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

Journalist Gaillard offers a comprehensive history of the 1960s that traces the decade’s fateful arc from its optimistic beginning— embodied in John F. Kennedy’s inaugural promise of a “new frontier” —to its end, traumatized by the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy, as well as the Vietnam War. As the decade unfolds, Gaillard moves seamlessly from the chilling brush with annihilation during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 to San Francisco’s 1967 “summer of love,” the violent protests that defined the 1968 Democratic Convention, and the 1969 moon landing, impressively merging these and other noteworthy events into a coherent whole. Two threads, however, dominate the narrative: the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Gaillard, a young man during the ’60s, judiciously adds his recollected thoughts about key events as they unfolded—by chance he saw “policemen shoving [King] roughly up the sidewalk, and... the moment shattered an illusion that everything was fine, that the racial problems in the South would subside if not for ‘agitators’ like King”—an addition that adds surprising poignancy and immediacy to the story. Older readers will find this a sobering retrospective, and for those who didn’t live through the ’60s, it’s an enlightening picture of America at a historic juncture. (Aug.)