Nineteen hundred and sixty eight came prewrapped in a mythic version of itself. At every moment, one was aware that this was 1968. The whole year was written in italics.

Everything lent itself to media melodrama, but this was not the fault of the events: they were born melodramatic. At the remove of a quarter-century, the list boggles the imagina- tion: the Tet offensive, the Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy campaigns, Lyndon Johnson’s stepping down, the King and Kennedy assassinations, the French utopia of May and its whiff of student–worker revolu- tion, the Columbia rebellion, Prague S...