1968 - Mark Kurlansky [0]
(Photo by Bruno Barbey/Magnum Photos)
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION:
PART I
The Winter of Our Discontent
CHAPTER 1
The Week It Began
CHAPTER 2
He Who Argues With a Mosquito Net
CHAPTER 3
A Dread Unfurling of the Bushy Eyebrow
CHAPTER 4
To Breathe in a Polish Ear
PART II
Prague Spring
CHAPTER 5
On the Gears of an Odious Machine
CHAPTER 6
Heroes
CHAPTER 7
A Polish Categorical Imperative
CHAPTER 8
Poetry, Politics, and a Tough Second Act
CHAPTER 9
Sons and Daughters of the New Fatherland
CHAPTER 10
Wagnerian Overtones of a Hip and Bearded Revolution
CHAPTER 11
April Motherfuckers
CHAPTER 12
Monsieur, We Think You Are Rotten
CHAPTER 13
The Place to Be
PART III
The Summer Olympics
CHAPTER 14
Places Not to Be
CHAPTER 15
The Craft of Dull Politics
CHAPTER 16
Phantom Fuzz Down by the Stockyards
CHAPTER 17
The Sorrow of Prague East
CHAPTER 18
The Ghastly Strain of a Smile
CHAPTER 19
In an Aztec Place
PART IV
The Fall of Nixon
CHAPTER 20
Theory and Practice for the Fall Semester
CHAPTER 21
The Last Hope
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PERMISSION ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
OTHER BOOKS BY MARK KURLANSKY
QUOTES
COPYRIGHT
To my beautiful Talia Feiga;
so that she will know truth from lies, love life, hate war,
and always believe that she can change the world
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to express my deep admiration and profound gratitude to Walter Cronkite, Gene Roberts, and Daniel Schorr, who informed this book with countless invaluable insights and the wisdom they so generously shared from three most remarkable careers.
I also owe a great debt to Nancy Miller, my patient editor, who has been dreaming and thinking with me about this book for ten years; to Deirdre Lanning, who helped me through a cybernightmare; and to my absolutely incomparable agent, Charlotte Sheedy, who is the kind of sixties person I am proud to have as a friend.
Thanks to Alice Dowd of the New York Public Library for her help and cooperation, to Mary Haskell for generously sharing her poster collection, and to my friend Hanna Kordowicz for her help in Poland, Elzbieta Wirpsza for her Polish translation, my friend Krystyna Skalski and Andrzej Dudzinski for help in Warsaw, Mark Segall for his assistance, and Dariusz Stola for his insights into Polish history. Thanks to Peter Katel, Fernando Moreno, and Tito Ramirez Morales for help in Mexico City, and Chantal Siri and Chantal Regnault in Paris. Thanks to Marlene Adler for her help at CBS, Jane Klain at the Museum of Broadcasting, Sarah Shannon for help in research, and Deborah Kroplick, without whose help and enthusiasm I am not sure how I would have finished.
Thanks to my wife, Marian Mass, who helped me in a hundred ways and whose great heart renews my faith in the world, and to the memory of her sister, Janet Phibbs, who I think would have liked this book.
I am also deeply appreciative of the help given to me by Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, Raúl Álvarez Garín, Eleanor Bakhtadze, François Cerutti, Evelyn Cohen, Dany Cohn-Bendit, Lewis Cole, Roberto Escudero, Konstanty Gebert, Alain Geismar, Radith Geismar, Suzanne Goldberg, Myrthokleia González Gallardo, Tom Hayden, Alain Kri-vine, Jacek Kuroń, Ifigenia Martínez, Pino Martínez de la Roca, Lorenzo Meyer, Adam Michnik, François Pignet, Roberto Rodríguez Baños, Nina and Eugeniusz Smolar, Joanna Szczesna, and especially Mark Rudd for his time, hospitality, the use of his unpublished manuscript, and for his honesty.
And to everyone who said “No!” and most especially all those who are still saying it.
INTRODUCTION
THE YEAR THAT
ROCKED THE WORLD
One of the pleasures of middle age is to find out that one was right, and that one was much righter than one knew at say 17 or 23.
—EZRA POUND, ABC of Reading, 1934
There has never been a year like 1968, and it is unlikely that there will ever be one again. At a time when nations and cultures were still separate and very different—and in 1968 Poland, France, the United States, and Mexico