Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960s

by William L. O'Neill

William L. O'Neill's masterly chronicle of the twentieth century's most confounding decade is an immensely readable book that combines wit with learning and seriousness with entertainment. Its emphasis is inevitably on politics, but it offers a brilliant yet balanced portrayal of the New Left, the counterculture, the civil rights movement, the plunge into Vietnam, the crisis in the universities, and the freakier aspects of the popular culture. It has endured as one of the great interpretations of the sixties.

Genres: History, Nonfiction

488 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1973

About the author

William L. O'Neill was an historian specializing in 20th century America. He earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan and his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. He taught at the universities of Pittsburgh, Colorado and Wisconsin before accepting a position at Rutgers University in 1971, where he taught until his retirement in 2006.

Reviews

[Julio The Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

"If you can remember the Sixties you weren't really there".---Robin Williams
"The Sixties were God's gift to conservatives".---George Will

I lived through two 1960s, first under Communism and later under capitalism. The capitalist Sixties tasted better but the Communist showed more promise. William O'Neill, late dean of American cultural historians, has wisely decided that in America 1960-1970 politics and culture could not be disentangled. He grants as much space to Barry Goldwater ("in your heart, you know he's right") as to DR. STRANGELOVE ("Mr. President, we must not allow a mineshaft gap!"). COMING APART renders a freak show as tragedy and vice versa. Assassinations, riots, genocidal war, police repression of all minority groups stand side by side with The Beatles, long hair and Lenny Bruce. Some of this farce has the air of fatalism. In "The New Left Comes and Goes" O'Neill, a historian of American progressive movements (his study of first-wave feminism, ALL WERE BRAVE, is definitive) concludes the "left was bound to fail because America is not fundamentally a leftist country"; a tautology that is nevertheless true. Special section: "Things to be Happy About in the Sixties": The mini-skirt, the 1969 Miracle Mets, Yves St. Laurent. In a decade dominated by the young, who even won TIME Magazine's MAN OF THE YEAR award, who were these young people? Were they, as Swiss psychohistorian Erik Erikson called them, "the most narcissistic generation in American history" or the most selfless, e.g. helping Black people in the South to register to vote, and demanding the vote for themselves? Who won the Sixties? Conservatives won the white working class, and hippies and other freaks (in a good way) made that easier, but the left (no longer organized into the New Left) won the campuses, and with it the cultural future. Still, the title of this brilliant synthesis is COMING APART. America never really got back together again, and we are still "fighting in the streets, with our children at our feet".

[Tim · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has always been clear to me that my life, and the lives of many around me, and the life of our society, have been greatly influenced by the creativity and cultural clashes of the 1960s. I wanted to read a book that would present and discuss that era. As I read, I realized that I already knew much of what the author covers. This is not an in-depth study, but more of a review of the top news stories of the decade, along with some analysis. It was written just at the end of the decade - he closes the book out with the election of President Nixon - so many of these events were still pretty recent. O'Neill does not come from a strong ideological position - probably center-left is where he would be on the political spectrum - and he is not promoting any particular theoretical positions. For the most part, he looks at things from a dry, detached perspective, and there is a dash of healthy cynicism in his approach. He was not especially attached to most of the figures in his narrative, although there are a couple that he clearly finds fascinating and/or admirable, such as Senator William Proxmire and Norman Mailer.

My favorite sections were on the Black Power movement and the counter-culture. In both of these, he covers a lot of the important territory and takes a look at the key players. The section on the turbulent Democratic Party nomination battle of 1968 was also well worth reading, and has interesting insights into President Johnson and others. His take on the Kennedy family is pretty cool-headed and analytical, from a political standpoint. Other topics that he goes over include the end of the Eisenhower Administration, the New Left and the campus upheavals of the time, and the Vietnam War and the diplomacy that came with it. "Coming Apart" was a good book and I got what I bargained for with it, even if it is a bit superficial and lacking original research. It is still in print after almost 40 years, so I guess it is fulfilling a useful purpose.

[Adrienne LaCava · Rating 4 out of 5]

O'Neill laments the demise of the "new left," so alive and vibrant in the sixties as our nation crept to the brink over and over. I love the title and it suits the organization of his research. Thought provoking in perspective, this is an interesting read for anyone who's intrigued by all the turmoil in American during that decade.

[Jim Dickinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great way to understand the most dynamic decade in US History.

[Robin McMillion · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this many years ago, but it stayed with me. A bit irreverent, and damned sad.