1968

1968

Yesterday was the fiftieth Anniversary of the death of Robert Kennedy.  The coverage brought back a lot of memories.

It was the worst year I can remember:  worse than 2017, worse than even 2001.  It was the year I turned twelve, and the year that I became involved in politics, history, and the life of America.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know about politics before.  In 1960, I proudly wore a JFK for President button.  When visiting a very Republican family friend, I was told to take the button off or sit outside.  I patiently waited outside the door and eventually they relented and let me in. I still have the small iron elephant they gave me as a present that day.

In 1966 my parents took me to see the President of the United States at the Fairgrounds in Dayton, Ohio.  I was excited and in awe just getting to see the President in person.  As Lyndon Johnson began to speak, a line of young people in the front, wearing black turtlenecks, began chanting for the President to stop the war in Vietnam.  They were from Antioch College in nearby Yellow Springs:  I was shocked that they would interrupt the President.

But it was in 1968 that I really became part of the American political system.

It was a Presidential election year, and it was the year that the Civil Rights movement and the movement against the Vietnam War both went to the streets.  Richard Nixon was back as a Republican running for the Presidency, and the Democrats were in disarray.  Gene McCarthy, running against the War, chased President Johnson out of the race with a strong showing in the New Hampshire primary.

Bobby Kennedy, also against the war, was reluctant to run against Johnson and the “Best and the Brightest” staff chosen by his brother and still running the government.  But he finally entered, infuriating the kids who got “clean for Gene” and splitting the anti-war Democrats.  Hubert Humphrey, the Vice President, also entered as Johnson’s proxy (I got to meet him at the Dayton Airport.)  There were protests at colleges (my sister was at Miami) and in the streets, both anti-war and civil rights.  We were a nation in turmoil.

The Civil Rights movement was torn:  Martin Luther King continued to lead the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the main organization, but the younger generation of leaders were splitting off.  The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) had broken away, and more radical groups like the Black Panthers and the Black Muslims were pressing for change.  King, seeing that black men were the greatest proportion of dying soldiers in Vietnam, came out against the war.

He began the Poor People’s Campaign, and marched in the streets for the sanitation workers in Memphis.

Each morning I woke at seven to catch the bus for Van Buren Junior High School.  The day began with a click, followed by the “clock-radio” with rock and roll.  Each half-hour, they read the news.  The news at 7 am on April 5^thwas that Martin Luther King had been shot and killed in Memphis.

Dayton burned that night. We sat in our family room, watching the live coverage from the TV station Dad managed.  Mom made sure we all stayed close to home.

I became a Bobby Kennedy supporter, and following his lead, and that of my sisters and Walter Cronkite, came out against the War.  It was not the majority view in suburban Kettering, Ohio, a town that was dominated by heavy industry and Wright Patterson Air Force Base.  Looking back, it probably wasn’t a majority view of my parents either.

I closely followed the Democratic campaigns.  Gene McCarthy refused to withdraw. He had earned the right to stay in the election, but at the time I wanted him out to give RFK a clear path to the nomination. It came down to California, and the delegate fight after, to see if anti-war Kennedy or pro-war Humphrey would gain the nomination.

June 5, 1968:  the clock-radio clicked and I woke to the news that Bobby Kennedy had been shot.  The next morning, the clock-radio clicked again, and he was dead.   The following days were quiet as we watched another Kennedy funeral.  The church service was in New York, and Ted Kennedy delivered the eulogy:

“…my brother…a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal, saw war and tried to stop it.”

He concluded with the words that were the driving force of the Kennedy Campaign,

“some men see things as they are and say why, I see things that never were and say, why not.”

It felt like the “things that never were” would never be.  Bobby Kennedy’s promise was lost.  We watched the mourning train go from New York to Washington, thousands lining the tracks, and the burial beside his brother in Arlington.

I spent the summer doing what eleven year olds do.  I swam, I rode my bike all over the city, and I played.  In late August, right before the start of school, I broke my arm.  After they set the break (without pain killers, I really remember that, just “hang on”) I was told to stay still for the next few days.  I sat on the couch with a “beer box” under my arm, and watched the continuous coverage of the Democratic Convention in Chicago.

It was a convention of disaster.  While the anti-war forces were marching the streets, the pro-war Humphrey forces had control of the convention.  Mayor Daley, a Humphrey man, decided to clear the protestors.  There were riots, there was tear gas; the live television coverage included beatings, and gassings, and cops chasing protestors and reporters into hotel lobbies and up stairwells.  It permanently disabled the Humphrey campaign.

It came as little surprise in November then, when the Principal announced over the PA system that Nixon was the next President of the United States.  Van Buren Junior High erupted in cheers, and I felt pretty miserable. There was little good to say about 1968.

Christmas of  ‘68 seemed to be more about turning the page on the year, and moving on towards the ‘70’s.  The one shining achievement was space exploration.  After the 1967 tragedy of Apollo 1, burning up on the Launchpad and killing three astronauts, the space program returned with earth orbits of Apollo 7 in October.  But it was Apollo 8 that was the first to leave earth and travel to the moon.

As they orbited, Astronauts Borman, Lovell and Anders made live broadcasts back to earth.  It was Christmas Eve, and the voices from far away read the Book of Genesis, “In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth…” as we watched the sun rise over the moon.  It was the most watched TV broadcast ever (at the time) and we all watched as three men in a tiny vessel reached out across space to remind us that we are one on a small world.

The war would drag on for seven more years, and the issues that Martin Luther King died for are still apparent today.  It seemed like we turned away from hope.

Now, fifty years later, we may feel like we have turned away from hope again.  But, just as in 1968, we are a resilient country and a nation of essential goodness, and we will persevere and return to hope.  And somewhere, there is some eleven year old, watching all of this, probably between video games, and learning about politics and the world in 2018.  I hope that child will find the leaders and inspiration for a better future.