Annus mirabilis, annus horribilis
Jonathan Mirsky
1968: THE YEAR THAT ROCKED THE WORLD by Mark Kurlansky Cape, 117.99, pp. 441, ISBN 0224062514 Authors often puff up their subjects because their books have been long and arduous in the writing, but Mark Kurlansky is right to say 'there has never been a year like 1968. and it is unlikely that there will ever be one again'. I hope I don't offend readers if I suggest that if they remember 1968 at all, it is as a year of student protest, which they didn't like and of songs, dances, and love they recall fondly.
1968 was much more than that. The Vietnamese war was the central and most continuous event. The Americans, as Kurlansky observes, were killing as many people every week as died on 9/11; they bombed North Vietnam for the first time; Lyndon Johnson decided not to stand for reelection because of the war; and the 23rd Brigade of the Americal Division murdered 500 civilians at Mylai.
But 1968 was yet more than that and it gave me the shivers, reading this comprehensive book, to recall how much I, then teaching at a somewhat remote Ivy League university, was emotionally and sometimes physically involved, as anyone who read the papers in those days and worked daily with young people was bound to be.
From New York to Chicago, London, Paris, Madrid, Prague, Berlin, Tokyo and Mexico City, students demonstrated against capitalism, communism, corruption, racism and adults, and in some of those cities, notably Mexico City, they were killed by the army and police. Police routinely beat up students in many of the demonstrations, for days on end in Chicago during the Democrats' presidential convention. The Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, setting in train, as Gorbachev was to admit years later, its own demise. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were shot dead, medal-winning black athletes at the Mexico Olympics gave the black power salute, women publicly trashed bras and girdles for the first time, and Apollo 8 flew within 70 miles of the moon.
There were plenty of other events, too, in Nigeria, Biafra, and the Middle East, and Kurlansky, who likes big subjects — his pre
vious books include one on salt and another on cod — keeps it all together and moving along, making not many mistakes as he goes. He describes at some length Walter Cronkite, the most famous American news presenter, going to Vietnam for the first time in 1968, and because of what he saw changing his mind about the war and unsettling President Johnson. But I met Mr Crookite in Saigon in 1965 where he told me the Vietnamese would have to learn 'that you can't fight a war without getting hurt'. And it is not correct to write, as Kurlansky does. that 'the suspicion has endured' that the Tonkin Gulf 'attack' on American warships in 1968 was a put-up job to justify LBJ's bombing of North Vietnam. No need for suspicion. The documentary evidence proves there was no such attack. But this is an excellent book, and while it is plain where the author's sympathies lie — usually with the demonstrators — he is objective enough, having interviewed some of the veterans of 1968 like Danny 'the Red' CohnBendit and Tom Hayden, and read the frank accounts of Abbie Hoffman, Stokely Carmichael and others, to lay out the various motives for demonstrating. Many of the leaders hoped to provoke violent responses from the authorities, although not as violent as the responses often were, because they attracted the media. The managing editor of the New York Times, Clifton Daniel, admitted that he didn't cover a significant feminist event because he knew there would be no violence.
Kurlansky doesn't miss the ultimate source of the demonstrations of 1968 — the civil rights movement in the early Sixties in the American south. White middle-class Americans, risking their lives and occasionally losing them in the Mississippi delta, who had been raised on the image of the kindly local policeman, learned that southern policemen were racists and sometimes murderers and that for far too long Washington had looked away. Later, the same liberals came to realise that working-class policemen in the north, like many 'hard-hat' labourers, grew to hate white middle-class youths who seemed to have everything but disliked the world about them. They were further astonished when they discovered that dressing in overalls and going unshaven, when they had the money to dress 'proper
ly', offended working people, who felt they were being imitated. This failed union of intellectuals and workers was seen all over Europe and many years later, in 1989, was one of the great failures of Tiananmen.
I have two criticisms of 1968, which I say again I liked a lot. Because his book is about the giant events of a single year, Kurlansky doesn't always do enough to show that some significant events of 1968 had their origins much earlier. He shows this well with feminism and the civil rights movement. But the anti-war movement started earlier than 1968. The famous campus leach-ins', often attended by thousands, began in 1965, as did huge national ones. In those days we believed for a while that not only did the public not know the facts about Vietnam but even top officials didn't. I recall sitting in his White House office explaining to McGeorge Bundy, one of LBJ's closest advisers, that the communist guerrillas in Vietnam were the same people who had fought the French since the Thirties and were not creatures of Moscow and Beijing. I wondered at the time if perhaps my argument was not clear enough for an ex-Harvard dean. Actually, he didn't give a damn.
The other unexplained factor in 1968 — and before is the number of Jews who went to the southern US to register blacks to vote, organised the anti-war movement, and spoke loudly against the system in Europe, where they aroused anti-Semitism. 'Jews from middle-class families and in disproportionate numbers were active in student movements in 1968,' Kurlansky says, and more or less drops it there. Despite what he suggests, I think this had next to nothing to do with the Holocaust. In any event, Jews were drawn to communist tyrants, as well; Lenin and Stalin had plenty of close Jewish comrades. Jews often feel like outsiders, and in 1968 in America they attacked the system from which they, and frequently their parents, had benefited. Two thirds of the white 'freedom riders' doing voter registration in the south, Kurlansky writes, were Jews. They did this, and later formed the anti-war movement, I suggest, because of their sympathy for those the system harmed, like American blacks and rebels abroad whom Washington saw as enemies.
Television, live, rolling television, came into its own in 1968, Kurlansky rightly notes. Seeing those body bags in Vietnam did more to stop the war than 1,000 demonstrations. Television also made politicians believe that 'style rather than substance' was the key to success. He quotes one of the urus of 1968, Marshall McLuhan: 'The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favour of his image, because the image will be so much more powerful than he could ever be.' Kurlansky names two leaders who 'have shown an intuitive fluency with this concept of leadership', Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. I think he is unfair to Mr Clinton, a flawed man of considerable substance.
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