It's wide.

In the sixties, we went through too much hope and too much despair in too short a time to come out of it intact.

As a generation, we started out fragmented, a CZ members of what the sociology just used to call the lonely crowd.

We had a moment of incredible unity in which we transcended every expectation.

And in that moment I think we did a lot of good.

Civil rights, for example, made enormous progress during the sixties.

In fact, we're still living today on the progress of the sixties and civil rights.

The women's movement catapulted itself out of the belly of the sixties.

The first women's caucus is in STS were in 1967 and we're still living on the energy of that today.

But by the time the sixties were over, certainly by the time of the end of the Vietnam War, people had been knocked back into their individual lives, stripped of that feeling of a generational destiny that had given us such power for those few years in which we felt it in our bellies.

I don't think we'll ever get that back again.

I don't know if there's another generation of Americans that will.

The experience was too complex, too many sided.

But I think that the generation that made the sixties what we remember ought to feel very proud of what it did.

We didn't stop the war in Vietnam, but we created the conditions in which it could not be fought.

And that was good because it would not have been good for this country to establish a garrison in Vietnam.

We would be bleeding to this day.

If we had quote won the war in Vietnam, it would not be over.

It would never end, and there was no strategic or other reason for us to be there.

And the generation of the sixties intuited this stood up for its belief, fought very valiantly against incredibly illegal acts of repression and in the end, made its points but then got smashed to smithereens.