A swing through the Sixties

At 1969's 'chaotic' Woodstock festival ticket-holders climb the sound tower for a better view. Picture: Three Lions/Getty

The 60s Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade
By Gerard DeGroot
Macmillan, 500pp, £20

YOU NEED TO KNOW THE YEAR Gerard DeGroot was born: 1955. He thinks he didn't miss the Sixties, but he did; which wouldn't matter except that he grew up just a little later, just in time to get adolescent-cross with old timers prattling on about how either human hopes were never higher, or human morals never lower than in that one magical decade. Like other children of the frightful Seventies, the age of Polystyrene you wore after the age of tie-dyed hemp you could smoke, he's a shade jealous. Or so it seems to me, but I'm class of 1946.

His book assumes the 1960s are worth 500 pages, but also insists they had no plot; DeGroot, as prosecuting counsel, says they "lacked coherent logic". Well, indeed; decades, like centuries, being accidents of the way we divide up time, very rarely think for themselves or issue manifestos. The 1970s probably couldn't even spell. The 1980s wouldn't admit it unless you paid them a brokerage fee.

But a decade can become an example, or even an ideology, if enough people think so, and DeGroot thinks too many people think so. He's giving us the 1960s "unplugged", the acoustic version without the usual electric amplification, because he wants to accuse the 1960s of leaving the world imperfect, and say they didn't matter. His method of proving the point is, he says, "kaleidoscopic", by which he means tiny chapters and lots of them, which will fall into patterns according to how you read them.

He darts between Sharpeville massacres, what a mess Woodstock was, Lady Chatterley, the Bay of Pigs, the Berlin wall, the Beatles, the miniskirt, the incidence of rape during the Summer of Love, Ronald Reagan and the 1960s' most successful politics, the LSE and "rivers jammed with bodies like logs" in Indonesia; and that's just the start. The effect is exhausting, especially since DeGroot doesn't admit to having much sense of direction; but don't be fooled. He's chosen, he says, to leave a great deal out, and the process of selection is an editorial in itself.

For the bits of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope fall into more – and more random – patterns than even the biggest collection of the shortest chapters; and reading DeGroot, you keep tripping over his intentions. They come at the end of almost every section. They're the political and historical equivalent of those Daily Mail pieces which take famous people and list their wardrobe malfunctions, their painful thinness, their looking older or suddenly looking younger. DeGroot likes diagnosing the cellulite of the soul.

He wants you to know that martyrs would just have gone wrong if they'd lived longer, that heroes can be egocentric, that the long term in politics may not be what politicians expect. He finds the "stench of hypocrisy" in Muhammad Ali's anger at white people, says Ali had a "magic key into the white world", which means he can't have read the speech he quotes the page before: in which the boxer says he's world champion and still there are neighbourhoods he can't live in.

He's beastly to the staunchly boring Leftists of Students for a Democratic Society, and calls their cause "futile"; he's kinder to right-wingers who went directly after power; but he misses something vital. He obviously doesn't know people like my friends who were once ghetto organisers for SDS and now, 40 years on, are still trying to manage the crises of New York City or give comfort and cures to the mentally ill at the poor end of the city's boroughs. Their 1960s experience moulded their lives, and their lives are anything but futile. The personal is political, remember?

The book is almost impossible to read straight through – constant changes of focus, self-contained bits and pieces – but it's well worth reading. DeGroot is a very nice writer, he has done rather brilliantly by great cultural icons like the Bomb and the Space Race in other books and he deserves to be indulged this once. His vignettes are sometimes so right you want to cheer, and I speak as one who was there; he pins the misogyny of radicals and sexual revolutionaries and holds it up for the world to see. Women lay down or made coffee; men ran the world.

He has a lovely eye for factoids: who knew it took sugar water to keep a Mod's hair in place? He sees the awful jokes in the 1960s, as when radicals who pressed for free drugs before they pressed for revolution find their followers so stoned they'd rather hear music than change the world. If he seems to dismiss them, he does still quote all those 1960s speakers who warned of a coming world of obedient consumers, well-behaved, constantly watched: our world, in fact.

But the moment you start having doubts, DeGroot gives you reason. We're told protest was rare in 1960s Britain, but he's forgotten that strikes weren't; suddenly you realise he thinks protest is an academic thing, and working class troubles don't count. He thinks 1960s Britain was stable, but for lots of us – first in the family at university – it was the second wave of all the social change that started in 1945.

He throws away all those stories about universal orgies for all, but misses the real importance of the way minds changed about premarital sex – 80 per cent against at the start of the decade, only 30 per cent at the end. Changes in attitude can matter more, and be much kinder, than changes in behaviour.

He's got a cloth ear for culture, too. The movie A Foreign Affair may be set in occupied Berlin, but it isn't one more Commie-bashing programmer; it's a curious morality tale about corrupt American officers, an honest Congresswoman, a Nazi war criminal and Marlene Dietrich. The notion that Paris in 1968 was somehow a movie scripted by André Gide is baffling, even more since DeGroot thinks it should have been directed by Jean-Luc Godard; Gide was a counter- revolutionary because he'd actually been to Russia, his notion of action was the personal and arbitrary acte gratuit, he was neither a famous Leftie nor a famous street fighter. And he was dead.

The great names of 1960s pop music, the ones whose independence and integrity were "nightmares for the industry", are apparently Dylan, Lennon, McCartney, Joplin and … Diana Ross, Motown's plastic cutie, replacement for a true and great artist in The Supremes. I'd be happy to offer DeGroot the course he needs: Diva 101.

But his analysis can be so sharp, it's worth arguing with. It has just one disagreeable effect: this revisionism puts down the people who became infected with hope in the Sixties. DeGroot manages misunderstandings that only a straight white boy could manage.

There's a clue when he approves the retirement of the German student leader Rudi Dutschke just before he was murdered, because he'd become a father and discovered "pursuits more important than violent revolution". This is false and it's sentimental: a person might want change for the sake of her or his children. There was a lot to change in the Sixties – think of the changes in law on homosexuality and abortion in Britain, for example – and Seventies persons shouldn't take the change for granted.

It gets worse. A bus full of civil rights activists is firebombed and we're told "while the attacks were undoubtedly frightening … (the photographs] provided valuable publicity for the movement". There's always an element of PR in martyrdom but I've never seen it quite so bluntly put, and I worry because only a page back, contradicting himself gloriously, DeGroot assures us "that the black community drew strength from marginalisation". All's for the best, you see, even attempted homicide, and nothing was ever as bad as we old-timers say. Dr Pangloss would blush.

The pattern repeats when he comes to the so-called Stonewall riots, one vivid moment when gay people in an ordinary New York gay bar stopped letting the world push them around. DeGroot really does say the Stonewall Inn was popular because it was a "squalid dump" with the constant threat of police raids; which is daft and misleading. The actual attraction was men and dancing, gay people went to a dump because anything better, lighter or cleaner could lose its licence for tolerating a bloke in tight trousers (in New York, some did) and the police raids were regularly bought off by the mobsters who ran Stonewall, an arrangement which made it relatively safe. The riots happened the night Matty the Horse didn't get the usual greenbacks to the right precinct; and so history is made.

Actually, Stonewall is a good example of what can go wrong in this kind of book. It's a landmark, and DeGroot needs landmarks, while he insists they mattered less than anyone thinks. In this case, he's more right than he knows: the notion that gays had felt alone and defeated until that magic Sixties moment has been comprehensively exploded by scholars like George Chauncey. But he can't read everything, and he hasn't always read enough.

Some of his most chilling pages are about the way the Great Generation that went through the Second World War turned against their own children; thought they'd done enough never to have to face dissent. Maybe that's part of my reaction; of course the 1960s failed to make a perfect world – consider the terrible parallels in lying and boasting between Vietnam and Iraq – but there was some progress and some seriousness there.

Maybe part of DeGroot's problem – in how he thinks, not what he knows – is being born in 1955.