RobKirkpatrick.com

(…with apologies to Public Enemy.)

I intended this to be a letter appearing in the Washington Post, but it doesn’t appear that they’ll be printing it, so I’m posting it here…

1969 vs. 1968?

In response to Carlos Lozada’s comments on my book in his article “2009 is over. But is it history?”, I want to clarify that I did not say I “might have called the book ‘1969: The Year After the Important Year.’” As I explain in my introduction, this was a joke made by a colleague, which I recalled to note the glut of books on 1968 and the gap that I sought to fill with mine.

Mr. Lozada argued that I “must outdo 1968” and incidents such as the Democratic Convention and the election of Richard Nixon. I take it, then, he does not see the significance of a year that witnessed People’s Park, the Stonewall Riots, the Manson Family killings, the War Moratorium, the Days of Rage, the occupation of Alcatraz, the public’s discovery of the My Lai massacre, and the killing of Fred Hampton? Or the importance of Nixon’s inaugural year, in which he escalated the war in Southeast Asia with covert bombings in Cambodia and drew lines in the sand with his famous “Silent Majority” address to the nation?

“When you need the Miracle Mets and the first modern ATM to boost your case, you know you’re in trouble,” writes Mr. Lozada. If he disagrees that the Miracle Mets (which he can reference 40 years later without needing to explain who they were) transcended the sports world, would he also question the importance of another event from baseball that year: Curt Flood’s announcement that he was challenging baseball’s reserve clause, thus signaling the onset of free agency?

If Mr. Lozada isn’t impressed with how the invention of the ATM changed the ways in which he conducts his financial transactions today, does he not believe that the maiden Boeing 747 flight, the first artificial heart implant, and the first computer network connection introduced major changes into modern life?  (Without that last item, I would not have found myself 40 years later reading Mr. Lozada’s article at home on my laptop.)  And, of course, there was a small technological achievement called Apollo 11.

While Mr. Lozada maintains I was applying the “Groundwork Argument” to substitute for a supposed lack of “historical moments,” I would suggest that recent History channel documentaries such as Woodstock: Now & Then and Sex in ’69: The Sexual Revolution in America (for which I was interviewed), as well as NPR’s humor piece on 40th anniversary “burnout,” seem to indicate others agree with my opinion that 1969 was indeed an important year with a unique legacy in America society.

Rob Kirkpatrick
Author of 1969: The Year Everything Changed

Here’s the article to which I’m responding:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/11/AR2009121102590.html