Too Good to be Forgotten

Too Good to be Forgotten: Changing America in the '60s and '70s By David Obst. John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Baffins Lane, Chichester. West Sussex P019 1UD, UK; 1998; GBP 18.99. 282 pages. ISBN 0471295388. Book available from Amazon.com USAor from amazon.com UK Reviewed by: Gloria Otto who was active in various student movements in the 60s.

A member of the most talked-about and studied generation ever, the baby boomers, takes us down memory lane with a personal account of his involvement in three of the most important events of the time, My Lai, the Pentagon Papers and Watergate. David Obst, who belongs to the first wave of boomers, had the uncanny ability of instinctively being present just where the action was happening. He was at the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, studied at Berkeley in the late 60s, helped break the My Lai massacre story which won the Pulitzer Prize, assisted Daniel Ellsberg with the Pentagon Papers and was an agent for Woodward and Bernstein AND John Dean of the Watergate scandal. Mr Obst's conviction that boomers are the ones shaping the direction the world is going in and to understand where they are leading it, we need to understand this generation and where it came from.

Don't skip the introduction in this well-organized book. Here you can take the test of whether you are an EB=Early Boomer or a LB=Late Boomer or if you happen to be on the fringe, a boomer at all. He is on target in defining polio, the real threat of nuclear confrontation and the pill as the dividing line between EBs and LBs. The first part entitled "Youth" takes us through the years 1958-1965 and is hilariously accurate in describing drop drills in schools (for those puzzled by this term, this book is a must), how the Cuban missile crisis affected teen-age life and an amusing tongue-in-cheek reflection on that all important First Sexual Encounter.

For anyone who has ever gone abroad to live on his or her own without proper background or language training or for anyone contemplating such a move, the second part "Taiwan in the years 1967-68" will make excellent reading. From the panic attack on his first morning upon realizing how far away from home he is to his confrontation with a life-style so utterly different and with how others saw him, one wishes he had written a book only on this chapter of his life. He stumbles upon an old missionary forced to flee from China and uses this encounter to start recording an oral history of what these people witnessed. He also comes closely in touch with American GI stories about what is happening in Viet Nam which will shape his outlook when he returns to the US.

The lion's portion of this book is of course devoted to the author's personal involvement in major events. The details are too numerous to be listed here, except for the one fact that he doesn't believe there is such a person as Deep Throat. He starts off each chapter with a good overall four-page summary of America at that specific time from the hits on radio and TV to the current mood and fashions and then proceeds to give an accurate and intimate view of the events taking place. He is also quite good at pointing out how foolish and immature baby-boomers could often be.

This is good reading not only for the generation who experienced all this, but for the children of boomers who might appreciate a more intimate account of their parent's lives.

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