Originally broadcast on The History Channel as a tie-in to Tom Brokaw’s recently published generational summation, “Boom: Voices of the Sixties,” “1968” is not simply a rote retelling of events from one of the 20th century’s most turbulent years. This documentary draws scholarly parallels between 1968 and 2008, pointing out often unnerving similarities along the way.
Like most of his TV news colleagues at the time, Brokaw was a straitlaced observer of the counterculture. But his relative youth allowed him to file reports from Haight-Ashbury without the kind of harsh judgment often heard from his contemporaries. In “1968,” Brokaw looks at the turning point in public attitudes toward the Vietnam War, the turmoil of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. By interviewing famous and private people who were swept up in the events, Brokaw shows that 40 years is not a huge chunk of time, and that our present often echoes the past — war, deep division and a hotly contested presidential race only scratch the surface.
The events of 1968 still elicit raw reactions from all points on the political spectrum. If “1968” has a weakness, it is the producers’ unwillingness to obtain copyright clearance for music — the generic acid rock used in the background hardly does justice to the polyglot greatness of that year’s music. But “1968” gets it right more often than wrong, and Brokaw offers just as much insight into baby boomer culture as he did for “the greatest generation.”