Fall-Out

Fall In and Cheer By John R. Coyne Jr. Doubleday, 184 pp., $8.95 In 1971 William L. O’Neill published a book described as an “informal history of America in the Sixties.” The book was titled Coming Apart. It was an historical report on the things that surprised, shocked, and divided the country, and brought some Americans close to despair during those turbulent years of racial strife, political controversy, assassination, and war.

At the center of most of the controversies of that decade were the young Americans, especially those who were in colleges and universities. Willingly or otherwise, they carried the principal burden of facing the issue of racial discrimination and desegregation. They too were most personally and immediately affected by the war. They were called upon to fight it, or, rejecting it, to avoid fighting it and to try to end it. Special deferments granted to college and university students, the ease of escaping the draft, did not free students from personal and moral responsibility for the war.

EM

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Eugene J. McCarthy

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Fall In and Cheer By John R. Coyne Jr. Doubleday, 184 pp., $8.95 In 1971 William L. O’Neill published a book described as an “informal history of America in the Sixties.” The book was titled Coming Apart. It was an historical report on the things that surprised, shocked, and divided the country, and brought some Americans close to despair during those turbulent years of racial strife, political controversy, assassination, and war.

At the center of most of the controversies of that decade were the young Americans, especially those who were in colleges and universities. Willingly or otherwise, they carried the principal burden of facing the issue of racial discrimination and desegregation. They too were most personally and immediately affected by the war. They were called upon to fight it, or, rejecting it, to avoid fighting it and to try to end it. Special deferments granted to college and university students, the ease of escaping the draft, did not free students from personal and moral responsibility for the war.