The Long Reach of 1968

Here's my September column from the St. Cloud (MN) Times:

Times Writers Group: We’ve yet to move beyond 1968

By Derek Larson • September 3, 2008

Some years have a longer reach in history than others. 1901, 1929 and 1941 were all turning points for the United States. But this fall, nothing from the past seems more relevant than 1968, the year everything seemed to go wrong and our politics crumbled into something almost unrecognizable.

As Americans consider their choices for president and other elected offices this fall, the shadow of 1968 looms just outside the frame, impacting our options, shaping the process and reminding us of just how important these decisions really can be.

1968 began badly. January brought the battle of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, marking the end of widespread public support for the war. The USS Pueblo was seized by North Korea, and a U.S. B-52 bomber carrying four nuclear bombs crashed and burned in Greenland. National security — and Vietnam in particular — dominated the presidential primaries that spring.

Eroding public support for the war was echoed in campus protests around the nation. In March, Robert Kennedy entered the campaign on an anti-war platform, and by the end of the month President Lyndon Johnson had withdrawn from the race. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, triggering riots in major cities. A week later, Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, banning discrimination in housing, but the civil rights movement continued to fragment, increasingly divided between King’s nonviolent civil disobedience and the emerging black power movement.

In June, Robert Kennedy was assassinated on the eve of his victory in the California primary, throwing the Democratic Party into chaos. A quiet Republican convention in Miami Beach nominated Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew as law-and-order candidates, a stark contrast to the Chicago Democratic convention, which devolved into riots three weeks later.

That fall, women protested the Miss America pageant, the Mexico City Olympic Games were marked by the silent display of two American medal winners raising their fists in a black power salute from the podium, and Lyndon Johnson announced the United States would cease bombing Vietnam.

Election Day in November brought a Nixon victory, laying the groundwork for Watergate and seven more years of war in Southeast Asia. The lasting legacy of 1968 was the rightward shift in our politics and the polarization of the electorate that has lasted to this day.

This was particularly evident in the 2004 presidential election, which featured two major candidates who took opposite lessons from the war. Indeed, the issue of Vietnam was front-and-center through the final weeks of the campaign, thanks to attacks on John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and a poorly researched story about Bush’s service records that ultimately led to Dan Rather’s retirement from CBS.

This election cycle makes it even more obvious we have yet to move beyond 1968.

While Republican candidate John McCain spent that year in a North Vietnamese prison and Barack Obama was just 7 years old, the long reach of 1968 is evident in everything they do. The cultural divides of the 1960s are echoed in the candidates’ positions on issues ranging from abortion to Iraq, the budget deficit to gay rights. Both conventions were scripted to be the anti-Chicago, with Obama given the daunting secondary task of mirroring the 1963 March on Washington.

Even the backlash against the events of 1968 — the rise of Nixon’s Silent Majority — is evident in McCain’s choice of a running mate as a concession to the socially conservative right.

Four decades of divisive debates, line-in-the-sand rhetoric, and confrontation about social issues failed to live up to either the promises of 1968 or the fears of those who saw the year as a sign of the apocalypse. If nothing else, perhaps the relative youth of candidates Obama and Sarah Palin (herself just 4 years old in 1968) will help us move past those contentious times.

The 21st century presents its own challenges, and one would hope that folks looking back from 2048 will be able to mark this year as a turning point in its own right.