1968 - Mark Kurlansky [60]
Growing up during the cold war had the same effect on most of the children of the world. It made them fearful of both blocs. This was one of the reasons European, Latin American, African, and Asian youth were so quick and so resolute in their condemnation of U.S. military action in Vietnam. By and large, theirs was not a support of communists, but a distaste for either bloc imposing its power. To American youth, the execution of the Rosenbergs, the lives ruined by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings, taught them to distrust the U.S. government.
Youth around the globe saw the world being squeezed by two equal and unsavory forces. American youth had learned that it was important to stand up to both the communists and the anticommunists. The Port Huron Statement recognized that communism should be opposed: “The Soviet Union, as a system, rests on the total repression of organized opposition, as well as a vision of the future in the name of which much human life had been sacrificed, and numerous small and large denials of human dignity rationalized.” But according to the Port Huron Statement, anticommunist forces in America were more harmful than helpful. The statement cautions that “an unreasoning anti-Communism has become a major social problem.”
This first started to be expressed in the 1950s with the film characters portrayed by James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Elvis Presley, and the beat generation writings of Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. But the feeling grew in the 1960s. The young invested hope in John Kennedy, largely because he too was relatively young—the second youngest president in history replacing Eisenhower, who at the time was the oldest. The inauguration of Kennedy in 1961 was the largest change of age ever at the White House, with almost thirty years’ difference between the exiting and entering presidents. But even under Kennedy, young Americans experienced the Cuban missile crisis as a terrifying experience and one that taught that people in power play with human life even if they are young and have a good sense of humor.
Most of the people who arrived at college campuses in the mid-1960s had a deep resentment and distrust of any kind of authority. People in positions of authority anywhere on the political spectrum were not to be trusted. That is why there were no absolute leaders. The moment a Savio or Hayden declared himself leader, he would have lost all credibility.
There was something else that was different about this generation. They were the first to grow up with television, and they did not have to learn how to use it, it came naturally, the same way children who grew up with computers in the 1990s had an instinct for it that older people could not match with education. In 1960, on the day of Eisenhower’s last news conference, Robert Spivack, a columnist, asked the president if he felt the press had been fair to him during his eight years in the White House. Eisenhower answered, “Well, when you come down to it, I don’t see much what a reporter could do to a president, do you?” Such a sentiment would never again be heard in the White House. Kennedy, born in 1917, was said to have understood television, but it was really his brother Robert, eight years younger, who was the architect of the Kennedy television presidency.
By 1968 Walter Cronkite had reached what for him was a disturbing conclusion, that television was playing an important part not only in the reporting of events, but in the shaping of them. Increasingly around the world, public demonstrations were being staged, and it seemed clear to him that they were being staged for television. Street demonstrations are good television. They do not even need to be large, they need only enough people to fill the frame of a television camera.
“You can’t put that as the only reason they were in the streets; demonstrations took place before television, but this was an added incitement to demonstrate,” Cronkite reflected decades later. “Particularly as television communications