THE VOICE OF THE PEOPLE OF 1968
Pondering their list of 1968’s top stories, the Chicago Tribune’s editors that year concluded it would be easier to render judgment on the year if they were film critics, not journalists.
“As a movie, 1968 would undoubtedly have established box office records but would have been assessed a critical failure for its emphasis on violence and chaos,” the paper wrote on New Year’s Eve half a century ago.
That day’s edition included a special section of the year’s history-making headlines. It opened with the story of the USS Pueblo, a naval intelligence vessel captured by North Korean gunships on Jan. 23, 1968. The final page noted that when the Apollo 8 spaceship completed a round trip to the moon, a “world-weary 1968 was given its greatest triumph on Dec. 27.”
In between were accounts of the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert Kennedy, of U.S. troops patrolling riot-torn American cities and Soviet tanks invading Czechoslovakia. President Lyndon Johnson declined to run for re-election, and when the Democrats met in Chicago to pick a replacement candidate, there were bloody clashes between cops and hippies.
So it’s little wonder that, to judge by Tribune readers’ letters to the editor published around the year’s end, Americans were confused and angry in 1968.
“After studying these episodes, many will come to the same conclusion,” wrote Virginia Sandberg of Mount Prospect, “that improvement is needed regarding the increase in crime, hate, and the loss of face for our government.”
Indeed, a nagging sense of America’s declining prestige troubled Tribune readers who rendered a split decision when the Pueblo crisis ended with the release of the crew, but not the ship, on Dec. 27.
I.C.R. of Chicago thought we should have told the North Koreans, 11 months earlier, that if our boys aren’t set free, the Marines are coming to get them. But Ray Gryska of Chicago countered: “By taking immediate action we would have been asking for a World War.”
Even a limited war was the last thing President Johnson wanted. He was desperately trying to find a way to end the stalemated Vietnam War, a crushing political liability in an election year like 1968. Opting for a negotiated settlement, he had to accept responsibility for the Pueblo affair.
So the crisis ended with a bizarre scene that stuck in the throats of many Americans: The U.S. issued a formal statement that the Pueblo had intruded into North Korean waters. Even as he was about to sign it, the American negotiator repudiated it as blackmail.
That prompted George Hoffman of Chicago to remind the Tribune of a recent item in its “Historical Scrapbook” feature. When Haitians seized a European ship in 1869, the British and French said that if it wasn’t released, they’d reduce to ashes the port where it was held.
“Contrast this with our dishonorable handling of the Pueblo,” Hoffman wrote.
Yet as the Tribune’s Kay Loring noted, no one story, no matter how dramatic, could sum up 1968. In a New Year’s Eve column, she proclaimed it the “year that history and hemlines moved at bewildering pace; that skirts flirted with midi and maxi and remained true in their way to micro-mini; that protest and dissension and violence almost became a way of life; that Bonnie and Clyde and their styles became a rage.”
On Dec. 31, 1968, the Tribune reported the kind of events that are the routine news of every day of every year. Two CTA bus drivers were robbed, as was an employee of Revere Electrical Supply in the company’s parking lot. A dog named Louie was adopted by the family of a boy named Larry. Guests fled a smoky fire in the Conrad Hilton Hotel. Firefighters fought another blaze amid the pushcarts of the Maxwell Street Market.
But in the special section was a reprinted headline from June 5, 1968: “JACKIE WITH RFK AT DEATH.” She “had grown closer to Sen. Kennedy since her own husband was slain by an assassin in 1963,” the story noted of President John F. Kennedy’s widow. “Outside the hospital, hundreds keep a quiet vigil. Many wept.”
That and other headlines of 1968 strongly suggested that the U.S. was on the wrong track. Yet then, as now, Americans were bitterly divided about what had led their country astray and how to undo it.
Peggy Anton, a Sullivan High School student, faulted the passivity of ordinary Americans. “Take heed future sheep,” she implored her generation. “Are you going to follow the herd over the cliff, or have you the strength to take your soul back from the brink and follow your own byway?”
William Schmidt, meanwhile, wrote in supporting the city’s crackdown on protesters during the Democratic convention and observed that “a minute percentage of the population think their will should prevail.”
President Johnson reacted to 1968’s violence by pressing Congress to enact gun control legislation. But King’s murder provoked deadly rioting in Chicago that left Tribune readers conflicted about the relationship among poverty, segregation and violence. Racial tensions were already high, as blacks were moving into communities where whites had formerly kept them out, and inhabitants of neighborhoods adjacent to Chicago’s ghettos were fearful and defensive.
“I am a member of the Southwest Associated Block club and proud of it. Therefore it irritates me when others refer to us as racists,” wrote Mrs. Edward Kostek. “We are good, law-abiding people with modest incomes who with the sweat of our brows, earned these modest homes in a modest community we love.”
William Gabor, a senior at Angel Guardian High School, urged Tribune readers to put inner-city violence in perspective: “In my opinion, the deprived child of the ghetto is aware of violence as he goes his way. Finally, because of the broken hopes, the despair, the anger, hate bursts forth in a terrible explosion of rebellion.”
But Tribune letter writers were less inclined to take advice from young people after the Democratic National Convention attracted a legion of anti-war protesters to Chicago in August. Federal troops patrolled the lakefront, just as they had earlier in other riottorn neighborhoods.
Reef Waldrep of Macomb questioned young activists’ reading of American history. “It has not been 100 years of oppression, regardless of what the New Left might say. … The good things multiplied even as America wrestled with communism, Nazism and racism.”
Frank Piehl of Griffith, Ind., pondered the logistics of the young people’s mantra, “Make love not war.” He asked: “But who will mind the store while they make love?”
Vice President Hubert Humphrey would get the Democrats’ presidential nomination that year, beating back a challenge by the party’s antiwar faction. But he was defeated in the fall election by former Vice President Richard Nixon. So Chicago entered 1969 with the White House about to pass from Democratic to Republican control, plus all the traditional parties and predictions.
The Tribune reported that for a New Year’s Eve dinnerdance, the swank Racquet Club “had been decorated with hundreds of multi-colored balloons.” At the John Dawsons’ holiday party, guests walked through a huge wreath, the hosts claiming that would bring them “good luck in the new year.”
Who would turn down the opportunity, given 1968’s tragedies?
Yet G.H. McLaughlin placed his hopes for better times differently. “Now we are about to inaugurate a Republican president. After eight years of unconscionable Democratic despotism and burgeoning bureaucracy, ” he wrote to the Tribune, “this might well be the beginning of Uncle Sam’s resurrection.”
In fact, Nixon did end the Vietnam War, only to resign the presidency in 1974 under threat of impeachment. So perhaps the most astute prediction made as 1968 passed into history was offered by Jacob Sampson of Chicago. We verify it with every trip to an airport.
Taking note of several recent airplane hijackings, Samson wrote to the Tribune: “My suggestion is to install at the gate leading to the plane an X-ray apparatus of the same pattern used in prisons to check parcels.”