NYT
It promised to be a very good year. But then anything would be better than 1967, with its angry kids burning the flag, and the war raging, and American cities going up in flames one after another.
A Page 1 headline in The New York Times said: “World Bids Adieu to a Violent Year.”
It seems impossible that 1968, the most incredible year of a most incredible decade, was 40 years ago. As the new year tiptoed in, Americans wrapped themselves as usual in the comfort of optimism. Snow fell on the revelers in Times Square. A threatened New York City subway strike was averted and the 20-cent fare maintained.
No one had a clue about what was in store. A friend of mine, looking back, said, “Sixty-eight was the whirlwind.”
It was a presidential election year, and The Times reported on Jan. 1 that G.O.P. leaders believed that Gov. Nelson Rockefeller of New York was the only Republican who could defeat Lyndon Johnson. Richard Nixon might give the president a good run, they said, but would probably lose. Ronald Reagan and the governor of Michigan, George Romney, would most likely lose decisively.
“The Sound of Music” and “Thoroughly Modern Millie” were hit movies, both starring Julie Andrews. “Hello Dolly” and “Fiddler on the Roof” were on Broadway. Ladies nylons at Gimbel’s were 88 cents a pair, and men’s dress shirts at Bloomingdale’s were three for $14.75.
Rock ’n’ roll, drugs and long-haired young people who considered themselves hip were ubiquitous. But it was still a pretty innocent time. That would change.
One of the astonishing things about 1968 was how quickly each shocking, consciousness-altering event succeeded the last, leaving no time for people to reorient themselves. The mind-boggling occurrences seemed to come out of nowhere, like the Viet Cong who set off a depth charge beneath the Johnson presidency with the Tet offensive at the end of January.
When Walter Cronkite learned of the coordinated wave of attacks throughout South Vietnam by the Cong and North Vietnamese regulars he is reported to have said: “What the hell is going on? I thought we were winning this war.”
The nation shuddered. The U.S. had never lost a war, but now men padding around in black pajamas and flip-flops fashioned from discarded tires gave every appearance of battling the mightiest military on earth to a stalemate.
The New Hampshire primary was March 12. Eugene McCarthy, a quiet, cerebral and sometimes flaky senator from Minnesota who was calling for a negotiated settlement of the war, electrified the country and exposed the president’s political vulnerability by finishing second with 42 percent of the vote.
Within days, Bobby Kennedy, who had only recently said he could see no circumstances in which he would challenge Johnson, was challenging him. McCarthy was furious. Johnson was traumatized.
By the end of the month, Johnson had abandoned the race.
Euphoria reigned — among young people, and those opposed to the war, and those who believed that ordinary people of good will could change the world. For many, it was the peak moment of the 1960s.
It lasted just four days.
On April 3, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis. Violence erupted in dozens of cities, and especially in Washington, where a number of people were killed and the fires were the worst the city had experienced since the British took the torch to it in 1814.
John J. Lindsay of Newsweek magazine said that when Bobby Kennedy was told that King had died, he put his hands to his face and murmured: “Oh, God. When is this violence going to stop?”
Kennedy himself was murdered two months later. I remember people not knowing what to say. The madness had been unleashed, and there seemed no way to rein it in.
There was much more to come, more war, the orgy of police violence at the Democratic convention in Chicago, the razor-thin election of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew over Hubert Humphrey and Edmund Muskie in November.
But an awful lot of people tuned out after Kennedy was killed. That seemed to be when, for so many, the hope finally died. The nation has never really recovered from the bullet that killed R.F.K.
Arthur Schlesinger, in his biography of Kennedy, quotes Richard Harwood of The Washington Post:
“We discovered in 1968 this deep, almost mystical bond that existed between Robert Kennedy and the Other America. It was a disquieting experience for reporters. ... We were forced to recognize in Watts and Gary and Chimney Rock that the real stake in the American political process involves not the fate of speechwriters and fund-raisers, but the lives of millions of people seeking hope out of despair.”
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