Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72

by Rick Perlstein

Time, on the other hand, claimed to see what the kids saw. And this was a watershed. It meant that Middle America was supposed to be embracing Woodstock, too. The cover of the August 29 issue featured Defense Secretary Melvin Laird. Page 33 featured a full-color photograph from Woodstock captioned, “Boys and girls related in a nearby river”; none of the relating boys and girls wore clothes. The accompanying essay, “The Message of History’s Biggest Happening,” noted that though Time usually recognized “battles won, treaties signed, rulers elected or deposed,” Woodstock should be counted among them “as one of the significant political and sociological events of the age.” It was “the moment when the special culture of U.S. youth of the ’60s openly displayed its strength, appeal, and power.” The magazine called the attendees “pilgrims” and cited the scholar Theodore Roszak, author of the celebratory new book The Making of a Counter Culture—“these rock revolutionaries bear a certain resemblance to the early Christians”—and snubbed “the oversimplification that all narcotics are dangerous and thus should be outlawed” as something as “absurd and hypocritical as Prohibition.” Time also complimented the New York Times for finally coming around—in a second editorial that redubbed Woodstock “essentially a phenomenon of innocence.”