50 years later
1968 is the year that transformed America.
1968 began with a hopeful, prayerful and, as it turned out, tragically ironic call for peace.
“Let us strive, then, to inaugurate the year of grace nineteen hundred and sixty-eight — the year of the faith which is transformed into hope — by praying for peace,” Pope Paul VI said in a Jan. 1 message to the world. “Grant us peace!”
There was nothing peaceful about 1968.
’68 was a war.
Waged in faraway jungles and rice paddies and nearby city streets and college campuses, at party conventions and peace talks, Olympic ceremonies and beauty pageants, motel balconies and hotel kitchens, in the media and in our minds.
Fought with B-52 bombers and flame throwers, Black Panthers and Yippies and helmeted police officers, presidents and candidates, mothers and sons, daily casualty counts and nightly televised violence and unrest.
An unrelenting life-and-death struggle for civil rights and human rights, hearts and minds, bodies and souls.
A war that wouldn’t end and couldn’t be won.
“The counterculture explosion of protest, irreverence, generational mistrust, iconoclasm, rebellion and all various forms of radical experimentation — sexual, musical, communal, psychotropic — began polarizing the nation on questions of basic American values,” author Lawrence O’Donnell wrote in “Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics.”
Fifty years later, we remain polarized and deeply divided on those questions.
Fifty years later, we still bear the scars of the woeful and violent wounds of 1968.
Fred Davis, a 33-year-old Memphis city councilman in 1968, feels it every time he sees a photograph or hears the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., killed by an assassin April 4 of that year in Memphis.
“You would think that 50 years later it would all be gone, but it’s not,” Davis, a Memphis insurance agent, said as tears welled in his 83-year-old eyes.
Ray Terry, a 29-year-old civil rights attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice in 1968, feels it every time he sees a photo or hears the voice of Robert F. Kennedy, killed by an assassin June 5 in Los Angeles.
“A lot of people knew the war in Vietnam was immoral and that Bobby was the only candidate who would and could stop it,” said Terry, 79, who is retired in Memphis.
Bill Bontemps, a 23-year-old soldier in a mortar platoon in Vietnam in 1968 — the war’s bloodiest year — feels it all the time.
“While all the turmoil was occurring here in the states, those of us on the front lines in Vietnam were close to experiencing hell,” said Bontemps, 73, a retired marketing director who lives in Washington, Illinois. “For us, 1968 was a year of horror and memories, many which still haunt us today.”
’68 ignited something in us.
The stunning frequency and fury of surprising and devastating events confused and frightened us.
The violence, division and disgust were in our face nearly every day — disturbingly unforgettable moments we watched, heard or read about.
U.S. troops pinned down in Saigon after a massive surprise attack by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces that revealed the absurdity of Johnson administration claims we were winning the war.
A South Vietnamese general executing a captured and handcuffed Viet Cong officer point-blank in the head.
A U.S. platoon led by Lt. William Calley attacking a Vietnamese village called My Lai with orders to “shoot anything that moved.”
“It seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate,” CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, “The Most Trusted Man in America,” gravely concluded in a special report a month later.
“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”
We were shocked when we watched President Lyndon B. Johnson’s stunning announcement in late March that he wouldn’t seek re-election.
We cried when we saw MLK lying on a Memphis motel balcony April 4 and RFK lying on a Los Angeles hotel’s kitchen floor June 5.
We cringed when we saw Chicago police beating unarmed protesters near the Democratic National Convention in July and Miami police shooting unarmed protesters not far from the Republican National Convention in August.
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley yelling obscenities and religious slurs at Jewish Sen. Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, who denounced the city’s “gestapo tactics.”
Tom Hayden and Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman.
“The whole world is watching.” State troopers shooting into a crowd of student protesters from South Carolina State in February, killing three black students and injuring two dozen.
The Kerner Commission warning later that month that the nation was “moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal.”
Protesters and police rioting in Washington, Chicago, Memphis and dozens of other cities.
Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton.
“Burn, baby, burn.”
Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Donald Trump and thousands of other college graduates finding ways to avoid being sent to war.
John Kerry on a swift boat, John McCain in a prisoner-of-war cell and hundreds of thousands of others casualties trying to get back home.
“Stop the bombing!” “Peace with honor.” “Peace now!”
’68 also inspired something in us. Women’s groups, led by Jeanette Rankin, marched in Washington in January to protest the Vietnam War.
Feminists, led by Robin Miller, protested the Miss America pageant in August by throwing “instruments of torture” such as high-heeled shoes and bras into a “freedom trash can.”
Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, who helped organize farm workers, helped Kennedy win the California Democratic primary.
U.S. Olympic medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos bowed their heads and raised their black-gloved fists in a Black Power salute during a medal ceremony in Mexico City in October.
Shirley Chisholm of New York became the first African-American woman elected to Congress.
Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in Gary, Indiana, became America’s first elected black mayors.
We dedicated the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, established Redwood National Park in California and put in place the first steel beams for the World Trade Center in New York.
Boeing rolled out its first 747. McDonald’s starting selling the Big Mac. We were introduced to the air bag, the ATM and emergency 911 service.
Dr. Christiaan Barnard performed the first successful heart transplant. Pope Paul VI banned Catholics from using birth-control pills. Larry Flynt opened his first topless Hustler club in Ohio.
Figure skater Peggy Fleming won Olympic gold in France. Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe dominated the tennis courts. Denny McClain won 30 games for the World Series champion Detroit Tigers.
We sang about a “Revolution” with the Beatles, went looking for “America” with Simon and Garfunkel, and were “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” with Otis Redding.
The musical “Hair” and the movie “The Green Berets” inspired more intergenerational protests. “2001: A Space Odyssey” inspired a young Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and a new generation of filmmakers.
We saw Richard Nixon on “Laugh-In,” U.S. prime-time TV’s first interracial kiss on “Star Trek,” and William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal nearly get into a fistfight on ABC News.
It was the end of liberal Republicans and Dixiecrats but the rise of George Wallace and Ronald Reagan and George McGovern, and the political debut of Roger Ailes, Nixon’s young TV adviser who two decades later started Fox News.
“1968 was the epicenter of a shift, of a fundamental change, the birth of our post-modern media-driven world,” journalist Mark Kurlansky wrote in “1968: The Year that Rocked the World.” ’68 changed our view of the world. On Christmas Eve 1968, for the first time in history, three men orbited the moon. On their fourth orbit, they glanced back and saw the Earth and took a photograph, perhaps the most lasting image of 1968.
“Earthrise,” astronaut Frank Borman said when he saw it.
Time magazine put the photograph on its next cover and called it “Dawn.”
Fifty years later, we still use 1968 to measure the progress of our efforts to address crime and violence, alleviate racism and poverty, resist war and preserve peace, and build a more perfect union and world.
’68 remains our point of reference.