Remembering watershed year that was 1968
Hard to believe so much changed in so short a time, writes Andrew Cohen.
Once in a generation, there comes a moment when everything changes. In the early 20th century, we might say that of 1914 and 1939, when both world wars began. Or 1929, when the markets crashed.
In the second half of the century, a pivotal year was 1968. The world seemed to come apart — shaken by war, revolution, assassination, protest, famine. It’s hard to believe so much could happen in so short a time, but 50 years ago, it did.
In the United States, the conventional wisdom was that Lyndon Johnson, who had been elected in a landslide in 1964, would run again in 1968. But when Sen. Eugene McCarthy challenged him in the first Democratic primary in New Hampshire and won a shocking 42 per cent of the vote on March 12, it suggested a sitting president (LBJ won 49 per cent) could be denied the nomination of his own party.
Chastened and depressed, Johnson delivered the first big surprise of 1968: on March 31 he announced that he would not seek re-election. Everyone was shocked; I remember my father, jubilant, jumping out of his chair. He and the liberals had abandoned Johnson.
Johnson’s renunciation set off a Shakespearean struggle between McCarthy, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey and the crown prince of American politics, Robert Francis Kennedy.
Among Republicans, there were also surprises. The favourite was Gov. George Romney of Michigan, Mitt’s father. But when he claimed in 1967 that he was “brainwashed” over Vietnam, it undid him in early 1968. The year would bring the return of Richard M. Nixon.
The election — and the year — was about Vietnam. The generals there claimed America was winning the war.
That illusion dissolved when the Communists, having infiltrated the south, unveiled another of 1968’s great surprises on Jan. 30: the Tet Offensive. They attacked cities across the South, including Saigon. They even breached the walls of the U.S. Embassy.
For the North Vietnamese, Tet was a military failure; they suffered thousands of deaths and were forced to retreat. Politically, though, it was a triumph: It showed Americans that the war was unwinnable.
America was in revolt. College campuses erupted. Martin Luther King Jr. led a Poor People’s March on Washington. Having won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, his civil rights movement was now embracing an anti-war, anti-poverty message.
King was shot, in Memphis, on April 4, 1968. It ignited days of rioting in cities across the country, engulfing downtown Washington.
In an impromptu requiem that evening to the African-Americans of inner-city Indianapolis, Kennedy spoke lyrically of Dr. King. Indianapolis did not explode. Then, mobilizing his army of loyalists, Bobby made a dash for the coast, less a campaign than a crusade of the poor, young and disenfranchised.
On June 5, 1968, the evening Kennedy won the California primary, he was murdered in Los Angeles.
In November, Nixon was elected. Having promised to end the war, he treasonously foiled a peace settlement in Paris days before the election. As president, he expanded the war, killing another 20,000 Americans.
Unrest was in the air elsewhere. In Canada, Lester Pearson left and the modish swinger, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, arrived. Defying bottlethrowing protesters in Montreal on the eve of the election, Trudeau won a thumping majority.
He would face down René Lévesque and the separatists, who formed a movement in 1968 that would threaten the unity of Canada for the next quarter-century.
In France, students led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit rocked the government of Charles de Gaulle in mass protests in May, forcing him out the next year. In Czechoslovakia, dissidents sought freedom in their “Prague Spring;” the Soviets sent in tanks to crush it. In Nigeria, famine ravaged the breakaway region of Biafra.
Feminism and black power emerged. Leonard Cohen introduced his first album, featuring the imperishable “Suzanne.” The Beatles began to break up.
In December, the astronauts of Apollo 8 entered the orbit of the Moon, the first time man had gone that far. When they looked at Earth at Christmas, they saw a planet, metaphorically, shifting off its axis.