Garrison Keillor, my generation’s Mark Twain, tells a story of how he spent the $6,000 he earned in 1974 from the New Yorker for his first major published work. He took his wife and young son on a train trip West. In the Portland train station rest room, he forgot his briefcase, which contained the sole copy of a new story “Lake Wobegon Memoir.” “The lost story shone so brilliantly in dim memory that every new attempt at it looked pale and impoverished before I got to the first sentence… [I hoped] that one Saturday night, I would look into the lights and my lost story would come down the beam and land in my head … I am still waiting for it.”
That’s the way I feel about 1968. A year when we lost so much which held such great promise. And much of my life has been a disappointing struggle to regain the fruit of that promise.
April 4, 1968: The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. is killed while standing at a balcony railing outside his motel room in Memphis, TN, where he has come to support and draw attention to a strike by sanitation workers.
April 23: At Columbia University in New York City, just south of Harlem, students demonstrate at a university construction project support of neighbors who use had been using the site for recreation. Five buildings are occupied, and seven days later police violently remove the students and their supporters.
May 3: The US and North Vietnam agree to start peace talks in Paris, which begin on May 10. The war will nonetheless continue to escalate and the US will not leave Vietnam for another 8 years.
May 6-13: In France, “Bloody Monday” marks one of the most violent days of the Parisian student revolt. Five thousand students march through the Latin Quarter with support from the student union and the instructors’ union. The fighting is intense with rioters setting up barricades and the police attacking with gas grenades. This inspires sympathy throughout France, with as many as nine million workers on strike by May 22. President de Gaulle authorizes large movements of military troops. This show of force eventually dissipates the French revolutionary furor.
June 5: Following his California primary victory, Robert Kennedy is shot by Sirhan Sirhan, a 24 year old Jordanian living in Los Angeles.. Kennedy dies in the early morning of June sixth.
July 8: “Yippies” (Youth Independent Party) Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Paul Krassner, who have previously disrupted the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange and destroyed the clocks at Grand Central Terminal, announce they will host a “Festival of Life” at the upcoming Democratic party convention in Chicogo, in contrast to what they term the convention’s “Festival of Death”.
August 8: Republicans nominate Richard Nixon for president, with MD Gov. Spiro Agnew as his running mate. By 1974, they will become the only two who have resigned from the nation’s highest elected offices.
August 20: The Soviet Union invades Czechoslovakia with over 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops, putting an end to the “Prague Spring,” and beginning a period of enforced and oppressive “normalization”.
August 26-28: The Democratic convention begins. No one leading in elected delegates, the most esteemed candidate, Kennedy, dead, and another (Sen McCarthy) seen as “unelectable”, party leaders will anoint Sen Hubert Humphrey, MN, as the party’s nominee.
August 28: Huge demonstrations outside the convention center result in police action against crowds of demonstrators without provocation. The police beat some marchers unconscious and send at least 100 to emergency rooms while arresting 175. Mayor Daley tried the next day to explain: “The policeman isn’t there to create disorder, the policeman is there to preserve disorder.”
September 7: Women’s Liberation groups target the Miss America Beauty Contest in Atlantic City. The protest includes the ritual disposal of traditional female roles into a “freedom ashcan.” While nothing is actually set on fire, one organizer’s comment that the protesters “wouldn’t do anything dangerous, just a symbolic bra-burning,” lives on in the derogatory term “bra-burning feminist.”
October 2: Police and military troops in Mexico City react violently to a student – led protest in Tlatelolco Square. Hundreds of the demonstrators are killed or injured.
October 3: George Wallace, independent Presidential candidate with significant support in the South and the Midwest, names ret AF Gen. Curtis LeMay as his running mate.The general, when asked about the use of nuclear weapons, says, “I think most military men think it’s just another weapon in the arsenal… I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. … I don’t believe the world would end if we exploded a nuclear weapon.”
October 12: The Summer Olympic Games open in Mexico City under boycott by 32 African nations in protest of South Africa’s participation. On the 18th Tommie Smith and John Carlos, US gold and bronze medalists in the 200-meter dash each raise a single black gloved fist during the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the medal ceremony. The two US athletes received their medals shoeless, but wearing black socks, to represent black poverty. Smith wore a black scarf around his neck to represent black pride, Carlos had his tracksuit top unzipped to show solidarity with all blue collar workers in the US and wore a necklace of beads which he described “were for those individuals that were lynched, or killed and that no-one said a prayer for, that were hung and tarred. It was for those thrown off the side of the boats in the middle passage.” Along with the white silver medalist, they wore Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR) badges.
November 5th: Election Day in the US. Nixon receives 31,770,000 votes; Humphrey 31,270,000, and Wallace (who wins five states, AK, LA, MS, AL, & GA) 9,906,000.
November 14: National Turn in Your Draft Card Day
And on an ironic note:
December 11: Unemployment stands at 3.3%, the lowest it has been in 15 years.
December 12: Robert and Ethel Kennedy’s daughter (11th child) is born.
December 21: Apollo 8 blasts off for the first moon orbital mission, presaging a landing there 7 months later.
This is a pretty scary list of events. The world, which at the start of the year had seemed so promising to this idealistic 19 year-old, displayed in concentrated detail just how dismaying a place it can be. The 40,000,000 people who voted for Nixon and Wallace showed the true face of the power structure in our country. Around the world, in France, Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America, as well as the US, that power structure used force to quell disorder which threatened to alter the nature of that power.
I no longer fear the power structure, possibly because for better or worse, I am now part of it. But I do fear what can happen when there is dissonance between those nominally in charge, and those who wish to change the world around them. There are times when that force of change can become nearly over-whelming, and I feel that force has risen again, as it did in 1968. I don’t know what the outcome will be, but I do know we need people like those we lost back then if we are to have a promising route forward.
I regard 1968 as Garrison did his lost manuscript. It held such promise, and the values and people which inspired us then can certainly provide a route through any tumult which threatens to engulf us this year. If only we have the patience and wisdom to seek them out, and listen.