GIVE ME A hero. Someone willing to throw his body on the line, who will feel the cutting edge of politics and jackboots and patriotic propaganda and do more than bleed. Heroes who don't sign advertising endorsements when their hour is over. America needs her heroes.

Milton Viorst is a liberal. He is a journalist--in name and spirit--who knew some of America's heroes. His book is an ambivalent portrayal of America in the '60s, a series of profiles of 14 heroes of the time. Some of them are still heroes. Fire in the Streets is honest history, good American story-telling, but there are no judgments or conclusions, and little adulation. Remember, Milton Viorst is a liberal.

Tom Hayden, E.D. Nixon, Allen Ginsberg, Allard Lowenstein, John Lewis, Stokely Carmichael, Jerry Rubin, Clark Kerr, James Mellon, Alan Canfora, Paul Williams, Joe Rauh, Bayard Rustin, James Famer. There were different heroes for different people. And though Viorst claims not to have written another history of the '60s, in a superior and unconventional way he has. The history is grounded in the civil rights movement, in Brown vs. the Board of Education, in E.D. Nixon and his Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. It is grounded in the "new values" of Jack Kerouac's prose--an inspiration for Tom Hayden--and of Allen Ginsberg's poetry, particularly his seminal work, Howl. And from those seeds, Viorst says, "the Movement" rose up, at times singularly eloquent, at times wanton and reckless. In an epilogue, Viorst says the '60s taught Americans that their country was not immune to social disorder--the kind of disorder that titillated Viorst's instincts and offended his middle class values at once. And given "the right provocation," he says, America could once again take its politics into the streets.

By his own admission, Milton Viorst is an outsider looking in. And while he learned a lesson from the '60s, he betrays a naivete about the heart of America and its prodigal sons. After more than 500 pages of detailed interviews and timeless quotations. Viorst concludes that the movement died because the civil rights movement was no longer around "to enrich it." because the dissidents had alienated the liberal establishment sympathizers who legitimized the protest, because America was tired of it all. Though Viorst never sees the depth of the dehumanization in America that throttled the Movement and killed it in the end. Fire in the Streets is saved by its heroes, who identify the antagonist of the Movement, the thug who aroused the civil rights movement, the assassin who cut them all down, and who lives today. Allen Ginsberg found the villain--the cause and effect--that Viorst gropes for:

What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imaginations? Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!...

Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies!

Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!

Note: Moloch is an archaic Semitic deity worshipped through the sacrifice of the young.

HE TELLS THE great story of the tense year the entire black population of Montgomery, Alabama boycotted their racist bus system. Saintlike in their patience and non-violence. E.D. Nixon, Martin Luther King, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and isolated Blacks of Montgomery waited for the wisdom of the Supreme Court.

"No one can understand the feeling that comes to a Southern Negro on entering Federal Court," Viorst quotes King, "unless he sees with his own eyes and feels with his own soul the tragic sabotage of justice in the city and state courts of the South. The Negro goes into these courts knowing that the cards are stacked against him...But the Southern Negro goes into the Federal Court with the feeling that he has an honest chance of justice before the law."

The non-violent civil disobedience of Thoreau, Gandhi and King has a sacred aura in this book, and it is vin dicated by its political and spiritual triumphs. But when the affluent college students of the '60s seize the revelations of the civil rights movement, the drama and courage of the protest, the transcendent irreverence of the beat generation, Viorst sees pretension; there is validity to the rancor, but will anyone die for it?

"Most of these students lived in campus communities segregated from the working society. They had little need to earn money, few mundane responsibilities and plenty of leisure time."

Viorst sees students pitying themselves, when perhaps they were just looking out the window, reading the newspapers, opening letters from the Selective Service, watching the death toll on the nightly news. They did not live in a campus vacuum, and too many students today know the terror of being 22 years old and leaving a sombre campus with nothing to do in the world.

Though every hero in the book exposes him, Milton Viorst never seems to confront Moloch. Instead, he credits the success of the Movement to good liberals and dedicated reformers, and he blames the disintegration on cynical militants and radicals.

Once grace had left the movement, the game was wild-eyed confrontation. Chicago. May Day. Kent State. Mark Rudd. Reform had become revolution, Eisenhower's "silent generation"--in which Viorst claims membership--had become "the silent majority," and an American President had promised to end the war. It took time, however, and during that time Viorst believes the Movement burned out.