Jo Freeman’s Review of A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope and Innocence Lost

By Jo Freeman

Review of A Hard Rain: America in the 1960s, Our Decade of Hope and Innocence Lost

By Frye Gaillard

Published by New South Books 2018, 687,  xvi pages

“If you remember the Sixties, you weren’t there” is a statement that has been attributed to many people.

Frye Gaillard remembers the sixties and took almost 700 pages to tell us about it. Born in 1946, the Sixties shaped his life — especially during his active years at Vanderbilt University. Between 1964 and graduation in 1968, he met Robert Kennedy, William Buckley, Julian Bond, Eldridge Cleaver and many others who made the Sixties such a memorable decade. Of all these, it was RFK who made the deepest impression; he appears in a lot of pages in this book. 

Growing up in Mobile, Alabama, Gaillard stayed in the South, initially as a journalist. He wanted to be a writer from an early age and succeeded admirably, this being his 29th book. Those books have focused heavily on his native South.  A Hard Rain does in the same way.  Since a good deal of the actions of the Sixties happened in the South this is fitting, though activists in other states might feel a bit slighted.

People who didn’t live through the Sixties are often told that it was about sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. That might be true for those who only know about 1967 – also known as the Summer of Love. But that was only a small sliver of the many things that made their mark. As Gaillard makes clear, the Sixties was really about race and war. Race dominated the first half of the decade and war dominated the second.