1968 - Mark Kurlansky [61]
This generation, with its distrust of authority and its understanding of television, and raised in the finest school of political activism, the American civil rights movement, was uniquely suited to disrupt the world. And then they were offered a war they did not want to fight and did not think should be fought. The young people of the generation, the ones who were in college in 1968, were the draftees. The Haydens and Savios, and Abbie Hoffmans, too young for Korea and too old for Vietnam, had not faced a draft. These younger members of the sixties generation, the people of 1968, had a fury in them that had not been seen before.
CHAPTER 6
HEROES
Let us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.
—FRANTZ FANON, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961
1968 WAS SUPPOSED TO BE Johnson’s year. As winter thawed toward spring, every one of the numerous men who were dreaming of the White House was calculating his chances of beating the incumbent president. And in every one of those hypothetical contests, Johnson was favored to win. But even those not running for president were running against Johnson. Martin Luther King and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference announced a plan to have hundreds of thousands of poor people, white and black, march on Washington in the spring. Poverty, instead of being hidden, would be displayed openly and put on television. The Reverend Ralph Abernathy, the number two leader in the movement, said, “We’re going up there to talk to LBJ, and if LBJ doesn’t do something about what we tell him, we’re going to put him down and get us another one who will.”
But by March 12, 1968 was no longer necessarily Johnson’s year. That day Johnson won his first primary, an easy contest in New Hampshire in which the incumbent was opposed only by the improbable senator Eugene McCarthy, the candidate Life magazine one month earlier had labeled “a conundrum.” The shock was that the president on that snowy New Hampshire day had defeated the conundrum by a mere 230 votes. Around the world, the news was reported as though the unknown senator had just been elected president, or at the very least had defeated Johnson. While Warsaw students were fighting police in the streets and Czechs were drifting ever further from Soviet control, the Soviet Party newspaper, Pravda, said that the primary results showed that the Vietnam War “has become the main and decisive question of the 1968 presidential election.” In Spain, where the University of Madrid was closed, the Catholic newspaper Ya predicted that the November elections would “turn upside down for Johnson.” In Rome, where students had shut down the university, the left-wing press was declaring a victory for the antiwar movement.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, last campaign, 1968
(Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)
Nelson Rockefeller, governor of New York, who was not on the Republican ballot in New Hampshire, conducted a disappointing write-in campaign in which he garnered only 10 percent of the vote. After the primary, he announced his decision not to run, leaving the Republican field open to what to many was the unthinkable: another Nixon nomination. Nixon had little time to gloat, because Robert Kennedy announced that he too was a candidate, raising the terrifying specter in Nixon’s mind of a rerun of the campaign that had almost ended his career—another Nixon-Kennedy showdown. But first Kennedy would have to unseat the incumbent. On March 31 came the bombshell: President Johnson went on television and announced, “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party as your president.”
Suddenly the front-running Democratic incumbent was out of the race, and no one was sure what would happen next. “It was America