They say that if you can remember the 1960s, you weren't there. Tosh, say I. Some of us, ranging from Tariq Ali to Jack Straw to Gyles Brandreth, were high with an excitement that had little to do with hallucinatory substances. We were in a fever of political madness, especially during 1968, when the world changed for ever, and our lives with it.
Mark Kurlansky's splendid narrative describes "a spontaneous combustion of rebellious spirits around the world" - an extraordinary mix of free love, yippies and miniskirts, muddled up with cobblestone-throwing students, sit-ins, Hair, Prague Spring, the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, Black Power salutes at the Olympics and the election by a whisker of an American president who eventually resigned in disgrace. It was a moment when generations diverged, in their clothes, language and beliefs; when Allen Ginsberg read his poems alongside his father, Louis, a New Jersey schoolteacher, "Louis in his tweeds and Allen in his beads".
The overpowering issue was the Vietnam war. The parallels with the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq are clear. Do they never learn? In 1968, the conflict became the longest war in US history, overtaking the war of independence. "Success" meant favourable body counts, as if the killing of numerous Viet Cong soldiers for each GI somehow cancelled out the losses on both sides. Then as now, nobody counted the civilian dead.
Kurlansky writes: "People born during and directly after the Second World War grew up in a world transformed by horror . . . The great lesson . . . was that everyone has an obligation to speak up in the face of wrong." Peace protests escalated as the Tet offensive of January 1968 proved that the communist army had the strength to strike into the heart of Saigon and other cities. Ever more young US conscripts were needed. Students were no longer protesting on behalf of the urban and rural poor, who had been gun fodder up until then. They did so on their own account.
In Warsaw, youths fought running battles with the police and army, and a thousand were imprisoned; in Paris, students highlighted the hopelessly inadequate resources for higher education; in Columbia, New York, students demanded mixed dormitories: the sexual revolution took precedence. What the groups had in common was that they grew spontaneously. Kurlansky argues convincingly that the leaders planned nothing; indeed, they did not plan to be leaders. The common factor was not conspiracy but anarchy, which was not merely a widely held political viewpoint, but stemmed from the natural disorganisation of the young. When breathless groups of demonstrators squealed, "Where next?" somebody would jump up and shout, "To the president's office!" - and off they would all run.
But they were also media-savvy. They knew, and were able to copy what was happening elsewhere, through the fresh medium of television. They understood that the best coverage came from being the victims of apparently unprovoked violence, so it was provoked and not resisted, with lessons learned from the civil rights movement in Mississippi.
Live satellite broadcasting brought staggering pictures. We could see the Americans losing in Vietnam - as the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite declared on air from Saigon. We could see that Czech citizens met the Russian tanks with bewildered questions, and judged, as they did, that communism could never survive. At the Chicago Democratic convention, we saw an unbroken, 17-minute sequence of police clubbing unarmed demonstrators outside the convention hotel. The juxtaposition of barbed wire, police dogs and official brutality in the US with bowed heads in Prague posed questions no administration could answer. One horrible televised sequence showed the South Vietnamese chief of police, Nguyen Ngoc Loan, confronting a badly beaten Viet Cong soldier in the street, then executing him with a pistol to the head. The shock of such images led to Lyndon Johnson's decision not to stand for a second term.
Kurlansky's impressive research includes interviews with Cronkite, Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Polish student leaders including Adam Michnik and Jan Nowak, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and numerous others. The book is written with shrewd humour and great insight; it vividly brings to life days that have already slipped into legend. Unfortunately, Kurlansky is weak on the feminist movement and did not bother to talk to any of the participants - it was about more than bra-burning and Miss World. And Britain's student protests and the deterioration of Northern Ireland are dismissed in a few sentences. Perhaps he didn't think that these were important, which is a shame, especially given his thoughtful analysis of the causes of mayhem elsewhere.
Not everything changed, not immediately. The Warsaw Pact countries stayed grimly quiescent for another 20 years, until a new generation simply stormed the Berlin Wall. Richard Nixon ended the war and the US for a while became less bumptious, at least until the election of Ronald Reagan. University administrators paid lip-service to the needs of their customers.
But the voters did not become more left-wing; rather the opposite. And while many of the 1968 student radicals became underground fighters in Mexico, Ulster, Palestine, central America, Spain and elsewhere, some of us, observing coolly where power really lies, thought the revolting students were wasting their energies, and instead opted to stand for public office ourselves. Foreign Secretary, take a bow.
Edwina Currie is soon to appear nightly on Hell's Kitchen with Gordon Ramsay
