The '60s Trip

By LANCE MORROW

Something about a '60s revival seems preposterous; the time was in so many ways junky and brutal, askew in its frame--beginning in November 1963 and ending, belatedly, in Watergate and the last choppers out of Saigon.

Yet the after-image is not entirely ugly. For Charles Mee, 38, author (Meeting at Potsdam) and the former editor of Horizon magazine, the decade had a chaotic vitality and charm. His title implies a Watergate history, but the book is something quite different--an odd and lovely exercise that is part autobiographical meditation, part elegiac crank letter to the American Republic, part confession and part essay on democratic politics. "I still fuse my public and private worlds," Mee writes. "All visions of the world are autobiographies."

In the spring of 1975, Mee was asked to collaborate on a book with H.R. Haldeman. A founder of the National Committee on the Presidency, which lobbied for Richard Nixon's impeachment, Mee nonetheless flew to California for several days of ultimately pointless discussions. The meetings with Haldeman were touchingly anticlimactic. The man looked scrubbed, healthy, pleasant, infuriatingly unscarred. He showed Mee his annotated books about Watergate; with relentless precision, Haldeman had used green, yellow or red Magic Markers to underline passages according to their degree of veracity.

But the Haldeman visit is relatively brief; it is the "other states of mind" that preoccupy Mee. He reflects on his Midwestern Catholic boyhood, his adolescent, nearly fatal struggle against polio -- an illness that drove him into intellectualism as a kind of self-defense. He describes his career at Harvard and his two marriages, both of which cracked up. It was during the Cuban missile crisis that Mee decided to leave home: "If I was to die, I told myself, I did not wish to die with my first wife." He loved the time for its vivid gaiety: "I thought the '60s were what life was." The decade eventually took on sinister aspects. Mee had his misadventures with alcohol and speed; he ruefully describes his visit to a filthy rural California commune that had even contrived to have its own black slum: "a grotesque parody of the very worst of the world they had wished to escape."

Mee's lively, mordant intelligence is at its best improvising on political ideas -- quarreling with Spengler, hallucinating a Socratic dialogue with an Exxon executive. In the end, the author pays a visit of homage to the aging Arnold Toynbee -- and plays his own complicated sense of disintegration and renewal against Toynbee's. Toynbee seems to listen with courtly regard as Mee excitedly spins out his vision of a new Renaissance based upon "a truly profound exploration led by neurophysicists and psychologists, structural linguists and anthropologists, into the structure of the mind." Mee demands to know what Toynbee thinks. The great historian smiles sweetly. In his deafness, he has not heard a word.

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