The World

At dawn on 5 June 1967, Israeli planes – Mirages supplied by France – obliterated the Egyptian air force, then Israeli troops smashed through Egyptian defences to take Sinai and reach the Suez Canal; Marshal Amer ordered counter-attacks, claimed victory, then panicked and retreated. Dayan switched northwards to smash Syria and take the Golan. Hussein watched tensely; Amer boasted of historical victories and ordered Jordan to attack Israel. Hussein sent in his Arab Legion. Dayan swiped them aside, occupying the West Bank, then, in a moment of almost mystic excitement, reunited Jerusalem under Jewish rule after two millennia. The Six-Day victory changed much: as Jews across the world celebrated and thousands prayed at the Kotel – the Wall, a surviving section of the Jewish Temple – Israel enjoyed a burst of overconfidence. Cool strategy suggested that some of Judaea and Samaria along with Golan and Sinai should be retained to give the narrow state some strategic depth. But the triumph brought many Palestinians under Israeli rule and awakened a religious nationalism beneath Israel’s secular, socialist tradition which demanded that Israelis should settle the lands of the ancient kingdoms. For many Israelis, Jerusalem – sacred Zion – became the ‘indivisible’ and ‘perpetual’ Israeli capital.

Nasser rushed to army headquarters where he and Amer almost came to blows, after which El Rais broadcast his resignation. Millions gathered outside his palace, crying, ‘We’re your soldiers, Gamal!’ Nasser, restored to power, sacked Amer, who supported by his officers tried to seize power. Nasser, at his own house, confronted Amer, ordering his arrest and exit: Amer either committed suicide or was liquidated. El Rais

mourned his ‘closest man’ and visited Brezhnev to procure arms. ‘If I were the Israeli leader,’ Nasser told Brezhnev, ‘I’d never give up the occupied territories.’ Brezhnev, facing the rout of his allies, used the hotline to confirm that LBJ would not intervene.

THE ASSASSINATIONS: RFK, MLK, MBOYA

LBJ was in no position to do so, destroyed by his Vietnamese war and challenged by his enemy, Bobby Kennedy, now New York senator, who had transformed into an inspirational liberal and channelled the rising disgust felt for the president. ‘Some men see things as they are, and ask why,’ he said. ‘I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.’

A total of 525,000 US troops were fighting in Vietnam; thousands of young Americans, rallied by Kennedy and MLK, protested against an unjust and misconceived war. Long hair, bell-bottoms and miniskirts were the costumes, marijuana the tonic and Marxist critical theory the vision, Mao and Che Guevara the heroes, for a radical new world that promised a utopian dream of love, tolerance and equality for the small numbers of young people in the Americas and Europe who actually experienced the short period known as ‘the Sixties’.

Its real chroniclers were poets first and foremost: Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, both Jewish children of middle-class families – one from Minnesota, the other from Montreal – who put their poems to music. Rock music provided the Sixties’ soundtrack, particularly a wave of British bands, led first by The Beatles but personified by the Rolling Stones, fronted by the lithe strut and full-lipped sexual insolence of Mick Jagger and the riffing guitarist Keith Richards, who wrote their own songs, channelling American blues, and now ‘conquered’ America; few songs encapsulated the rebellion, promise and cynicism of the Sixties as well as ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’. The British establishment feared these hedonistic radicals, arresting Jagger and Richards, who were sentenced to jail for drug possession. But they were rescued by a Times editorial entitled ‘Who Breaks a Butterfly upon a Wheel?’ After their release came apotheosis: they and other rock stars – gifted musicians from obscure origins now rich from selling millions of records and playing to stadiums, flying the globe in customized airplanes accompanied by their own retinues of paramours, courtiers and drug dealers – attained, for the next fifty years, the apex of a new global social prestige, shared with film and sports stars, in the West’s mass-consumer age, comparable to that of princes, paladins and popes of earlier centuries.

The era had its own distinctive visual backdrop too: news footage of sweaty, stoned American troops and Chinook helicopters in the first televised war, Vietnam. The great artistic manifestation of this alienated world was the distorted brilliance of the paintings of Lucian Freud, grandson of Sigmund, which were more considerably exciting than the concept-laden ‘abstract expressionists’ of the Fifties.^*