CHAPTER 21

THE LAST HOPE

I am more impervious to minor problems now; when two of my people come to me red-faced and huffing over some petty dispute, I feel like telling them, “Well, the earth continues to turn on its axis, undisturbed by your problem. Take your cue from it. . . .”

—MICHAEL COLLINS, Carrying the Fire, 1974

TOM HAYDEN later wrote about 1968, “I suppose it was fitting that such a bad year would end with the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency.” A Gallup poll showed that 51 percent of Americans expected him to be a good president. Six percent expected him to be “great,” and another 6 percent expected him to be “poor.” Nixon, looking exactly like the “Eastern moneyed boy” George Wallace accused the Californian of being, formed his cabinet from a thirty-nine-story-high luxury suite with a view of Central Park in New York’s Hotel Pierre, conveniently close to his ten-room Fifth Avenue apartment. A hardworking man, he rose at seven, ate a light breakfast, walked the block and a half to the Pierre, passed through the lobby, according to reports, “almost unnoticed,” and worked for the next ten hours. Among the visitors who seemed most to delight him was the University of Southern California star O. J. Simpson, the year’s Heisman Trophy winner who had run more yards than any other player in history. “Are you going to use that option pass, O.J.?” the president-elect wanted to know.

For the two thousand high-level positions just below the cabinet, he told his staff he wanted as broad a search as possible. Taking his instructions to heart, they had a letter drafted personally from Nixon asking for ideas and sent it to the eighty thousand people in Who’s Who in America,which led to news stories that Nixon was consulting Elvis Presley, who happened to be listed in the book. Though traditionally presidents revealed their cabinet choices gradually, one by one, Nixon, trying to tame that new media that had been troubling his career for a decade, arranged to have his entire cabinet announced at once from a Washington hotel with prime-time coverage on all three television networks.

1968 Yippie poster calling for a demonstration at the Nixon inauguration

(Library of Congress)

This was one of his rare television innovations. However, he did show a strange affinity for another piece of technology, which in time was his undoing—the tape recorder. The Johnson administration had been fairly restrictive in the use of wiretapping and eavesdropping devices, but in the spring of 1968 Congress had passed a crime bill that greatly liberalized the number of federal agencies that could use such devices and the circumstances under which they could be used. Johnson had signed the bill on June 19 but said he believed that Congress “has taken an unwise and potentially dangerous step by sanctioning eavesdropping and wiretapping by federal, state, and local officials in an almost unlimited variety of situations.” Even after the bill passed, he instructed Attorney General Ramsey Clark to continue restricting the use of listening devices. But President-elect Nixon criticized the Johnson administration for not using the powers given by the new crime bill. Nixon called wiretaps and eavesdropping devices “law enforcement’s most effective tool against crime.”

He also had new ideas for listening devices. In December Nixon aides announced a plan to place listening posts in Birmingham, Alabama, and in Westchester County, New York, so that the president-elect could hear from “the forgotten American.” The plan was for volunteers to tape conversations in a variety of neighborhoods, town meetings, schools, and gatherings so the president-elect could hear Americans talking. “Mr. Nixon said that he would find a way for the forgotten man to talk to government,” a Westchester volunteer said.

The Chicago convention remained at the heart of one of America’s increasingly hot debates, the so-called law and order issue. While revulsion at the comportment of Daley and the Chicago police was the first reaction to the riots, increasing numbers argued that Daley and his police were right to impose “law and order.” In early December a government commission headed by Daniel Walker, vice president and general counsel of Montgomery Ward, issued its report on the Chicago riots under the title Rights in Conflict.The report concluded that the incident was nothing short of a “police riot” but also that the police were greatly provoked by protesters using obscene language. Not only the Left but the establishment press pointed out that police are quite accustomed to obscene language and wondered if this could really have been the cause for what seemed to be a complete breakdown of discipline. Mayor Daley himself was known to use unpublishable and unbroadcastable language.

The report described victims escaping from the police and the police responding by beating the next person they could find. It never did explore why McCarthy workers and supporters were targeted. Life magazine reported that the most corrupt police divisions were the most violent, implying that these were “bad cops” who did not take orders. But many of the demonstrators, including David Dellinger, remained convinced that far from a breakdown in discipline, “organized police violence was part of the plan,” as Dellinger testified to Congress.

On the other side, there were still many people who believed the Chicago police were completely justified in their actions. So the Walker Report neither healed, resolved, nor clarified. The House Un-American Activities Committee conducted its own hearings, subpoenaing Tom Hayden and others from the New Left, though they did not hear from Jerry Rubin because he arrived in a rented Santa Claus costume and refused to change out of it. Abbie Hoffman was arrested for wearing a shirt patterned after an American flag. He was charged on a newly passed law making it a federal crime to show “contempt” for the flag. The committee’s acting chairman, Missouri Democrat Richard H. Ichord, said that the Walker Report “overreacted,” as did newsmen who covered the story. The keen eyes of the House Un-American Activities Committee had, not surprisingly, uncovered that the whole thing was a communist plot. Their evidence: Dellinger and Hayden had met with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong officials in Paris. “Violence follows these gentlemen just as night follows day,” Ichord said, waxing nearly Shakespearean.

The Government Printing Office refused to print the Walker Report because the commission refused to delete the obscenities that witnesses accused demonstrators and police of shouting at one another. Walker said that deleting the words would “destroy the important tone of the report.” Daley himself praised the report and criticized only the summary. As he walked out of the press conference, reporters shouted, “What about your police riot?” But the mayor had no comment.

The law with which Abbie Hoffman was arrested for his shirt was one of several laws passed by Congress to harass the antiwar movement, as Republicans and Democrats competed for the “law-and-order” vote in an increasingly repressive United States. Another of these 1968 laws made it a crime to cross state lines with the intent to commit violence. Federal prosecutors in Chicago were considering charging the leaders of the Chicago demonstrations with this untested law. But Johnson’s attorney general Ramsey Clark had no enthusiasm for such a conspiracy trial. This changed when Nixon took office and appointed New York bonds lawyer John Mitchell attorney general. Mitchell once said that Clark’s “problem” was that “he was philosophically concerned with the rights of the individual.” He wanted a Chicago conspiracy trial and on March 20, 1969, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, John Froines, and Lee Weiner—who came to be known as the “Chicago Eight”—were indicted. Hayden, Davis, Dellinger, Hoffman, and Rubin openly admitted organizing the Chicago demonstrations but denied causing the violence that even the government’s Walker Report blamed on the police. But they barely knew Black Panther leader Bobby Seale. During the trial, Judge Julius Hoffman ordered Seale bound and gagged for repeatedly calling Hoffman a fascist. None of them understood how SDS activists Froines and Weiner had gotten on the list and in fact the two were the only ones acquitted. The others had their convictions reversed on appeal. But John Mitchell himself later went to prison for perjury in the Watergate investigation.

The Italians for a brief moment in November were gripped by the story of Franca Viola, who married the man she loved, a former schoolmate. Two years earlier she had rejected the son of a wealthy family, Filippo Melodia, so he kidnapped her and raped her. After being raped, a woman had to marry her aggressor because she had been dishonored and no one else would have her. This approach had worked for Sicilian men for about a thousand years. But Franca, to the applause of much of Italy, went into court and said to Melodia, “I do not love you. I will not marry you.” This came as a blow to Melodia, not only because he had been rejected, but because under Sicilian law, if the woman doesn’t marry the rapist, he is then tried for rape, a crime for which Melodia was sentenced to eleven years in prison.

On December 3 strikes and protests by both workers and students paralyzed Italy after two striking workers were shot and killed in Sicily. An anarchist bomb destroyed a government food office in Genoa. The bombers left flyers that said, “Down with Authority!” By December 5 Rome was closed by a general strike. But by December 6 the workers had ended their strike for higher wages and left tens of thousand of protesting students on their own.

In France, too, the idea of merging the worker and student movements was still alive but still failing. On December 4, Jacques Sauvageot met with union leaders in the hopes of building the unified front that had failed in the spring. De Gaulle had been artificially propping up the franc for more than a year simply because he believed in “the strong franc,” and it was now seriously overvalued and declining rapidly in world currency markets. Instead of the normal fiscal maneuver of devaluing, he shocked Europe and the financial world by instituting a series of drastic measures to reduce social spending in order to try to uphold the declining currency. French workers were furious. On December 5 strikes began. But by December 12 the government had negotiated an end to the strikes and the students again found themselves alone when they shut down Nanterre to protest police attempts to interrogate students. The French government threatened to start expelling “student agitators” from the universities.

With each blow, it was predicted that de Gaulle would be tamed—when his prestige declined after the spring riots and strikes, when his foreign policy was shaken by the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, when his economy was undone by the collapse of the franc. Yet at the end of the year, to the utter frustration of his European partners, he blocked British entry into the Common Market for the third time.

On November 7 Beate Klarsfeld, the non-Jewish German wife of French Jewish survivor and celebrated Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, went to the social democrats convention in Berlin, walked up to Chancellor Kiesinger, accused him of being a Nazi, and slapped him in the face. By the end of 1968 the West German state had sent to prison 6,221 Germans for crimes committed during Nazi rule—a considerable number of convictions, but a minuscule percentage of Nazi criminals. In 1968 the West German state convicted a total of only thirty Nazis, almost all minor, obscure figures. Despite the numerous very active and murderous Nazi courts during Hitler’s rule, not a single judge had ever been sent to prison. On December 6 a Berlin court acquitted Hans Joachim Rehse, a Nazi judge who had sentenced 230 people to death. The prosecution had chosen to try him on seven of the more arbitrary and flagrant abuses of justice, but the court ruled that the prosecution had shown only abuse of the law, not the intention to do so. The decision was based on an earlier case in which it was ruled that judges were not guilty “if they were blinded by Nazi ideology and the legal philosophy of that time.” As Rehse left the courtroom, a crowd chanted, “Shame! Shame!” and an elderly man walked up and slapped him across the face. The following week eight thousand marched through Berlin to the city hall to protest Rehse’s release. There was little time left. The federal statute for prosecuting Nazi crimes was to expire in one more year, December 31, 1969.

During the summer of 1968, the Spanish government had placed the Basque province of Guipúzcoa under indefinite martial law. In the village of Lazcano, the village priest denounced the organist for having played the Spanish national anthem during “the elevation of the sacrament.” The priest was fined for his criticism, which was easily arranged since the organist also happened to be the mayor of the village. While the mayor was away, his house was burned down. Five young Basques were arrested and held for five days. According to witnesses, they were handcuffed to chairs and kicked and beaten for three of those days. They confessed. The prosecution asked for death sentences in a trial that presented no evidence other than police testimony. In December three were sentenced to forty-eight years in prison, one was sentenced to twelve years, and one was acquitted.

However, on December 16 the Spanish government tried to show its concern for justice by voiding the 476-year-old order by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella expelling all Jews from Spain who did not convert to Catholicism.

In June, when Tom Hayden had called for “two, three, many Columbias,” he had added that the goal was “so that the U.S. must either change or send its troops to occupy American campuses.” By December he was getting his second scenario. On December 5, after a week of riots and scuffles between police and students and faculty at San Francisco State College, armed policemen, weapons drawn, tossing canisters of Mace, began to clear the campus. Acting president S. I. Hayakawa, who had made his point of view clear when arriving in office a week before by denouncing the 1964 Free Speech Movement, told a crowd of more than two thousand students, “Police have been instructed to clear the campus. There are no innocent bystanders anymore.” The protests had begun with the demands of black students for black studies courses. For the last three weeks of the year the university was kept open only with a large armed police contingent regularly attacking students as they gathered to protest.

The nearby College of San Mateo, which was closed because of violence, reopened December 15, in the words of the school president, “as an armed camp,” with riot police stationed throughout the campus.

The most reviled president of a riot-torn campus, Columbia’s Grayson Kirk, who resigned in August, in December moved into a twenty-room mansion in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The mansion had been provided by Columbia University, which owned the property.

In the beginning of December, the British, who had backed the Nigerian federal government, started to change their view of the Biafran war. While before they had been insisting on the imminent victory of Nigeria, they had now come to see the war as a hopeless stalemate. The United States also changed its policy. Johnson ordered contingency plans for a massive $20 million air, land, and sea relief program for Biafra. The French had already been supplying Biafra, which the Nigerians angrily said was the only thing keeping Biafra going. Supply planes for Biafra took off every night at 6:00 P.M. from Libreville, Gabon. But Biafra was able to continue its fight for only one more year, and by the time it finally surrendered on January 15, 1970, an estimated one million civilians had starved to death.

After eleven months of negotiation, the eighty-two crew members of the U.S. ship Pueblo were released from North Korea in exchange for a confession by the U.S. government that it had been caught spying. As soon as the eighty-two Americans were safe, the U.S. government repudiated the statement. Some felt this was a strange way for a nation to conduct its affairs, and others felt it was a small price to pay to get the crew members released without a war. Left unclear was exactly what the Pueblo was doing when seized by the North Koreans.

1970 poster, after the My Lai massacre became known. Frazer Dougherty, Jon Hendricks, and Irving Pettin designed the poster from an R. L. Haeberle photograph.

(Collection of Mary Haskell)

In Vietnam word of the massacre carried out by the Americal Division in My Lai in March continued to spread through the region. In the fall, the letter from Tom Glen of the 11th Brigade reporting the massacre was in division headquarters, and the new deputy operations officer for the Americal Division, Major Colin Powell, was asked to write a response. Without interviewing Glen, he wrote that there was nothing to the accusations—they were simply unfounded rumors. The following September, only nine months later, Lieutenant William Calley was charged with multiple murders, and by November it had become a major story. Yet Powell claimed he never heard about the massacre until two years after it happened. Nothing of Powell’s role in the cover-up—he was not even in Vietnam at the time of the massacre—was known by the public until Newsweek magazine reported it in September 1995 in connection with rumors of a Powell run for president.

Despite Johnson’s November announcement of a unilateral halt to bombing of North Vietnam and the expressed hope that this would lead to intense and productive negotiations, on December 6 the Selective Service announced that the draft call was to be increased by three thousand men a month. By mid-December peace negotiators in Paris were saying that Johnson had “oversold” the prospects for peace as the election approached.

In Paris the year-end peace negotiations had settled down to a tough and determined effort to resolve . . . the table issue. Hanoi was determined to have a square table, and that was completely unacceptable to South Vietnam. Other proposals debated by the different delegations included a round table, two arcs facing each other but not separated, or facing but separated. By the end of the year eleven different configurations were on the metaphoric table, which was still the only one they had. Behind the table issue were thornier realities, such as the North Vietnamese insistence on a Viet Cong presence, while the Viet Cong refused to speak with South Vietnam but were willing to speak with the Americans.

Senator George McGovern, the last-minute peace candidate at the Chicago convention, blurted out what many were trying to avoid saying when he called South Vietnamese vice president Nguyen Cao Ky a “little tinhorn dictator” and accused him and other South Vietnamese officials of holding up peace negotiations. “While Ky is playing around in the plush spots of Paris and haggling over whether he is going to sit at a round table or a rectangular table, American men are dying to prop up his corrupt regime back home.” It had been the policy of the antiwar senators to avoid speaking plainly about the South Vietnamese, some out of respect for Johnson, others to avoid upsetting negotiations. With Johnson out of power, they intended to speak more plainly. Some said they wanted to wait until Nixon’s inauguration, but McGovern started speaking two weeks early. A Gallup poll showed that a narrow majority of Americans now favored withdrawal and leaving the fighting to the South Vietnamese.

McGovern urged that there be a thoughtful assessment of the lessons of Vietnam. To him one of the great lessons was “the peril of drawing historical analogies.” Although there was no parallel between what was happening in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s and Europe in the late 1930s, the World War II generation became mired in a Vietnamese civil war in part because they had witnessed the appeasement of Hitler.

McGovern said, “This is a war of the daily body count, given to us over the years like the football scores.” The military understood that this too had been a mistake. They had even exaggerated the body counts. Future wars would appear to be as bloodless as possible, with the military saying as little as possible about enemy dead.

The military was learning its own lessons, not all of which were what McGovern had in mind when he tried to open this discussion. The military concluded that in a television age, journalists would have to be much more tightly controlled. The image of warfare had to be monitored carefully. Generals would have to consider how a battle looked on television and how to control that view.

The idea of a drafted army would be abandoned because it produced too many reluctant soldiers and too much adverse public opinion. It was better to have an all-volunteer military, drawn mostly from a few segments of society, people in need of employment and career opportunities. Wars would cease to be a major issue on campuses when students were no longer asked to fight.

But warfare was also to be used only against relatively defenseless countries, where technological superiority was critical, against enemies that would offer weeks, not years, of resistance.

The year 1968 ended exactly as it began, with the United States accusing the Viet Cong of violating its own Christmas cease-fire. But during the course of this year, 14,589 American servicemen died in Vietnam, doubling the total American casualties. When the United States finally withdrew in 1973, 1968 remained the year with the highest casualties of the entire war.

At the end of the year, Czechoslovakia was still defiant. A nationwide three-day sit-in strike by one hundred thousand students was supported by brief work stoppages by blue-collar workers. Dubek made a speech saying that the government was doing its best to bring back reform but that the population should stop acts of defiance because they only led to repression. In truth, by December, when travel restrictions were put back in place, the last of the reforms had been undone. On December 21 Dubek addressed the Central Committee of the Slovak Communist Party, his last speech of 1968. He was still resolute that the reforms must go through and that they would build a communist democracy. With the exception of a few references to “current difficulties,” the speech could have been written when the Prague Spring was in full bloom. He said:

We must, as a permanent positive feature of the post-January policy, consistently ensure fundamental rights and freedoms, observe Socialist legality, and fully rehabilitate unjustly wronged citizens.

He urged everyone to go home, spend time with their families, and get some rest. In 1969 Dubek was removed from office. In 1970 he was dismissed from the Communist Party. He and the reforms, “socialism with a human face,” slowly vanished into history. Mlyná, who resigned his post in November 1968, realizing that he would no longer be able to pursue any of the policies he had wanted, said, “We were really fools. But our folly was the ideology of reform Communism.”

In April 1968 Dubek had given an interview to the French communist newspaper l’Humanité:

I do not know why a socialism that is based on the vigorous functioning of all democratic principles and on the people’s free right to express their views should be any less solid. On the contrary, I am deeply convinced that the democratic atmosphere in the party and in public life will result in the strengthening of the unity of our socialist society and we shall win over to active collaboration all the capable and talented citizens of our country.

Dubek, the bureaucrat with the pleasant smile, was a confusing blend of contradictions. He spent his entire career as a cog in a totalitarian engine and then, when he emerged on top, declared himself a democrat. He was a pragmatist and a dreamer. He could be a skilled maneuverer in the baroque labyrinth of communist politics. But in the end even he admitted that he could be incredibly naïve.

By the end of 1968 the Soviets were worried, but they had not yet discovered how much they lost when they killed the dream of the Prague Spring. Dubek had tried to come back the way Gomułka had come back in 1956, curbing great ambitions, lowering the people’s expectations, getting along with Moscow. But Dubek was not a Gomułka. At least that was what Moscow concluded—while the people of Czechoslovakia were still trying to decide what he was. It is often forgotten that in 1968 Alexander Dubek was the one leader who was unshakably antiwar, who would not contemplate a military solution even to save himself—a leader who refused to be bullied or bought by either communism or capitalism, who never played a cold war game, never turned to the capitalists, never broke a treaty or agreement or even his word—and he stayed in power, true power, for only 220 exciting days. They were days in which impossible things seemed possible, like the slogan written on a Paris wall in May: “Be realistic, ask for the impossible.” After he was gone, no one felt that he had ever really known him.

The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 20, 1968, marked the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. When the end finally came more than twenty years later, the West was shocked. They had already forgotten. But at the time of the invasion, even Time magazine was predicting the end. It was the end of heroic Russia: a country widely admired because it had bravely dared to stand alone and build the first socialist society, because it was the big protector in the fraternity of socialist countries, because it had sacrificed millions to rid Europe of fascism. It was no longer viewed as benign. It was the bully who crushed small countries. After the fall of the Soviets, Dubek wrote that the Soviet Union had been doomed by one essential flaw: “The system inhibited change.”

The downfall took longer than most people predicted. In 2002 Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, told his long-standing friend, former Dubek government official Zdenk Mlyná:

The suppression of the Prague Spring, which was an attempt to arrive at a new understanding of Socialism, also engendered a very harsh reaction in the Soviet Union, leading to a frontal assault against all forms of free-thinking. The powerful ideological and political apparatus of the State acted decisively and uncompromisingly. This had an effect on all domestic and foreign policy and the entire development of Soviet society, which entered a stage of profound stagnation.

Dubek’s dream, a path that was never found, was very different from what happened—the collapse of communism. He and many other communists always believed that the abuses of the Soviet system could be reformed, that communism could be made to work. After the Soviet invasion, no one could believe this, and without that belief, there was little left to believe in.

Without that dream, reform-minded communists had no choice but to turn to capitalism, which they found unacceptably flawed. They made the same mistake that was made in 1968—they now thought capitalism could be reformed and given a human face.

In Poland the students and intellectuals of 1968 finally got the workers to stand with them in the 1980s and drove out communism. Jacek Kuroń, near tears in a 2001 interview, said this about the new system:

I wanted to create a democracy, but the proof that I had not thought it through is that I thought capitalism could reform itself and everything such as self-government by workers could be accomplished later on. But then it appeared to be too late. This is proof of my own blindness. . . .

The problem of Communism is that centralization is the central dictatorship and there is no way to change it. Capitalism is the dictatorship of the rich. I don’t know what to do. Central control can’t stop it. The one thing I regret is participating in the first government [postcommunist]. My participation helped people accept capitalism.

I thought capitalism was self-reforming. It’s not. It’s like Russia—controlled by only a small group because capitalism needs capital. Here now [in Poland] half the population is on the edge of hunger and the other half feels successful.

Interviewed at the end of the year, Samuel Eliot Morison, at eighty-one one of the most respected American historians, said, “We have passed through abnormal periods before this, periods of disorder and violence that seemed horrendous and insoluble at the time. Yet we survived as a nation. The genius of our democracy is its room for compromise, our ability to balance liberty with authority. And I am convinced that we will strike a new balance this time, and achieve in the process a new awareness of human relationships among our people.”

As Jacek Kuroń discovered in Poland, the changes in the world have been very far from what the people who were out to change the world had wanted. But that is not to say that 1968 did not change the world. Antiwar activists did not end American hegemonic warfare but only changed the way it was pursued and how it was sold to the public. In opposing the draft, the antiwar activists showed the generals what they had to do to continue waging war.

In history it is always imprecise to attribute fundamental shifts to one exact moment. There was 1967 and 1969 and all the earlier years that made 1968 what it was. But 1968 was the epicenter of a shift, of a fundamental change, the birth of our postmodern media-driven world. That is why the popular music of the time, the dominant expression of popular culture in the period, has remained relevant to successive generations of youth.

“Back to normal.” 1968 Paris student silk-screen poster.

(Galerie Beaubourg, Vence)

It was the beginning of the end of the cold war and the dawn of a new geopolitical order. Within that order, the nature of politics and of leaders changed. The Trudeau approach to leadership, where a figure is known by style rather than substance, has become entrenched. Marshall McLuhan, that great prophet of the 1960s, predicted, “The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be so much more powerful than he could ever be.” The political leaders of the 1968 generation who have come to power, such as Bill Clinton in the United States or Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, have shown an intuitive fluency with this concept of leadership.

In 1968 it was often said hopefully by “the establishment” that all of these radical youth were acting the way they were because they were young. When they got older, surely they would “calm down” and busy themselves earning money. The strength of capitalism, like the Mexican PRI, is its limitless belief in its own ability to buy people off. But, in fact, they have remained an activist generation. Pollsters in the United States find that it is the young voters, especially the eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds who were enfranchised because of the activism of 1968, who are least likely to participate.

In October 1968 when Hayden testified before the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, Judge A. Leon Higginbotham asked him if he believed giving the vote to eighteen-year-olds would decrease the frustration of youth. Hayden warned that if they were not given anyone to vote for it would just increase their frustration. Most of the leaders of 1968 either remained politically active like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Tom Hayden or became journalists or teachers. Those are the more apparent ways to try to change the world. Adam Michnik, who became the editor of the largest-circulation newspaper in central Europe—a fate he never imagined befalling him—is often visited by what is known in France as “sixty-eighters.” “I can recognize a sixty-eighter in a second,” he said. “It is not the politics. It is a way of thinking. I met Bill Clinton and I could see he was one.”

Of course, one of the great lessons of 1968 was that when people try to change the world, other people who feel a vested interest in keeping the world the way it is will stop at nothing to silence them. In 1970 four antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University were shot and killed.

Yet all over the world people know that they are not powerless, that they can take to the streets the way people did in 1968. And political leaders, particularly those media-genius products of the 1960s, are very aware that popular movements are ignored at their peril. People under twenty-five do not have much influence in the world. But it is amazing what they can do if they are ready to march. Remember 1968? In the mid-1990s, when students began protesting in Paris, the Mitterrand government paid attention in a way the de Gaulle government didn’t until whole universities were shut down. Mitterrand remembered 1968, and so did everyone in his government. On November 29–December 3, 1999, when a World Trade Organization conference in Seattle was confronted by huge, angry “antiglobalization” demonstrations, it made such an impression on then president Clinton, a zealous promoter of world trade, that he has regularly discussed the movement ever since.

The year 1968 was a terrible year and yet one for which many people feel nostalgia. Despite the thousands dead in Vietnam, the million starved in Biafra, the crushing of idealism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the massacre in Mexico, the clubbings and brutalization of dissenters all over the world, the murder of the two Americans who most offered the world hope, to many it was a year of great possibilities and is missed. As Camus wrote in The Rebel, those who long for peaceful times are longing for “not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.” The thrilling thing about the year 1968 was that it was a time when significant segments of population all over the globe refused to be silent about the many things that were wrong with the world. They could not be silenced. There were too many of them, and if they were given no other opportunity, they would stand in the street and shout about them. And this gave the world a sense of hope that it has rarely had, a sense that where there is wrong, there are always people who will expose it and try to change it.

But by the end of the year 1968, many people felt weary, angry, and longing for a news story that was not abysmally negative. At the very end of the year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, provided that story. Only seven years earlier, when America seemed much younger; when political assassinations seemed to be something that happened in other, poorer, less stable countries; when the generation that was to fight, die, and protest over Vietnam were still schoolchildren—President Kennedy had promised that man would reach the moon by the end of the decade. On May 25, 1961, he had said:

I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon—it will be an entire nation.

The new sixties generation thrilled to the early space shots, which were covered by radio and broadcast in the school classrooms. There was a sense of living in a new age of exploration, comparable to that of the fifteenth century. But somehow space exploration seemed to fade away, or at least everyone’s focus had shifted. Young men weren’t going to the moon, they were going to Vietnam. Occasional articles said the NASA budget had to be cut to divert money to the Vietnam War. Kennedy’s prediction that getting to the moon would be expensive was accurate; from the creation of NASA on October 1, 1958, to its tenth anniversary on October 1, 1968, it spent $44 billion on space missions.

Then, in late September, people were allowed to slip back to that more innocent time. As though there had been no Soviet invasion, the space race to the moon was back on. The Soviets had sent Zond 5 around the moon, and it seemed they would soon send a cosmonaut there. In October the Americans sent three men on the Apollo 7 mission, in which they orbited the earth for eleven days in a spacecraft designed to eventually go to the moon. The craft had first been tested in January in an unmanned mission. The Apollo 7 mission went so well, “a perfect mission,” according to NASA, that NASA decided to jump ahead. Apollo 8, which had been scheduled to repeat Apollo 7’s flight, would instead blast out of the earth’s orbit and go to the moon. Then, at the end of October the Soviets sent a man in Soyuz 3, the closest anyone had ever gotten to the moon.

Less romantic, but of more immediate impact, on December 18, exactly ten years after the first satellite transmission with Eisenhower’s Christmas greeting, Intelsat 3—the first of a new series of communications satellites that would extend live television transmission to the entire world—was launched. The new satellite more than doubled the capacity for television and telephone transmissions through space. The new age of television was now in place.

In time for Christmas, Apollo 8 was scheduled for December 21. Many predicted that the Soviets would beat the three astronauts to the moon. Sir Bernard Lovell, a leading astronomer and head of the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Britain, said that the mission would not gain scientific information worth enough to justify the risk. NASA was candid that this was a more dangerous mission than usual. The craft was going to orbit the moon, which had not been done before by a manned spacecraft, and if after orbiting the spacecraft engine failed to start, the craft would be stuck in a permanent orbit, like an artificial moon of the moon. NASA also confirmed that the mission was not scientific. Its purpose was to develop and practice the necessary techniques for landing on the moon.

Apollo 8 lifted off on schedule and halfway to the moon broadcast a television program from inside the craft with a clarity that was rare in television. Millions were dazzled. As the craft approached the moon, it turned around and from space sent back to earth the first astonishing photos of our little blue-and-white planet. The pictures ran in black-and-white on the front page of newspapers around the world. The television broadcast and photographs from Apollo 8 gave a sense in this first global year that this, too, like so many other milestones that year, was an event the whole world was watching. On Christmas Day the three astronauts flew around the moon only seventy miles above its surface, which they found to be gray, desolate, and lumpy. Then they fired their rockets and headed back to this planet of blue seas, rich vegetation, and endless strife.

Just before 1968 was over, there was a moment of tremendous excitement about the future. It was an instant when racism, poverty, the wars in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Biafra—all of it was shoved aside and the public felt what astronaut Michael Collins felt the following summer when he orbited the moon while his teammates landed:

I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let’s say, 100,000 miles, their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.

And so the year ended like Dante’s traveler who at last climbed back from hell and gazed on the stars.

    To get back up to the shining world from there

    My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel:

And following its path, we took no care

    To rest, but climbed: he first, then I—so far,

    Through a round aperture I saw appear

Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,

Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.

—DANTE, The Inferno

The earth in the last week of 1968. Photographed behind the moon by Apollo 8.

(Courtesy of National Space Science Data Center)