Embedded Files
"To understand a man, you have to know what was happening in the world when he was twenty."
The quote is attributed, probably apocryphally, to Napoleon. Still, it rings true to my ears. My "year of being 20" was 1968, a year of change and protest both here and abroad. I have no doubt that "what was happening in the world" then has affected, even shaped, my view of the world and of our country.
I came of age in a country that had turned a corner on its racist past and had begun to expand its social safety net to take care of all its people; a country that had defended voting rights, encouraged fair elections, and ensured due process; a country where journalists often spoke truth to power. I would hate to see all that disappear.
I came of age in a country that had embarked on a foolhardy war in Southeast Asia complete with its own lies, war crimes, and excessive destruction. Perhaps, this was the source of my first inklings that the United States was no longer the world's guiding light. We were, for much of the 20th century, a protector of human rights and a supporter of international law. I pray that this, someday, may again be the case.
1968
In spite of the war raging in Vietnam, 1968 started out on a hopeful note.
The Great Society legislation was beginning to improve life for Americans, especially for the more vulnerable and the previously discriminated against. Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, the Civil Rights and Voting Acts, the Education Acts, and the Economic Opportunity Act were fundamental changes that became engrained and essential parts of life in America.
The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was Earl Warren. With its enlightened understanding of "the common good", the Earl Warren Supreme Court had done much for civil rights, due process, individual and civil liberties, and fair legislative apportionment [see sidebar below for 10 of the Court's most consequential decisions]. The Court set the stage for much of the twentieth century's progressive developments - elements of democracy now under attack in Trump's America with the help of the John Roberts Supreme Court.
Across Western Europe, the destruction and economic instability of World War II had prompted European governments to expand their social safety nets into more comprehensive welfare states. These systems were now firmly in place and functioning with health coverage and other benefits available to all.
In the Eastern bloc country of Czechoslovakia, Alexander Dubček was initiating the reforms of the Prague Spring, aimed at liberalizing that country and granting greater rights and freedoms to its citizens.
In March, three events shook the political landscape in the US. On March 12, anti-war candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota won 42% of the vote in the New Hampshire primary - an unexpectedly strong result that electrified the antiwar crowd. On March 16, a strongly antiwar Robert F. Kennedy, announced his candidacy. Kennedy was more of a political force with more political savvy than McCarthy and presented a greater challenge to Johnson. On March 31, President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election. Many had the sense that, one way or another, we would soon have a president committed to ending the Vietnam War.
But 1968 was also a year of great tragedy as some of our nation's finest leaders were assassinated. Just four days after Johnson announced he would not run, civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. The country entered a period of grief and rage with riots and violence in many cities. The evening of the assassination, Robert F. Kennedy delivered an improvised and powerful speech in Indianapolis, Indiana, after informing a crowd of supporters that Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated. His calming words are credited with preventing riots and violence in Indianapolis, unlike in many other cities that night. Two month later, Bobby Kennedy was dead, gunned down in Los Angeles at a campaign event.
Speaking of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, j0urnalist Jack Newfield wrote, "The best among us had been struck down, and you had the feeling that we would never be this hopeful again." *
By year-end, fate proved him right.
In August, within a few days of each other, the Prague Spring was crushed and the Democratic National Convention saw "a police riot" against antiwar protesters.
In November, Richard Nixon, whose policies would continue the Vietnam War for another six years, was elected President.
A summary of the protests of 1968 follows. And then some closing thoughts.
Prague Spring (January - August 1968)
The Prague Spring began in January 1968 with Alexander Dubček's rise to power in Czechoslovakia. Dubček ushered in an era of political liberalization with his desire for "socialism with a human face". The reforms aimed to provide greater rights to citizens, including freedom of the press, speech, and travel, and partial economic decentralization. Mass actions propelled the reform movement and in late June 1968, the dissident writer Ludvík Vaculík published the "Two Thousand Words" manifesto, a pivotal document that called for continued mass action to demand full democracy.
The movement came to an end when Soviet-led Warsaw Pact forces invaded Czechoslovakia in August. The invasion sparked widespread popular resistance, as citizens openly condemned the invasion, constructed barricades and argued with occupying soldiers. The media and press played a large role in this resistance, reporting and uniting these many different and autonomous actions. In the end, the superpower won out. By August 27, the resistance had been crushed and the Prague Spring was over.
May 1968
In May 1968, US troop levels in Vietnam reached 525,000, a more than 20-fold increase from the weeks before the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Many Americans were already beginning to suspect the veracity of the reports that led to that resolution as well as to reject the fallacious "domino effect" theory promoted for decades by Cold Warriors and rabid anti-communists.** The release of the Pentagon Papers would confirm the former suspicions, and history itself would confirm the latter.
The Resistance to the war had already begun many months earlier.
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. had led a massive march of 400,000 protesters from Central Park to the United Nations to protest the war. Later that year, a smaller group of 35,000 would March on the Pentagon, which became the basis for Norman Mailer's The Armies of the Night.
In January 1968, the Tet Offensive gave further evidence of misleading information from the Johnson Administration. The United States and South Vietnam were not by any means winning this war.
In February 1968, the revered CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, who watched as helicopter gunships kept firing rounds into the neighborhoods that U.S. generals had been assuring Cronkite were under the safe control of America and its South Vietnam ally, went on national TV to speak the truth, that the fighting was, at best, a “stalemate” and that it was time for America to negotiate an honorable peace and leave the Southeast Asian nation. *** [Sidebar]
May 1968 would see two memorable protests.
The Catonsville Nine: On May 17, 1968, nine Catholic peace activists including clergy and present and former members of religious orders - Dan Berrigan, Phil Berrigan, David Darst, John Hogan, Tom Lewis, Margie Melville, Tom Melville, Mary Moylan, and George Mische - went to the draft board in Catonsville, Maryland, took 378 draft files, brought them to the parking lot in wire baskets, doused them with homemade napalm, and set them on fire. The Catonsville Nine stood trial in Baltimore Federal Court later that year for this epic act of nonviolent civil disobedience. Though they were found guilty, the actions against draft boards did not stop. Almost 300 draft boards were vandalized in protest from 1968 to 1972.
Mai 68: What began as a student protest for university reform quickly evolved into a sweeping critique of capitalism, authoritarianism, and militarism, with Vietnam as a central rallying point. On 6 May, police violently dispersed a student gathering at the Sorbonne, leading to clashes with protesters and mass arrests. As the confrontations escalated, students erected barricades, and the night of 10 May saw intense street battles between protesters and police. Public outrage fueled further mobilization, and by 13 May, the protests had evolved into a general strike. About 10 million workers, or two-thirds of the labor force, walked off the job in the largest general strike in French history, shutting down factories, transportation, and public services.
Mai 68 had profound long-term consequences. The events weakened President Charles de Gaulle's authority, and he resigned the following year. The movement led to increased state investment in education and social policies. The strikes forced major concessions in labor rights, including wage increases, better working conditions, and expanded social protections. The movement also contributed to the growth of feminist, environmentalist, and LGBTQ activism.
Democratic National Convention, Chicago
The most famous protest against the Vietnam War in 1968 occurred in August at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated two months earlier, and Hubert Humphrey, LBJ's hand-picked successor who had not renounced Johnson's disastrous Vietnam policy, was the leading candidate. The protests lasted approximately seven days, from August 23 to August 29, 1968, and drew an estimated 10,000 anti-war protesters, who hoped to sway the delegates to nominate one of the remaining antiwar candidates, Eugene McCarthy or George McGovern.
"The whole world is watching"
We watched network television's live coverage...protesters chanting "the whole world is watching" and Chicago police waylaying antiwar protesters, beating them with clubs, and tear-gassing them. Termed a 'police riot' by those who investigated the violence in Chicago, the events of that night were misinterpreted by those Americans who remained duped and still supported the war [PBS video below] as an example of "liberal bias in the media". Hubert Humphrey won the Democratic nomination. Ten weeks later, the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, defeated Humphrey in the general election.
Humphrey was too late in distancing himself from Johnson's policies. But at least he did so. Kamala Harris never managed to get away from Biden's genocide-enabling Gaza policies and she paid the price at the polls - winning 7 million less votes than Biden had in 2020 and becoming the first Democrat to lose the presidential popular vote in 20 years. [Sidebar]
Did it matter?
1968 was the year between between the Summer of Love and the Woodstock Music Festival. The counterculture was one of "peace, love, and understanding"[Elvis Costello's "What's So Funny?" - sidebar] The protests of 1968 here and in Europe were led, initiated, and supported by student activists, idealistic young men and women of my generation and of my political inclinations. We really believed there was a chance that the world would change for the better...or, perhaps more accurately and naively, that we could change the world.
So, in the end, did the protests of 1968 matter?
In France, there was overwhelming support for the protests, which started as a call for university reforms. The Mai 68 protests had profound, beneficial, long term effects - in labor rights, wage increases, better working conditions, and expanded social protections.
Although the reforms of the Prague Spring were reversed and Dubček was ousted, the movement exposed the fragility of Soviet authority and showed that people within the Eastern Bloc craved autonomy and reform. The Prague Spring inspired future democracy-resistance movements such Poland's Solidarity movement of the 1980's and Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution of 1989. In the late 1980s, Russian President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika reforms echoed Dubček’s ideas. In 1991 the Soviet Union dissolved.
In the United States, we saw disappointing results. Protests against the war fell on deaf ears within the government, and the war continued until April 1975 when North Vietnamese Army tanks rolled through the gates of Saigon. The Chicago antiwar protesters, most notably the "Chicago Seven" (originally the "Chicago Eight"), were prosecuted by the Nixon Administration. [CSNY "Chicago" - sidebar] Their convictions in the infamous trial conducted by Judge Julius Hoffmann were eventually overturned.
The Pentagon Papers, released in 1971, showed that multiple presidential administrations had systematically deceived the public and Congress about the war's progress, leading to the landmark New York Times Co. v. United States Supreme Court decision affirming free press rights. It is now generally accepted that the Vietnam War was one of the most disastrous foreign policy mistakes in US history, or as a college friend succinctly put it at an alumni reunion some decades later, "Bob, you were right."
If there was one unambiguously positive and permanent result from the protests, it was the ending of the military draft. Unfortunately, the lesson of the Pentagon Papers ("yes, Virginia, your leaders lie") were forgotten in later years, most notably in the invasion of Iraq.
We did what we could and I have no regrets about our efforts. Would I do it again knowing what the eventual outcome would be? Sure I would. In the words of American political activist Angela Davis, "Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don't yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it's actually going to be possible."
Decisions of the Earl Warren Supreme Court
Brown v. Board of Education (1954) Declared racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, overturning Plessy v. Ferguson. It famously stated that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”.
Loving v. Virginia (1967)
Struck down laws banning interracial marriage, affirming marriage as a fundamental right under the Equal Protection Clause.Hernandez v. Texas (1954)
Extended Fourteenth Amendment protections to Mexican Americans, ruling that they could not be excluded from juries based on ethnicityMiranda v. Arizona (1966)
Established the “Miranda rights,” requiring police to inform suspects of their rights to remain silent and to an attorney during custodial interrogation.Gideon v. Wainwright (1963)
Guaranteed the right to legal counsel for all defendants in criminal cases, even if they cannot afford one.Mapp v. Ohio (1961)
Applied the exclusionary rule to state courts, meaning evidence obtained illegally cannot be used in court.
Reynolds v. Sims (1964)
Mandated “one person, one vote” in state legislative districts, ensuring equal representation.Baker v. Carr (1962)
Allowed federal courts to hear redistricting cases, opening the door to judicial review of political gerrymandering.
Engel v. Vitale (1962)
Prohibited state-sponsored prayer in public schools, reinforcing the separation of church and state.Tinker v. Des Moines (1969)
Affirmed students’ rights to free speech in schools, as long as it doesn’t disrupt the educational environment.
Prague Spring: The Soviet-led invasion sparked widespread popular resistance. Citizens openly condemned the invasion, constructing barricades and arguing with occupying soldiers.
Support Rally for the Catonsville Nine: The Catonsville Nine were tried in federal court October 5th, 1968. Despite lead defense by counterculture icon William Kunstler, they were found guilty.
The Mai 68 student protests evolved into a sweeping critique of capitalism, authoritarianism and militarism and had profound long-term effects.
To the list of other reasons that voters did not come out for the Democratic nominee, we must add her failure to break with Biden and acknowledge the genocide in Gaza.
Notes
*Ed. Note: I've lost the actual reference. These may not be the exact words, and Jack Newfield may not have been the person who wrote them.
**The theory held that if one country fell to Communism, many more would fall in its wake.
***Contrast this with today's CBS which just hired a Trump loyalist to review its news coverage and who fired Trump critic, comedian Stephen Colbert, in July.
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