How Has America Changed Since 1968?

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It was a crazy year.

Over the course of it, America's idea of itself went through a seismic shift, and it began 50 years ago.

Welcome to 2018.

Let's talk about 1968.

This is Radio Atlantic.

Happy New Year!

I am Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic, here with me in D.C.

Hello, Jeff.

Jeff who?

Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

That, Jeff, yes.

Hi.

I don't know.

That was like, I don't know.

Maybe we have first-time listeners who don't know the cast of characters.

We very well might.

I hope we do.

Over there in New York, you have heard the delightful laughter of our esteemed co-host, Alex Wagner.

Good tidings.

Good tidings in the new year.

She's so esteemed.

She continues to be esteemed.

Always.

You are also esteemed, Jeff.

No, I'm not esteemed this time.

Jeff who.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

And joining us from California is Atlantic Staff Raider Connor Friedersdorf.

Connor, welcome.

Thank you for having me.

Thank you for joining us.

We are talking today about the year 1968.

It's January 2018.

However, 50 years ago was the beginning of the year that many call the most momentous year in modern American history.

Connor, you came up with the idea a few months back.

You said we should do a whole year-long year-spanning project focused on 1968.

Why is this year so interesting?

Well, you have this interesting combination of these seminal touchstone moments, Martin Luther King being assassinated, Robert F.

Kennedy being assassinated.

In Vietnam, the Tet Offensive and the Milai Massacre were seminal events of that year that started to turn the country against the war in Vietnam.

You have the iconic black power salute at the Mexico City Olympics.

These moments in history that we all remember.

And at the same time, you have all of these little smaller moments that you'd never know about unless you delve into the archives of newspapers and magazines, as I've been doing, in part because I've become frustrated with what I think of as a presentist bias in media today, talking about Donald Trump.

And I saw at the end of 2017, a lot of headlines that were saying, is this the craziest year in American political history?

And I thought, no, not even close.

The Civil War years were probably the craziest years in American political history, or perhaps the Revolutionary War years.

And in modern American history, maybe 1968 was the year that upended everything in ways that really tore apart the whole country and caused a lot of people to look back and remember that year as a time when a lot of things changed.

What is resonant or relevant about 1968 to you now?

I am going to be consuming culture that was produced in 1968 until the end of my life.

I have seen the movie The Graduate, which was actually released in 1967, but won Academy Awards in 1968.

You know, I've seen that movie a dozen times.

I'm going to be listening to The Rolling Stones and the Beatles and albums that, you know, they released the White Album that year and Her Satanic Majesty's Request.

I'm going to be listening to those albums until I'm old.

That's different than bygone generations.

My parents, who were starting high school in 1968, were not listening to music or watching movies that were produced in 1918.

So you have these technological changes that made it possible for the culture of that year to carry over to today.

And, you know,

so we're conversant with the culture of 1968 today.

It shaped us.

You have resonances with the student demonstrations of that year and the campus upheavals of this year.

And it really informed us and shaped us in a way that five decades in the past hadn't always done in other periods in American history.

And so I think that you can look back and see similarities and differences that can inform how we behave as citizens today and how we understand our world today.

Can I ask, Connor, do you feel like the 50 years between 1968 and 2018 are a particularly chaotic or fruitful half century compared to other 50-year periods?

Well, there's certainly a very particular period in American history when coming off of World War II, the United States just became a hegemon in ways that it never had before.

And there's this moment that I think of in the late 90s when, you know, you're reading about, oh, this is the end of history and the beginning of global democracy.

And, you know, the United States is going to kind of retain this place as the American experiment informing the rest of the world.

And now we're seeing that actually we're in a kind of chaotic period where a lot of things in the world are up in the air.

A lot of people are losing faith in the American experiment and questioning the future.

It's kind of an authoritarian moment in American politics.

And so I do feel as though the period we're in now and 1968 are resonant with one another.

And, you know, you could say that the mid-90s and the 50s were two times when America was relatively united and felt assured of its future.

And maybe those two time periods resonated with one another.

Come back to that.

Jeff,

how much are we allowed to spoil the fact for a listening audience that we're going to be revising these events?

Surprise, listening audience, we're going to be revisiting 1968 in a pretty big way.

We're going to be revisiting

in various ways

the King assassination in particular and the consequences of that, which feels very, very obviously fresh.

I mean, I think the impetus for us to focus on that, well, we have a number of reasons.

The first is that the Atlantic published Letter from a Birmingham jail, we have a long association with the civil rights movement as an issue.

But I think also there is this overwhelming feeling that,

to state the obvious, that the election of Barack Obama did not actually

bring about a tidy resolution to the issue and challenges of race in America.

And

don't spoil that for our

spoiler alert.

Race is still an issue in America.

Is that the kind of spoiler alert you were trying?

Well,

but

this is paramount

for us as a journalistic institution.

And

I think last year, 2017, really proved to us that we can't do enough on this issue.

And so the opportunity to go revisit,

I would say that the King assassination is one of the most important events of post-World War II America.

And we can use that as a locus to sort of say,

you know, where have we gone?

Where have we not gone?

Where did we think we were going?

And what happened along the way?

So

there's no spoiler here.

We're going to be spending a lot of time thinking about this.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So we are going to be revisiting some of the major events of 1968 in a big way as the year progresses.

But Connor, you kicked off the year by looking at some of the smaller moments, as you said.

What did you find when you went back through newspaper archives at the first of the year to see some of those little nuggets that tell us something about the texture of that time?

Just about any newspaper from any day in 1968 is a fascinating read from a present perspective.

One of the things I found, for example, in the Los Angeles Times was a headline, doctor's bills expected to continue their rise.

It's a headline that you could have seen yesterday.

And you kind of go into the story and it says, it used to be that a new baby was $200.

Now the bill is slightly below $250.

And that's $1,808 in 2017 dollars.

And of course, Today,

I looked it up.

The Kaiser Family Foundation says that it's an average of $9,700 for a normal delivery and roughly $12,500 for a cesarean section.

So we're talking about some serious medical inflation.

And so this was something they were worried about back in 1968, and the problem just got worse and worse and worse.

Just little nuggets like that that you can pick up and get context for some of the debates that we have today.

And then there are other little moments.

In other parts of the newspaper, for example, the advertisements are as fascinating or more fascinating than the articles.

Always looking at this home magazine that was produced in California called California Home.

And this just captures the strange moment of gender dynamics in 1968.

So we think back of that year as, oh, this is the sexual revolution is happening, right?

And yet here I have this home magazine and it has an ad that says, the 14-year itch.

As a marriage matures, another kind of crisis develops.

The wife grows more sophisticated and confident with her cooking skills.

She wants to spend most of her time in the kitchen working on fancier foods.

Yet her husband never loses his appetite for good, wholesome, everyday food, like mashed potatoes.

These marriages can all be saved.

With French's instant mashed potatoes, they have a flavor so good it fools the experts.

Your husband can have the good, wholesome, simple food he desires, and you can have the extra time to work on even fancier foods because French's instant mashed potatoes take so little time to prepare.

Finally, something to free me up when I'm making small finger sandwiches and truffle-deviled eggs.

By the way, Alex is married to one of the world's great chefs.

So

I don't want to hear her.

I'm pretty sure that's mashed potatoes.

It's more like this whiteness.

You know what's interesting about that, Connor, is that in 19, I think it was 1932, Helen Keller published a piece in The Atlantic, a very famous piece, advocating for women to get their husbands into the kitchen and to do housework so they could learn what the lives of women are like.

But if you look at the ads in The Atlantic in 1968, just like ads in other news, other magazines and newspapers, They were all predicated on the idea, correct idea, that women were doing 90, 95% of all the housework.

It's interesting that

Helen Keller's piece in the Atlantic didn't change anything.

But Connor, so one of the questions that I have about 1968, and I think this comes out of interviewing Ken Burns recently about his documentary series on Vietnam.

And one of the things that came out of this documentary series was that 67, 68, 69, these are the the years in which Americans lost faith in their politicians, where Americans began to understand that presidents lie.

And I'm wondering if you had to rank order

the long-term consequences of events of 1968, I was wondering if you would, where you would put sort of the loss of faith in political leadership

in the sort of century-long ranking of why this year is so important.

Could you talk about that for a minute?

minute?

One thing I've been most fascinated to read about as President Trump was rising to power is some of the literature on authoritarianism and authoritarian moments.

And one of the themes that kept recurring was that the authoritarian tendency in voters is often latent for long periods of time,

but that certain qualities, certain things cause it to become extant.

And one of those things is a loss of faith in leadership or a feeling that leadership is inept or corrupt.

And I think that both today and in 1968, you see these moments where the

loss of faith in leadership and protests surrounding it both were the impetus for eventual progress, but also frightened voters in a way that caused them to embrace, in one case, Richard Nixon and in another case, Donald Trump.

One difference, I think, from the Nixon era was that Watergate, although it diminished faith in the government,

it was a moment of widespread respect for the press.

And today, we have the country pretty divided about whether they trust the press,

but pretty unified in distrusting Congress and politicians.

Connor, on that note, I was surprised to read an Elizabeth Drew

story that was published in The Atlantic in 1968, the level of cynicism that was already at play play within the political parties themselves.

She writes in a piece, it is a sign of the destitution of the current state of politics that to a major extent, each party's program consists of counting on the other to defeat itself.

I mean, that's something that you could have written yesterday.

Absolutely.

Interesting thing about this conversation.

Only one of us, I believe, had actually been born in 1968.

Oh, which one was that?

Matt.

No, according to

Jeff.

Which Jeff?

Exactly.

According to biographical details, I feel comfortable divulging here because you've already disclosed them in prior episodes of Radio Atlantic.

I have.

You

have been around four years old at this time.

Three.

So let's not push it.

Three.

Let's not age him.

Let's not push it.

And you were living in Queens, New York?

Brooklyn.

Brooklyn.

To be exact.

To be exact.

So I want to tell you a little story.

I've smoking a ton of weed, by the way.

At three.

Turning on and dropping out, man.

A hard-edged toddler, Jeff.

Yeah.

I want to tell you a little story that was happening right around the corner from you in January of 68.

And

this is just such a fascinating little window for me into how crazy a time it was.

And the story kind of set the template for a lot of what we're still wrestling with today.

Jeff, any of you actually, have you heard of the National Economic Growth and Reconstruction Organization?

Can't say that I have.

Any other take is?

No.

No.

So if you'll note the acronym, it's Negro.

So January 4th, 1968, the New York Times publishes this little item that begins like this: quote, a Negro organization, which was ordered this week to stop operating unfranchised bus service in Queens and Harlem, has offered to buy the city bus lines that run through Harlem.

If the city will not sell the bus lines, the organization known as NEGRO, and again, that's the National Economic Growth and Reconstruction Organization, has asked that the city remove its buses from Harlem and let the Negro group run its own buses there.

So this is a tiny little story.

Why do I find it fascinating?

Some rogue group wants to supplant the city bus service.

Fine.

I want to call y'all's collective attention and that of our listeners to the guy at the center of the story, whose name is basically the opposite of mine.

It's Dr.

Thomas Matthew.

Any of you ever heard of this guy?

No.

Nope.

After the item ran in the Times, Dr.

Matthew is about to get a ton of attention.

He was already on the radar.

Newsweek had profiled his organization, Negro, in this giant special report issue they did in 1967 called The Negro in America.

But I want you to read a brief, I want to read you a brief passage from his bio in a New York Times profile from 1970.

Quote, he was born in a basement next to Knickerbocker Hospital when the hospital refused to admit his mother because she was black.

He lived in various basements with his parents.

His father was a janitor and his six brothers and sisters until the age of 19.

It was while attending a New Year's Eve party in St.

Louis that he received word that he'd been accepted by Harvard Medical Center.

He borrowed $50 from a friend and set off for Boston the next day in an old car he'd constructed out of used parks.

Dr.

Matthew, who was the country's first black neurosurgeon, practiced at Mount Sinai Hospital and then at Coney Island Hospital.

Later, he founded the Interfaith Hospital in Jamaica, Queens, on the theory that a hospital was one of the best places to provide jobs for people.

End quote.

So late in 1968, Dr.

McHugh is about to be booked into federal prison for willfully refusing to pay his income taxes on principle.

In January of 1969, President Richard Nixon reached down from on high to give him clemency and get him out of federal jail.

In 1970, he leads a group of black squatters to take over Ellis Island for several weeks.

Then he's all over the national press for several years before he's sent to prison once again for misusing federal funds.

It turns out that Dr.

Matthew is a mixture of Herman Cain crossed with Ben Carson, crossed with Oprah, with like a dash of Paul Manafort thrown in there.

But the most important thing to know about him is probably his philosophy because it's a window into the really surprising politics of the moment.

You have to keep these two things in mind.

Dr.

Matthew is a black nationalist, one, and the Nixon administration totally loves him, two.

I want you guys to listen to a clip of him from an interview he did in October of 1968, which will give you a sense of what Negro was all about.

Well, first of all, we're not just a business organization.

We're an organization attempting to rehabilitate the black man in America into an identifiable people.

We don't think it's enough to say that we're just black men.

We must know which black man are we.

We must have a a specific identity.

And we submit that the black man in America here has a particular history.

He has a culture.

He has a difference about him because of the historical experiences he's had that differentiates him from any black man elsewhere in the world.

So consequently, we are a tribe, a nation, social nation, if you will.

We call it the Negro.

So you hear in that clip, he's a black nationalist, but he was introduced to Richard Nixon by Pat Buchanan.

And Richard Nixon would make him in some ways the centerpiece of his outreach to black Harlem, black New York, in 1968.

Why,

I might ask, would a Republican president and the Republican presidential administration

love a black nationalist?

It's one of the weird vortexes of 1968 politics.

politics.

There are, of course, many strains of black nationalism.

One of them was Dr.

Matthew's strain, the black economic nationalists, the folks who said African Americans need to be self-sufficient.

We need our own separatist economy and economic strategy.

Dr.

Matthew made this big deal out of selling Negro bonds for his organization.

and saying that economic investment into black America needs to not look like welfare.

He had this huge argument with the NAACP,

and he led a group of Negro demonstrators to the NAACP offices, and they did this big demonstration before they got kicked out.

He would fall somewhat precipitously from grace in 1973 after he was convicted of misusing federal funds that had gone to his interfaith hospital.

But he was this crazy

entrepreneurial, black nationalist, conservative-friendly figure that I think was just this window into how weird and unexpected the politics of 1968 really were.

Knowing that the Nixon administration certainly took issue with many black nationalists, with Malcolm X, among others.

Does it surprise you to know that there was a strain of black nationalism in Harlem that was very appealing to conservatives at the time.

Well, it's, you know, situating Richard Nixon within conservatism is itself a very

fraught enterprise.

You know, in just a few years, you're going to have

Dick Cheney and Rumsfeld sitting in a room deciding on what prices everything is going to be in the economy, as Nixon imposes it.

So he has a very unusual relationship to conservatism.

And hearing this story makes me wonder if this individual wasn't serving two purposes at once.

On the one hand, he was

preaching this kind of

up-by-the-bootstraps, do-it-yourself message that has always resonated with conservatives.

And on the other hand, he was a radical of the sort that was going to put some voters ill at ease and maybe drive them into the arms of Nixon.

Maybe that's too cynical.

I don't know.

The context here was 1967.

This was a year when race riots were happening around the country, when cities are going up in flames around the country, and there's this almost national divergence between two approaches to it, Nixon's law and order approach, and the course of action that

Dr.

King was foremost in stumping for, that there's real economic recompense that needs to be made for African Americans to address what was at the root of this fury.

We went down one of those two paths as a country, but I think it says something about just how volatile and dynamic and interesting 1968 was that a fellow, like the first black neurosurgeon in America, according to the Times, became a footnote in history, not even a name that any of us recognize.

And also how complex race is

when it intersects with politics and how, as much as we think it unfolds along certain lines, we are reminded that often it doesn't.

Absolutely.

All right.

In a minute, we're going to come back for another edition of The World's Worst Game Show, as it's been called

by Alex Wagner.

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All right, Jeff, Alex, Connor, I am going to ask you about a few different indicators.

And I want you to tell me whether you think they've gotten better since 1968 or worse.

Are they worse today than they were then or are they better now?

Let's start with the homicide rate.

Which do you think it was?

The national homicide rate.

The national homicide rate, according to the most recent available data.

And all of these will be using the latest data available versus

the same picture in 1968.

Is this a game show about homicide rates?

Because if that's the case, then it's not a good thing.

Nothing's more fun than that.

It is actually the worst game show in history, by the way.

I'm going to say the homicide rate has gone down.

If only because I know the New York City murder rate is down, although Chicago Chicago is up, but I feel like nationally we're trending down.

I think it was spiking already by 68, although I could be wrong.

So I think that we're, if we're not down from there, we're at state, we're at the same level.

Yeah.

Any guesses, Connor?

Better or worse?

Connor probably actually has the stats in front of him.

I don't.

I think we're at about the same level.

I'm going to say maybe it was a little bit better.

That's a guess.

I think it was close.

Yeah, so the homicide rate was actually quite quite a bit better today versus 1968.

4.9 per 100,000 people in the latest data, 6.9 in 1968.

So we were already on the upward spike.

Yes.

That culminated in the late, what, 80s, early 90s?

Yeah, and it's not clear to me how much of that was just improvements in medical technology in the intervening decades.

Seatbelts.

I guess that's not homicides.

No, probably not.

But I'm going to ask the same question about the violent crime rate overall.

Better?

Worse?

Worse.

Worse now?

Worse now.

Yeah, worse now.

Worse now.

No, actually, right up.

I'm saying worse then.

You're saying worse then?

I think maybe worse then, actually.

I'm changing my.

Yeah, so it's actually worse today.

The violent crime rate was

298 per 100,000 in 1968 and 397 per 100,000

in the latest data.

And of course, again, there's this question.

A lot of that, the aggravated assault rape was higher

today,

and the reports of rape were also higher today.

But is that just because

we both recognize more behaviors as rape and they're more likely to be reported?

I don't know.

So there's this measure of income inequality called the genie ratio.

Do you think that that measure has gotten better or worse since 1968?

I'm going to guess it's gotten worse, aka it's more extreme.

Yes.

Okay, I'm just going to move past that one because, yes, it has moved from 0.348 in 1968 to 0.452 today, which doesn't mean much, but all that is to say that income inequality has gotten significantly worse.

Interestingly, though, 1968 was actually the most income equal year

according to census data since 1947.

Like income equality was at its peak in 1968.

And do we know what the top marginal tax rates were back then?

Or average CEO pay?

I'm sure if we looked into it, those might be factors that influence that.

I'm very sure.

Okay, here's a subject that comes up a lot today and came up a lot in 1968.

How do you think Americans' respect for the police has changed?

According to the percentage of Americans who responded, that they have a, quote, great deal of respect for the police.

Do you think that there were, it was a higher percentage in 1968 or a higher percentage today?

I mean, are we just broadly sampling the country?

I'm sure that, especially today, that's one of those questions where it varies wildly depending on who's being asked the question and what the sample size is from that population.

So this is per sneakity with statistics.

Boy,

this is the Gallup survey.

So it's a tracking survey that's been going on

since the 60s.

So it's a pretty large sample size and pretty consistent.

I am going to guess that it's been stable in the sense that, well, this is why, because last year, after all of the

controversy around police shootings of unarmed blacks and Black Lives Matter,

there are polls I remember suggesting that approval for police is somewhere around 75 or 80 percent, regardless of all the things that were happening.

And so we sometimes forget and sorry to say it, the media bubble, that there are a lot of, there's a lot of people in America who don't think like people

in the East Coast and West Coast elite.

So I'm going to guess that it's pretty stable.

Or not even East Coast and West Coast elites, but I mean, depending on if, you know, where you talk to communities of color, there's going to be different attitudes towards law enforcement.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right.

But that's universal across the country.

But what I'm saying is that among whites,

the support for police in particular has been high and remains high.

Remains high.

Yeah.

Interestingly, 1968 and 2016 were the two years when respect for the police was highest.

And it was about the same.

Jeff, you're right.

So

in moments of civil disorder, people

run to the police.

Most people run to the police

and think of the police as having a very hard job.

Yeah.

I think that's definitely one inference that one could take from that data.

But what are the numbers?

I'd be very interested to see where the the numbers are in the African-American community because I have a feeling there are generational splits in that as well.

So we can only go back to 2000, but yes, as you might expect, folks who are not white expressed a fairly significantly lower amount of respect for the police.

When Gallup started tracking this in 2000, it was 62 to 46 white to not white.

In the recent spike, it was 80 to 67.

I'm going to ask you one more.

We could keep playing this game all day.

Got a bunch of indicators here.

I'm going to ask you one more.

How do you think that the minimum wage, inflation-adjusted minimum wage, has fared since 1968?

Do you think it's higher or lower than it was?

I think the federal minimum wage is lower than it was, but that the states that have pushed it up to 15 are higher.

I agree with Connor.

I think the federal, I feel like we must be talking about the federal minimum wage here

is lower.

I agree with Alex, who agrees with Connor.

Yes.

And you would all be correct.

Federal minimum wage,

$10.74 in 1968, now $7.25.

Wow.

Always a reminder that in 1963, in the March on Washington for jobs and freedom, one of the demands that Dr.

King and the marchers were marching for was the equivalent of a $15 minimum wage in today's dollars.

So that's it.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Absolutely.

Wait, did you?

did you invent that saying?

Listen, I'm patenting that on Radio Atlantic.

If you hear it again, I deserve a residual.

I'm writing it down.

Any of that surprise you?

You know, one of the most interesting stats, and this is, you know, I learned this also from Ken Burns and watching his very long

documentary.

You know, it was a minority of people in America.

It was a loud minority, but it was a minority that was radicalized by the Vietnam War.

The silent majority was a real thing.

And we find that in the Black Lives Matter protests of last year.

We see that in the remarkably consistent rates of police approval, police approval ratings.

The country is basically a conservative country.

And

the country is essentially a conservative country.

There are moments of radicalization across broad swaths of the population.

But basically, the default position of people, especially in times of radical change and disorder, is to

move to order and have greater respect for police and other institutions that

keep the peace.

I was surprised myself

at the positive ratings the police received in polls last year, given all that we had seen.

yeah i i don't know that i would conflate conservatism and uh and i don't mean political conservatism i mean conservatism because that like you know sort yeah sort of institutionalists yeah institutionalists yeah

so let us move uh we will stay with 1968 uh throughout as i mentioned 2018 and connor i hope you'll we'll have you back as we do but now i want to turn to our closing segment for the first time in 2017 favorite albums of 1968 The first time in 2018, I think is the year.

Sorry, 2018.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe the year is 2018.

This is only the first of many, many times in which I'm going to make that mistake.

Keepers, Alex, let me turn to you first.

What of everything that you've seen, heard, enjoyed, experienced in recent days, not enjoyed, would you most like to keep?

What would you like to not forget?

As we speak of the old, I have gone back to an an age-old

food stuff that deserves a resurrection, if you will, a dusting off, a renaissance,

and should be a phenomenon in this year and every year henceforth, which is bone broth.

Now, I know if some of you follow the sort of food blogs, you know that bone broth is very au corant, but of course,

broth made from bones is a very old thing.

But in this season of bitter,

hellacious, ass-biting cold, that's going to get us the explicit rating on iTunes.

There is nothing better than a coffee cup filled with hot bone broth.

It is nourishing.

It has collagen.

It has restorative properties.

It's tasty.

It's better than coffee.

I've been drinking a lot of it.

I'm getting sick, but I feel like the bone broth may be the thing that staves off the winter blues.

And it's really old.

It is too bad that we're not underwritten by bone broth this week.

That was a very eloquent

endorsement.

It's better than anything that they were serving in 1968.

And in fact, they may have been serving it under the name consomme back then, but at any rate, it is

go find yourself a cup.

You can make your own bone broth at home with your new and shiny pressure cooker slash instant pot.

For those of you who got that as a gift in this holiday season, Connor, what is your keeper this week?

Well, since we started out with some Cambodian surf rock, my keeper is this Japanese psychedelic surf rock band that I recently discovered called Kikagaku Moyo.

And if you could imagine that the Japanese took the beach boys in sort of the same way that they took whiskey and sort of refined it and then put their own spin on it, this is that band.

And I've been enjoying it in the new year.

I suggest you all do as well.

Kikugayu Moyo.

Is that right?

Yeah, that is right.

Thank you for that.

Jeff, what would you like to do?

I'm staying with a 1968 theme: Electric Ladyland.

Yes.

Jimi Hendrix Experience.

Oh, we're going to be coming up with your child, Slight Return, Crosstown Traffic.

One of the greatest albums of all time, I think.

A lot of great albums in 1968.

I can't name most of them, but a lot of great albums from 1968.

So our colleague.

I think, you know, Hendrix.

Yeah.

Now and forever.

I know at least one of our colleagues who would be criminally offended that the White album was not

the one you chose.

However, I side with you.

I'm all Hendrix.

My Keeper for the week is also music related.

It's not 1968,

but in 1973,

Elton John was out on tour.

Goodbye, Yellowbrook Road

was about to come out.

He was

in some ways at the height of his powers, although a pretty powerful guy.

He performed this astonishing concert

tour.

And one of my Christmas gifts this year was

a

ticket to a tribute concert in honor of this concert by the group Rocket Man at the House of Blues in Orlando, Florida.

It was a delight

and it was

one of the things that has changed, one of the things that has definitely been different from 1968 to today

is that live music has in some ways diminished in its presence as

entertainment.

There are fewer live concerts.

Musicians have a harder time supporting themselves.

There are not as many of those just blockbuster, transcendent, cultural live concert moments as, for example, this 1973 Elton John Goodbye Ellerick Road tour.

And to see it reenacted in the most delightful way by a guy, by the Elton Johnniest tribute performer that one could imagine was a real treat.

I do not want to forget it was a joy.

Tribute concerts, man, they can be kitschy, but that one was just a joy.

It was a joy joy to be transported to an era that I was not alive during, to a concert that I never would have been able to see, and I don't want to forget it.

And with that, that brings us to the end of another Radio Atlantic.

Alex, thank you very much.

Grazi Mile.

A pleasure as always.

We'll see you next week, Alex.

Till next week.

Jeff, Connor, thanks.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend with production support from Kim Lau and Diana Douglas.

Thank you to our colleague Conna Friedersdorf for joining us, and as always, to my co-hosts, Jeffrey Goldberg and Alex Wagner.

Speaking of my esteemed co-host, Alex is going to be one of the hosts of Showtime's political documentary series, The Circus.

I will definitely be watching when the next season begins in April, and don't worry, we will not be Radio Atlanticing without her.

Congrats, Alex.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode and your stories about 1968 or any of the themes we discussed.

So leave us a voicemail at 202-266-7600.

Don't forget your contact info.

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Most importantly, thank you for listening.

May the year ahead reward all your hopes for it.

We'll see you next week.