As a young reporter based in Omaha, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Washington, D.C., during the 1960s Tom Brokaw witnessed firsthand the issues that continue to affect America today — racial inequality, poverty, women’s rights, freedom of speech, journalism, activism, politics, war and a country divided.

In addition to Brokaw’s own experiences, “Boom!” is based on more than 50 interviews with a wide variety of well-known artists, politicians, activists, business leaders and journalists, as well as lesser-known figures, including a daughter of a former Mississippi segregationist governor, Vietnam veterans, civil rights activists, health care pioneers, environmentalists and war protesters. An excerpt.

Introduction: What was that all about?
When I began to tell members of that large, raucous generation born just after World War II, the baby boomers, that I was thinking of writing a book on the aftershocks of the Sixties, a number of them laughed a little nervously and said, “What are you going to call this one? 'The Worst Generation'?

Their references to my book about the generation that grew up in the Depression and fought in World War II were a little defensive and a little defiant. More than a few baby boomers had told me over the years that they represented the greatest generation. After all, they said, they were the largest, the best educated, and the wealthiest generation in American history. More important, many believed they had stopped a war, changed American politics, and liberated the country from the inhibited — and inhibiting — sensibilities of their parents.

I assured my boomer buddies that I don’t think they represent the worst — far from it — but I also teased that I didn’t think many of them were as great as they thought they were.

They did give us the Sixties. There’s no doubt about that. But the bottom line has yet to be drawn under those turbulent times. Conclusions have yet to be established. Thumbs up or thumbs down?

Former president Bill Clinton, who was a bearded student and famously avoided the draft during the Sixties, says in these pages, “If you thought something good came out of the Sixties, you’re probably a Democrat; if you thought the Sixties were bad, you’re probably a Republican.” The evidence is still coming in and the jury is still out — and forty years later we don’t seem anywhere near being able to render a verdict.

In fact, here we are, nearing the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, and as you will discover in this book, many of the debates about the political, cultural, and socioeconomic meaning of the Sixties are still as lively and passionate and unresolved as they ever were. Moreover, those debates and the issues involved are a critical and defining part of our contemporary dialogue about where this nation is headed now and how it gets there. The presidential election of 2008 in many respects may be an echo chamber of the election of 1968, with the lessons learned or ignored in Vietnam applied to the war in Iraq.

So I decided to organize a virtual reunion of a cross section of the Sixties crowd, in an effort to discover what we might learn from each other, forty years later. Just like your high school or college reunion, not everyone showed up for this one. Some who did will surprise you with what they have to say about then and now. You’ll meet some famous names from the Sixties, but also those who went through life-changing experiences entirely comfortable in their anonymity.

Personally, as someone who lived through the Sixties — a time I count as beginning with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 and ending with the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974 — I have many personal memories of that turbulent, exhilarating, depressing, moving, maddening time that simply do not come together in a tidy package of conclusions.

Nineteen sixty-eight was the volcanic center of the Sixties, with landscape-altering eruptions every month: political shocks, setbacks in Vietnam, assassinations, urban riots, constant assaults on authority, trips on acid, and a trip around the moon.

Nineteen sixty-eight was the year when Kris Kristofferson says he did “a one-eighty turn” in his life; it was also the year Pat Buchanan realized his dream of a conservative victory in the presidential election.

There are many voices and many different judgments in these pages, but there is at least one common conclusion. Everyone agrees that the Sixties blindsided us with mind-bending swiftness, challenging and changing almost everything that had gone before.

Boom! One minute it was Ike and the man in the gray flannel suit and the lonely crowd ... and the next minute it was time to “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” time for “We Shall Overcome” and “Burn, baby, burn.” While Americans were walking on the moon, Americans were dying in Vietnam. There were assassinations and riots. Jackie Kennedy became Jackie O. There were tie-dye shirts and hard hats; Black Power and law and order; Martin Luther King Jr. and George Wallace; Ronald Reagan and Tom Hayden; Gloria Steinem and Anita Bryant; Mick Jagger and Wayne Newton. Well, you get the idea.

Boom!

Few institutions escaped some kind of assault or change. The very pillars of the "Greatest Generation" — family, community, university, corporation, Church, law — were challenged to one degree or another. Nothing was beyond question, and there were far fewer answers than before. A Time magazine cover story on a Southern theological philosopher stopped America in its tracks with the front-cover question “Is God Dead?”

Boom!

Authority lost its privileged place almost overnight. Authority figures — fathers, mothers, cops, judges, teachers, senators, and the president of the United States — were suddenly spending as much time defending their conduct as they were exercising their power. University presidents and deans were physically thrown out of their offices. Flags were burned and cops were routinely called “pigs.”

Boom!

Crew-cut veterans of World War II looked up at the dinner table and — boom! — they saw a daughter with no bra, talking about moving in with her boyfriend, and a son with hair down to his shoulders, wearing a T-shirt with a swastika superimposed over an American flag, discussing his latest plot to avoid the draft. In those same families, however, Mom came to realize her life did not have to be defined by the walls of the kitchen and laundry room.

Boom!

A good deal of the assault on authority was uneven. Citizen coalitions rallied around common interests and forced politicians to abandon smoke-filled rooms.

Lawyers banded together to represent the poor against the insensitivities of the establishment.

The public began to question the effects of pollution, overpopulation, and overconsumption, injecting energy into the nascent environmental movement.

Boom!

Ralph Nader took on the auto industry — the high church of American capitalism — and changed it, forcing it to become protective of the safety of the vehicles and their occupants. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s words and personal courage, embodied in his philosophy of nonviolence, struck a mighty blow against racism. Other challenges to authority were mindless and self-serving, exaggerated acts designed to replace one kind of authoritarian excess with another.

Dick Armey, the former North Texas State University economics professor who was part of the Newt Gingrich–led Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, said famously, “I think all the troubles in the country began in the Sixties.” His ideological opposite, Michael Heyman, a former dean of the UC Berkeley law school and chancellor of the university, was sympathetic to the students’ demands for more free speech in 1964. But as the movement expanded he became personally conflicted by what he calls “the anarchy — there was a lot of provocation ... like the filthy speech ... which infuriated me because it strengthened the hand of the right so much.”

Boom!

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