A Question Of Authority

By ERIC POOLEY

Bull Connor thought he knew a thing or two about power. In May 1963 the public-safety commissioner of Birmingham, Ala., was ready to use water cannons and attack dogs on a group of civil rights demonstrators led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The protesters responded in a way Connor found hard to fathom--they knelt in the street and prayed. "Let them turn their water on," said one. "Let them use their dogs. We are not leaving. Forgive them." Connor gave the order to mow down the marchers, and television beamed the scene to a horrified world. Among the viewers was President John F. Kennedy, who was so appalled that after two years of foot-dragging he suddenly threw his weight behind a federal civil rights bill.

The blacks of Birmingham raised the fundamental question of the 1960s: Who has authority, and why? Six months later, the question was posed again in Dallas, when the squeeze of a trigger snuffed out the life of the world's most powerful man--the ultimate attack on authority. Kennedy's assassination began a nightmarish string that ended with the 1968 slayings of King and Robert Kennedy. Great leaders were called, great leaders were murdered, and great cities burned, baby, burned. And through it all, Vietnam was blazing too, an unwinnable, unfathomable, undeclared war that claimed 57,605 American lives in exchange for--what? The country never found out.

No wonder the young hitched a ride to another America: a sweet-smelling place of laughter and music and bad poetry, where a sugar cube under the tongue could demolish the authority of reason itself. The prankster visions of the Acid Tests swirled around the stark realities of American power, and the decade found its signature moments: a flower in a gun barrel, a Defense Secretary scowling out a Pentagon window at the hippies trying to levitate his fortress. When Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election, in March 1968, he was tacitly admitting that the freaks might be right. Suddenly, Richard Nixon was President, and millions of people--many of them middle-aged and middle American--were marching not only to end the war but to remind Nixon that his power sprang from their will. But he didn't get the message until 1974.

Before the '60s, America seemed immune to the revolutionary impulse that defined the 20th century elsewhere. Periods of tumult--the giddy swirl of the '20s; the grinding despair of the Great Depression, which led so many to question capitalism itself--only served to highlight the broad, deep social stability born of American affluence. But the 1960s brought one great revolution in American life--civil rights--and many smaller ones. Religious dogma, journalistic objectivity, middle-class morality--all came under assault as the war sputtered on. Pleasures were now political statements; student opposition to the war turned into an assault on Amerika. By 1970, when four students at Kent State were killed by National Guardsmen, Abbie Hoffman's "revolution for the hell of it" seemed nothing like revolution and an awful lot like hell. Recoiling, voters rejected the vaguely countercultural George McGovern in favor of four more years with Nixon. That set the stage for the apogee of public disillusionment, Watergate, and the Reagan Revolution, which blamed the '60s for the social pathologies afflicting America. Lasting dominion over the decade belonged to Madison Avenue, which turned the counterculture into the marketing tool it is today. Jerry Garcia is dead. Long live Cherry Garcia.