By April MacIntyre Dec 8, 2007, 5:49 GMT
The documentary narrated by Tom Brokaw titled "1968" will affect people differently, based on their age and political leanings.
Tom Brokaw - © Anthony G. Moore / Photorazzi
It is but a small slice of the one of the most turbulent decades of the last century; it was a year that at age six found me quietly observing the reactions and listening to adults and the news we all saw nightly.
I was an observer, not a participant in any of the movements, protests or causes.
"1968" opens with Jon Stewart explaining that the difference between now (Iraq) and then (Vietnam) was soley the draft.
Brokaw, who's just written a book on the '60s, interviews both conservative voices such as Pat Buchanan, and left leaning voices who railed against the machine.
Were the college-aged youth in 1968 all spoiled, self indulgent hedonists or visionaries? The answer again depends on where you were (assuming you were around) in space and time.
President Lyndon B. Johnson's reeling over the TET Offensive and “losing” Walter Cronkite, lamenting he had also "lost" middle America, the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, campus riots, the Democratic convention riots, the feminist and civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, two hours was not long enough to cover it all.
Brokaw does personal recollection narration very well, along with great B-roll and interspersed interviews that knit together compelling stories giving credence and flavor to frame the condensed version of 1968.
Pat Buchanan, the strongest conservative voice Brokaw interviews, called 1968 "the most divisive year in American history."
Bruce Springsteen tells Brokaw he was a “faux hippy” and came of age after the TET Offensive, sharing the irony of the man who penned “Born to Run” really never left New Jersey after all.
The bloodiest year in Vietnam was 1968.
That was year I remember watching Walter Cronkite on CBS Nightly News while doing art work at the kitchen table in my small New England town while my mother cooked; together we watched the breaking news that Kennedy had been shot, King had been shot, and for the first time in televised American history, vivid color war footage was shown of our boys being blown up and wounded in Vietnam.
I don’t remember that year being a summer of love. It seemed a veil of sadness draped everyone around me.
Viewers will get a general overview of the good, the bad and the cultural confusion of the time in the History Channel special "1968 with Tom Brokaw" (9 p.m. Sunday). Well worth watching.
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