Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties America

Dave Monroe monropolitan at yahoo.com
Sun Apr 16 08:44:06 CDT 2006


The San Francisco Chronicle
The '70s -- America's low point
Reviewed by Joshua Spivak

Sunday, April 16, 2006

1973 Nervous Breakdown 

Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties
America 

By Andreas Killen 

BLOOMSBURY; 312 PAGES; $24.95 

Has America gotten over the '70s? Events from the
once-overlooked decade still seem to haunt the
country. Both the Deep Throat revelation and the
wiretapping controversies bring to mind Watergate. The
documentary "American Family" that ran in 1973 can be
seen as the forerunner to the current reality-TV
obsession. And of course plenty of people see the
specter of the inglorious end to Vietnam in any
American foreign activity.

According to Andreas Killen's new book, "1973 Nervous
Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of
Post-Sixties America," the decade has had an outsize
impact on American culture. Killen, an assistant
professor of history at the City College of New York,
locates the unlikely year of 1973, which he refers to
as a low point in American history, as a watershed
year. Arguing that a number of current cultural trends
had their loci in the early 1970s, and especially in
1973, Killen explores some of the bizarre and
sometimes overlooked events of the era: skyjackings,
POWs, conspiracy theorists, cults, the early
forerunners of reality TV and Andy Warhol's obsession
with celebrities. Using Nixon's paranoia and the
growing Watergate scandal as a thread throughout the
year, Killen writes an entertaining, if not entirely
convincing, cultural study. 

The book works well in its primary goal of tracking
cultural trends, and ends in 1976 with the Patty
Hearst affair and trial -- the ultimate amalgamation
of celebrity, POWs, conspiracies, cults and reality
TV. However, those expecting a full-out historical
analysis of the early '70s will not find it here.
Killen is heavily focused on the arts and
personalities. For example, there are extended
discussions on movies of the period, Warhol's
superstar Edie Sedgwick and the glam rock band the New
York Dolls, but the OPEC oil embargo and its
devastating effect on the economy are barely
mentioned. 

The work is divided into chapter-length explorations
of trends. Some trends are fully presented and serve
as a good study of the period. He takes the revelation
of the Watergate tapes and connects them with a rich
cultural brew of conspiracies, including some
conspiracy-minded movies and the year's top literary
work, Thomas Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow." He also
examines the bizarre fascination with cults, in which
Lyndon LaRouche, the Moonies and David Berg (founder
of the Family) all get to make an appearance. The
focus of the chapter on cults is not on the bizarre
and frequently dangerous ones but on the strange
behavior of one of the leaders of the anti-cult
crusaders, Ted Patrick. Patrick is quoted as
describing the cult's mind-control technique as "an
energy from the brain waves that comes down through
the eyes. ... This is what E.S.P. is. They're teaching
this in all the universities." 

However, others chapters lack both a full explanation
and a historical perspective. A look at how POWs
responded to being released after the Vietnam War
splits the returning veterans into two groups: those
who continued to support the war and America (in
Killen's retelling, primarily the elite pilots) and
those who were disenchanted after their experience --
the drafted Army grunts. That there was a split in the
POW ranks is definitely worth exploring. But outside
of a few isolated quotes, Killen does not provide any
real evidence that the second, disgruntled group was
actually a significant minority rather than just a few
people who could be quoted. 

In the same vein, Killen spends a chapter on power
shifts. A major example is how political power moved
away from places like New York City and began to be
concentrated in the Southwest, especially southwestern
California. While he provides an interesting story on
the growth of Orange County -- and especially on how
the city of Irvine was built -- he does not seem to
fully appreciate that the migration of political power
was a long-developing trend that had already
manifested itself much earlier. In the 1964
presidential race, both political candidates were able
to claim Southwestern roots. In reality, the Northeast
had been steadily losing power for years. 

Both of these chapters point to the hole in Killen's
central thesis. Are the '70s more important,
culturally or otherwise, than any other decade? Sure,
some events had an impact. Some people use Vietnam as
their reference point to advocate avoiding war and
foreign interventions. Others look back several
decades to the appeasement at Munich. Wiretapping?
Look at the LBJ tapes. POWs, cults and brainwashing?
All part of the Korean War. Did glam and punk rock
have more of an impact than 1980s hip-hop? The reality
is that it is pretty hard to single out any time
period as a dominant one. And while Killen provides
some good examples, it is easy to provide some
counterpoints. 

A further flaw in the work is that except for the
chapter on movies, the book mainly uses
contemporaneous commentators, rather than people
looking back with some perspective. Some of the
comments are completely unhelpful. New Yorker critic
Pauline Kael is cited for her comment that "the
country has never been more star crazy that it is
right now." Couldn't that have been said any time in
the past hundred years? And, in the only sports
reference Killen makes in a year of several noteworthy
sporting achievements (the Dolphins' completion of the
NFL's only undefeated season, Secretariat, the Ya
Gotta Believe Mets, the A's), there is the obvious
error in quoting a hagiography of Roberto Clemente,
who died on Dec. 31, 1972, calling him "perhaps the
most complete player of his generation." No. As every
Bay Area resident can attest, that would be Willie
Mays. 

It is clear that the '70s, like every other decade,
had a real impact on America. In "1973 Nervous
Breakdown," Killen provides and traces to the present
some good examples of this impact. He also gives the
reader an interesting primer on the American culture
of the time and some nice vignettes on some otherwise
forgotten phenomena. However, the book is a bit overly
ambitious in its goals. Killen does show that the '70s
were important, but there's no need to inflate its
influence on America. 

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/04/16/RVG2KI4PIN1.DTL

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