JEFFREY HERF
253
A decade later, when Tom Hayden was asked to reconsider what he
did in 1968, he said, "The things you have to do to be heard in a closed
society will make you seem preposterous, crazy and subject you to all kinds
oflabels." A "closed society"? Farber lets the remark pass without comment,
despite the fact that his book indicates how open, free, and vulnerable the
technocratic imperialist beast was.
Farber's conclusion returns to the theme of pragmatic politicians and
voters confronting idealogues. "The battles of the 1960s ... revolved
around the question of how to define the relationship of ideology and
pragamtic considerations." Farber evokes sympathy for those seeking "free
spaces from which to build political consciousness," faced with the "imperfect
reality of community men like Mayor Daley" and the "simulated world of
technocratic internationalism they had been raised to manage." Where much
literature on the 1960s suffers from self-importance and pretentiousness,
Farber has done us the service of digging into the real spirit of the times. Yet
in places where he departs from a restrained authorial voice, he accepts the
language of the decade, its easy evocation of free spaces in a "closed soci–
ety," of the idealistic young gone wrong in rage against technocratic interna–
tionalism.
What seems hardest to grasp for the authors of these three very dif–
ferent books is that the movements of 1968 had their successes as well as
their failures. The demonstrations at the Democratic Convention made huge
contributions to dividing the Democratic Party, facilitating Hubert
Humphrey'S defeat and Richard Nixon's election. The movements in the
streets, though a numerical minority, considerably raised the cost of pursuing
the war, and became an important front in the battle against American in–
volvement in Vietnam. Rubin, Hoffman, and their comrades were successful
in introducing and legitimizing the use of drugs, especially marijuana, hashish,
and LSD, in the middle class. And from Bob Dylan's turn to the electric gui–
tar in Newport in 1965 to Abby Hoffman's manipulation of television in
Chicago
in
1968, the counterculturalleft played a vanguard role
in
exploiting
technology to reach an expanded audience.
In 1968 people who thought that taking LSD was a good thing, that
America was a closed society, who either thought a Communist victory was
desirable in Vietnam or didn't think through what its consequences would be,
received great press and media attention in Western Europe, Japan, and the
United States. As Caute's travelogue reminds us, in all of the open, free
Western democracies, intellectuals and activists of the left were successful in
raising the cost to the American government of staying in Vietnam. Though
each of these three books takes ideas of the sixties seriously, all underesti–
mate the political weight of the new left and antiwar movements in this re-
gard.
Bureaucracies can be impersonal, governments unresponsive, and
