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THE YEAR OF DREAMING DANGEROUSLY | PAGE 1, 2
Out of the ashes of the riots in the wake of King's murder, new hope came in the form of Bobby Kennedy, who had undergone a profound transformation from Vietnam hawk and aide to Sen. Joe McCarthy to dove and spokesman for the dispossessed. Kennedy's campaign was suddenly a romantic odyssey. The last hero. The crowds -- black and white, young and old, working-class and affluent -- were enormous, frenzied. People reached out to touch him as if he were a rock star, tearing off cuff links, even shoes. He broke bread with a fasting Cesar Chavez to support the farm workers' union. He won the California primary. And then he too was gunned down. The two great reformers, King and Kennedy, were dead. That led to the inevitable showdown. Both sides, rebels and rulers, were spoiling for a confrontation. Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley made it possible. He denied permits for protesters at the Democratic Convention. While "the whole world (was) watching," his police rioted, clubbing demonstrators, reporters and bystanders indiscriminately. The Democratic Party self-destructed. The system fell apart on national television. Backlash "law & order" candidate George Wallace stirred up the angry white male vote. The country was dangerously polarized. Cold warrior Richard Nixon -- back from the political dead -- won the presidency by a razor-thin margin. The war in Vietnam would last another seven years, engulfing Cambodia and Laos. Curtain. And that was just the year at home. In May '68 there was very nearly a revolution in France. In August, Russian tanks invaded Czechoslovakia and crushed the Prague Spring, the experiment in "socialism with a human face." And in October the Mexican government massacred as many as 500 students demonstrating for democracy in the streets of Mexico City. Why was '68 such a convulsive, extraordinary year? One theory, popular among the chattering class, was that it was all Dr. Benjamin Spock's fault. "Permissive child rearing, which actually I never experienced in my own life, was supposed to be the source of the movement," observed author/activist Barbara Ehrenreich. "We heard over and over again that we were a generation of spoiled kids, Dr. Spock's kids. But that wasn't true of Germany. It was not true of Italy or Japan. The fact that this outpouring of protest was international completely refutes that simplistic, psychological argument." So what was the cause of this international phenomenon? Demographics is no doubt a key. This was the arrival of the baby boom writ large across the Western world. Universities were teeming from Paris to Mexico City to Berkeley. By '68 there were some 8 million students enrolled in American colleges, many more than ever before. "An enormous generation swamped the institutions that were supposed to civilize them," bemoaned Judge Robert Bork, who had his thumb in the dike at Yale. We were a generation in the midst of self-discovery and eager to assert ourselves. The mood was distinctly rebellious on campus -- for a variety of reasons. In the United States, the struggle for racial equality in the South clearly inspired and galvanized a youth movement. But the war in Vietnam and the draft were absolutely central. I remember a cover of Ramparts magazine that captured how I felt: "Alienation is when your country is at war and you hope the other side wins." The Vietnam War "broke my American heart," said Students for a Democratic Society leader Carl Oglesby, and I know exactly what he meant. It shattered forever my childhood patriotism and made me question everything. The war not only caused the greatest rift in American society since the Civil War, it generated violent protests worldwide in '68: London, Rome, Berlin, Tokyo. Another factor was rising expectations. Not only were we protesting social injustice, we -- students, activists, freaks -- came to believe we were creating a new society, a counterculture. In the midst of '68's tragedies, there was tremendous exuberance and joy. The economy promised more affluence, the Kennedy-Johnson years brought more reforms, from civil rights laws to the War on Poverty. Our motto, in a way, was: "More." And then, there was the music. From James Brown's "Say It Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud," to the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man." No matter how many times the music has been cynically recycled as nostalgic hooks in car commercials, the rock 'n' roll of '68 was in real time incandescent, sometimes incendiary. It was on every radio, AM at that: Aretha Franklin's "Think," Janis Joplin's "Piece of My Heart," Sly and the Family Stone's "Dance to the Music," the Temptations' "I Wish It Would Rain," Otis Redding's "Dock of the Bay," the Doors, Cream, the Chambers Brothers and the Beatles' "Revolution" (warning about the dangers of carrying pictures of Chairman Mao -- excellent advice). Much has been made of the impact television had on the '60s generation. But I would argue that radio was even more important. Cheap transistors and car radios were like drums in the jungle for a worldwide youth movement. They made the music nearly universal at a time when even schlock rock -- the Rascals' hit, "People Got to Be Free" -- carried a "subversive" message. No one caught the mood of impending doom more accurately than Bob Dylan, who always seemed to be six months ahead of everybody else. In his first post-motorcycle accident song, "All Along the Watchtower," which Jimi Hendrix transformed into a hit, Dylan wailed, "There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief." And in words that riveted me in '68 and stayed with me ever since, Dylan implored: "Let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late." In '68 the Mexican students sang Beatles songs as they took to the streets. Bernadette Devlin and the civil rights marchers in Northern Ireland echoed, "We Shall Overcome." In one of my favorite stories, recounted by Paul Berman in his book "A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968," the young playwright Vaclav Havel visited New York in the spring of '68, went up to Columbia to observe the student strike and purchased Frank Zappa and Velvet Underground albums to take back to Prague, where they inspired a dissident band, the Plastic People, and other cultural rebels. For Havel and his comrades in the Prague Spring -- who finally succeeded 20 years later in their Velvet Revolution -- Frank Zappa and Lou Reed are heroes of the anti-authoritarian spirit that helped end Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. (It's a concept, incidentally, that Judge Bork just can't grasp. When I told him about the Havel-Zappa connection, he just shook his head. Bork still wants to censor Zappa.) And what of the relevance of all this, 30 years later? If nothing else, knowing what transpired in '68 is a way to understand our generation, the '60s generation. My father's generation endured the Depression and fought World War II. But '68 was our crucible. It was the year a generation raised in the optimism of the New Frontier and the Beatles lost its innocence. 1968 remains a fault line in American politics: What side were you on? As Pat Buchanan, who was a Nixon speechwriter in '68, told me, "I think there's an amount of bitterness and animosity that our generation is going to carry to its grave. These wounds aren't going to heal." This is one of the reasons Bill and Hillary Clinton are the objects of such venom. Clinton may not have been much of a street-fightin' man, but he was of that time, and hey, he dodged the draft, didn't he? Reporter Jules Witcover called his book on '68 "The Year the Dream Died." The dream, that is, of King and Kennedy, of a nobler, more inclusive, reformed America. Instead, we got Nixon, Watergate, Ronald Reagan and 25 years of political backlash in Washington. In a political sense, '68 in America was not the beginning, but an end. Buchanan is fond of saying that conservatives won the political battle, but lost the cultural war. The feminist protest at the 1968 Miss America pageant certainly presaged the women's movement, though contrary to myth no bras were actually burned there. But, sure -- legalized abortion, gay rights, student power, drug enjoyment (and abuse), affirmative action, uncensored expression -- they're all part of the cultural transformation set in motion by the upheavals of the late '60s. But '68 was also something quite specific. A year of high moral drama. A sort of distillation of the '60s when politics mattered and adrenalin was the drug of choice. Before self-indulgence and narcissism set in. Jack Newfield wrote that after the deaths of King and Kennedy we became a generation of might-have-beens. What if Kennedy had won? What if the Vietnam War had ended in 1969? In other countries, the story is a bit different The French students lost at the barricades but ultimately managed to reform the antiquated educational system and to rejuvenate the Socialist Party, which took power a decade later. Their cherubic leader, "Danny the Red," is now a member of the European Parliament. In the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, class of '68, is president. And in Mexico, at long last, democracy has stirred and an opposition leader has been elected mayor of Mexico City. In a symbol of the change, a Mexican congressional committee this year began investigating the army massacre of student protesters in '68, the "Night of Sorrow," which the government had shrouded in secrecy for 30 years. In Paris '68, the audacious slogan was, "All power to the imagination." That was the pure spirit of '68. Question everything. Dream. A simultaneous cultural and political revolt. That spirit -- what Paul Berman calls a "utopian exhilaration" -- swept the globe. What became of it? Assassinations, repression and exhaustion extinguished the spirit of '68. But like a subterranean fire, it resurfaces at historic moments: the student pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square, or the end of apartheid in South Africa. Berman argues, I think persuasively, that the embers of '68, especially in Prague, helped ignite the revolution of 1989 that brought liberal democracy to Eastern Europe and ended the Cold War.
Turn-of-the-century America, by contrast, seems an unlikely place for a revival
of utopian idealism. I don't know where we might, in this skeptical, fragmented, self-absorbed country, locate the flickering spirit of '68.
Stephen Talbot's documentary "1968: The Year That Shaped a Generation," will air Monday, July 27, at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations. |
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