1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  The following morning an estimated eight thousand to twenty thousand people appeared on Kurfurstendamm, a wide boulevard lined with fashionable shops—used to launch expensive new fashion trends since West Berlin’s isolation simplified market research. Amazingly, the students’ ranks were swollen with hundreds of West Germans who had crossed East Germany, spending the night before in homes of Berlin comrades. The New York Times, which estimated “more than 10,000,” called it “the biggest anti-American rally ever staged in the city.” Through the cold, humid, gray streets of West Berlin, they carried with them a curious blend of cultures—portraits of Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Rosa Luxemburg, the Jewish leftist from Poland killed in Germany in 1919. They shouted the chant always heard at American antiwar marches—“Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh! NLF is gonna win!” They marched to the Opera House, where Benno Ohnesorg had been shot, and then to the Berlin Wall for more speeches. Dutschke said to a cheering crowd, “Tell the Americans the day and the hour will come when we will drive you out unless you yourselves throw out imperialism.” But for all his apparent anti-Americanism, Red Rudi, said to be the most important student revolutionary in Europe, was married to an American theology student from Chicago.

  The police, many on horseback, had been posted mostly to protect American military and diplomatic installations. But the demonstrators made no attempt to approach these areas. Demonstrators climbed two thirty-story construction cranes and attached huge Viet Cong and red flags. The demonstrators then booed as construction workers took the flags down and burned them. The city of West Berlin, working with the trade unions, was able to assemble an equally large counterdemonstration that chanted, “Berlin supports America” and “Throw Dutschke out of West Berlin.”

  The students from other countries returned from Berlin’s February Vietnam demonstration exhilarated. The British mounted their own demonstration on March 17, the second demonstration organized by Tariq Ali and the VSC. The first, like most previous London demonstrations, had been smaller and without violence. But on this occasion, thousands filled Oxford Street, a solid river of red flags and voices chanting, “NLF is gonna win!” A German SDS contingent had urged the VSC to try to take the U.S. embassy, but Tariq Ali did not believe this was possible. When the crowd reached Grosvenor Square, to the complete surprise of the VSC organizers, they broke through the police line and started running for the embassy. Armed with clubs, mounted British police charged with a brutality rarely seen in London. Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones was there and wrote about it in “Street Fighting Man.”

  Anti–Vietnam War demonstration in Grosvenor Square, London, July 7, 1968

  (Photo by David Hurn/Magnum Photos)

  Aside from the imported issue of Vietnam and a worsening climate in Northern Ireland, the biggest issue in Britain that year was racism. Led by Enoch Powell, a member of Parliament, the country was seeing a virulent strain of what the American civil rights movement called white backlash set off by the Labour government’s proposed Commonwealth Immigration Bill. As the British decolonized their empire, workers were being told that black and brown people from the former empire would be coming and taking away their jobs. “Keep Britain White,” was Powell’s slogan, and a number of workers groups demonstrated with this slogan. There was some amusement when a Kenyan diplomat was harassed entering the House of Commons by “Keep Britain White” hecklers who shouted, “Go back to Jamaica!” at the East African.

  It was Germany that seemed a volatile place waiting for a larger explosion. On April 3 the violent left wing that would gain more prominence in the 1970s for such actions burned two Frankfurt department stores. On April 11, Rudi Dutschke was in front of a West Berlin drugstore about to buy medicine for his baby boy, Hosea Che—named for a prophet and a revolutionary—when Joseph Bachmann, a twenty-three-year-old out-of-work Munich housepainter, walked up to him and fired three bullets from a handgun. One hit Dutschke in the chest, a second in the face, and a third lodged precariously in his brain. This was the first attempt at a political assassination in Germany since the fall of the Third Reich. Arrested after a gun battle with the police, Bachmann explained, “I heard of the death of Martin Luther King and since I hate communists I felt I must kill Dutschke.” Bachmann, who kept a picture of Hitler in his apartment and identified with him as a fellow Munich housepainter, was a devoted reader of a hate-mongering, right-wing paper called Bild Zeitung, Picture Times. The tabloid was owned by Axel Springer, Germany’s most powerful press baron, whose papers slavishly supported all U.S. policies and viciously attacked leftist movements, both cheering and encouraging attacks against them. DON’T LEAVE ALL THE DIRTY WORK TO THE COPS! read one headline.

  Bild Zeitung, launched in 1952, became the centerpiece of an empire of right-wing press that became the largest in Europe with Bild’s circulation of four million, the largest of any daily on the European continent. Fourteen Springer publications, including five daily newspapers, had a total circulation of fifty million. The papers were not only anticommunist but also racist, and many felt that they were appealing to the very beast the new Germany was trying to lay to rest. Springer always claimed that he spoke for the way the average German thought, which was exactly what many feared. Springer did not deny that the paper sometimes got carried away. “You should see me falling out of bed in the morning with surprise at what I read in my own papers,” he once said.

  It was not only students who were angered. Even before the shooting, two hundred writers had asked their publishers to boycott his papers. But while Bachmann’s claim that the newspaper had inspired him resonated with many, Axel Springer himself was more complicated. He was known as an excellent employer who treated workers so well that despite his right-wing politics, organized labor supported him. And despite the Nazi-like tone of his papers, Springer was a strong supporter of Jewish causes, to which he contributed generously from his own fortune. He campaigned tirelessly for German reparation payments to Israel, and his papers were strongly pro-Israel. But in 1968, what Germany’s New Left was most aware of was that the Springer press had declared war on them, demanding repressive laws to curtail demonstrations and to deal harshly with demonstrators, whom he called “terrorists.” He urged vigilante violence against the students.

  The response was immediate: The anger over the shooting instantly transferred to anger toward Springer, because of his campaign for years against the Left, but also from a long-simmering rejection of the notion that Europe could be run by powerful press barons. A forerunner of Murdoch and Berlusconi, with an empire that seems quaint today in its lack of broadcast holdings, the question remained—how was it that this man, scooped up by the British from Germany’s rubble to run a radio broadcast, had become the most powerful opinion maker in Europe?

  Only hours after the attack on Dutschke, a crowd of angry young people gathered in front of the nineteen-story steel-and-glass office block in the bohemian Kreuzberg section of Berlin. Springer had chosen the spot to build because it was defiantly right up against the Wall. He put a neon sign on the building that said, “Berlin bleibt frei”—“Berlin remains free.” Police used water cannons to disperse the crowd of students who threw rocks and flaming torches. The following day, columns of students, arms linked, marched in waves toward the West Berlin Springer building. By the time they reached it, it was already fortified with barbed wire and riot police. The crowd chanted Dutschke’s name and “Springer, murderer!” and “Springer, Nazi!” The police turned on their water cannons and began arresting demonstrators. At the City Hall demonstrators chanted, “Fascists!” and “Nazis!” The students also marched to the American radio station, where windows were broken. Munich demonstrators did better, actually managing to get inside the Springer building there before being driven off by police. Failing to take over buildings, students burned delivery trucks. Thousands of students also clashed with police in Hamburg, Esslingen, Hanover, and Essen. Mostly it was student clubs pitted against police water cannons, and the high-pressure water w
on the day. But the demonstrators stopped or delayed delivery of Springer papers. In Frankfurt they also stopped the leading West German business paper, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, because it was printed at a Springer plant. Demonstrators also appeared in front of Springer buildings in New York, London, and Paris. In London Tariq Ali led a group that broke away from a Martin Luther King memorial in Trafalgar Square and attempted to take over Springer offices. In Paris Alain Krivine recalled, “When Rudi was shot was the first spontaneous violent demonstration in Paris. The police were not even in riot gear, no helmets or shields, when suddenly the students in the Latin Quarter began to hurl tables and chairs at police.”

  In Germany, the event fell on an Easter holiday, and five days of street battles followed the shooting. In these riots two were killed—an Associated Press photographer and a student, both from objects thrown by students—and several hundred were wounded. Many hundreds were arrested. It was the worst German street rioting since before Hitler came to power. Remembering the consequences of German political instability, most West Germans did not approve of the street violence. In June 1968 the German magazine Der Spiegel conducted a poll in which 92 percent of Berlin citizens were opposed to “the use of violence by protesting students.” The students were failing to appeal to the working class: 78 percent of Berliners under thirty from working-class homes said they opposed the student violence. Even some students were outspokenly opposed to the violence.

  Dutschke survived his wounds and even wrote a letter to his would-be assassin, explaining his ideas of socialism. But Bachmann hanged himself in his prison cell.

  Among the 230 students arrested in Berlin was Peter Brandt, the son of Willy Brandt, former Berlin mayor, minister of foreign affairs, and vice chancellor of Germany. Willy Brandt had always been the good German, the socialist who had opposed fascism and had nothing to hide in his past. But Peter said he was disappointed in his father, that since he had gotten into government he had lost his socialist fervor. He was a social democrat, the German equivalent of a liberal. “I never said that my father should leave office. That’s not true,” Peter stated. “But I think that he has changed and I regret it. He is no longer the same man. He is no longer the socialist who went to fight in Spain during the Civil War. We don’t agree anymore.” When his father suggested that he was spending too much time on politics and not enough on his studies, he said, “If I find that something needs to change, I find that it is my duty to do something to make that change happen.”

  One of Peter’s professors warned his father, the vice chancellor, “In another six months your son Peter will become a communist.”

  Brandt shrugged. “Anyone who has not been a communist at the age of twenty will never make a good social democrat.”

  CHAPTER 10

  WAGNERIAN OVERTONES

  OF A HIP AND BEARDED

  REVOLUTION

  I had been raised on Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood and the endless hero actor fighting against injustice and leading the people to victory over tyranny. The Cuban thing seemed a case of classic Hollywood proportions.

  —LEROI JONES, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, 1984

  IN FEBRUARY 1968 a group of twenty young Americans arrived in Havana from Mexico City. The trip had been organized by the American SDS. In the group was a twenty-year-old Columbia University junior from New Jersey named Mark Rudd, who had raised money for his Cuban trip by selling hashish at the West End Bar, a student hangout in upper Manhattan.

  The group met with the Vietnamese diplomatic delegation and were surprised by their extreme courtesy. The Vietnamese ambassador said that he understood there were important differences between the American government and the American people. Though the students accepted the ambassador’s gracious remark with relief, Rudd seized the occasion to point out that while he wished the ambassador’s comments had been correct, in reality, most Americans did support the war.

  The Vietnamese diplomat smiled at the earnest young blond student. “This will be a very long war,” he said. “It has already lasted for us more than twenty years. We can hold out much longer. Eventually the American people will tire of the war, and will turn against it. Then the war will end.”

  Rudd realized the ambassador was right. One of the diplomats said he had fought in South Vietnam for seven years, living in tunnels and emerging at night to attack the Americans. Everywhere in Cuba that winter, there was news from Vietnam. A large neon sign over a main Havana street, La Rampa, gave the current total of planes shot down. When the students went to the countryside, they found Cubans standing around transistor radios getting news of the Tet Offensive. Someone gave Rudd a ring that was said to have been made from the metal of a shot-down American plane.

  The students met many Cubans who were their age, including Sylvio Rodriguez, who sang ballads in the style of Joan Baez. They spent time in the leafy tropical park with the famous ice-cream shop Coppelia. Rudd later remembered: “We hung out at Coppelia eating tomato ice cream and went to great parties with Afro-Cuban music, which I had never heard before and didn’t quite understand. I saw in Cuba what I wanted to see: factories, farms, and institutions that were owned by the state, socialized. I wanted to see a different way to organize society. But I didn’t see the obvious, that you can’t have a one-party state, that you have to have elections.”

  Fidel Castro, bearded and in army fatigues, the surprising and slightly offbeat sensation of 1959, had become the New Left hero of 1968.

  He had been neither bearded nor revolutionary in 1955 when he visited the United States looking for financing to overthrow the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who had seized power three years earlier and had banned all political parties. Batista was corrupt and disliked, and Castro, Dr. Fidel Castro as he was known in the United States in deference to his law degree, was reasonable, earnest, clean-cut, and reassuringly middle class.

  In December 1956 Castro landed a yacht in Oriente province with a fighting force of eighty-two. The Cuban government reported that almost all the rebels, including Castro, were killed. This was only a slight exaggeration; the casualties included all but a dozen survivors who made it into the Sierra Maestra mountains with Dr. Castro among them. This was not known for certain until a retired New York Times correspondent, Herbert L. Matthews, accomplished one of the most famous and controversial newspaper scoops of the twentieth century by finding Dr. Castro alive, bearded and talkative in his mountain hideaway along with eighteen colorful bearded rebels, including one who had been a pro baseball player in the United States.

  The Times ran Matthews’s interview as a three-part series on February 24, 25, and 26, 1957. It has often been attacked by anti-Castro elements for presenting Fidel as a sympathetic freedom fighter similar to a World War II partisan. Of course, Americans conveniently forget that many World War II partisans had also been communists. The most remembered attack on the Matthews series was a 1960 cartoon in the conservative National Review showing an avaricious-looking Castro hunkering down on an island labeled “The Cuban Police State.” The caption read, “I got my job through the New York Times.”

  But the Times was far from the only media outlet that ran favorable coverage of Dr. Castro at the time. A rabid anticommunist Hungarian exile named Andrew St. George wrote favorably of the Cuban rebels in Look; Jules Dubois gave sympathetic coverage in the Red-baiting, right-wing Chicago Tribune; photojournalist Dickey Chapelle spent three weeks with Castro for the extremely conservative Reader’s Digest. Time, another right-leaning publication, ran thirty-two articles on the Cuban rebels in the two years leading up to their victory, most of them favorable. In December 1956 Time called Fidel “Lawyer Castro” and said that he was a “well born, well-to-do daredevil of 29.”

  American reporters always emphasized Castro’s middle-class character, origins, and education and invariably mentioned his pure Spanish blood. It was never said, but it was reassuring to know, that the Cuban rebellion was no dangerous “Negro uprising.” To the
American press he was a good story, a colorful and uplifting tale of a struggle for freedom. But what was starting to become more important was that he made for great television. He looked dashing in fatigues, and his uncertainty in English showed a touchingly vulnerable, less assured side that in reality he never had. He was simply uncomfortable in English. Three months after Matthews’s scoop, a CBS News team traveled to the green, thickly overgrown tropical mountains of Cuba’s Oriente province and shot a prime-time news special that aired in May called Rebels of the Sierra Maestra: The Story of Cuba’s Jungle Fighters.

  Television had come along too late for the Mexican revolution. It had missed the romance of the beautiful Emiliano Zapata, famous for his exquisite horsemanship, and the wild, mounted northern bandits of Pancho Villa, although they were captured in the fifties by Hollywood with romantic rebel stars including Marlon Brando as Zapata. But now television had a live revolution, with the large and rugged-looking Dr. Fidel Castro and his heartthrob Argentine sidekick Che. The Barbudos, the bearded band of rebels, cigars clenched in their teeth, dressed in green, toted huge guns more impressive for portraits than military tactics—but the weapons were reminiscent of the Mexican revolution, which was the very image of a fabled Latin revolution. In between climbing down green slopes to attack the evil dictatorship and its underpaid and undermotivated henchmen, Fidel could squat in the jungle just south of Miami with CBS correspondent Robert Taber and speak into a microphone. Not nearly as graphic as the live warfare from Vietnam of 1968, this coverage felt immediate but was appealing in its bloodlessness.