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.
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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
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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.