The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties

I always wondered how my parents managed to miss the Sixties. According to Jonathan Leaf, they were in very good company. Easy to read, fun, disturbing, and provocative, PIC '60s offers a counter weight for those of us who didn't live through America's best promoted, least experienced decade.

If this Robin Williams line is true, so is its corollary: If you where there, you don't really remember it. Baby Boomers all were there and in too many cases they were formed by that decade and what they recall of it. And it turns out they really don't remember it. As long as the Largest Generation retains the commanding heights of much cultural and academic production, that is a problem. Jonathan Leaf's The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Sixties is part of the solution. In 13 short, yet devastating, chapters covering everything from the sexual revolution to movies to Camelot to the nascent conservative movement, he demonstrates conclusively that everything most people think they know when asked about the Sixties is wrong. Each of the phenomena described as universal Sixties experiences either occurred principally in earlier decades (e.g., civil rights, feminism), later decades (e.g., rock and roll), existed only a fringe or elite phenomenon (e.g., hippies and Haight-Ashbury), or is remembered in such a distorted or incomplete way as to approach falsehood (e.g., the moon landing, Camelot, many more). Just learning the facts about these well justifies buying and reading this book. But even readers familiar the actual events of the Sixties will find reading rewarding. First, there is the author's erudite and accessible style which will occasion more than frequent chuckles even when recounting familiar facts. Second, the book is filled with facets and sidelights which will come as enlightening surprises even to those consider themselves well-informed. For example, Malcolm X was a gay hustler--did that chapter of his Autobiography get cut? César Chávez and Tom Tancredo would have seen eye to eye on illegal immigration--does the University of California know that it closes down for a day every year to honor what most of its constituencies would consider a "hatemonger"? Every baby boomer with a tendency to reminisce along the lines of the stereotypical images of the Sixties needs to read this highly entertaining debunking of Sixties mythologies. So should anybody who might come under their influence.

I have this book in the kitchen so I can browse through it and read out bits to my husband. We both laugh. I spent part of the sixties living on an Army base and part in grad school, plus some time in New York City, so I consider I experienced a lot of "sixtieses." This book tells me things I remember, things I suspected at the time, and things I had no idea about. Very funny, and very very smart.

This is the kind of book I enjoy most, the kind that really helps crystallize my opinions on matters I had had a lot of vague, disorganized thoughts about before. As someone who actually lived through the Sixties (and has a certain sentimental attachment to them, mostly because they represent my youth), this book actually brought back a lot of memories, not all of them good. With the passage of time, I had forgotten the scuzziness and insanity of those years, and the mindlessness of radicalism which was fashionable at the time. Reading the political demands of the Black Panthers (the release of all black prisoners form jail), and the pronouncements of some of the feminists (all heterosexual sex is rape) brought it all back home. I found as I read the book that I was actually reliving some of those scenes, and political events, or at least my youthful impression of them. Leaf has done a lot to correct some of those youthful (mis)impressions. The book was an education. I had known about the Altamont debacle before, but I hadn't known exactly WHY it happened. I had heard about JFK's ill health, but I hadn't known the details. I had vaguely sensed that the radicals were socialists, but I hadn't known exactly what their connections with hard core communists were. I had heard that the Black Panthers were a bunch of thugs, but hadn't known the details of their crimes. I hadn't been aware of the philosophical differences between Friedan and Steinem. I had known that the Beatles' music had stood the test of time better than many other rock groups, but I hadn't known WHY (the classical music training of their producer, George Martin, made for the much more creative arrangements on their songs). I had a vague recollection of Abe Fortas being corrupt, but hadn't known about the exact nature of his transgressions. And so on. The media has always seemed to look down its collective nose at the Fifties, and the Seventies, and even the Eighties. (How could the media, with its usual biases, not despise a decade dominated by Reagan -- and at its end -- by the collapse of communism?) But the Sixties are a sort of sacred cow, and this book does a great job of skewering many of the myths which have sprung up around it.

For decades I've been telling people that America in the "sixties" were not what the media depicts as the sixties, but a much more complicated place - that people with long hair (like I had) walking along the road in a place like Vermont in 1969 (the sixties didn't get more "late" than 1969) had beer cans thrown at them, where in most parts of the country and for most years of the decade, the "sixties" was no more than a ripple disturbing the surface. Leaf's book is invaluable at providing the facts and figures and anecdotes that show that I was right - that I wasn't dreaming. Of course it's an immense subject, but Leaf writes authortitavely and wittily about a well-chosen range of subjects. The highest praise I can give it is that my little girls, aged 13 and 15, have taken it up to their room and are poring over it - and laughing over what their school teachers (too young to have experienced the decade) have been solemnly misinforming them about for years. Get it and save your children's sanity and intellect - and if you are a child of the sixties, the soundness of your own memory.