1968 - Mark Kurlansky [168]
It seems a surprising degree of shock about obscene language for a man who had just spent several years working with Lyndon Johnson. But Johnson did not talk that way in front of women, which was the old code. It might have shocked Humphrey to know that a psychiatrist who taught at Columbia during the spring upheavals wrote that a Barnard woman was more likely than a Columbia man to “curse a cop” during a riot. “They were aware that cursing was a weapon, one of the few they had.” William Zinsser, writing about this in Life magazine, said, “Feminism finds its ultimate tool—the four letter word”—but then Zinsser referred in his article to “Barnard girls” and “Columbia men.”
The majority of people on the other side of the generation gap from Humphrey were not likely to empathize with his horror of naughty words in front of the fairer sex. Why didn’t Daley’s anti-Semitism shock Humphrey, not to mention that trendy word about carnal relations with a female parent? In any event, he had probably lost most of those voters on “Goodness me.” By 1968 not many people were still saying “Goodness me.”
In later hearings, Abbie Hoffman agreed with Mayor Daley that it was the television cameras that had brought the protesters to Chicago. In September Hoffman boasted, “Because of our actions in Chicago, Richard Nixon will be elected President.” Many were inclined to agree with that assessment. But it could still come down to the campaigns the two candidates would run. Strangely, for the first time in 1968, the war in Vietnam was not the deciding issue.
Miraculously, the clubbings in Chicago killed no one, though one man was shot while fleeing. The police claimed he was armed. At the same time, Vietnam had its worst week of the summer, with 308 Americans killed, 1,134 wounded, and an estimated 4,755 enemy soldiers killed.
CHAPTER 17
THE SORROW OF
PRAGUE EAST
I think that in the long run, our non-violent approach and the moral supremacy of the Czechoslovak people over the aggressor had, and still has moral significance. In retrospect it could be said that the peaceful approach may have contributed to the breakup of the “aggressive” bloc. . . . My conviction that moral considerations have their place in politics does not follow simply from the fact that small countries must be moral because they do not have the ability to strike back at bigger powers. Without morality it is not possible to speak of international law. To disregard moral principles in the realm of politics would be a return to the law of the jungle.
—ALEXANDER DUBČEK, August 1990
ON TUESDAY, AUGUST 20, Anton Tazky, a secretary of the Slovak Communist Party Central Committee and a personal friend of Dubek’s, was driving back to Bratislava from an outlying Slovak district. He saw odd, bright lights, and as he drove closer, realizing that these were the headlights of tanks and military trucks, and that these vehicles were accompanied by soldiers in foreign uniforms, he concluded that he had driven by a movie shoot. He went to bed.
August 20 was a hazy summer day. Dubek’s wife, Anna, had been up much of the night before with intense pain from a gallbladder problem. On Tuesday morning Dubek took her to the hospital and explained to her that he had an afternoon presidium meeting that would run late and he might not be able to visit her until Wednesday morning. It was the last time the presidium would meet before the Fourteenth Party Congress three weeks later, and Dubek and his colleagues wanted to use the congress to solidify in law the achievements of the Prague