Atop a now quiet green hillside, where 400,000 young Americans once writhed in
a sea of free love and mud, a stately structure is being built from stone
and wood.
For critics it is a “hippy museum” celebrating the acid-opened minds and
anarchy of the Woodstock Festival in August 1969. To others it overlooks
sacred ground — now eerie and gentle like an old battlefield — a place where
the shock troops of America’s culture war convulsed in electric ecstasy with
Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin during “three days of peace and music”.
But no one doubts that Woodstock was the culmination of a traumatic and
tumultuous decade of change, framed by assassinations, race riots, a Cold
War with Russia — and a hot war in Vietnam. One exhibit will try to explain:
“How we split politically as a nation at that point in the Sixties — and how
it has never been healed.”
The wounds remain open even in this presidential election, 38 years later.
John McCain, a gnarled 71-year-old candidate, feels the pain of those he
sustained in Vietnam every day: he cannot raise his arms above shoulder
level, comb his hair or fasten his tie.
At the last Republican presidential TV debate, he earned an ovation when he
mocked Hillary Clinton for wanting to mark a “cultural and pharmaceutical
event” with a $1 million federal grant to the Woodstock museum. “I was not
there,” he said. “I was tied up at the time.” So successful was this line
that he later used it in a TV advertisement, splicing images of hippies
cavorting in Max Yasgur’s fields with a photograph of himself as a prisoner
of the Vietcong who tortured him.
For years after Vietnam, the Democrats were punished by voters who associated
them with the unpatriotic, disrespectful, flag-burning peaceniks of that
summer in ’69.
Now, when Democratic presidential candidates promise to end the Iraq war, they
bend over backwards to lavish tribute on the courage of American soldiers.
None more so than Mrs Clinton who has strived ceaselessly to brand herself
as a political centrist with hawkish – even conservative – tendencies,
sponsoring a Bill in the Senate to make flag-burning illegal, initially
supporting the invasion of Iraq and opposing gay marriage. Such positioning
only makes Republicans despise her more because they doubt her sincerity and
resent encroachment on their territory. The woman who wants federal funding
for a hippy museum is, they say, the real Hillary.
She is, after all, one half of a couple who represent much of what disgusts
conservatives about the Sixties. The bearded sexually charged Bill escapes
Vietnam to study in Oxford where he “did not inhale” and then marries
Hillary, an earnest feminist with big glasses. They name their only child
after a Joni Mitchell song, Bill gets oral sex in the Oval Office, while his
gender revolutionary wife transforms the cookie recipe role of First Lady
into a political power base. And now the pair of them are intent on
hoodwinking God-fearing Americans into electing them. Again.
President Bush, who also avoided service in Vietnam, represents the
reactionary wing of the same generation. His own hard-drinking phase ended
when he found Jesus and saw off a challenge from that liberal elitist John
Kerry amid smears on the Democratic candidate’s own Vietnam war record.
At a recent “Values Voters’ summit for Evangelical conservatives in
Washington, Republican candidates trumped each other as they evoked images
of a preSixties America where “gay” meant “joyful” and “wife” meant
“home-maker”. Mr Clinton himself is on record as saying: “If you thought
something good came out of the Sixties, you’re probably a Democrat; if you
thought the Sixties were bad, you’re probably a Republican.”
But this may be the last presidential race where the cultural war fought at
Woodstock has such impact. The first members of the “baby-boomer” generation
reached pensionable age this year. Barack Obama has spent much of his
campaign for the Democratic nomination promising a new brand of politics
that transcends the cultural divides thrown up by the Sixties.
Aside from being the child of a black father and a white mother and who was
barely 8 years old at the time of Woodstock, it is not clear exactly what Mr
Obama means. But his target appears to be bickering baby-boomers like Mr
Bush and the Clintons.
“Part of it is generational,” he said. “Senator Clinton and others, they’ve
been fighting some of the same fights since the Sixties and it makes it very
difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done.”
Back in Bethel Woods, the site’s chief executive talks of the irony of Mr
McCain exploiting the “same political divisions” that the museum hopes to
put into context. “McCain’s picking on the issue to wave the flag is a
legacy of 1968, Richard Nixon’s silent moral majority concept, and that old
culture war,” says baby-boomer Michael Egan. But he bridles when it is
suggested that the forces unleashed by his generation at Woodstock are now
so spent they can be consigned to the status of museum artefacts.
Mr Egan wears his hair in the style of Mr Clinton or Tony Blair, refusing to
give in entirely to having it cut short, and sports a psychedelic tie with
his denim-esque shirt. He describes Woodstock as a “big deal” which “still
resonates through America”.
How so? “Well, many of the things that we take for granted today first
flowered in the 60s. Diversity and civil rights, caring about the
environment, questioning authority – and we ended a war. Some, or all, of
that is still playing out,” he says. He was a teenager working at a cinema
on Long Island at the time of Woodstock. “We all wanted to go but only the
girl ushers went – and they got arrested.”
Mr Egan says he was “not exactly” a hippy and does not want to talk about any
drug use. “I went on Vietnam protests and that kind of thing. I was
certainly caught up in the optimism and idealism of a generation that
thought it could change the world.” Was he jealous of those girls that got
arrested? “Yeah,” he says with a smile. “I was.”
But the ageing process forms its own tissue that binds the wounds of the
Sixties. Those behind the project include former protagonists from opposite
sides of the culture war.
To Alan Gerry, the cable TV billionaire who has poured $85 million into the
Bethel Woods Centre for the Arts, the museum is about using Woodstock’s
notoriety to regenerate the run-down slice of rural up-state New York where
he grew up.
Despite being a Republican who banned his own daughters from attending the
festival, Mr Gerry has become similarly generous to Democratic politicians
backing the museum (his family recently contributed $9,200 to Mrs Clinton’s
campaign).
His chief of staff, retired Colonel Darrell Supak, is overseeing the project.
He was preparing to be commissioned into the military in 1969. A bit
“square”, were you? “Probably,” he replies. “My hair was as short then as it
is now.” Did he ever take drugs? “Definitely not – it would have been bad
for my career.” But then he adds: “Look, I think this project transcends
whatever we were back in ’69.”
Mr Egan agrees, saying: “Although you could say Darrell and I are on opposite
sides of the cultural divide, we have come together over this.” A registered
Democrat who bemoans the lack of idealism in today’s youth, Mr Egan admits
his views have mellowed. “You get older, you have a family, I guess you
gravitate to the centre.”
Visitors to the museum next summer will get a sanitised Woodstock experience.
In the central area they will be able to sit, surrounded by giant video
screens, explore the sights and sounds of the festival. But not the smell,
the mud or other, illegal, sensory experiences. No “bad brown acid” tabs
will be sold at the gift shop. Souvenirs are more likely to include CDs,
mugs and T-shirts. How about patchouli oil? “I don’t know,” says a
spokesman, “it might come under the body products category.”
Bethel Woods may yet gain fresh significance as the place where a
counter-cultural revolution becomes harmless enough to sustain a
family-friendly visitor attraction for children studying “the 1960s And All
That”.
Dick Devlin, a huge hairy relic of the era who says he arrived for the
festival in ’69 and never left, now works as the official “site
interpreter”. He has a ready stock of jokes for visitors. “Yeah! Woodstock!
Is it over yet? Ha!” he grunts. Does he think Woodstock achieved much? “We
planted a seed,” he replies more quietly. “But I’m not sure that I like
where we are today.”
Jiin Christou arrives in her hybrid car and gazes at the site. How does she
feel about the museum? “We’re not central to what is going on, I mean what
just happens will always happen and always has so, you know, it’s just
nature.” She pauses and asks: “Am I making sense?”
Not really. But this 30-year-old musician, not even born at the time of
Woodstock, sounds more authentic than most of what is said at presidential
debates – or sold in the gift shop being built on top of the hill.
The political skirmishes
1972 Richard Nixon (below with John McCain) wins a landslide against
the antiwar George McGovern whom he ridicules as the radical candidate of
“acid, amnesty and abortion”
1976 Jimmy Carter narrowly beats Gerald Ford – the last Republican
nominee to favour abortion rights – despite promising a “blanket pardon” to
Vietnam War draft dodgers and telling Playboy he had “lusted in his heart”
1980 Ronald Reagan, embraced by the Christian Right, defeats Carter,
whose handling of the Iranian hostage crisis symbolises America’s military,
moral and economic decline
1984 Reagan wins again over the liberal Walter Mondale after a first
term in which he declared “war on drugs” and Vietnam a “noble” cause
1988 George H. W. Bush, a decorated Second World War veteran, defeats
“Massachusetts liberal” Mike Dukakis, whose wife was falsely accused of
burning a US flag
1992 Bill Clinton, a baby boomer, survives allegations that he had
affairs, smoked pot, and dodged the Vietnam draft, beating Bush in a
campaign focused on the economy
1996 Clinton wins again over the stiff, Establishment candidate Bob
Dole – selected by Republicans ahead of Religious Right culture warriors
like Pat Buchanan
2000 George Bush (the younger) says Christ saved him from alcoholism
and beats fellow baby boomer Al Gore, who spends much of the campaign
distancing himself from the Clinton sex scandal
2004 Bush wins again after galvanising “values voters” with fears of
gay marriage and stem-cell research, and rebutting claims that he had dodged
the Vietnam draft. His opponent, John Kerry, sees his Vietnam war record
smeared
