomenon and remains a model of the “nonfiction novel.”

  Shawn came to adore the Beatles, though the astute archivist will note scant coverage of the band in the magazine. Such are the curiosities—the misses among the hits—in any publication. But what was more remarkable was how many of the cultural touchstones of the time the magazine, which was not exactly Rolling Stone or Creem, did cover well. Nat Hentoff’s 1964 Profile of Bob Dylan, Jane Kramer’s Profile of Allen Ginsberg, Pauline Kael’s essays on the films of that time, and Michael Arlen’s Vietnam-focused television criticism all hold up for their vitality. In poems like W. S. Merwin’s “The Asians Dying,” the politics, the catastrophe, of the sixties was never far away. As a vehicle for fiction, The New Yorker widened its scope, including not only the suburban-based classicists Updike and Cheever, mainstays of the magazine, but also the Yiddish-language tales of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the Paris-based stories of Mavis Gallant, and the formal experiments of Donald Barthelme. William Shawn did not look the part, and his voice was barely a whisper in a raucous time, but this book demonstrates that he, too, was a man of the turbulent sixties and that his New Yorker was equal to the moment.

  A NOTE BY GEORGE PACKER

  THESE DAYS, THE quarter century between the Second World War and the 1970s seems like at least an American silver age. The middle class was big and prosperous. Leaders in government, business, and labor worked out compromises that kept the deal table level and the payout fair. National institutions worked pretty well, and under stress they didn’t collapse. Congress responded to civil-rights protests with sweeping, bipartisan legislation; environmental awareness produced the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. As Richard H. Rovere wrote in “Half Out of Our Tree,” even the protests over the war in Vietnam showed that American democracy still had a pulse—a strong one by today’s standards.

  Read the journalism of the 1960s and you might not think so. If the country now seems to be painfully breaking down, in the sixties it was quite dramatically exploding. The sense of continuous crisis forced a change in the journalism that appeared in The New Yorker. The magazine lost its habitual cool, its restraint. It began to publish big, ambitious reports and essays that attempted to meet the apocalyptic occasion. These pieces were intended to make noise, even to shock the national mind, and they dominated conversation for weeks or months. In the sixties, The New Yorker acquired a social consciousness. It went into opposition,
challenging the complacent postwar consensus that had prevailed across American culture, including in its pages. The result was some of the most famous and influential journalism ever to appear in the magazine.

  This work occupied so much territory—paid for by the voluminous and high-end advertising that used to fill The New Yorker’s pages—that some of the pieces took up an entire issue, or else spread themselves out over two, three, or even five in succession. Ambitious work had often appeared in the magazine, but the pieces from the sixties were something more than stories enjoying the luxury of a lot of space to be well and fully told. This was journalism as event. Sometimes the events arrived so fast and thick that readers could barely catch their breath. Rachel Carson’s warning of the effects of chemical spraying on birds, trees, and other living things—published in the late spring of 1962—is now credited with starting the environmental movement. Five months later, James Baldwin’s autobiographical essay on the black church, the Nation of Islam, and the racial crisis detonated, making him a prophet of the civil-rights era, Jeremiah to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Moses, and that rare thing in American letters—the writer as national oracle. No less a personage than Bobby Kennedy felt prompted to answer “Letter from a Region of My Mind,” privately, leading to an angry exchange between the two in Kennedy’s midtown Manhattan apartment.