Paranoia Strikes Deep

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

– “The Second Coming”, William Butler Yeats, 1919

Yeats wrote those words in the aftermath of the Great War (1914-1918) and Spanish Flu pandemic. Ten years later, Hitler was on the rise in Germany and the global financial system was starting to topple. Ten years further on, and the world was once again engulfed in a struggle to avoid self-destruction. Another decade, and two nations began an arms race which threatened to obliterate all life in a nuclear winter.

Yet we have managed to pull back from each abyss. In the years since, civilization has periodically seemed to be coming apart all around us. Now feels like one of those times. I have not felt such foreboding since 1968.

What are the reverberating echoes from that time? In the ‘60s, protests in major cities erupted over a number of specific grievances: the war in Vietnam, persistent evidence of racism in both the North and South, continued treatment of women as second class citizens in many arenas.

Today, the 2011 protests in New York’s Zuccotti Park (“Occupy Wall Street”) live on in drives to dramatically raise the minimum wage and the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders. Repeated killings by police of unarmed African-Americans have triggered protests in multiple sites across the country, including Missouri, Baltimore, Cleveland, and New York City. Black Lives Matter, a movement born of those protests, is in the midst of finding its voice.

Expected party standard bearers Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton, found themselves facing a tsunami of resistance in their drives to presidential nominations, the one trounced by Trump, the other fighting for her life against Sanders. The Republicans are talking about a contested (“brokered”) nominating convention, with no one arriving in Cleveland having a majority of votes. And HRC has utilized a dramatic “southern strategy” to put herself into a slim lead.

But 1968 was a very dramatic year, one long nightmare of plot twists with unexpected results. What follows is not a prediction of what I think will happen over the course of the next 10 months. But it does hold up a mirror of what we might want to be prepared for, given the tenuous hold received wisdom seems to have over how events are unfolding.

The quotations and dates listed are from “The Whole World Is Watching”, an oral history of 1968.

The sitting President, Lyndon B. Johnson, had won the 1964 election with the highest percentage of the popular vote, 61%, in the 20th century. But he pursued policies which angered many. His robust support of the Civil Rights laws of 1964 and 65 began to splinter support the “solid south” had given Democrats since before the Civil War. The passage of Medicare and Medicaid legislation, which he also championed as a stalwart follower of FDR’s New Deal, severed any support he might find from the conservative right. And his continued escalation of the American role in Vietnam lost him support among many young people and those in academia.

Senator Eugene McCarthy (D-MN) began what appeared to be a quixotic campaign against LBJ, mainly to provide a voice for those who objected to the US involvement in Vietnam. Surprisingly, he came within 230 votes of winning the first primary in New Hampshire on March 12. Four days later, Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-NY), brother of the assassinated former President, entered the presidential race.

On the Republican side, Richard Nixon, having spent the previous six years building alliances and support within the party after narrowly losing the 1960 Presidential race and failing in 1962 to secure the Governorship of California, had little competition from Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan.

In February, three events galvanized opinion against US action in Vietnam. On the Feb. 1st, a photograph appeared on front pages all over the world showing the South Vietnamese chief of police executing a Viet Cong prisoner, who was defenseless with his hands tied behind his back. A week later, an unnamed US official was quoted as saying, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it” when explaining the violence of US force forces attacking the town of Ben Tre. And during the month, it became clear that the “Tet [Vietnam New Year] Offensive” launched by North Vietnam was not going well for the US, so much so that the US began secret negotiations with North Vietnam on peace talks.

Among the objectors to US involvement in Southeast Asia was Martin Luther King, Jr. He had moved from leading protests against the Jim Crow laws of the south to supporting the economic needs of all African-Americans. He saw the war as draining resources away from anti-poverty programs. He also began to emphasize support of unions, especially those whose members included many blacks. In late March, he went to Memphis, TN. where striking garbage workers were demonstrating. On March 28, he led a protest march in which a 16 year old black boy was killed, 60 people were injured, and over 150 arrested.

On March 31st, Johnson delivered a live, evening televised address to the nation on the Vietnam war. He stated his belief in “peace through strength”, and outlined not only what had been done to demonstrate that strength – bombing and killing -, but also how he proposed to achieve peace through negotiation. All pretty standard stuff. But then, at the very end, he said this, seemingly out of the blue: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

Imagine, if you will, Hillary Rodham Clinton dropping out of the presidential race because of revelations that her private State Department email server had been hacked by the Chinese. That’s the impact Johnson’s abdication had on us. Everything changed.