Tom Brokaw not only smoked pot in the ’60s, he inhaled too.

“I talk about it in my book,” the former anchor of “The NBC Nightly News” said on the phone recently, in an interview about his two-hour documentary about 1968, the most tumultuous year of that tumultuous decade.

“Like everybody else, I experimented with a little pot at that time and I went down to a friend’s house in Malibu and he gave me a headset, gave me a joint and [Brokaw listened to] ‘Alice’s Restaurant’ for 18 minutes.”

Brokaw, 67, shared this apparently pleasant memory because Arlo Guthrie, the folk singer who recorded the 18-minute, 37-second song – a ’60s classic – is among those Brokaw interviewed for his TV special on 1968. In the show, Guthrie – his famous long hair now white as snow – even plays guitar and sings a verse of “Alice” for Brokaw, who was obviously delighted.

In 1968, Brokaw was a local news anchor on NBC-owned KNBC-TV in Los Angeles and also worked as a correspondent based in L.A. for “The Huntley-Brinkley Report,” NBC’s evening newscast.

This week’s TV special is tangentially related to Brokaw’s newest book – “Boom! Voices of the Sixties: Personal Reflections on the ’60s and Today” – in which the anchorman famous for his World War II book “The Greatest Generation,” turns his attention to the hippie generation.

“The relationship [between the book and the TV show] was not absolutely organic,” Brokaw explained. “I was working on the book and we talked about what we could do around it for television . . . so we went to the History Channel and they said, ‘We’d take [a show on] 1968 – that year alone – for sure’.”

Why 1968?

Because “everything in ’68 was bold print,” Brokaw said.

“A president is forced from office within his own party [democrat Lyndon Johnson, who announced that year he would not run for re-election]; you have the Tet offensive [a turning point in the Vietnam War]; you have the assassination of the great moral leader of our time, Dr. Martin Luther King; you have the assassination of the brother of the martyred president, Bobby Kennedy; you have [protestors clashing with police] on the streets of Chicago; and you have Richard Nixon coming back from the political dead to win the election as president of the United States six years after he had said you won’t have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.

“And at the end of that year, you have Apollo 8 [the first spacecraft to orbit the moon]. Pick a lede!”

Brokaw covers all of those stories in “1968,” which he also narrates. Besides Guthrie, other interview subjects include Bruce Springsteen, Pat Buchanan, James Taylor and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas.

While watching this documentary, you might wonder how the nation survived that year.

“Well, it’s a resilient country,” Brokaw said. “We have great strengths that are put to the test from time to time and we always manage to get through them. That’s the enduring lesson.”

1968 WITH TOM BROKAW

Sunday, 9 p.m., History Channel