MERICA IS HOPELESSLY DIVIDED.
How many times daily do rueful
cable pundits, Internet oracles, and
TED talkers remind us of this
dispiriting state of affairs? We’ve
devolved into tribes, they say, Red
vs. Blue, hunkered down in ideological and
demographic silos, ranting in echo chambers. The
news cycle is a relentless 24/7 barrage of “breaking”
cataclysms and outrages, real and imagined. Mass
shootings. Foreign cyberattacks. Eroding norms and
failing institutions. And all of it stoked by a social
media that, while ostensibly designed to bring us
together, seems devilishly adept at tearing us apart.
Have things ever been this bad? Or worse? Well,
yes. For starters there was the Civil War, in which
Americans slaughtered 620,000 other Americans,
primarily over the right to own fellow human beings.
But really, we needn’t go back that far. A half century
will do—say to the summer of 1969, a period of social
and political strife that threatened to swallow us up
in existential despair. The Vietnam War ground on,
tearing at the country’s heart with no end in sight. It
is difficult today to convey the level of anguish that
conflict engendered. In our own era, an all-volunteer
military ensures that America’s wars directly affect
only a small slice of the population. These wars are
remote, so much so that, after a while, they scarcely
create major headlines. But in ’69, for families all
across the country, Vietnam was deeply, gut-
wrenchingly personal because of the draft, which put
any healthy young man between 18 and 26 at risk of
getting himself bayoneted or blown to bits in a jungle
on the other side of the globe.
In 1969, of course, America’s wounds were still raw
from the traumas of 1968, when the assassination of
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. seemed to symbolize
shattered hopes for racial reconciliation and sparked
rioting in more than 100 cities across the country.
Two months later, the murder of New York senator
Robert F. Kennedy, who had been running for
President on a progressive antiwar platform,
provoked a national paroxysm of grief—and
flashbacks to the 1963 assassination of his older
brother President John F. Kennedy, the tectonic
tragedy commonly said to have signaled the end of
American innocence, if such a thing ever existed.
With surging candidate RFK cut down at 42, the 1968
race saw antiwar protests and a violent police
response at the Democratic National Convention in
Chicago. The election itself reflected a deeply
conflicted national mood: Republican Richard M.
Nixon edged the Democratic candidate, Vice President
Hubert Humphrey, by fewer than 500,000 popular
votes. (Embattled President Lyndon B. Johnson had
declined to run for reelection.) Nixon had won only
43.4 percent of the vote, thanks in part to segregationist
firebrand George Wallace, who siphoned off 9 million
votes and won five southern states—a howl of white
racist grievance in the civil rights era.
“A lot of people voted for Nixon because they
thought he was going to end the Vietnam war,” says
historian Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The
Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.
In the summer of 1969, America was reeling: Political turmoil,
a wretched war, an erosion of hope. Then, in August, came the
miraculous surprise of Woodstock
back to the
garden
4 LIFE WOODSTOCK
