1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  Perhaps this new Gaullian tone was influenced by dreams of a Nobel Peace Prize. Paris Match asked Pompidou if he agreed with some of the General’s inner circle who had expressed outrage that de Gaulle had not already received the prize. But Pompidou answered, “Do you really think that the Nobel Prize could be meaningful to the General? The General is only concerned about history, and no jury can dictate the judgment of history.”

  Aside from de Gaulle, the American computer industry struck one of the new year’s rare notes of optimism, predicting a record year for 1968. In the 1950s computer manufacturers had estimated that six computers could serve the needs of the entire United States. By January 1968 fifty thousand computers were operating in the country, of which fifteen thousand had been installed in the past year. The cigarette industry was also optimistic that its 2 percent growth in sales in 1967 would be repeated in 1968. The executive of one of the leading cigarette manufacturers boasted, “The more they attack us the higher our sales go.”

  But by most measurements, 1967 had not been a good year in the United States. A record number of violent, destructive riots had erupted in black inner cities across the country, including Boston, Kansas City, Newark, and Detroit.

  1968 would be the year in which “Negroes” became “blacks.” In 1965, Stokely Carmichael, an organizer for the remarkably energetic and creative civil rights group the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, invented the name Black Panthers, soon followed by the phrase Black Power. At the time, black, in this sense, was a rarely used poetic turn of phrase. The word started out in 1968 as a term for black militants, and by the end of the year it became the preferred term for the people. Negro had become a pejorative applied to those who would not stand up for themselves.

  On the second day of 1968, Robert Clark, a thirty-seven-year-old schoolteacher, took his seat in the Mississippi House of Representatives without a challenge, the first black to gain a seat in the Mississippi State Legislature since 1894.

  But in the civil rights struggle, action was shifting from the soft-spoken rural South to the hard-edged urban North. Northern blacks were different from blacks in the South. While the mostly southern followers of Martin Luther King, Jr., studied Mohandas Gandhi and his nonviolent anti-British campaign, Stokely Carmichael, who had grown up in New York City, became interested in violent rebels such as the Mau Mau, who had risen up against the British in Kenya. Carmichael, a good-humored man with a biting wit and a sense of theater that he brought from his native Trinidad, had been for years regularly jailed, threatened, and abused in the South, as had all the SNCC workers. And during those years there were always moments when the concept of nonviolence was questioned. Carmichael began hurling back abuse verbally and sometimes physically, confronting segregationists who harassed him. The King people chanted, “Freedom now!” The Carmichael people chanted, “Black Power!” King tried to persuade Carmichael to use the slogan “Black Equality” rather than “Black Power,” but Carmichael kept his slogan.

  1967 poster designed by Tomi Ungerer

  (Collection of Mary Haskell, copyright © 1994 Diogenes Verlag)

  Increasing numbers of black leaders wanted to fight segregation with segregation, imposing a black-only social order that at least paid lip service to excluding even white reporters from press briefings. In 1966 Carmichael became head of SNCC, replacing John Lewis, a soft-spoken southerner who advocated nonviolence. Carmichael turned SNCC into an aggressive Black Power organization, and in so doing Black Power became a national movement. In May 1967 Hubert “Rap” Brown, who had not been a well-known figure in the civil rights movement, replaced Carmichael as the head of SNCC, which by now was nonviolent in name only. In that summer of bloody riots, Brown said at a press conference, “I say you better get a gun. Violence is necessary—it is as American as cherry pie.”

  King was losing control over a badly divided civil rights movement in which many believed nonviolence had outlived its usefulness. 1968 seemed certain to be the year of Black Power, and the police were readying themselves. By the beginning of 1968 most American cities were preparing for war—building up their arsenals, sending undercover agents into black neighborhoods like spies into enemy territory, recruiting citizenry as a standing reserve army. The city of Los Angeles, where thirty-four people had been killed in an August 1965 riot in the Watts section, was contemplating the purchase of bulletproof armored vehicles, each of which could be armed with a .30-caliber machine gun; a choice of smoke screen, tear gas, or fire-extinguishing launchers; and a siren so loud it was said to disable rioters. “When I look at this thing, I think, My God, I hope we’ll never have to use it,” said Los Angeles deputy police chief Daryl Gates, “but then I realize how valuable it would have been in Watts, where we had nothing to protect us from sniper fire when we tried to rescue our wounded officers.” Such talk had become good politics since California governor Pat Brown had been defeated the year before by Ronald Reagan, largely because of the Watts riots. The problem was that the vehicles cost $35,000 each. The Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office had a more cost-effective idea—a surplus army M-8 armored car for only $2,500.

  In Detroit, where forty-three people died in race riots in 1967, the police already had five armored vehicles but were stockpiling tear gas and gas masks and were requesting antisniper rifles, carbines, shotguns, and 150,000 rounds of ammunition. One Detroit suburb had purchased an army half-track—a quasi tank. The city of Chicago purchased helicopters for its police force and started training 11,500 policemen in using heavy weapons and crowd control techniques in preparation for the year 1968. From the outset of the year, the United States seemed to be run by fear.

  On January 4, thirty-four-year-old playwright LeRoi Jones, an outspoken Black Power advocate, was sentenced to two and a half to three years in the New Jersey State Penitentiary and fined $1,000 for illegal possession of two revolvers during the Newark riots the previous summer. In explaining why he had imposed the maximum sentence, Essex County judge Leon W. Kapp said that he suspected Jones was “a participant in formulating a plot” to burn Newark on the night he was arrested. Decades later, known as Amiri Baraka, Jones became the poet laureate of New Jersey.

  In Vietnam, the war U.S. officials were forever telling correspondents was about to end still seemed far from over.

  When the French had left in 1954, Vietnam was divided into a North Vietnam ruled by Ho Chi Minh, who had largely controlled the region anyway, and a South Vietnam left in the hands of anti-communist factions. By 1961 the Northern communists had gained control of half the territory of South Vietnam through the Viet Cong, which met with little resistance from the Southern population. That year the North began sending troops of their regular army south along what became known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail to complete the takeover. The U.S. responded with increased involvement though it had always been involved—in 1954 the U.S. had been financing an estimated four-fifths of the cost of the French war effort. In 1964 with North Vietnam’s position steadily strengthening, Johnson had used an alleged naval attack in the Gulf of Tonkin as the pretext for open warfare. From that point on, the Americans expanded their military presence each year.

  In 1967, 9,353 Americans were killed in Vietnam, more than doubling the total number of Americans previously killed, which now stood at 15,997, with another 99,742 Americans wounded. Newspapers ran weekly hometown casualty reports. And the war was also taking a toll on the economy, at a cost of an estimated $2 billion to $3 billion a month. During the summer, President Johnson had asked for a large tax increase to stanch the growing debt. The Great Society, the massive social spending program that Johnson had begun as a memorial to his fallen predecessor, was dying from lack of funds. A book published at the beginning of 1968 called The Great Society Reader: The Failure of American Liberalism contended that the Great Society and liberalism itself were dying.

  New York City mayor John Lindsay, a liberal Republican with presidential aspirations, said on the last day of 1967 that if
the country could not allocate more money to cities under current spending plans, then “the obligations that the United States feels it has in Vietnam and elsewhere ought to be reexamined.”

  The U.S. government, involved in an intense race with the Soviet Union to be first to the moon, had been forced to cut back on its space exploration budget. Even the Department of Defense was prioritizing, asking Congress at the first of the year for permission to delay or cancel orders for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of low-priority military equipment and facilities so that more money would be available to meet the cost of the war in Vietnam.

  On the first day of the year, President Johnson launched an appeal to the American public to curtail plans for foreign travel in order to help reduce a growing deficit in international payments, which he blamed in part on the fact that Americans had been going overseas in increasing numbers. Secretary of State Dean Rusk said that tourists must “share the burden.” Johnson asked people to put off nonessential travel plans for at least two years. He also proposed a mandatory curtailment on business investments abroad and a tax on travel that Tennessee Democratic senator Albert Gore called “undemocratic.”

  Many in France, where there is an understandable tendency toward a Francocentric view of events, felt that Johnson had taken these measures as reprisal against the admittedly too haughty de Gaulle. The Paris daily Le Monde said Johnson’s proposals were offering Americans an opportunity “to concentrate their resentment on France.”

  With the war increasingly expensive and unpopular, U.S. government officials were under intense pressure to make it look better in 1968. R. W. Apple of The New York Times reported:

  “I was in a briefing the other day,” a middle-level civilian said, “and the man briefing us came out and said it: ‘An election year is about to begin. And the people we work for are in the business of reelecting President Johnson in November.’ ”

  The thrust of this new public relations campaign was to try to make South Vietnam look as though it were worth fighting for. With U.S. officials instructed to convince the American public that the South had an effective fighting force, they had to try to get the South Vietnamese army to accomplish something that could be cheered. Equally important, they had to try to clean up the embarrassing corruption in the South Vietnamese government and to somehow portray its head, Nguyen Van Thieu, contrary to all evidence, as an inspiring leader who motivated his people to sacrifice for the war effort. The already troubled relationship between the press and the U.S. government was certain to get worse in 1968.

  A New Year’s editorial in the official Hanoi newspaper, Nhan Dan, stated that “our communications lines remain open as ever” in the face of bombing and asserted that “the political and moral unity of our people has strengthened.”

  President Ho Chi Minh’s New Year’s message said the people of North and South Vietnam were “united as one man.” The seventy-eight-year-old president, in an at least half-accurate forecast, predicted, “This year the United States aggressors will find themselves less able than ever to take the initiative and will be more confused than ever, while our armed forces, dashing forward with the impetus of new successes, will certainly win many more and still greater victories.”

  He extended best wishes to all friendly nations and to “the progressive people in the United States who have warmly supported the just struggle of our people.”

  Clearly the ranks of such “progressive people,” to use Ho’s term, were growing. Not only had pollsters noted a slippage in support for the war, but increasing numbers were willing to demonstrate against it. In 1965, when the Students for a Democratic Society, SDS, had called for an antiwar demonstration in Washington, many, including some in the old pacifist movement, complained that the SDS had failed to criticize the communists, and there were many disagreements on tactics and language. Still, they had assembled twenty thousand in their April march on Washington, which had been the largest antiwar march to date. But by 1967 the SDS and the antiwar movement had avoided the old arguments of the cold war and experienced a remarkably successful year. The National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam, the Mobe, a coalition of old-time pacifists, new and old leftists, civil rights workers, and youth, had mounted a peaceful demonstration of tens of thousands in San Francisco. In March, they rallied a few hundred thousand people to march behind Martin Luther King, Jr., in New York City from Central Park to the United Nations.

  In the fall, for Stop the Draft Week, ten thousand mostly young antiwar demonstrators participated in what became a street fight with the Oakland, California, police. The antiwar movement was also breaking away from King’s nonviolent tactics. These protesters did not allow themselves to be dragged into police wagons. They charged police lines and retreated behind makeshift barricades in the street. Students at the University of Wisconsin tried the old tactic of sitting in at a university building, several hundred strong, to protest the presence of Dow Chemical recruitment. The Madison police did not drag the protesters away but used Mace and clubs, which so outraged the public that soon the police were fighting several thousand.

  Dow, evil-corporation poster child of the 1960s, produced the napalm used against soldiers, civilians, and landscape in Vietnam. First developed for the U.S. Army during World War II by scientists at Harvard, napalm was a clear example of the military using educational institutions to develop weaponry. Originally the name napalm was given to a thickener that could be mixed with gasoline and other incendiary material. In Vietnam the mixture itself was called napalm. The thickener turns the flame into a jellylike substance that can be shot a considerable distance under pressure. As it burns with intense heat, it sticks to the target, whether vegetal or human. According to the National Student Association, of the seventy-one demonstrations that were mounted on sixty-two college campuses in October and November 1967, twenty-seven of them were directed against Dow Chemical. Only one of the seventy-one demonstrations was about the quality of education.

  On a Saturday in late October 1967, the Mobe had organized an antiwar demonstration in Washington, with protesters gathering at the Lincoln Memorial and then crossing the Potomac to march on the Pentagon. An antiwar activist from Berkeley, Jerry Rubin, was there with a New York City friend from the civil rights movement, Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman managed to grab media attention during the Washington march by promising to levitate the Pentagon and exorcize it by spinning it around. He did not deliver on his promise. Norman Mailer was there and wrote about it in Armies of the Night, which was to become one of the most read and praised books of 1968. The poet Robert Lowell, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, and editor Dwight MacDonald were among the marchers. These were more than just spoiled and privileged draft-dodging kids, which had been the popular way to characterize the antiwar movement or, as Mailer put it more sympathetically in his book, “the drug illumined and revolutionary young of the American middle class.” This was clearly becoming a broad-based and diverse movement. “Join us!” demonstrators shouted at the soldiers guarding the besieged Pentagon, as though intoxicated by their sudden power to recruit more and more supporters.

  In the first week of 1968, five men, including Dr. Benjamin Spock, the author and pediatrician, and the Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., chaplain of Yale University, were indicted on charges of conspiring to counsel young men to violate the draft law. In New York City, Dr. Spock said that he hoped “one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand, or even five hundred thousand young Americans either refuse to be drafted or to obey orders if in the military.” Spock’s arrest in particular garnered attention because conservatives for some time had been blaming what they termed his permissive approach to child rearing for creating this spoiled and quarrelsome generation. But after the arrests, a New York Times editorial stated, “It is significant that the two best- known leaders of this challenge to the draft are a pediatrician and a college chaplain, men especially sensitive to young America’s current moral dilemma.”

 
On January 4, Bruce Brennan, a thirteen-year-old from Long Island with shoulder-length hair, was charged with truancy. His mother, who owned the Clean Machine, a shop where Bruce worked that sold psychedelic paraphernalia and peace symbols, and his father, the president of a management consulting firm, said that Bruce was being singled out because of his involvement in the peace movement. The youth said he had missed school eleven times because of illness and twice to march in peace demonstrations. The mother said her son had become involved in the movement when he was twelve.

  Despite all of this opposition, Lyndon Johnson, after five years in office, seemed a solid favorite to win another term. A Gallup poll released on January 2 showed that just less than half the population, 45 percent, believed it was a mistake to have gotten involved in Vietnam. On that same day, an hour and twenty minutes before the end of the New Year’s cease-fire, 2,500 Viet Cong attacked a U.S. infantry fire support base fifty miles northwest of Saigon in an area of rubber plantations, killing 26 Americans and wounding 111. These were the first Americans to die in Vietnam in 1968. The U.S. government reported 344 Viet Cong killed. The United States had a policy of reporting the number of enemy bodies left on the field—a Vietnam War propaganda innovation called “the body count”—as though if the tally rose high enough, America would be declared the winner.

  A Republican state-by-state survey released at the beginning of the year indicated that their only hope to unseat Johnson was New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. Richard Nixon, the party predicted, would narrowly lose, as Nixon tended to do. Michigan governor George Romney had become the object of too many jokes when he reversed his support for the Vietnam War, claiming he had been “brainwashed.” The dry-witted Democratic Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy commented, “I would have thought a light rinse would have done it.” California governor Ronald Reagan hoped he could step into the vacuum created by Romney. But he had been an elected official for less than a year. Besides, Reagan was considered too reactionary and would likely be completely routed, as would Romney. The Republican Party knew about routs. It was a sensitive topic. In the last election their candidate, Barry Goldwater, running against Johnson, had sustained the worst defeat in American history. He also had been too reactionary. A liberal like Rockefeller might have a chance.