1967: The Year of Fire and Ice

    1967 was a dramatic and dynamic year in American life, music, art, and world affairs. However, the author of this book relies heavily on stereotyping. For instance, he devotes a chapter to Israel and the Six Day War, and he gets a lot of it wrong. Firstly, Israel’s planes were high-speed interceptors, not fighter-bombers, and the Egyptian pilots were eating breakfast when the Israelis attacked, not sitting in their cockpits. Next problem is that the author leaves out major details; Israeli officers had to work hard for their ranks, while the Egyptian and Syrian officers were all incompetent. Israel’s intelligence service had been hard at work for 20 years, spying on the Arab world, and it was the intelligence that gave Israel an advantage. At the time of the Six Day War, the US was bogged down in Vietnam. Were the South Vietnamese army officers as incompetent as the Arab officers? If so, was the USA just babysitting an army that was too damn lazy?

    The author begins with Abba Eban’s visit to Washington DC to ask for US help, and the dismissive response of LBJ. There’s no explanation of why. Was it because the USA was more concerned about Vietnam? Was Johnson looking to keep the Arab Oil Sheiks happy? There’s a lot more going on here than the author goes into.

    In terms of movies (kind of lame, ever since Hollywood had been killed by TV) American audiences were shocked by You Only Live Twice, with its portrayal of the Japanese as good-natured allies of the USA. Then there was the epic The Dirty Dozen, which tossed “civilized warfare” out the window. It may have been groundbreaking for the role of Jim Brown (how many Black action heroes were there at the time, besides Woody Strode?) and the amount of violence. However, it was not the only war film of the era; we had Von Ryan’s Express, Cast a Giant Shadow, The Manchurian Candidate, and others. Paint Your Wagon was garbage, and who needed a big-budget western when you could watch Gunsmoke and The Rifleman for free? Sergio Leone’s Italian westerns did well at the box office, probably because they had an edgier style that appealed to younger audiences (the Baby Boomers weren’t especially fond of John Wayne’s hypermasculinity.)

    The bottom line is that this book contains absolutely NOTHING that I haven’t already seen in every book, documentary, biography, or comic about the 60’s. Half the stuff in this book was portrayed on The Wonder Years, and that wasn’t even a primary source.