1968 - Mark Kurlansky [2]
1968 was a time of shocking modernism, and modernism always fascinates the young and perplexes the old, yet in retrospect it was a time of an almost quaint innocence. Imagine Columbia students in New York and University of Paris students discovering from a distance that their experiences were similar and then meeting, gingerly approaching one another to find out what, if anything, they had in common. With amazement and excitement, people learned that they were using the same tactics in Prague, in Paris, in Rome, in Mexico, in New York. With new tools such as communication satellites and inexpensive erasable videotape, television was making everyone very aware of what everyone else was doing, and it was thrilling because for the first time in human experience the important, distant events of the day were immediate.
It will never be new again. “Global village” is a sixties term invented by Marshall McLuhan. The shrinking of the globe will never be so shocking in the same way that we will never again feel the thrill of the first moon shots or the first broadcasts from outer space. We now live in a world in which we await a new breakthrough every day. If another 1968 generation is ever produced, its movements will all have Web sites, carefully monitored by law enforcement, while they are e-mailing one another for updates. And no doubt other tools will be invented. But even the idea of new inventions has become banal.
Born in 1948, I was of the generation that hated the Vietnam War, protested against it, and has a vision of authority shaped by the memory of the peppery taste of tear gas and the way the police would slowly surround in casual flanking maneuvers before moving in, club first, for the kill. I am stating my prejudices at the outset because even now, more than three decades later, an attempt at objectivity on the subject of 1968 would be dishonest. Having read The New York Times, Time, Life, Playboy, Le Monde, Le Figaro, a Polish daily and a weekly, and several Mexican papers from the year 1968—some claiming objectivity and others stating their prejudices—I am convinced that fairness is possible but true objectivity is not. The objective American press of 1968 was far more subjective than it realized.
Working on this book reminded me that there was a time when people spoke their minds and were not afraid to offend—and that since then, too many truths have been buried.
Mexican student movement silk-screen poster with the SDS peace sign and a Cuban Che Guevara slogan “We shall win!”
(Amigos de la Unidad de Postgrado de la Escuela de Diseño A.C.)
PART I
THE WINTER
OF OUR
DISCONTENT
The things of the eye are done.
On the illuminated black dial,
green ciphers of a new moon—
one, two, three, four, five, six!
I breathe and cannot sleep.
Then morning comes,
saying, “This was night.”
—ROBERT LOWELL, “Myopia: a Night, ”from For the Union Dead, 1964
CHAPTER 1
THE WEEK IT BEGAN
THE YEAR 1968 BEGAN the way any well-ordered year should—on a Monday morning. It was a leap year. February would have an extra day. The headline on the front page of The New York Times read, WORLD BIDS ADIEU TO A VIOLENT YEAR; CITY GETS SNOWFALL.
In Vietnam, 1968 had a quiet start. Pope Paul VI had declared January 1 a day of peace. For his day of peace, the pope had persuaded the South Vietnamese and their American allies to give a twelve-hour extension to their twenty-four-hour truce. The People’s Liberation Armed Forces in South Vietnam, a pro–North Vietnamese guerrilla force popularly