Jo Freeman Review of A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope and Innocence Lost

Jo Freeman's Review of A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope and Innocence Lost

Race is a recurring theme, even when he’s writing about music, movies, religion and sports. For example, he describes the victory of underdog Texas Western against powerhouse U. Kentucky in 1966 as essentially a black against white match in which black won, though it was several paragraphs before I realized that he was describing a basketball game.

War took over as President Johnson committed more and more troops to Viet Nam. Since the author didn’t go himself, he writes about his friends’ experiences as well as the larger trends which governed that conflict. It was a brutal, unwinnable war based on bad assumptions and worse decisions.

Race and war entwined during the riots. Most people have forgotten that the first riot of the decade was in Birmingham in 1963. They spread North in 1964, but it was the Watts riot of 1965 that really woke people up. The number of riots peaked in 1967 but didn’t decline until the next decade. The riots as much as anything pushed race off of the public agenda in favor of war. Racial progress stalled while the anti-war movement thrived.

The Sixties was a period of major cultural change, so it is fitting that this book comes out as we enter another such era. The civil rights movement was the mother of many social movements, which divided and multiplied for the next few decades. Some of these are re-emerging today.

Although Gaillard’s experiences and those of his friends are in recounted in this book, they are fleeting. It is more reportage than memoir, relying heavily on his years as a reporter and on the writings of historians and other journalists. He’s read a lot of books.

The book follows a year by year format, but sometimes it’s hard to tell which year he is writing about – especially for those who don’t have their own memories of that decade. Gaillard is a very good storyteller. He pulls you into the many stories of the Sixties, even when you aren’t quite sure where in the decade they are taking place.

If you want to remember the Sixties, whether you were alive then or not, reading A Hard Rain is an entertaining way to do so.

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Jo Freeman's Review of A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope and Innocence Lost

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