When America Turned: Reckoning with 1968

Introduction: The Turning

[1] INTRODUCTION The Turning I turned twenty in 1968, the year in which the country, perhaps once and for all, broke its own heart. In reflecting back on that gone time at the age of sixty-three, it is now clear that a great divide then began to open up in American life, one that seems to grow deeper with every passing day. What came to feel like a long, complicated, and bitter divorce has left our children looking on at our public life with baffled wonder. Norman Mailer, ever alert to the convergence of the personal and the political, deploys just such a metaphor in The Armies of the Night (1968). He is marching arm and arm with Robert Lowell toward the “heart” of the nation’s power when “the sense of America divided on this day now liberated some undiscovered patriotism in Mailer so that he felt a sharp searing love for his country in this moment and on this day, crossing some divide in his own mind wider than the Potomac, a love so lacerated he felt as if a marriage were being torn and children lost.” Feeling as though he has stepped through some crossing in the reaches of space between this moment “and the Civil War,” Mailer honors the rhyme across centuries, one in which the seventh decade is destined to mark an intense time of ideological, intergenerational, and interracial conflict. It is a family fight, as wrenching as a divorce. Mailer thus understands his suddenly recognized love as also bound up with an imminent sense of loss: “Never does one love so much as then, obviously then.” I have spent a fair amount of my adult life pondering my own conflicted love for my country, and attempted, in 1993, to put my thoughts into print in Out of the Sixties: Storytelling and the Vietnam Generation. There I tried to answer a simple question: What have we—Americans born between Pearl Harbor [2] INTRODUCTION and Ike’s election—given to the culture? My answer took the form of close readings of ten literary careers. But the answer provided now appears to me to have been insufficiently historical, failing to supply the context out of which these artistic performances arose. I treated art as belonging to a world apart. Then came John Kerry’s defeat in the presidential election of 2004. How was it that a decorated hero of an earlier Asian war proved unable to attract more votes than a man who had dealt with the most agonizing choice of his youth by finding himself a stateside sinecure? From where I stood, it looked as if Kerry had done two honorable things: he had fought in the Vietnam War, and then he had fought against it. It was brave to go, and it was brave to reconceive his action as contributing to a terrible and ongoing “mistake.” His behavior—then, in the late sixties and early seventies—modeled a capacity for self-critique largely absent in our public life. It also embodied the power of the concerned young to change the course of American history. Yet when Kerry came to run for the presidency, and against a man who had neither fought in the war nor fought against it, he was unable to find the words to express the meaning and value of his and his generation’s complex fate. This act of self-silencing, along with the ongoing influences of the old debates in a new wartime, made clear to me the need to find adequate words—and occasioned my second attempt to do so. I wanted to see whether my reading and writing could somehow yield a narrative capable of building a bridge—Mailer himself is crossing the Memorial Bridge when he makes his discovery of an America divided— between our dispirited national moment and the richly confused year in which Mailer published his book. I knew, above all, that I had to deal with the iceberg still cruising through our dreams, with the Vietnam War. “I had to explore the ground again,” as John Laurence writes in The Cat from Hué (2002). “Part of the process was to figure out what could not be understood while the war was being fought: the secret history of the war, the hidden agendas of the participants, the truth behind the lies and propaganda.” Standing in the way of any serious answer were forty years of “polemical cartoonization of the...