A checklist tour through 'Washington in the '60s'

The rush of history marks documentary on pivotal decade

"Washington in the '60s," airing Monday night on WETA, conjures up a proud but haunted District that lost itself in rancorous smoke.

Much of it is about what's long gone: the Senators baseball team, swanky venues such as Duke Zeibert's and Sans Souci, the Kennedy allure, affordable Georgetown, the Beatles at the Coliseum, and the sense, as a nostalgically oblivious Pat Buchanan describes it, of a village where everyone liked one another, "read the same newspapers, listened to the same radio" stations, and met one another coming around the city's idyllic and idealistic corners.

At least, that's how it was if you're Pat Buchanan. He also fondly recalls Glen Echo Park (watch this doc just to relive, or discover for the first time, the amusement park's nifty, "Mad Men"-era commercial jingles), where his grandmother spent their ride money on gambling, and oh, how he sparkles at the thought. But then, he was white and happy, and Glen Echo was in the '60s staunchly off limits to blacks.

This hour is mainly about that Washington, divided (then and now) by race. In the 1960s, the city sets off on an endless, painful search for its modern, home-ruled self. As we all know, the decade culminates with 14th Street ablaze in the aftermath of Martin Luther King's assassination in 1968. "I could not fathom the celebratory nature of what was going on in the street, with some of the looting, with the tragedy of the loss of this leader who would have decried this action," former D.C. Council member Charlene Drew Jarvis recalls here. The riot damage, she adds, "was not downtown. It was in the communities of African Americans, their business corridors. That was not going to be repaired for 30 years."

And the repair to the neighborhood would come in the form of the limitless supply of luxury loft condos now in full bloom. "Washington in the '60s," narrated by homegrown broadcaster Connie Chung (who married another local, Maury Povich, also featured here), is chock-full of clips of the emerging metropolis.

So much of what's really interesting here -- streetcars passing along still-familiar blocks; interiors of long-gone restaurants and other venues -- necessarily has to make way for the news that dominated D.C. then, which all rushes by, as if being checked off an inventory: JFK's inauguration and funeral; the murder of the president's rumored mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer; the opening of Dulles International Airport and the Capital Beltway; the Redskins of Sonny Jurgensen and Bobby Mitchell; the rise of Walter E. Washington and the emergence of a dashiki-clad political activist: Marion Barry.

Fascinating (especially for those of us who moved here much later), but all too hasty, and patched together with stock footage of Mall protests wherever necessary. The documentary quickly loses its dreamy quality and relies too heavily on not-terribly-illuminating local luminaries, some of whom (Post columnist Colbert I. King; sports analyst Phil Wood; Povich) articulately move things along, but many of whom seem bored with their own stories.

Things reach a low point when G. Gordon Liddy is called on to drop this bit of sharp observation: "Once we had the Beltway, you had people who said, 'Are you inside the Beltway, or outside the Beltway?' "

D.C.'s first congressional delegate, the Rev. Walter Fauntroy, recalls with lingering sadness how long it took D.C. residents to get the right to vote for president (1964) and the general air of unfairness that has dogged its people to this day. Funny that this is the same Fauntroy, a civil rights champion, who has lately busied himself trying to prevent same-sex marriage in the District. It serves as a reminder that "Washington in the '60s" all but overlooks the emergence of other minority communities that played a part in its history; it seems there's just not room to tell everybody's story.

After beginning so happily with cherry blossoms and small-town bonhomie, "Washington in the '60s" has no choice but to end in a funk -- a national pall -- setting a bleak stage for WETA's next installment, due early next year: "Washington in the '70s."

Washington in the '60s

(one hour) airs Monday at 9 p.m. on WETA.