1968 - Mark Kurlansky [153]
Odumegwu Ojukwu, the thirty-four-year-old head of state, a British-educated former colonel in the Nigerian army, said, “All I really ask is that the outside world look at us as human beings and not as Negroes bashing heads. If three Russian writers are imprisoned the whole world is outraged, but when thousands of Negroes are massacred . . .”
The U.S. government told reporters that it was helpless to aid Biafra because it could not afford to give the undeveloped world the appearance that it was interfering in an African civil war. It was not clear if this decision took into account the impression it had given the world that it was already interfering in an Asian civil war. But it did seem true that there was a growing resentment in Africa of Western aid for Biafra. This, not surprisingly, was particularly true of Nigerians. One Nigerian officer said to a Swiss relief worker, “We don’t want your custard and your wheat. The people here need fish and garri. We can give them that, so why don’t you find some starving white people to feed.”
CHAPTER 15
THE CRAFT OF
DULL POLITICS
Yes, Nixon was still the spirit of television. Mass communication was still his disease—he thought he could use it to communicate with masses.
—NORMAN MAILER, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, 1968
1968 WAS AN AMERICAN election year, and election years in America tend to display a peculiar kind of frontier campaigning so brash that the other democracies study the spectacle with bemused fascination. But beyond the power plays, the unbridled ambition, and the unconscionably phony posturing are voters who are allowed to hope once every four years. In 1968 hope ended in the late spring on a kitchen floor in California. After the killing of Robert Kennedy, novelist John Updike said that God may have withdrawn His blessing for America.
The world had watched Bobby growing a little every day in 1968—the muttering family runt who became a little more clear-spoken, a little more inspired, with every interview, each appearance, campaigning with an energy and determination rare even in American politics, through crowds with signs that said “Kiss Me Bobby” and who ripped off his shoes and clothing as though he were a rock star. He became so good at television that Abbie Hoffman enviously called him “Hollywood Bobby.” Hoffman said with frustration, “Gene wasn’t much. One could secretly cheer for him the way you cheer for the Mets. It’s easy knowing he can never win. But Bobby . . . Every night we would turn on the TV set and there was the young knight with long hair, holding out his hand. . . . When young longhairs told you how they heard that Bobby turned on, you knew Yippie! was really in trouble.” Tom Hayden, not given to admiring candidates from the political establishment, wrote, “And yet, in that year of turmoil, I found that the only intriguing politician in America was the younger brother of John F. Kennedy.”
Yevtushenko had described Kennedy’s eyes as “two blue clots of will and anxiety.” When Kennedy met the Russian poet, Yevtushenko proposed a toast and wanted to smash the glasses. Kennedy, being not at all Russian, wanted to substitute some cheaper glasses. But cheap glasses are thick, and those, slammed to the floor, did not break, which the Russian poet took as a frightening bad omen.
Everyone could see the doom that Lowell wrote was “woven in” his nerves. So could he. When he learned of his brother’s assassination, he said that he had expected it to be himself. His brother’s widow, Jackie, had feared