Fathers and Sons Children of the American Dream

461 pp. $8.95.

DON'T SHOOT-We Are Your Children! Its title threatens to give the book away. Its Random House imprint and overlarge type lend weight to the suspicion. So the temptation is simply to abandon the volume, to file it away on the already overcrowded shelf of revolutionary beiles-lettres, to condemn it to be read only by confused, embattled parents in fruitless attempts to discern some sort of message from across the barricades.

But don't For the book's author, New York Times reporter J. Anthony Lukas, refuses to believe in the barricades, and as a result, his book confidently crosses and recrosses generational divides, geographical locales and political boundaries to construct a thickly textured facsimile of the beginnings of this nation's present civil war. By recording the growth of ten lives. Lukas provides portraits of a group of radical leaders-as well as a few less radical losers-coming of age in the America of the early and middle sixties. His often disparate material coalesces into a whole because the events that keep reoccurring throughout this series of lives-the '54 Supreme Court Decision, the assassination of John Kennedy, Mississippi Freedom Summer, Berkeley's Free Speech Movement, San Francisco's Human Be-In, Vietnam Summer Project, the March on the Pentagon, Chicago-form the incantation that called forth the radicalism of the seventies.

But, rather than impose upon the events to give meaning to the lives, Lukas has turned his ten character studies into ten distinct views through a sociological kaleidoscope. Individually each portrait is representative of nothing but itself-the precision and detail with which each life is sketched see to that-but, in chorus, they sing of a continuum between America's individualistic, democratic past and its childrens' attempts to ward off the uglier threats of its disputed future. "Like clay," Lukas writes, "the past may be pulled and molded into new shapes, but it is always the past becoming the future."

TAKEN in broad outline, the ten lives are little more than the stuff of which youth exploitation films are made: Dave is the revolutionist who exceeds the activism of his father, an Old Left professor, by leading the seizure of University Hall: Roy is the black, native son of Mississippi who brings the reality of a militant Afro-American Organization home to Brandeis; Sue is a sensitive, Southern farm girl who joins the Civil Rights Movement in her growing knowledge that a good man is hard to find; and Don, whose prison notes record an adolescent stubbornness mellowing into militant pacifism, chooses to be a prisoner in the Federal pen rather than the army. The actual scripts, however, that Lukas has prepared to demonstrate these personal transformations are filled with individual scenes that win back for the stereotypes a convincing sense of life:

Dave "learned how to underline books on the swaying subway, a feat of muscular discipline which involved bracing your legs against the floor, pushing hard against the seatback and tucking your elbows in close to your body. The underlining was a little wobbly, but it traced the wavering path of Dave's radical education." Roy is interviewed at Brandeis by its director of admissions, who, "a teacher of Irish literature on the side.... found Roy 'gentle as a chrysanthemum, smiling as a sunflower.'" Sue, in assuming her mother's role in caring for her Southern family, overcomes her fear of "the Barnes brothers, both of them grotesquely deformed. They couldn't walk, so they put rubber tires around their legs to crawl across the store to get things off the shelves. For longer distances they would get up on little wheeled carts."

And Lukas also writes of those who failed to overcome the obstacles. His Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the two worlds of Linda Fitzpatrick, the eighteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Connecticut family who was murdered in the East Village in 1967, is included here in an expanded version. Far from being an easy exercise in playing off the grotesque obtuseness of Linda's parents against the equally grotesque facts of her pathetic death, the study achieves its drama and poignancy because of all that it leaves unsaid. A sympathetic English teacher can still describe the dead girl as looking "puffy and gray, perfectly awful... If you'd jabbed a needle in her I don't think you would have gotten any reaction," while her father, ever-eager to set the record straight-for the benefit of the Times and its readers if no one else-keeps insisting "We always do things as a family."

ESCHEWING the egocentric New Journalism of the sixties. Lukas himself maintains a scrupulously low profile throughout. In a sense his book is a journalistic analogue to SDS's founding Ann Arbor statement for the people are allowed to speak for themselves, their speech and memory becoming the source of the book's authority and success. Its not always terribly exciting-the chapter on Jim, a Haight-Ashbury hippie, is made tedious by its subject's now fairly conventional opinions-but when the reporting breaks forth it does so with an energy that approximates the frenzy of good, crazy fiction. "Groovy" Hutchinson, the drifter who was murdered alongside Linda Fitzptarick, comes on like a Ken Kesey hero, a con artist who ultimately can't scramble back into the society that has maimed him. Jerry Rubin appears in a whole series of guises-from young Jimmy Olsen-type reporter to revolutionary vaudevillian. And, in what is possibly the best piece of the lot, Lukas follows young Watts poet Johnny Scott into streets where "dogs: strays and wanderers, wild scruffy hounds with yellow fangs and frothy lips, lop[e] in packs through the streets, yelping at cars, overturning trashcans, chasing little black boys all the way home."

Lukas has a difficult time extracting general conclusions from such a wealth of highly individualistic sources. His suggestions as to how, following an Ericksonian proposition, "the child expresses openly what the parent represses," are fairly anticlimactic. Perhaps, more interesting, is how all of the children interviewed, with the possible exception of Linda and Groovy, are as much in search of an authentic past as they are seeking for a viable future. It is a purified radicalism that each has attained, primarily because lonely, personal struggles rather than mass revivals seem to typify the radicalizing process of the early sixties-or, at least so one is tempted to romanticize. And because each has fought the battle within himself, he searches in his own past, his family and his home, for sustenance.

So Sue discovers the strikers of Harlan, Kentucky, while Johnnie finds Richard Wright and Leroi Jones. There is a fullness and depth in the majority of these lives that goes beyond even the care that Lukas has paid them. And one begins to wonder if those of us who reached radicalism' after 1968, when the lonely experiences had given way to mass response, have built on foundations of the same solidity.