Reeling in the Year
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
If “1968 With Tom Brokaw,” a two-hour special airing Sunday night on the History Channel, attempted to be anything more than the television equivalent of a coffee-table book on a pivotal year in America’s ongoing culture wars, it would be a serious disappointment. Fortunately, its aspirations are modest and its pleasures abundant.
Its chief asset is its host, whose Midwestern amiability never flags. Whether he’s doing a goofy, gushing interview with singer Arlo Guthrie on the meaning and myth of “Alice’s Restaurant” or having a semi-serious look at the civil rights struggle, it’s very hard to hold anything against Mr. Brokaw. Sure, he’s essentially sending a valentine to the summer after the Summer of Love, and he is seriously wet on the Tet Offensive in Vietnam (Walter Cronkite be damned, we creamed them on the battlefield). But let’s not get too lathered up when Mr. Brokaw goes misty-eyed down memory lane at Haight-Ashbury as “Buffalo Springfield” plays on the soundtrack.
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