In new documentary, Brokaw revisits 1968

It airs Sunday on the History Channel.

By FRAZIER MOORE

AP TELEVISION WRITER

NEW YORK — The year 1968: Was it groovy? A bummer?

“I think 1968 was probably the worst year in this nation’s history,” says conservative commentator Pat Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon who coined the term “silent majority.”

“It was a lot of fun,” says Michelle Phillips, the sylphlike former member of the Mamas and the Papas.

Even 40 years later, there is no consensus on 1968 — nor does Tom Brokaw seek one in his new documentary, “1968 with Tom Brokaw.”

Airing 9 p.m. Sunday on the History Channel, it’s a two-hour flashback to a year so laden with events and messages “we’re still working our way through it,” as Brokaw summed up during a recent interview.

The year began with the Tet Offensive, a major Vietcong assault against South Vietnam that shattered many Americans’ faith that the war could ever be “won.” The year ended, mercifully, with the Apollo 8 mission that sent three Americans orbiting around the moon and inspired a nation that badly needed it.

In between ... the assassinations of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy; riots in cities and uprisings on campuses, plus the violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; a peace movement flourishing while the war claimed the lives of 16,500 U.S. military (almost twice as many as the previous year); Nixon narrowly winning the presidency, sealing a remarkable political comeback. Plus sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll.

“I remember thinking that I was living in so many Americas,” said Brokaw, marveling that when his journalism career had brought him to Los Angeles’ KNBC two years earlier, “I saw Reagan get elected [governor] on the one hand, the counterculture rising on the other hand.”

He also remembers how the media had trouble accepting the complexity of events as they unfolded.

When an NBC News bigwig asked Brokaw, new at the network, for his thoughts, “I said, ‘California has a much broader vein of important cultural contributions to the country than it gets credit for.’ And he said, ‘I don’t want to hear that. I love the kookiness. That’s what we want out of California.’ There were these stereotypes in play.”

Now 67, the former NBC News anchorman covered many of the major events of that decade, while experiencing them as a member of the generation at their core: baby boomers. He stayed busy.

“I’ve led a pretty fast-paced life. I’ve not taken a lot of time to be contemplative,” Brokaw said. “But this was an opportunity that was forced on me to be that.”

The opportunity was writing his recently published history-memoir, “Boom! Voices of the Sixties” — and his documentary, which narrows the focus to the year that epitomized the boomer revolution.

In the film, Brokaw revisits the Haight-Ashbury section of San Francisco, where the counterculture flowered (and where he, a neatly groomed young correspondent, is seen in archival footage reporting from the same intersection).

He recalls the loss of a close friend in the Vietnam war, a fighter pilot killed in 1968 at age 30, and makes a pilgrimage to the grave site in South Dakota.

He joins former anti-war radical Mark Rudd at Columbia University where students led by Rudd occupied the administration building and (Rudd fondly recalls) the Grateful Dead were on the quad, rocking out.

Archival footage recaptures triumphant moments at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel ballroom as Bobby Kennedy claimed victory in the California primary that June. Moments later, he was gravely wounded by an assassin’s bullet.

Outside the hospital where Kennedy later died, Brokaw interviews longtime friend Rafer Johnson, the Olympic gold medalist-turned-sportscaster who had signed on with Kennedy’s presidential campaign. After the shot was fired, Johnson recalls, “I reached up and got my hand on the gun.”

“I don’t even know what to compare it with even today, Tom,” he says quietly when asked his reaction when Kennedy’s death was announced just a few steps from where they are standing.