Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 24, 1993 TAG: 9301270308
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By Mitchell Landsberg
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
1968
Asked recently about his memories of 1968, one newly elected member of Congress responded with a laugh: "I don't remember. I DID inhale."It's an old joke: If you remember the '60s, you didn't really live through them.
But it's not really true. Most people who lived through 1968 can remember it all too vividly, can still see the images of shock and mayhem and still feel the pervading sense that every societal nerve had been laid open to the icy chill of tragedy and the burning rage of denial and despair.
It can get tiresome, this rehashing of the baby boom's coming of age, but 1993 may be as good a time as any to recall that tragic, traumatic, strangely transcendant year.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of 1968, if years can be said to have anniversaries. We can expect a barrage of quarter-century remembrances: of the Tet offensive, of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy assassinations, of the My Lai massacre, of the Chicago riots, of Prague Spring and the Soviet invasion, of the student uprisings in Paris and Mexico City, at Columbia and San Francisco State, of "Soul on Ice" and "2001: A Space Odyssey," of "Laugh-In," of Janis and Jimi and the Beatles' "White Album."
Enough time has passed to give the year some historical perspective. Increasingly, historians see it as a watershed, a year that ended one era and began another.
And with Bill Clinton's election as president, it's a good time to think about what it means that a generation forged in the rebellion of that year has - incredibly - become the Establishment.
The late Abbie Hoffman was once quoted as saying, with characteristic sarcasm: "1968 was a great, wonderful year. They don't make years like that anymore."
To which many people would add, "Thank God."
"The intensity - I've not lived through any period that was so politically and culturally intense," said Robert Shetterly, now an artist in Maine, then a student graduating from Harvard University and a draft resister.
"It was almost more than one could bear - the intensity of the highs and the lows and the grief and the anger."
Frank Elmore, now an actor in New York, was drafted that year and later served in Vietnam. "It was, I guess, one of my least favorite years ever," he said. "I think that year left a scar that now, 25 years later, is just being healed."
1968 defies easy categorization. It was the culmination of the '60s rebellion - and yet the violence and cultural revolution persisted for years after. It was the end of eight years of Democratic presidents - yet their Republican successor, Richard Nixon, continued many social and economic policies that seem liberal today.
It was a year remembered for a flowering of "black power" - yet some historians believe the Civil Rights movement effectively ended with King's assassination. It was a year of tearing down walls - yet women complained that "the Movement" left them walled in the kitchen.
"It was a turning point, but it was a very confused turning point," said Arthur Schlesinger Jr., the historian, who spent part of that year as an adviser to Robert Kennedy.
He maintains that the real turning points in recent times were 1960, 1980 - and 1992.
But other scholars of the period disagree. One is Kevin Phillips, who in 1968 was credited with drawing a blueprint for Nixon's successful presidential campaign. Phillips believed that the Democrats had lost touch with average Americans - the white working class that had once been the party's base of support.
Relying partly on Phillips' analysis, Nixon campaigned on behalf of "the silent majority," middle-class whites who felt betrayed by liberals, threatened by blacks and outraged by student protesters.
George Wallace, running as an independent, targeted a similar, but perhaps more disaffected, group of mostly blue-collar Southerners. In the end, Nixon won narrowly over Democrat Hubert Humphrey. But taken together, the votes for Nixon and Wallace added up to a decisive Democratic repudiation - nearly a reversal of the Democrats' landslide victory of 1964.
The only similar reversals in a party's fortunes, Phillips said, were in the watershed years of 1860, 1932 - and 1992.
So 1968 was the beginning of a Republican era that ran, in many respects, until this year (Many historians consider Jimmy Carter's Democratic presidency to be a post-Watergate fluke).
And yet, 1968 was the beginning of many liberal cultural changes - feminism, gay rights, multiculturalism, a breakdown of authority - that have continued to this day.
How can that be?
Todd Gitlin, a sociology professor at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage," believes that 1968 was simply "a turning point in more than one sense."
"There's no simple way to explain it," he said. "There are these moments in the history of modernity. 1789 is one. 1848 is a second. 1917 is another . . . . They're all watersheds. The world looks different after this."
All the portents were there at the beginning of 1968. The previous year also had been tumultuous, with devastating race riots in Newark, N.J., and Detroit; large and increasingly confrontational anti-war demonstrations; and the blossoming of the Flower Children - i.e., hippies - in the Summer of Love.
The waves that were rising in 1967 crashed in 1968. The year started on an ominous note when North Korea seized the USS Pueblo, a Navy spy ship. Its 83 crew members were held until December.
Then, at the end of January, during the Vietnamese New Year celebration of Tet, North Vietnam launched a vast offensive against U.S.-held bases and cities throughout South Vietnam. Communist soldiers swarmed into the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon. Casualties were heavy on both sides.
In retrospect, many military historians say Tet was a defeat for the North. But psychologically, it was clearly a victory. The message it sent was that an American victory in Vietnam would only come at an enormous price. Many Americans decided it was a price they would not pay.
After that, the year seemed to lurch from one shock to the next.
On March 31, President Lyndon Johnson went on television to announce - in words that many Americans can still recite - "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party as your president."
On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was slain in Memphis. Within hours, riots erupted in 110 American cities. Some of the worst were in Washington, and the symbolism was powerful. The nation's capital lay under a pall of smoke; the fires were the worst since the War of 1812.
For many Americans, especially black Americans, King's murder extinguished hope that the nation's racial wounds could be healed, or that a decent leader - a hero - could triumph. But others put their hope in the presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy, bearer of the mantle of his brother's presidency, champion of the poor and dispossessed.
Robert Shetterly, who is white, remembers being shocked by the King assassination. But his hope lasted two more months. Then, on June 5, Kennedy was shot. He died the next day.
"That was the first time during this whole thing that I actually wept," he remembers. "I guess that's because Bobby Kennedy seemed to be the last one . . . the last hope. When he was taken away, that was just like this black hole opened up underneath."
A student at Georgetown University, Tom Caplan, remembers being awakened the morning of June 6 with the news that Kennedy had been shot. He sought out a housemate, Bill Clinton, and the two sat stunned, absorbing the loss.
"It stunned one into silence, so there weren't any memorable quotations," said Caplan, now a novelist in Baltimore. "It was if you had been hit."
A few days later, Caplan and Clinton graduated from Georgetown. Caplan remembers the mood at their commencement: "It was as if you were being set loose in a world that contained everything but hope."
Months later, in December, the rock group the Doors performed on "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour." A fresh-faced Jim Morrison sang:
"Wild child, full of grace,
"Savior of the human race. . . .
"Not your mother's or your father's child,
"You're our child, screaming wild!"
That pretty much summed up the sense of rage and anarchy among many young people that year. It culminated in August, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Chicago was not just a battle over ideology. It was the culmination of a cultural clash among generations and social classes. The demonstrators, there to protest the Democrats' war in Vietnam, were mostly young, mostly educated and middle-class. Their adversaries, the police, were mostly older, mostly military veterans, mostly from working class backgrounds.
"We didn't like them and they didn't like us," recalled Tom Skelly, a member of the Chicago police force then and now. He remembers the constant barrage of insults, the rocks and sticks and excrement that rained down on cops all week.
Asked if the police rankled at being called "pig," he said: "Pig was a nice word. They called us everything. Pig was just part of the sentence."
All across the country, Americans watched televisions in horror as police did battle day after day with the young demonstrators. By the final day of the convention, the cops had turned vicious, clubbing, punching and tear-gassing demonstrators, reporters, photographers and bystanders, seemingly indiscriminately.
The chant went up from the protesters: "The whole world is watching."
And it was.
One of the remarkable things about 1968 is that the tumult was worldwide. Students nearly shut down the government of France. Czechs became emboldened at the idea of freedom, enough so that the Soviet Union sent its army to crush the gentle rebellion. Mexican authorities mowed down students demonstrators.
Was it a contagion? Certainly modern communication helped transmit the bug of rebellion. And worldwide, the uprising was led by a baby boom generation that was raised to have high expectations about the world it was inheriting and a cocky sense of its own place in that world.
Dan Hamburg was a student anti-war activist at Stanford University that year. He offers a two-word explanation for the upswell of dissent: Benjamin Spock.
"Just the way that postwar babies were reared must have something to do with it," he said.
Hamburg remembers his own bitter sense of betrayal when he learned some of the harsh truths of history and of his own government's conduct in the world. He demonstrated angrily against the war in Vietnam, and was arrested and briefly jailed in 1970 during a demonstration at Stanford's ROTC building.
By then, he was fed up with politics, and joined the back-to-the-land movement of young people to the forested hills north of San Francisco. The personal became political; his energies were channeled into running a school.
But after a while, he began to take an interest in local politics. He won seats on the local planning commission and the county board of supervisors.
Last fall, running as a Democrat, he won election to Congress.
At an orientation session for freshmen Democrats, he said, each new member was given three minutes to describe what brought them there.
"It was really interesting how many of us had been to jail, how many of us had been arrested for something, how many of us were involved in the Civil Rights Movement. There's a lot of us."
Chief among them is baby boomer No. 1, Bill Clinton, another man whose views were shaped in many ways by 1968.
In December of that year, the United States sent the first manned spaceship into lunar orbit. For the first time, people saw pictures of the Earth from the Moon - strange, beautiful pictures.
"It was the only portion of the universe that had any color," astronaut Frank Borman remembers. "Everything else looked black and white."
Newspaper editors that year named the flight of Apollo 8 as the top story of the year - an incredible choice, in retrospect, given the other events of the year, but one that may have reflected a search for light in the darkness. From space, the Earth was self-contained, a single splash of life in the void, without borders, without wars, without strife. Frank Borman received a pile of letters and telegrams when he returned to Earth.
He remembers one in particular. It said: "Many thanks. You saved 1968."
Top hits of 1968\ \ TELEVISION\ 1967-68
1. "The Andy Griffith Show"
2. "The Lucy Show"
3. "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C."
4. "Gunsmoke"
5. "Family Affair"
6. "Bonanza"
7. "The Red Skelton Hour"
8. "The Dean Martin Show"
9. "The Jackie Gleason Show"
10. "Saturday Night at the Movies"
\ MUSIC
1. "Hey Jude," Beatles
2. "I Heard It Through the Grapevine," Marvin Gaye
3. "Love is Blue," Paul Mauriat
4. "Love Child," Dianna Ross and The Supremes
5. "Honey," Bobby Goldsboro
6. "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay," Otis Redding
7. "People Got to Be Free," Rascals
8. "This Guy's In Love With You," Herb Alpert
9. "Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)," John Fred and His Playboy Band
10. "Woman, Woman," Gary Puckett and The Union Gap
\ BOOKS\ FICTION
1. "Airport," Arthur Hailey
2. "Couples," John Updike
3. "The Salzburg Connection," Helen MacInnes
4. "A Small Town in Germany," John Le Carre
5. "Testimony of Two Men," Taylor Caldwell
6. "Preserve and Protect," Allen Drury
7. "Myra Breckenridge," Gore Vidal
8. "Vanished," Fletcher Knebel
9. "Christy," Catherine Marshall
10. "The Tower of Babel," Morris L. West
\ BOOKS\ NON-FICTION
1. "Better Homes and Gardens New Cook Book."
2. "The Random House Dictionary of the English Language: College Edition."
3. "Listen to the Warm," Rod McKuen
4. "Between Parent and Child," Haim G. Ginott
5. "Lonesome Cities," Rod McKuen
6. "The Doctor's Quick Weight Loss Diet," Erwin M. Stillman and Samm Sinclair Baker
7. "The Money Game," Adam Smith
8. "Stanyon Street," Rod McKuen
9. "The Weight Watcher's Cook Book," Jean Nidetch
10. "Better Homes and Gardens Eat and Stay Slim."
\ MOVIES
The 10 highest grossing movies of the year, as compiled by Exhibitor Relations Co., a Hollywood research and consulting firm:
1. "The Graduate"
2. "Funny Girl"
3. "2001: A Space Odyssey"
4. "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?"
5. "The Odd Couple"
6. "Bullitt"
7. "Romeo and Juliet"
8. "Oliver"
9. "Planet of the Apes"
10. "Rosemary's Baby"
Keywords:
YEAR 1968