[NYTr] Bob Herbert on 1968: Still Reeling After All These Years

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

New York Times - Jan 1, 2007
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/01/opinion/01herbert.html


Still Reeling After All These Years

By BOB HERBERT

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.”