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In 1968, by the Hoffman hypothesis of atomic aging, the world was about 22 years old. The baby-boom generation, not only in America but in much of the rest of the world, grew up not merely in the shadow of the Bomb but also in an envelope of common experiences. Television gave them a collective memory -- of Howdy Doody and Beaver Cleaver, of public events (most vividly and traumatically, the assassination of President John Kennedy). Then, in the mid- and later '60s, the young endlessly enriched and elaborated their culture, through music mainly and through drugs and costume and linguistic style (groovy, far-out, rip-off, bummer, bread, acid head, pigs, narcs, rap, trash). They made a worldwide cultural revolution.
Woodstock and the "Woodstock Nation" that Hoffman wrote about would come in 1969. The year 1968 was more politically preoccupied. But the personalities and anthems of rock gave pulse to the politics and identity to the young. It was the sound that they inhabited -- Steppenwolf, Country Joe and the Fish, the Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Marvin Gaye, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Simon and Garfunkel, the Beatles going into their White Album phase and, above all, Bob Dylan, still. Dylan's music had a genius of portent: "The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind." Back in 1965 he had written, "Something is happening here, but you don't know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?" He was right.
The youth of the world's atomic age came to a sort of critical mass in the spring of 1968. Nineteen days after King's assassination, students at Columbia University began occupying five buildings on the campus and held them for almost a week. Mark Rudd, a Columbia junior with a gift for confrontational theater, led an "action faction" of S.D.S. He wrote an open letter to University President Grayson Kirk, which he closed with a line from LeRoi Jones: "Up against the wall, m, this is a stickup." With some of the student movement's talent for converting disrespect to symbolic desecration, the occupation forces moved into Kirk's office, smoked his cigars (one student with his feet perched on Kirk's desk, an act of smirking and virtually Oedipal lese majeste -- O.K., Dad, whatcha gonna do about it, huh?) and, after six days of occupation, left the place a mess.
The uprising at Columbia was the work of a minority of student radicals. But it was not an aberration. Around the world that year in cities as widely spaced as Paris and Tokyo and Mexico City and Berkeley, students rose in protest and revolt. The spasms of unrest seemed almost psychologically coordinated, as if a mysterious common impulse had swept through the nervous system of a global generation. The theme of the protests, and of the generation, was . . . what? To challenge authority. To change the world. To take possession of the world. To announce itself.
In Paris, what began as protest over sex-segregated dormitories ended in a general strike and very nearly brought down the government of Charles de Gaulle. Hallucination again, the decade's leitmotiv of illusion: now you see it, now you don't. For some days it looked as if France were in the grip of a revolution, everyone manning the barricades. The country came to a boil and then, just as quickly, cooled down to the status quo.