Tom Brokow's second greatest generation is that of the 1960s, according to his just-out book Boom! Voices of the Sixties: Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today (a book that I will almost certainly not read--because there are already ten or so really great books about the decade that I want to read first).Ah, but for Brokaw the 1960s run from 1963 to 1974. So the decade is defined on one end by the assassination of JFK and on the other end by the resignation of Nixon.
This is not just a center-stage-centered approach (though it is that, first and foremost) but, it seems to me, ignores art and what we call "culture" (in the phrase "arts & culture") almost entirely. It helps me understand a little more and a little more keenly what I want to do in learning about 1960 and its effects.
Is '60 the moment when the end of the end of the Old Left had been reached and the New Left began to emerge? Is it the final ascendancy, in certain scenes at least, of poetic postmodernity? Surely the publication of Donald Allen's The New American Poetry that year suggests this, but then again--once again--we look back on "New" here and see continuity. The rhetoric of the Kennedy-Nixon contest made much less of a dent than everyone (at the time as well as since) claimed, so one wonders why were such great claims made? 
Had we come to expect "1960" to be truly ubiquitously modern in a way that the 1950s really were not--not quite? And what specifically does "modern" mean in the Kennedyesque talk then and now about the torch being passed to a new generation, etc.? The First Lady really meant "modernist" when Camelotians said "modern." What about the others across the new young cultural leadership? I've been surprised by how frequently the 
"Beat movement" was covered in 1960 in the mainstream press. I was expecting a fair measure but I've found tonnage. 1960 was the year when the figure of the beat was beginning to find acceptance, although still 80% of these stories are mocking, rebels-without-cause condescension. For anyone whose analysis made an impact nationally, do these antipolitical adolescents count as part of the "new young cultural leadership"? No, but rather than the two being opposites, they fall along a Continuum of the New American. Now that's a change for '60.
