Charles Dickens, at the start of A Tale of Two Cities, his novel of the French Revolution, portrays 1789 as a magical year that crystallized “the best of times” and “the worst of times” within itself. Living through 1968 in America felt like this, though “the best” was concentrated in the year’s first half, and “the worst” in its last. “The best” of 1968—indeed, the whole idea of “1968”—lay in the fusion of the mass movement against the Vietnam War with cultural currents that had flourished and grown all through the 1960s. The clichés that our mass media used to describe them—“the counterculture,” “sex, drugs, rock-and-roll,” “the greening of America”—for once conveyed something real. The uncanny feeling of “1968,” of what it was like to be here then, was that somehow, maybe for fifteen minutes, all these pretentious labels were real.

In America, the cauldron that overflowed in ’68 had been boiling for years before. I think it started in the late 1950s, when the small, st...

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