1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  The Italians for a brief moment in November were gripped by the story of Franca Viola, who married the man she loved, a former schoolmate. Two years earlier she had rejected the son of a wealthy family, Filippo Melodia, so he kidnapped her and raped her. After being raped, a woman had to marry her aggressor because she had been dishonored and no one else would have her. This approach had worked for Sicilian men for about a thousand years. But Franca, to the applause of much of Italy, went into court and said to Melodia, “I do not love you. I will not marry you.” This came as a blow to Melodia, not only because he had been rejected, but because under Sicilian law, if the woman doesn’t marry the rapist, he is then tried for rape, a crime for which Melodia was sentenced to eleven years in prison.

  On December 3 strikes and protests by both workers and students paralyzed Italy after two striking workers were shot and killed in Sicily. An anarchist bomb destroyed a government food office in Genoa. The bombers left flyers that said, “Down with Authority!” By December 5 Rome was closed by a general strike. But by December 6 the workers had ended their strike for higher wages and left tens of thousand of protesting students on their own.

  In France, too, the idea of merging the worker and student movements was still alive but still failing. On December 4, Jacques Sauvageot met with union leaders in the hopes of building the unified front that had failed in the spring. De Gaulle had been artificially propping up the franc for more than a year simply because he believed in “the strong franc,” and it was now seriously overvalued and declining rapidly in world currency markets. Instead of the normal fiscal maneuver of devaluing, he shocked Europe and the financial world by instituting a series of drastic measures to reduce social spending in order to try to uphold the declining currency. French workers were furious. On December 5 strikes began. But by December 12 the government had negotiated an end to the strikes and the students again found themselves alone when they shut down Nanterre to protest police attempts to interrogate students. The French government threatened to start expelling “student agitators” from the universities.

  With each blow, it was predicted that de Gaulle would be tamed—when his prestige declined after the spring riots and strikes, when his foreign policy was shaken by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, when his economy was undone by the collapse of the franc. Yet at the end of the year, to the utter frustration of his European partners, he blocked British entry into the Common Market for the third time.

  On November 7 Beate Klarsfeld, the non-Jewish German wife of French Jewish survivor and celebrated Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, went to the social democrats convention in Berlin, walked up to Chancellor Kiesinger, accused him of being a Nazi, and slapped him in the face. By the end of 1968 the West German state had sent to prison 6,221 Germans for crimes committed during Nazi rule—a considerable number of convictions, but a minuscule percentage of Nazi criminals. In 1968 the West German state convicted a total of only thirty Nazis, almost all minor, obscure figures. Despite the numerous very active and murderous Nazi courts during Hitler’s rule, not a single judge had ever been sent to prison. On December 6 a Berlin court acquitted Hans Joachim Rehse, a Nazi judge who had sentenced 230 people to death. The prosecution had chosen to try him on seven of the more arbitrary and flagrant abuses of justice, but the court ruled that the prosecution had shown only abuse of the law, not the intention to do so. The decision was based on an earlier case in which it was ruled that judges were not guilty “if they were blinded by Nazi ideology and the legal philosophy of that time.” As Rehse left the courtroom, a crowd chanted, “Shame! Shame!” and an elderly man walked up and slapped him across the face. The following week eight thousand marched through Berlin to the city hall to protest Rehse’s release. There was little time left. The federal statute for prosecuting Nazi crimes was to expire in one more year, December 31, 1969.

  During the summer of 1968, the Spanish government had placed the Basque province of Guipúzcoa under indefinite martial law. In the village of Lazcano, the village priest denounced the organist for having played the Spanish national anthem during “the elevation of the sacrament.” The priest was fined for his criticism, which was easily arranged since the organist also happened to be the mayor of the village. While the mayor was away, his house was burned down. Five young Basques were arrested and held for five days. According to witnesses, they were handcuffed to chairs and kicked and beaten for three of those days. They confessed. The prosecution asked for death sentences in a trial that presented no evidence other than police testimony. In December three were sentenced to forty-eight years in prison, one was sentenced to twelve years, and one was acquitted.

  However, on December 16 the Spanish government tried to show its concern for justice by voiding the 476-year-old order by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelling all Jews from Spain who did not convert to Catholicism.

  In June, when Tom Hayden had called for “two, three, many Columbias,” he had added that the goal was “so that the U.S. must either change or send its troops to occupy American campuses.” By December he was getting his second scenario. On December 5, after a week of riots and scuffles between police and students and faculty at San Francisco State College, armed policemen, weapons drawn, tossing canisters of Mace, began to clear the campus. Acting president S. I. Hayakawa, who had made his point of view clear when arriving in office a week before by denouncing the 1964 Free Speech Movement, told a crowd of more than two thousand students, “Police have been instructed to clear the campus. There are no innocent bystanders anymore.” The protests had begun with the demands of black students for black studies courses. For the last three weeks of the year the university was kept open only with a large armed police contingent regularly attacking students as they gathered to protest.

  The nearby College of San Mateo, which was closed because of violence, reopened December 15, in the words of the school president, “as an armed camp,” with riot police stationed throughout the campus.

  The most reviled president of a riot-torn campus, Columbia’s Grayson Kirk, who resigned in August, in December moved into a twenty-room mansion in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The mansion had been provided by Columbia University, which owned the property.

  In the beginning of December, the British, who had backed the Nigerian federal government, started to change their view of the Biafran war. While before they had been insisting on the imminent victory of Nigeria, they had now come to see the war as a hopeless stalemate. The United States also changed its policy. Johnson ordered contingency plans for a massive $20 million air, land, and sea relief program for Biafra. The French had already been supplying Biafra, which the Nigerians angrily said was the only thing keeping Biafra going. Supply planes for Biafra took off every night at 6:00 P.M. from Libreville, Gabon. But Biafra was able to continue its fight for only one more year, and by the time it finally surrendered on January 15, 1970, an estimated one million civilians had starved to death.

  After eleven months of negotiation, the eighty-two crew members of the U.S. ship Pueblo were released from North Korea in exchange for a confession by the U.S. government that it had been caught spying. As soon as the eighty-two Americans were safe, the U.S. government repudiated the statement. Some felt this was a strange way for a nation to conduct its affairs, and others felt it was a small price to pay to get the crew members released without a war. Left unclear was exactly what the Pueblo was doing when seized by the North Koreans.

  1970 poster, after the My Lai massacre became known. Frazer Dougherty, Jon Hendricks, and Irving Pettin designed the poster from an R. L. Haeberle photograph.

  (Collection of Mary Haskell)

  In Vietnam word of the massacre carried out by the Americal Division in My Lai in March continued to spread through the region. In the fall, the letter from Tom Glen of the 11th Brigade reporting the massacre was in division headquarters, and the new deputy operations officer for the Americal Division, Major Colin Powell, was asked to write a response. Without in
terviewing Glen, he wrote that there was nothing to the accusations—they were simply unfounded rumors. The following September, only nine months later, Lieutenant William Calley was charged with multiple murders, and by November it had become a major story. Yet Powell claimed he never heard about the massacre until two years after it happened. Nothing of Powell’s role in the cover-up—he was not even in Vietnam at the time of the massacre—was known by the public until Newsweek magazine reported it in September 1995 in connection with rumors of a Powell run for president.

  Despite Johnson’s November announcement of a unilateral halt to bombing of North Vietnam and the expressed hope that this would lead to intense and productive negotiations, on December 6 the Selective Service announced that the draft call was to be increased by three thousand men a month. By mid-December peace negotiators in Paris were saying that Johnson had “oversold” the prospects for peace as the election approached.

  In Paris the year-end peace negotiations had settled down to a tough and determined effort to resolve . . . the table issue. Hanoi was determined to have a square table, and that was completely unacceptable to South Vietnam. Other proposals debated by the different delegations included a round table, two arcs facing each other but not separated, or facing but separated. By the end of the year eleven different configurations were on the metaphoric table, which was still the only one they had. Behind the table issue were thornier realities, such as the North Vietnamese insistence on a Viet Cong presence, while the Viet Cong refused to speak with South Vietnam but were willing to speak with the Americans.

  Senator George McGovern, the last-minute peace candidate at the Chicago convention, blurted out what many were trying to avoid saying when he called South Vietnamese vice president Nguyen Cao Ky a “little tinhorn dictator” and accused him and other South Vietnamese officials of holding up peace negotiations. “While Ky is playing around in the plush spots of Paris and haggling over whether he is going to sit at a round table or a rectangular table, American men are dying to prop up his corrupt regime back home.” It had been the policy of the antiwar senators to avoid speaking plainly about the South Vietnamese, some out of respect for Johnson, others to avoid upsetting negotiations. With Johnson out of power, they intended to speak more plainly. Some said they wanted to wait until Nixon’s inauguration, but McGovern started speaking two weeks early. A Gallup poll showed that a narrow majority of Americans now favored withdrawal and leaving the fighting to the South Vietnamese.

  McGovern urged that there be a thoughtful assessment of the lessons of Vietnam. To him one of the great lessons was “the peril of drawing historical analogies.” Although there was no parallel between what was happening in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s and Europe in the late 1930s, the World War II generation became mired in a Vietnamese civil war in part because they had witnessed the appeasement of Hitler.

  McGovern said, “This is a war of the daily body count, given to us over the years like the football scores.” The military understood that this too had been a mistake. They had even exaggerated the body counts. Future wars would appear to be as bloodless as possible, with the military saying as little as possible about enemy dead.

  The military was learning its own lessons, not all of which were what McGovern had in mind when he tried to open this discussion. The military concluded that in a television age, journalists would have to be much more tightly controlled. The image of warfare had to be monitored carefully. Generals would have to consider how a battle looked on television and how to control that view.

  The idea of a drafted army would be abandoned because it produced too many reluctant soldiers and too much adverse public opinion. It was better to have an all-volunteer military, drawn mostly from a few segments of society, people in need of employment and career opportunities. Wars would cease to be a major issue on campuses when students were no longer asked to fight.

  But warfare was also to be used only against relatively defenseless countries, where technological superiority was critical, against enemies that would offer weeks, not years, of resistance.

  The year 1968 ended exactly as it began, with the United States accusing the Viet Cong of violating its own Christmas cease-fire. But during the course of this year, 14,589 American servicemen died in Vietnam, doubling the total American casualties. When the United States finally withdrew in 1973, 1968 remained the year with the highest casualties of the entire war.

  At the end of the year, Czechoslovakia was still defiant. A nationwide three-day sit-in strike by one hundred thousand students was supported by brief work stoppages by blue-collar workers. Dubek made a speech saying that the government was doing its best to bring back reform but that the population should stop acts of defiance because they only led to repression. In truth, by December, when travel restrictions were put back in place, the last of the reforms had been undone. On December 21 Dubek addressed the Central Committee of the Slovak Communist Party, his last speech of 1968. He was still resolute that the reforms must go through and that they would build a communist democracy. With the exception of a few references to “current difficulties,” the speech could have been written when the Prague Spring was in full bloom. He said:

  We must, as a permanent positive feature of the post-January policy, consistently ensure fundamental rights and freedoms, observe Socialist legality, and fully rehabilitate unjustly wronged citizens.

  He urged everyone to go home, spend time with their families, and get some rest. In 1969 Dubek was removed from office. In 1970 he was dismissed from the Communist Party. He and the reforms, “socialism with a human face,” slowly vanished into history. Mlyná, who resigned his post in November 1968, realizing that he would no longer be able to pursue any of the policies he had wanted, said, “We were really fools. But our folly was the ideology of reform Communism.”

  In April 1968 Dubek had given an interview to the French communist newspaper l’Humanité:

  I do not know why a socialism that is based on the vigorous functioning of all democratic principles and on the people’s free right to express their views should be any less solid. On the contrary, I am deeply convinced that the democratic atmosphere in the party and in public life will result in the strengthening of the unity of our socialist society and we shall win over to active collaboration all the capable and talented citizens of our country.

  Dubek, the bureaucrat with the pleasant smile, was a confusing blend of contradictions. He spent his entire career as a cog in a totalitarian engine and then, when he emerged on top, declared himself a democrat. He was a pragmatist and a dreamer. He could be a skilled maneuverer in the baroque labyrinth of communist politics. But in the end even he admitted that he could be incredibly naïve.

  By the end of 1968 the Soviets were worried, but they had not yet discovered how much they lost when they killed the dream of the Prague Spring. Dubek had tried to come back the way Gomułka had come back in 1956, curbing great ambitions, lowering the people’s expectations, getting along with Moscow. But Dubek was not a Gomułka. At least that was what Moscow concluded—while the people of Czechoslovakia were still trying to decide what he was. It is often forgotten that in 1968 Alexander Dubek was the one leader who was unshakably antiwar, who would not contemplate a military solution even to save himself—a leader who refused to be bullied or bought by either communism or capitalism, who never played a cold war game, never turned to the capitalists, never broke a treaty or agreement or even his word—and he stayed in power, true power, for only 220 exciting days. They were days in which impossible things seemed possible, like the slogan written on a Paris wall in May: “Be realistic, ask for the impossible.” After he was gone, no one felt that he had ever really known him.

  The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968, marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. When the end finally came more than twenty years later, the West was shocked. They had already forgotten. But at the time of the invasion, even Time magazine was predicting the end. It was the
end of heroic Russia: a country widely admired because it had bravely dared to stand alone and build the first socialist society, because it was the big protector in the fraternity of socialist countries, because it had sacrificed millions to rid Europe of fascism. It was no longer viewed as benign. It was the bully who crushed small countries. After the fall of the Soviets, Dubek wrote that the Soviet Union had been doomed by one essential flaw: “The system inhibited change.”

  The downfall took longer than most people predicted. In 2002 Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, told his long-standing friend, former Dubek government official Zdenk Mlyná:

  The suppression of the Prague Spring, which was an attempt to arrive at a new understanding of Socialism, also engendered a very harsh reaction in the Soviet Union, leading to a frontal assault against all forms of free-thinking. The powerful ideological and political apparatus of the State acted decisively and uncompromisingly. This had an effect on all domestic and foreign policy and the entire development of Soviet society, which entered a stage of profound stagnation.