Kent State was the final stand. According to Viorst, it was the test of how revolutionary the left was, and how far they would go. But "few were ready to die, so the decade reached its end." Viorst says that by this time, the country had reached agreement that America had blundered in entering the war. But the animus of the Movement, vibrant in all of Viorst's heroes, was not the nemesis of one war, of one minority--it was the nemesis of an entire machine, the ideals and values of America which caused the country to blunder into war, oppress peoples, and poison the environment. The Movement was out to get Moloch, the institution of dehumanization that is lighted on billboards and written on paychecks and that drafts the young to fight for vital interests and economic growth.
"But, as Orwell said," Viorst quotes Ginsberg, "a functioning police state doesn't need police to enforce. They get people to internalize. In 1984, the people don't realize there's a war at the other end of the planet. Then, suddenly, they wake up to the fact that there has been some vast conditioning. Brainwashing may be too strong a word, but it's accurate. It was a conditioning so that the public was able to amnesiaize vast areas of its own consciousness.
"So once there was a breakthrough in that central area, and a breakthrough in the gray room, then everything was called into question. After sex was made conscious, what about money? What about capital exploitation? What about plastic? What about tearing up the earth and replacing it with asphalt? What about the murder of one hundred million buffalo?"
AND WHAT ABOUT the '60s? Viorst is a good journalist, and like a good journalist, he has written a good story, a collection of informative and deeply moving profiles of America's heroes. But as an outsider, he does not share their stirring disillusionment with America, with its institutions of democracy and justice. He does not see the ultimate goal of any social movement, taken to its wildest extreme; he does not feel the urgency to change--the fire in the streets. Viorst is content to believe that the Movement ran out of steam and conviction--and something to complain about.
Viorst never says much about the FBI's attempts to "destroy and neutralize the New Left" through its counterintelligence programs. He doesn't mention its plan to divide and dissolve the New Left through a campaign of misinformation, instigation, and harassment. Nor does he mention that J. Edgar Hoover, then director of the FBI and the de facto trigger of American justice, instructed his agents to "prevent the rise of the messiah who could unify and electrify the militant Black nationalist group. Martin Luther King...aspires to this position. King could be a very real pretender for this position should he abandon his supposed obedience to 'white, liberal doctrines,' and embrace Black nationalism.
"Take him off his pedestal," Hoover said, "and reduce him completely in influence," and replace King with another, more impotent Black leader.
Milton Viorst knew King, he knew some of the heroes, talked with them, held hands with them, wrote a book about them. But Milton Viorst's a liberal, and there is one thing he never shared with them--he never confronted Moloch.