40 Years Ago: 1968

1. 

(Posted to the blog January 15 2008)

With this week’s celebration of  Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, the presidential primaries and the continuing war, and since I’m reading David Halberstam’s The Powers That Be, especially the parts about the Washington Post and the Vietnam war, I’ve been thinking about 1968.

It was, of course, a pivotal year in American history, as Tom Brokaw’s recent book and documentary, and another that came out a few years back, showed us.

It was the year I began my adult life. It was 40 years ago.

In the beginning of 1968 I was 22. I had graduated, from Marymount College, with a major in political science and a junior year spent at the London School of Economics, the previous June. Over the past few months I’d picked grapes near my home in upstate NY to make some money, and decided to move to Washington, DC.

My cousin and  I moved in with a friend of hers near Calvert St and Columbia Ave, and we started looking for jobs and an apartment. She found a job as an art school receptionist first, and we got a basement apartment in the Mt. Pleasant area, on Lamont Street. It was a slightly dicey neighborhood but with some touches of gentrification. At night we could hear the animals in the National Zoo.

I answered several ads for various types of office work, nothing I looked at was interesting nor were they interested in me. Finally I went to the Washington Post where they were offering jobs taking classified ads at a rate of $135/week, higher than anything else I’d seen. The personnel counselor said I was overeducated, and sent me to the Promotions department where they had a temporary opening. 

For 6 weeks or so I would visit the newsroom library, looking for clips of stories that were to be submitted to various journalism prizes, including the Pulitzers. I clipped copies of the stories and pasted them in booklets. I had a job, of sorts, in Washington. 

 

Meanwhile, the Vietnam war, after 5 years or so, was escalating, and more and more American soldiers were being sent there, and dying. Marines were surrounded at Khe Sanh. The Tet new year was coming. Eugene McCarthy’s youth campaign was surging and it seemed this reluctant scholar might challenge Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Bobby Kennedy – and George Wallace -- were considering starting campaigns, too. The growing cost of the war was threatening to erode LBJ’s Great Society. War and draft protesters were being prosecuted. The Beatles had released Magical Mystery Tour and were visiting India, and drugs were changing the culture. North Korea seized a U.S. Navy ship, the Pueblo, and the second –second! Super Bowl was played (Lombardi’s Packers beat Oakland).

 

 It seems it was a time very much like this one.

 

 And it would be an eventful year.   

 

 

2. 

February 1 2008

By the beginning of February, the war in Vietnam was becoming even more of a disaster. The marines at Khe Sahn were suffering constant bombardment by mortar and rockets from North Vietnamese infantry, a hellish episode that would last 77 days.

 

The end-of-January Tet celebrations in the ancient capital city of Hue erupted into a series of early morning attacks from Viet Cong and NVA in several locations around South Vietnam. The next day, Viet Cong attacked the US Embassy in Saigon.  The battles around Hue would continue for a month.

On February 1, Eddie Adams took this photo on a Saigon street. (On the same day, former vice president Richard Nixon announced his candidacy for president.)

Every setback in Vietnam, every television report, every dead American was a painful reminder of how terribly things had gone wrong. 

We had strong feelings about the war, everyone did, one way or another. I’d studied the history of Vietnam starting around the time the escalation began in 1965, the year I went to study in London. I was convinced that we had no reason to be involved in this essentially internal civil war. By the time I graduated in 1967 it was a much different – and much bigger -- war.

That spring I attended a military funeral, fortunately the only one I went to during the war, at West Point. The brother of my classmate, who had graduated in the class of ’66 along with the classmate’s fiancé, was killed near Saigon as he patrolled with his men. Young Lt. Frank Rybicki got stuck in the mud and handed a buddy his rifle stock to pull him out:  It went off. The story of his passing ran in Newsweek. We were devastated at the waste of life. And the military pomp of a West Point funeral, with the glory of the Hudson River valley around it, only reinforced my feelings that the war was taking an unnecessary toll on the military.

It was winter, we didn’t really know anyone in Washington, so we must have spent a lot of time at home, reading the newspapers. In those days we’d always read a morning and an afternoon paper, so here we subscribed to both the Washington Post and the Evening Star (we occasionally saw the third DC paper, the tabloid Daily News).

I don’t remember much about television, but least in those pre-cable days we would have had a small set receiving the three networks. We certainly would have watched the evening news, since Walter Cronkite was a regular at home, along with some of the Sunday news analyses.

So we were aware of what was going on with the war, or at least what was being reported, even if it didn’t affect our lives.

We met a group of young men one day in a park; they were military, from various forces, in DC for some sort of training, maybe languages, since I think later they went to the language school at Monterey. For awhile they were someone to spend time with, go to movies.

We hadn’t really known anyone in the military – aside from some of my college contacts at West Point -- before this. Soon our younger brothers would have to face the draft. With the negativity about ‘hippies’ and the past year’s ‘Summer of Love’, growing drug use, and increased frustration with the slowness of improving civil rights  and ghetto poverty (on Feb 8, in Orangeburg SC -- the ‘Orangeburg Massacre’ -- 3 college students would be killed  and 27 wounded when troops fired into a crowd protesting segregation there), living in the US was depressing. But exciting things were happening, too.

 

 

3.

 February 8, 2008

Sometime in early February I actually started the job at the Washington Post. We had no car and my cousin was taking a bus to Wisconsin Avenue; I took one down 16^th St, I suppose, to the Post’s plant on L Street between 15^th and 16th. The promotions department was on the first floor off the lobby, and when I needed to visit the newsroom library I took an elevator to the 5^th floor. Lunch was in the cafeteria. 

 

During my days there, I was reading award-quality stories that had run the previous year, as I cut and pasted them into shape to fit into booklets. I wish I remembered the stories, but I do remember one of the trips to the library: sent to find some stories by John Goshko about ‘airplanes and Peru’ I met a slightly long-haired kid who was working part time there and attending American University. His name, I learned later, was Joe Wright, and although my request confused him at first he found the stories for me.

In late January 1968 Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In had debuted on television. I expect we would have watched: it was one of the only programs that paid attention to the current culture and may have had some musical acts. There was still the Smothers Brothers show, too, and we’d been able to see some of our favorite musicians on the Ed Sullivan show over the last few years. There’d been Shindig and Hullaballoo but they were long gone. Star Trek, the original Shatner version, had been on for a couple years but I don’t think we watched it often.

We probably spent more of our time listening to our records collection. We’d been listening to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – over and over and over – for several months, now, and never got tired of it. The Stones had released Satanic Majesties’ Request in December. My music was mostly English, from the Beatles and Stones to the Animals, Kinks and Zombies.

 

 My cousin introduced me to her folk collection, lots of Boston-area old-tyme music and Greenwich Village acts like the Jim Kweskin Jug band, Eric Anderson, Tom Paxton and Dave van Ronk. We certainly would have had some albums by some of the west coast bands like Jefferson Airplane (Surrealistic Pillow had come out nearly a year before), Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Janis Joplin, Lovin’ Spoonful, and the like.

Movies, especially foreign films, were an occasional treat. About this time we would have seen the one starring John Lennon as a British tommy soldier in WWI, How I Won the War.  I’m sure I bought a copy of the first Rolling Stone magazine, the November ’67 issue with Lennon, in role, on the cover, at one of the local newsstands or headshops, where I also picked up an occasional underground comic book, maybe one of the first Zap comics with R Crumb’s Mr. Natural. 

We spent weekends exploring the areas around Georgetown and Dupont Circle, where alternate businesses selling imported objects, colorful clothing and the like were flourishing, along with the Adams-Morgan neighborhood near us, around 18^th and Columbia. We heard stories about the amazing Ambassador Theater’s attempt to become an eastern Fillmore Ballroom, opening in July ’67 and hosting acts like the PeanutButter Conspiracy, Grateful Dead and the Doors, and a legendary August gig by Jimi Hendrix. Unfortunately the theater had closed in early January after complaints by local residents. (There are posters, clippings and the like on this web site: http://www.crosstownarts.com/ambassador/index.html. Among them a Post story about a ‘pyschedelic debutante ball’. Far out.)

 

 

4. 

February 15, 2008

 

In Memphis, sanitation workers went on strike on February 12. 1,300 workers walked out of their jobs to force the city to recognize their union, AFSCME Local 1733, trying to change “a long history of mistreatment and disrespect amid shameful working conditions.”  http://www.afscme.org/about/1029.cfm.

 

 In Vietnam, reporters were having difficulty – as usual --  finding out the truth about the war effort. The military kept reporting all was going well while reporters on the streets in Hue knew it was not. Halberstam tells a story in Powers That Be about Walter Cronkite being flown to Hue from Saigon to see the pacified Hue streets; on the flight back he flew with bodies of 12 American boys killed that day in the ‘non-fighting’. As Halberstam tells it, 

 

"here was Cronkite flying to Saigon, where the American military command was surrounded by defeat and calling it victory. "

 Not long after that, on February 27, Cronkite would report on his evening news program, "Who won and who lost in the great Tet Offensive against the cities? I‘m not sure…It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out...will be to negotiate, not as victors but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could." Lyndon Johnson’s reaction was that if he had "lost Cronkite," he‘d "lost Mr. Average Citizen."

Other events of February: Lisa Marie Presley was born to Elvis and Priscilla. Eldridge Cleaver published his blockbuster memoir ‘Soul on Ice’. The first 911 telephone emergency system was inaugurated in Alabama. The Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads merged into Penn Central. British astronomers announced the discovery of pulsars.

 

 Another 10,000 U.S. troops were sent to Vietnam.  On February 23, Over 1,300 artillery rounds hit the Marine base at Khe Sanh and its outposts, more than on any previous day of attacks.

 

On the cover of GQ magazine: a  dashiki.

And so it went.

 

 

5. 

March 5, 2008

March was a quiet month for me, as I continued to work at the Washington Post’s promotions department, cutting up news clippings and pasting them into contest entry books. 

 

But it was a month of heroes and strife around the world.

Over the weekend of March 2-3, there were constant meetings at the home of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in suburban Virginia to discuss the ramifications of a possible run for president. 

 From Jack Newfield’s book, Robert Kennedy, A Memoir:

“The weekend….was an almost continuous meeting of Kennedy’s informal cabinet….there were long distance phone calls, and rotating participants, with Ted Kennedy, Kenneth O’Donnell, and Fred Dutton…Jesse Unruh told them that a new California poll showed Kennedy with 42 percent, Johnson with 32…McCarthy with 18…by this point Kennedy finally understood that running and losing would be less painful than not running and contributing to Johnson’s renomination….”

In Poland, a Mar. 2 condemnation by the Writers’ Union over the banning of a play would escalate into a student protest on Mar. 8, and more and more protests against the Soviet-controlled Communist government that year.

 

 On March 4, in Atlanta, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. announced the final plans for a Poor People’s Campaign, which would march to Washington, DC, in April. The New York Times said "For the first time he decisively linked its antidiscrimination and antipoverty objectives to a campaign to end the war in Vietnam."

Top 10 songs in Canada, March 4:

 1. Love Is Blue Paul Mauriat 

 2. The Unicorn The Irish Rovers

 3. Carpet Man The Fifth Dimension

 4. (Sittin' On) The Dock Of The Bay Otis Redding

 5. Mighty Quinn (Quinn The Eskimo) Manfred Mann

 6. Brown-Eyed Handsome Man Jerry Jaye

 7. Just For Tonight The Chiffons

 8. Walk Away Renee The Four Tops

 9. The Ballad Of Bonnie And Clyde Georgie Fame 

10. Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) Kenny Rogers.

On March 6, the attacking forces around the embattled Khe Sanh marine base suddenly disappeared into the surrounding jungle.

On March 7, the “Battle of Saigon” ended.

On March 9, The New York Times reported that General William Westmoreland was asking for 206,000 more troops in Vietnam. There were already 500,000 deployed.

On March 10, Bobby Kennedy went to California to join Cesar Chavez’ farm workers campaign.  Cesar Chavez, who had been fasting for 25 days, broke his fast at a Mass attended by 8000. Kennedy called Chavez "one of the heroic figures of our time."

On March 11, the U.S. military launched sweeps against the remaining Viet Cong forces around Saigon and other areas.

 

 

6. 

March 20, 2008

March was certainly an eventful month that year.

 

On the 12th, a hijacker commandeered a flight and ordered it to Cuba, just one of at least 19 such occurrences that year.

That day, Lyndon Johnson barely beat Eugene McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary, by 7 percentage points. Newfield: “Suddenly, Lyndon Johnson’s renomination was in doubt”.

 

McCarthy told his supporters that night: “People have remarked that this campaign has brought young people back into the system. But it’s the other way around. The young people have brought the country back into the system.”

On the Republican side, Richard Nixon won the New Hampshire Republican primary, with 78% percent of the vote. His chief rival for the nomination had been George Romney, but he had withdrawn from the race in February, after reaction to his statement that he’d been ‘brainwashed’ on Vietnam by the military doomed his campaign. NY Gov Nelson Rockefeller got 11% of the vote,  as an antiwar write-in candidate, and became the new rival.

 

 On March 16th, Robert F. Kennedy announced his campaign for president, in the same Senate caucus room where his brother had announced eight years before, saying “I do not run for the Presidency, merely to oppose any man, but to propose new policies” Kennedy's run was a shock to those who hoped for a change in McCarthy's candidacy; it seemed to guarantee a divisive campaign.

 Also that day, US troops under the command of Lt. William L. Calley Jr. massacred Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. We would not hear about this disaster for over a year. Press coverage of the incident just said: "U.S. infantrymen had killed 128 Communists in a bloody day-long battle."

On March 17, 10,000 anti-Vietnam war protesters massed at London's Trafalgar Square, where Vanessa Redgrave was one of the speakers. The demonstration then moved to Grosvenor Square, where some tried to get into the the ultra-modern new American Embassy. 200 protesters were arrested and 91 injured.

 On March  19, Howard University students seized the administration building.  A few days later, students protesting the Vietnam War, the ROTC program on campus and the draft, confronted Gen. Lewis Hershey, then head of the U.S. Selective Service System, and as he attempted to deliver an address, shout him down with cries of "America is the Black man's battleground!"

 

On March 22, Johnson announced the promotion  of Gen. Westmoreland to Army Chief of Staff, relieving him of his Vietnam duties. Johnson had been studying Westmoreland's request for 206,000 more troops, on top of the 500,000 already deployed, and his advisers were telling him the additional budgetary strain of a huge troop call-up would endanger the country's financial status.

That day,  Daniel Cohn-Bendit and seven other students occupied the Administrative offices of Nanterre, launching France into what would become a state of revolution in the month of May.

Meanwhile, we were settling in to life in Washington.  I didn't know much yet about the city at all. I'd visited once for a few days when I accompanied my father on a business trip to check out Trinity College as a high school senior. Then my senior year of college, two other roommates and I came down to stay with a fourth roommate at her Arlington home for a weekend. It was January 1967, and warm enough to tour the city in a convertible with the top down. To me, it was the South. By late March this year we would have been enjoying a few spring flowers and slightly warmer weather.

About half our neighbors were black. We didn't spend a lot of time out in the neighborhood yet, but got to mingle with Washingtonians on the buses and at our work places. When we could, taking longer bus trips or finding people with cars to get out with, we acted like tourists,  amazed by Washington's incredible scenery, especially the monuments on the mall and Capitol at night, all lit up, the crowds around the White House, the jumping bar and restaurant scene of Georgetown. Probably our first trips to the Smithsonian museums were in this period.

We had read, of course, about the demonstrations. The summer before college I'd watched the March on Washington led by Dr. King on television, aching to be there; my parents didn't want me to go. The previous fall there'd been the march on the Pentagon. I wanted to go then, too, but knew I needed to stay and make enough money picking grapes so I could move to DC when the season finished. We listened to that one on the radio, I expect, as we were tuned to a Canadian news station most days, in that vineyard overlooking Lake Ontario.

Now we were there and they were shutting down Howard University. Little did we know that the unrest would soon reach a lot closer.....

 

7.  

March 28, 2008

 

I didn't know much about the Washington Post, either, despite working in a temporary job in the promotions department there for a few weeks. 

I'd been a daily newspaper reader all my life, reading the two Rochester papers and the Sunday New York Times since childhood. At college, it was the Times, where I probably got it daily by subscription.  I'd enjoyed reading the British papers during my time in London, too, amazed at the number and variety of them. But I'd only been reading the Post for a couple of months.

 I didn't know but would soon learn, for example, that the Meyer/Graham families had owned it for the last 35 years, and that in 1954 they'd bought the premier Washington newspaper, the Times-Herald, and that the masthead still, in 1968, read Washington Post and Times-Herald, and that they'd recently bought a half-interest (with the NY Times) in the International Herald Tribune, and that the company also owned Newsweek. 

 

I didn't know that Philip Graham, from a Miami dairy farm family (and brother of future Sen. Bob Graham), who had married Katharine, the daughter of owner Eugene Meyer, and taken over the running of the paper, had shot himself to death in late 1963 after a long battle with bipolar disease. Or that Kay, a so-called 'mousy housewife', had taken control of the newspaper and picked her own editor, Ben Bradlee, to run the Post's newsroom. (Kay was no longer 'mousy' after her triumphant showing as the star of Truman Capote's 'Black and White Ball' in 1966.) Her son Donald had come back from his service in Vietnam and joined the DC police force in January.

Russell Wiggins was still the editor, but he was due to retire at the end of 1968. Alfred Friendly had been the managing editor; but Bradlee's original stint as deputy managing editor lasted only from August to November 1965, when Friendly agreed to go back to writing as an associate editor and vice president, and had become a roving foreign correspondent based in London. (He was about to win a Pulitzer for his coverage of the Six-Day War.) 

 

Bradlee was in charge, and bringing in influential writers like Dick Harwood, Haynes Johnson, David Broder, Stanley Karnow, Ward Just, and Nicholas von Hoffman. (von Hoffman had written a wonderful series the previous 'summer of love' on the Haight-Ashbury scene. It was here the phrase 'We are the people our parents warned us against' originated.) Kay Graham had recently picked Philip Geyelin to run the editorial page.

I also didn't know that there was tension in the newsroom between the new management and the old, represented by long time city editor Ben Gilbert, or that the Post had  recently had to play catchup when the New York Times came out with the March 10 story about Westmoreland's request for over 200,000 more troops for Vietnam. The Post had only in January increased its Vietnam bureau to two men, Lee Lescaze and Peter Braestrup.  After Tet, Herblock drew his first cartoon critical of the war. According to  Halberstam, the Post's news meetings were becoming 'shouting matches' over Vietnam coverage and editorial policy.

So, one day in late March, here I was, dressed in my good suit (my mother had cashed in a savings bond to buy it, a plaid wool suit with brass buttons, for going to job interviews), to have an interview at the Post's newsroom library. The woman who ran the promotions department had suggested it would be a good place for me, since my temporary job was ending soon, and sent me to see Mark Hannan.

Mark Hannan, director of research. He ran the Post's library, along with two librarians, Ann and Bill, and a staff of about a dozen or so filers and researchers. Mark had come from the St. Petersburg Times, gotten a degree in library science, and also covered steeplechase racing for the Post. To my amazement, he hired me.   I would start a fulltime job in the Post's library, with a 6 month probationary period, the end of March, or maybe Monday, April 1.

I didn't know anything about news libraries, either, never knew they existed. This would be a whole new world for me. Looking back, it seems it would be a perfect fit.

It was getting to be spring in Washington and we were eagerly awaiting the blooming of the cherry blossoms around the Tidal Basin. The annual Cherry Blossom Festival would be held next week, with the height of the festival on Saturday April 6.

 Meanwhile, Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, was killed in a MIG-15 which crashed on a training flight in Russia on the 27th. That day, students began a boycott of classes at Bowie State College in Maryland. It would end a couple days later when Gov. Spiro Agnew agreed to hear student grievances.

On Sunday, March 31, Dr. Martin Luther King spoke  at Washington's National Cathedral, in the last Sunday sermon of his life, where he  tried to assuage Washingtonians' fears about the upcoming Poor People's Campaign march on Washington, scheduled for later in April.

 

"We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming to tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty...We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that it signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent action, to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make the invisible visible..." 

 

The New York Times reported that King also said that he might be persuaded to call off the Poor Peoples Campaign  he were given "a positive commitment that (Congress and the President) would do something this summer" to aid the nation's slums.

That night, Americans crowded around their TV screens to watch as President Johnson gave a televised speech to the nation.  He announced that U.S. bombing of North Vietnam would be reduced, and requested that the Hanoi government resume peace talks; but also, that South Vietnam should increase its military effort against the North.  He agreed to send an additional 13,500 U.S. troops to Vietnam. He promised that someday, American troops would be able to leave Vietnam. Then the shocker: 

  thse times as in times before, it is true that a house divided against i""....I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president."  Johnson had spent much of the last few days debating his decision, and the Vietnam situation, with his advisors, called 'the wise men', including new Defense Secretary Clark Clifford. They had sent word to Gen. Westmoreland that his request for 200,000 more troops was being cut.  

8.  

April 4, 2008

  Monday, April 1, started out as a normal work week. It may have been my first day in the Post's library, although I might have started the week before. Whichever, I was in a strange new job working with people I was just getting to know, in a city I didn't yet know well. This week would be a defining time.

 

In Vietnam, troops in Operation Pegasus began the fight to open the road to Khe Sanh.

On Tuesday, April 2, the film 2001 Space Odyssey, based on writings by Arthur C. Clark (who died last week) had its world premiere at the Uptown Theater in Washington. General release --with 19 minutes deleted -- would be April 6.

 

That day, Sen. McCarthy got 56 percent of the vote in the Wisconsin primary.

On Wednesday, Martin Luther King returned to Memphis and that evening gave his 'I have been to the mountaintop' speech. 

"Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world....the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. ...But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding."

 

North Vietnam agreed to meet with U.S. representatives to discuss peace talks.

April 4 was the one year anniversary of Dr. King's speech at NY's Riverside Church, Beyond Vietnam-- A Time to Break the Silence,  

 

("A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. ... Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war....If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.")

 

That evening, as King stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel (now the National Civil Rights Museum http://www.civilrightsmuseum.org/) in Memphis, preparing to go to dinner with a few close associates, he was shot by a sniper.  News of the shooting came over the wires shortly after 7;  the announcement of King’s death around 8:30.

Washington Post reporter Hollie West arrived soon after at 14^th and U Streets, where Dr. King's SCLC had its DC headquarters. Nearby was the office of the more radical SNCC, once led by Stokely Carmichael, who was now back in Washington heading a local 'Black United Front'. Inside the People's Drug Store, solemn shoppers were listening to President Johnson's announcement of King's death and request for non-violence.

 As West watched, Stokely Carmichael and some of his followers began going into shops along the streets and asking proprietors to close in honor of Dr. King. All remained peaceful for awhile, as store owners agreed and closed their doors. But about 9:30 a window at People's Drug broke; it was the beginning. Soon teenagers were marching up the street, shouting 'black power'. Carmichael, and chairman of the DC city council, Rev. Walter Fauntroy, tried to calm the crowd down. But eventually the crowd got out of control. Police, who were staying away to avoid clashes, had to move in. The formed a wedge and moved up 14th St., forcing people to the side. That night many of the 300 shops in the 20-block strip of 14th St and adjacent streets, had windows broken and goods looted. In the early morning hours, the first fires were set, in two food markets near 14th and Fairmont. Some stories in downtown Washington had windows broken too. By about 3 a.m., though, police had broken up most of the rioting.

The next morning, things were calm and city officials hoped the violence was over. Schools opened as usual. We went to work.  But kids began walking out of schools and roaming the streets, and at Howard University, Carmichael told a rally crowd that more violence was coming. By noon, the 14th St. corridor was jammed with people, and the Safeway market went up in smoke. As the day went on new breaking, looting, and arson cases spread, further up the 14th St. hill, along 7th St. closer to downtown, and on the H street corridor near the Capitol. By afternoon there was smoke everywhere from fires.

Stores owned by blacks had 'Soul Brother' signs in the windows (whatever happened to that phrase?), but it didn't always help. Post reporters and photographers, many of them black, were covering the streets. One man stopped columnist Bill Raspberry, pleading 'Soul brother, get them to stop'.

I didn't know much about what was going on except for reports we were getting through the newsroom talk from reporters coming back from the riot zones. At some point in the afternoon, some of us were sent home.  The city was a giant traffic jam as office workers fled downtown and city buses may not have been running. 

So I walked home, up 16th Street, passing within two blocks of the main riot corridor.  I could see and smell smoke coming from 14th St and some of the nearby streets. About halfway between the Post and our apartment in Mt. Pleasant, a couple of blocks north of U St., is the beautiful Meridian Hill Park, with terraces, fountains and statues.  From the overlook here is a good view over the city, so naturally I wandered through the park and watched for awhile before going up the hill.

As I stood watching, people were passing by, carrying things that had obviously been looted from stores. Some were  struggling with TVs and other large items. One young man came right by me with his loot, and when I looked at him, he stopped and talked to me: "It's not against you.  I'm just getting what the system owes me".  Everyone was friendly; some seemed slightly embarrassed. There was some disorder in the small business section near our neighborhood further north, too, still only 3-4 blocks from the upper section of the 14th St. where more stores were looted and burned. Tear gas had been set off by police so I had my first whiff of what would become a familiar smell over the next few years.

That afternoon several expensive stores in the downtown area, just 10 blocks from the White House, were looted and burned too.  Large areas of the city were aflame. Looting and fires also occured in the Anacostia section of DC, and spread into other neighborhoods. Around 4 o'clock, the first Army troops, from the 3d Infantry at Fort Myer, crossed the bridge into the District. Several more troops and National Guard units, from as far away as Fort Bragg, were on the way. About that time Mayor Walter Washington ordered a curfew to start at 5:30 p.m. and lasting until 6:30 a.m.

Once we got home that afternoon, we would have to stay there. But by nighttime nearly 6000 troops had turned the city streets into a ghost town. More were coming.

More on King's death: In the Atlanta Journal Constitution: Martin Luther King Jr.
In the Memphis Commercial-Appeal: http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/mlk2008/

Riot references: 10 Blocks from the White House, the Post's recap of the riot published later that year, by Ben Gilbert and staff.


9.  

April 5, 2008

 

Saturday was supposed to be the big day of the Cherry Blossom Festival, but that had been canceled by now. Tourists were getting a peek at the riot areas, which were cordoned off by troops and police but could be seen from side streets in places. It looked like a scene from WWII, burned buildings everywhere.

And fires were still breaking out, there was still sporadic looting, and some sniper incidents. The curfew started at 4 p.m. that day so downtown Washington was deserted by early evening. That night police arrested 600 for curfew violations, all over the city.

There were 13,600 troops by Sunday -- Palm Sunday.

Either Saturday or Sunday, we went out to see what was happening. We may have gone to the Tidal Basin to see the blossoms. But I took some pictures in the areas on the edges of the riot zone, probably mostly near our Mount Pleasant neighborhood but also in  Meridian Hill Park. I don't recognize much in these photos now.

 

Military occupation of our nation's capital -- not the only time I would see it.

 

My roomate/cousin George, Meridian Hill.

 

 

 

 

By the time the weekend was over, 12 people were dead and over 1100 injured. 7,600 people had been arrested. Later, the Post would estimate 20,000 people participated in the riots. 900 businesses were damaged, and many business owners would never return. But we would see those 'soul brother' signs for months. In Boston, a scheduled James Brown concert was held as a tribute and rioting was minimal. In New York, Janis Joplin and Big Brother with Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Guy, Joni Mitchell, Richie Havens, Paul Butterfield, and Elvin Bishop held an impromptu 'Wake for Martin Luther King, Jr.'

On Saturday, in Oakland, a shootout between police and Black Panthers resulted in the death of young Panther treasurer Bobby Hutton, who had recently joined the organization at 16.

There were riots in about 100 other cities that week, including Baltimore, Chicago, Kansas City; nearly 50 died.

This week was my introduction to journalism. Although I was a news junky I had never thought of journalism as a career. But as I read the details of the riots and how Post reporters and photographers covered them, and as I heard the stories when I went back to work, hearing how these men (and a few women) who I would soon get to know and work with had faced rioters, angry police, snipers, fires, tear gas and still gotten amazing stories about how people's lives were affected by that awful week, gave me an appreciation of the work journalists do.

 I would never forget.

On Monday April 8, the siege of Khe Sanh ended. Over the 78 days of the siege, 199 Marines were killed and 830 wounded. The weeklong battle to reopen the road to Khe Sahn by the 1st Cav had resulted in 92 killed and 629 wounded. The base at Khe Sahn, after all the cost of keeping it going, would be shut down after Westmoreland was replaced in June.

On Tuesday, Martin Luther King Jr. was buried in Atlanta, his body flown from Memphis in a plane chartered by Robert F. Kennedy's campaign.  Baseball's opening day was moved to the next day, when Vice President Hubert Humphrey would throw out the first ball at the Senators/Twins game on opening day, Wednesday, with soldiers patrolling the streets outside DC Stadium.

The curfew on DC lasted until Friday that week, with later and later starting times.Troops would leave the city by Easter Sunday, and the state of emergency dropped on the 15th.

(Postscript: Post photographer Matt Lewis took many of the pictures of the riots, and also photographed the 1963 March and other protests in DC in those years. The Post has a video of his photos and memories online.)


10.
April 23, 2008

On April 11 Defense Secretary Clifford announced Gen. Westmoreland's request for 206,000 additional soldiers would not be granted. He set a ceiling of 549,500 troops in Vietnam, and a plan for Vietnamese military to take over responsibility for the war effort.

Also that day, president Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which added fair housing provisions to the previous civil rights legislation of 1964: it prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin.

In Germany, student leader Rudi Dutschke was shot in an attempted assassination. Riots broke out on the news.

The Prague Spring was under way, since Alexander Dubcek had become first secretary of the Central Committee of Czechoslovakia in January. Novotny resigned as president the end of March and in April, Dubcek's reforms were launched.

On April 20, Pierre Trudeau became prime minister of Canada, replacing Lester Pearson.

On April 23, at Columbia University in New York, students angry over recently revealed university involvement with a weapons-research think tank, and a planned gymnasium in Morningside Park, took over a classroom and administration building. Over the next few days students, led by the SDS's Mark Rudd, occupied other buildings including the university president's office in Low Library. The protest would be broken up by NYC police on April 30.

April 29, Hair opened on Broadway, after a six-month off-Broadway run.The cast album would become one of our favorites of that year. 

 

 

On the 30th, Rockefeller defeated Nixon in the Massachusetts primary on April 30 and announced he would actively seek the Republican nomination. Eugene McCarthy, the only name on the Democratic ballot, got 49 percent of the votes, but Bobby Kennedy write-ins totaled about 25 percent.

Also in April, The Boys in the Band debuted on Broadway, called one of the first 'looks into the closet'

Books of the month: Gypsy Moth Circles the World, Francis Chichester; French Chef Cookbook, Julia Child; The French Lieutenant's Woman. For more on who was important in the book world that year, here's a wonderful gallery of 1968 illustrations from The New York Review of Books, by David Levine.

Simon and Garfinkel released their Bookends album in the beginning of April. They already had two albums in the top ten that month, The Graduate soundtrack, and Sounds of Silence (Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme). Cream's Disraeli Gears was also in the top ten, along with Dylan's John Wesley Harding. The Beatles started their own management firm and record company, Apple Corps. Sly and the Family Stone released Dance to the Music. Another album I was listening to then: Love's Forever Changes, released the previous  year.

London Bridge was sold to Robert P. McCulloch, founder of Lake Havasu City, AZ, who submitted the winning bid for $2,460,000; it would be shipped to Arizona at a cost of $7 million.

We were visiting some local galleries like the Corcoran, near the White House. We fell in love with the Washington Color School artists, particularly the work of Gene Davis , whose simple color stripes reminded us of 'Op Art' but had a whole new feel. Back in the apartment, we started making our own color striped paintings.  

 

We must have seen 2001: Space Odyssey that month, too. It had premiered in DC just before the riots. The Uptown Theater was up Connecticut Avenue so would have been fairly easy to get to from our place. I re-read the book this month and was blown away by parts of it: it's been a long time since I've seen the movie. But I was particularly struck by the section about how the two astronauts got their news:  On a paper-thin flat computer screen called a 'Newspad',  full description from the book here:   It was nearly (but not quite) hypertext, nearly 25 years before the World Wide Web:

More on 1968:  From BBC Radio ;  Project 1968 , "blog docu-novel about the lives of two young women on their way to the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago."


11.
May 8. 2008

In May, the turmoil continued:

On May 2, in France, the university at Nanterre was shut down by its administration after several weeks of student protests. The next day, students at the Sorbonne held a protest of the events in Nanterre, and police responded by surrounding the campus and shutting it down. The National Union of French Students and the Lecturers' Union called a strike, and on May 6 they marched to the Sorbonne. Police charged the crowd and the students created barricades. Rioting and conflicts with police would continue, including an all-night riot on the rive gauche on May 10. The Communist Party responded by calling for a national one-day strike on May 13. That day, a million people marched in Paris. Workers continued the protests, shutting down factories, around the country. The situation would continue through the month.  

 

On May 7, the Indiana primary gave Robert F. Kennedy his first big win, with  42 percent of the Democratic vote (27 percent for McCarthy, 31 percent for Indiana governor Branigan, standing in for Humphrey, who wasn't running in primaries.) He had spent lots of time in Indiana, motorcading across the state and giving a memorable impromptu speech the night King was shot. There had also been a whistle-stop campaign on a trail following the route of the Wabash Cannonball. Richard Nixon easily won the Republican primary, and had barely campaigned there.

That day Alabama governor Lurleen Wallace died of the cancer that had been diagnosed after she agreed to run as a stand-in for her husband George, who had to give up the office because of term limits. She took the office in January 1967;  George became a candidate for president on the American Independent Party ticket.

On May 10, peace talks began in Paris but soon stalled as the U.S. insisted that North Vietnamese troops withdraw from the South, while the North Vietnamese insist on Viet Cong participation in a coalition government in South Vietnam. It was the first diplomatic discussion between the two sides in the Vietnam war but would only lead to on and off talks over the next five years.

On May 11, the first marchers in the Poor People's March began to arrive in Washington DC. Led by the late Martin Luther King Jr's deputy Ralph Abernathy, nine caravans had started from different sections of America on May 2 and picked up demonstrators along the way. In Washington, they would begin setting up a shantytown-style campsite, called Resurrection City, on 16 acres of the Mall near the Lincoln Memorial where Dr. King had spoken in 1963.

Meanwhile, at the Washington Post's library, I was learning the ropes and the news archiving and research systems, in the days before computers.

I'd long been a hoarder of news clippings, especially political cartoons, so the job appealed to me: It was a simple system of clipping and filing. Every day several library staffers would organize several copies of each page of the newspaper, and mark each story with the date and one of several different file headings. A story about Bobby Kennedy's campaign in Indiana might be marked with headings like "Kennedy, Robert F: presidential campaign", "Kennedy, Robert F: Speeches", "Presidential Campaign, 1968: Indiana primary", Presidential Campaign: Democratic Party", "Indiana: politics", etc. Then another staffer would take a metal bar and strip each story from the pages and fold into envelope size. Next several other staffers would alphabetize the clips, and file them into envelopes in file drawers.

It was tedious, particularly the filing. New envelopes had to be labeled when it was a new category or when the old ones got too full. Typewriters were kept on carts in the aisles for this. Since filing was the most boring job, it got put off the longest. There was always a backlog of clips to be filed.

Of course, the second part of the job was finding those clips for reporters. Since the latest weren't always filed yet, sometimes they had to be retrieved from several places. The specific clips requested were pulled from the original envelopes (which didn't leave the library) and placed in check-out envelopes, and logged. Copy boys (or girls) would pick them up and deliver to the reporters or editors who requested them. Hopefully in a day or two they would be returned and refiled.

If a reporter needed other sources of information, there was a book collection, mainly reference books like encyclopedias, almanacs, Who's Whos, etc. Plus a large magazine collection. Sometimes the only way to find a specific piece of information was to use the New York Times' index, in book form, the only one available. Or Facts on File, a monthly report of news from around the world, collected in book form at the end of the year.

Several of the library staff specialized in answering reference questions. As a new employee I was relegated to the files. But I was interested to watch as the others went through the research routines.

Some jobs were specialized: for example, one staffer, an ex-Navy submariner, answered the military questions. He also had a weekly job of calling the Pentagon each Friday for the Vietnam 'body counts' (both U.S. military and enemy combatants) which would be published over the weekend. Another researcher specialized in local politics; she was active in the northern Virginia Republican organization.

The library was tucked in the far northwest corner of the newsroom, in the old Post building facing south on L St. (It would be a couple years until the construction of a new, larger addition facing 15th St.) The library's front counter faced rows of reporters' desks, with editors' offices on the far side. Just near the library corner were the offices of cartoonist Herblock and political reporter Chalmers Roberts. (In the photo, the only one I have from the old library, Joe Wright answers a research question at the front of the library facing into the newsroom. One of the reporters standing at  front: Holly West.) 

I was getting to know the staff, and meeting some of the reporters. I was getting a regular paycheck,  somewhere around $120 a week, which seemed like a fortune to me at the time. Some time during these first few weeks my boss, Mark Hannan, took me to meet Howard Simons, assistant managing editor. He was a wonderful man who would encourage my advancement at the Post over the next several years. I was feeling pretty lucky to be there. 

 

More on the events of the year at the Guardian: 1968, year of revolt. 

12:

May 18, 2008

 

The SCLC's Poor People's Campaign began its Washington marches for equal justice and economic aid to the poorest in America.  Resurrection City was coming to be. On 15 acres of West Potomac Park, the grounds around the Lincoln Memorial, marchers had arrived by convoy, sometimes in wagons drawn by mules, wearing denim overalls and country clothing, and they were building a shantytown near where the Vietnam memorial would rise years later. Rows of shacks made of plywood and plastic created a 'main street'. About 2600 or so residents, from cities and small towns in the South and in the North, would live here in squalor as the May rain turned the grounds to mud.

  I know we went to see, as did many other Washingtonians and tourists. You couldn't get in without proper credentials, but could view from the snow fence around the outer limits. I wish I had taken pictures, but it was probably hard to get anything without getting close. It was probably a rainy day, anyway. It seemed to rain the whole month.

There isn't much history of this event on the web, even the Wikipedia entry is sparse . The Washington Post hasn't yet done an anniversary package, either. A public radio program  has some remembrances by participants. Lots of photographs are out there, though. Lots of photographers went there to take pictures, and many are available now in online galleries, or for sale (links to some are on the radio package).

 

There is a nice original story on the Harvard Crimson's website, though, from 1968:  The Poor People Take Over the Town. "there it is, fans, just like Martin Luther King said it would be--400 A-frame shelters made of plywood and plastic. And poor people from Mississippi and Alabama right before your very eyes."

On that day the primary was held in Nebraska.  Kennedy got 51.5 percent of the Democratic vote, McCarthy 31 percent. On the Republican side, Nixon won with 70% of the vote to 21% for California governor Ronald Reagan and 5% for Rockefeller.  Reagan was undeclared but still was becoming Nixon's leading challenger; he wouldn't declare until the convention in August.

On May 17, nine people  entered the Selective Service Offices in Catonsville, Maryland, removed several hundred draft records, and burned them with homemade napalm in protest against the war in Vietnam. The nine were arrested and would be tried and sentenced to jail.

Among them were two brothers, also priests, Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit, and Philip Berrigan, a member of the Society of St. Joseph and a World War II war hero who claimed to have been "a skilled and remorseless killer." according to his brother Jerome.

The previous October Phil, with three others, had entered the draft office in Baltimore and poured blood -- their own blood -- on some of the files.

This event struck home for me, as the Berrigan brothers had given talks, and conducted Masses, at Marymount College during my senior year there. I had taken communion from one of them. Even more, Phil Berrigan would leave the priesthood to marry Elizabeth McAllister. Sister Elizabeth had been a Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary and taught at Marymount: I took her class in art history senior year. She was a joyous person who was involved with the students and who cared about causes like poverty and peace.   

 

They were a stirring example. Although Phil spent much of the next several years in prison, they would raise three children and found Baltimore's Jonah House (the site also has Catonsville memorial information. A a documentary film on Catonsville,  Investigation of a Flame. ) 

(It had been an interesting time of change at Marymount. The reforms of Vatican II were sweeping through the church, and nuns like Sister Elizabeth were bringing in new ideas, inviting controversial speakers like the Berrigan brothers. Sometime around my senior year many of them gave up the nuns' habit for street clothes, and there were evening folk music masses where everyone drank the wine, from jugs. I remember walking back to the dorm from those masses and passing nuns on their way back to the convent, singing. Very different from my first year there when you had to wear white gloves to mandatory chapel and the teaching nuns wore elaborate habits and were called 'mother' to separate them from the sisters -- working nuns, often from Latin America, who cooked and cleaned.)

Also in the news that month, Drew Pearson's 'Washington Merry-go-Round' column reported on May 23 that Robert Kennedy, as Attorney General, had authorized FBI wiretaps on Martin Luther King. The story, of course, caused an uproar and cast a negative cloud over both King and Kennedy.

On May 28, the Oregon primary gave McCarthy a win over Kennedy (McCarthy 44.7 percent, Kennedy 38.8), giving Kennedy his first loss and making the coming California race even more important. Nixon won on the Republican primary there with 65 percent. 

13:
June 2, 2008

At the beginning of June, it was starting to feel as though the world was falling apart.

France was still in an uproar, with strikes, protests, riots, and de Gaulle had just disbanded Parliament and announced a new election.

Students were shutting down universities in Spain, England and Germany. Reaction to student protests in Poland had worsened anti-Semitism there and Jews were being asked to leave. There was civil war in Nigeria, where the Ibo nation of Biafra had declared its independence the previous year. A new Nigeria offensive this month led to a blockade and mass starvation.

In Washington, things were a mess at Resurrection City, with rains creating a mudfield; the papers were reporting that young bored residents, some of them urban gang members, were bringing in booze and partying all night. Park Police weren't allowed inside the perimeter and fears of crime and violence were increasing. 

On June 3, Andy Warhol was shot in the lobby of his New York studio, The Factory, by Valerie Solanis.  A panhandler and author of  the anti-men 'SCUM Manifesto', Solanis was angry that he had not produced a play she had written. Warhol would be permanently injured, a friend was also shot, and Solanis, defended by feminists, would spend a few years in prison and mental institutions.

The next day was California's primary.
We hoped we'd soon know more about who would be running against Richard Nixon.

As diversion from the news, we were listening to the new album by the Small Faces, Ogden's Nut Gone Flake, which had come out and shot to number one in England just a couple weeks before. (One song: Itchycoo Park.) We watched the first episode of The Prisoner, the strange British spy/science fiction fantasy starring Patrick McGoohan, beginning a summer run in the U.S. We were also anticipating going to see the Roman Polansky movie, Rosemary's Baby, which would debut on June 12.

But things were only going to get worse.
 

 

14:
June 4, 2008:

On Tuesday, June 4, California held its primary. Winning this primary was essential to Bobby Kennedy's successful nomination, to reverse the damage of his recent loss in Oregon, and he'd held rallies the day before in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Watts and San Diego, a grueling day. On primary day he, Ethel and six of their kids rested in a borrowed Malibu house and arrived in the evening at his LA headquarters at the Ambassador Hotel. 

At 10 pm. California time, he was confident of victory and gave interviews to NBC's Sander Vanocur and CBS' Roger Mudd. Just before midnight he gave a victory speech in the ballroom to his California supporters. The speech ended with "...and on to Chicago". 

On the way to another reception he took a detour through the hotel's kitchen pantry. It was there that Sirhan Sirhan was waiting with his gun, and there that Bobby Kennedy's campaign ended. Five other people were also shot.

He had won California by a close victory, but enough, 46.3 percent to McCarthy's 41.8.  In the hospital with a bullet in his brain, and one in his neck, he lived another day, making it through surgery but not responding. 

Most people in the east woke up to the news since it happened after 3 a.m. eastern time. The day was a terrible day for everyone. The news of Kennedy's death at 1:44 the next morning meant we woke up the next day to even worse news.

 Members of the Kennedy family, including his brother's widow Jacqueline, flew to Los Angeles to accompany Bobby's body back to New York, where the plane was met by a crowd of New York dignitaries at LaGuardia airport. A motorcade took the casket to St. Patrick's cathedral, where a huge line of mourners would wait. All day Thursday mourners passed through the church as 8 masses were held. In Los Angeles, Sirhan Sirhan was arraigned for the murder. That night, the Kennedy family asked that the cathedral be left open for thousands more to file through to view his casket. The Friday funeral mass was filled with the famous, from Nixon to McCarthy, Goldwater to Rockefeller, Ralph Abernathy to Billy Graham.  Afterwards the procession moved to Penn Station, where the body was placed on a train for the last trip to Washington.

The outpouring of emotion along the train route was heartbreaking, as was the last ceremony as Kennedy was buried near his brother in Arlington National Cemetery.

When John F. Kennedy was shot, I was a freshman at college, studying in my dorm room when I heard, and the news was so staggering it was nearly incomprehensible. I could do nothing but run to the chapel and try to pray.  The next night a few of us had tickets to see Beyond the Fringe, the radical British satire review. It was hard to do, but we'd already bought the tickets, so we took the train to the city. Outside the theater near Broadway, passersby mumbled how terrible it was to be going to a comedy. What else could we do? It was a sad comedy that night, and the next morning more shock, as we watched in the dorm lounge,  Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald to death on live TV.

Now, again, four and a half years later, we'd been through the horror of King's murder and riots, and now this. It was staggering. I remember little of these days, just that I spent them at work, probably with an eye on a television most of the time.

I know there were tears. And seeing Paul Fusco's photos of the people standing next to the railroad tracks to watch Bobby's train go by, there are tears again. 'People were watching hope pass by'. The multimedia presentation is at the New York Times website. In the Republican primary, California governor Reagan was the only candidate listed on the ballot. The California votes added to his popular vote total, slightly higher than Nixon's by convention time, when Reagan would actually declare himself a candidate. But the previous week's Oregon primary results had put Nixon over the top.

Now what?

Sources: Newfield, Robert Kennedy; Witcover, 85 Days. 

 

15:
June 27, 2008

Since Dr. Martin Luther King's murder in April, investigators had been following a trail of a man who seemed to have been following King, and went by the name of Eric Stavro Galt. Although  information linked him to King's murder in Memphis, it was three months before he was finally caught.
 Police in London arrested him June 8 at  Heathrow Airport, where he was trying to leave the UK with a Canadian passport under the name of Ramon George Sneyd. James Earl Ray was extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's assassination. He would confess in 1969 and be sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted the confession and was supported in his effort for a retrial by King's family.  40 years later questions about James Earl Ray linger, Atlanta Journal Constitution.

On June 10, Gen. Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland  as military commander in Vietnam.

At Walter Reed Army Hospital, former president Dwight D. Eisenhower was hospitalized since a late April heart attack in California. He had another attack on June 16.

On June 19, president Johnson signed the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, passed in reaction to increasing crime rates and the last few year's urban riots. Among the provisions of this law, first time restrictions on purchase of handguns. Title 3 provided guidelines for wiretapping by government agencies, designed to protect individuals from government snooping, but it carried a clause allowing wiretapping for 'national security', something the coming Nixon administration would seize on. Johnson expressed dismay at the provision, saying the nation 'had taken a dangerous step' that could lead to 'producing a nation of snoopers bending through the keyholes of the homes and offices in America, spying on our neighbors'  but signed the bill anyway.

On June 22, Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren submitted his retirement; he would leave as soon as a replacement was approved, before a new president (likely Nixon) would take power. Warren had headed the court for 15 years and had headed the commission that reported on John F. Kennedy's assassination. A few days later, president Johnson nominated his longtime friend and current Supreme Court justice Abe Fortas to replace Warren as chief. Johnson also nominated a Texas crony, former congressman and judge Homer Thornberry, to replace Fortas.

France remained unstable, with ongoing protest marches and a strikes at industrial facilities including Renault Peugeot, and Citroen factories. On June 11 a riot at the Paris barricades resulted in 70 injuries and 400 arrests. On June 16 police removed the last 2000 students from the Sorbonne. By the 18th, workers were beginning to return to their jobs, and prime minister Pompidou announced an end to the crisis. In the June 23 election, huge victories were scored by the centrist Gaullist party, with losses for the socialist and leftist factions. The left would lose even further in the June 30 elections.
 
 At Resurrection City in Washington, the mood was brutal. Uniformed 'Tent City Rangers' tried to keep order couldn't restrain the  gang-like 'marshalls' who erratically enforced entrance to the compound and who ranged through the city at night. The SCLC's Ralph Abernathy was stricken by criticism of the marchers and of his staying outside of the camp many nights, and blamed it on the American culture that had created 'a monster in the ghetto'.
Despite the problems, the National Park Service extended the camp's permit from June 16 to June 24. 50,000 people arrived for the 'Solidarity Day' demonstration on June 19, 'Juneteenth'. The next night several youths skirmished with police officers, who responded with tear gas, outside the encampment, and began stoning cars along Independence Avenue and other nearby streets.
Three nights later a similar incident resulted in 'clouds of tear gas'  rolling through Resurrection City, where the few remaining protesters ran from their tents toward the Washington Monument. On the morning of June 24, 1000 police arrived to close Resurrection City down. 115 people remaining in the camp were arrested as they sang freedom songs; 200 more, including Reverend Abernathy, would be arrested later on Capitol Hill. Park officials prepared to bulldoze the camp.
During the day, several incidents occurred in areas of DC previously destroyed by the April riots; it looked like another riot was coming. A curfew was called that evening. A city in shock was in shock once again, but calm was restored fairly quickly. 

 

At the Washington Post, I was getting to know some of the Post's reporters, mostly those from the Metro Desk who covered the city. They tended to need local story background more, so spent lots of time in the library. They were young and talented and many would go on to do great things:  Len Downie (who just announced his retirement after years as the Post's executive editor, suceeding Bradlee), Robert Kaiser, Bob Maynard, Carl Bernstein, Jim Hoagland, Richard Cohen, Paul Valentine, Marty Weil, Paul Levey, Glegg Watson, Hollie West, Stuart Auerbach, William Raspberry, Leon Dash, Ivan Brandon, Carol Honsa, Susan Jacoby, and lots more.  

 

 I was impressed with how they covered the April riots. Now I watched them covering another huge story under personal danger. I particularly remember seeing Paul Valentine coming in to the newsroom, having been directly hit with tear gas and stinking of it, his face red and eyes watering so badly, we feared for his health. I was developing a huge respect for journalists and the work they did.

On the cover of Time that month: The Gun in America, Aretha Franklin, Robert F. Kennedy, and graduates.

Listening to:  United States of America . Taj Mahal.  New friends from the Post library were listening to folk/country rock, and I was getting hooked on their music: The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Jesse Colin Young's Youngbloods...Dylan, of course.  My love of British bands continued with new albums from Cream, The Who.


16:
Aug 6, 2008:

Somehow July slipped by me, so here's what we were doing that month in 1968:

On July 1, President Johnson signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement with 58 other countries in efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.
Also that day,  customs stops ended between European Common Market countries.  (But the UK's admission was still being thwarted by deGaulle).

Early in the month, Intel Corp. was founded.

Gen. Creighton Abrams took over command in Vietnam. Congress passed a 10 percent federal income tax surcharge to help finance the cost of the war. Early in the month, North Vietnam released 3 American pilots shot down over Hanoi. Later, President Johnson met with Vietnamese president Thieu in Hawaii.

In France, a new government was formed July 13. Two days later, France detonated a nuclear bomb in the Pacific.

Later in July, a fight between two Mexico city schools led to a police/miliitary attack, becoming a riot; there were brutality accusations. On July 26, a demonstration crossed the lines of a march supporting the July 26 revolution in Cuba; this led to several more days days of rioting, 1 dead.

On July 17, Saddam Hussein was involved in a military coup that overthrew the government,  bringing the Baath party into power, and became vice chairman of the military council in Iraq.

On July 25th, Pope Paul VI published the encyclical Humanae Vitae, condemning birth control.

And a new group, formerly Bob Dylan's backup, released an eagerly anticipated album: The Band's  Music from Big Pink. This would quickly become one of my favorites. 

On the radio: Tiptoe thru the Tulips, by Tiny Tim. Number one: Herb Albert's This Guy's in Love with You. Yellow Submarine, the movie, came out in Britain. We couldn't wait to see it when it would be released later in the year in the U.S.; we began painting copies of some of the artwork from the movie.

Back in Washington, we'd discovered the agony of DC's hot humid summers. With no air conditioning, sleeping at night meant a window fan and lying barely covered on top of the bed. 

But the parks were full of people, especially the park in Dupont Circle and the 'P Street beach' next to Rock Creek just across the bridge from Georgetown. Some days the places looked like a 'be-in' with hippie clothes, beads, incense and marijuana smoke; at Dupont there was more of an African American crowd with lots of drumming. 

We got to meet some of the neighbors on the sidewalks on our street, too. 

16: 

August 8, 2008

On August 5, the Republican National Convention opened its sessions at the Miami Beach Convention Center.
Norman Mailer on attending an event in Miami Beach in August:
"The vegetal memories of that excised jungle haunted Miami Beach in a steam-pot of miasmas. Ghosts of expunged flora, the never-born groaning in vegetative chancery beneath the asphalt came up with a tropical curse, an equatorial leaden wet sweat of air which rose from the earth itself, rose right up through the baked asphalt and into the heated air which entered the lungs like a hand slipping into a rubber glove....Of course it could have been the air conditioning: natural climate transmogrified by technological climate. They say that in Miami Beach the air conditioning is pushed to that icy point where women may wear fur coats over their diamonds in the tropics." (It's no wonder for years after 1968 I considered Miami a place I would never go.)

Nixon entered the convention as front-runner but the Rockefeller forces still had a bit of hope. Ronald Reagan, bolstered by his California primary votes, announced his candidacy.
Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, the former Democrat who had turned republican in 1964, supported Nixon over Reagan or the independent George Wallace and pushed for Nixon to choose a conservative VP candidate like Maryland Gov. Spiro Agnew over a more liberal candidate like Fla Gov. Claude Kirk or Illinois Sen. Charles Percy. It was the beginning of Nixon's 'Southern Strategy' which would turn politics on its face as formerly Democratic southern states moved en masse to the Republican party. 

Photos of the Florida delegation led by Gov. Claude Kirk, and Nixon supporters' signs, from Florida Memory.

 

On the first ballot, Nixon got 672 votes over Rockefeller's 277 and Reagan's 182.

From Nixon's acceptance speech:

As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame.

We hear sirens in the night.

We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad.

We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.

And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish.

Did we come all this way for this?

Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this?

Listen to the answer to those questions.

It is another voice. It is the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting.

It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans -- the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators. 

On the night of August 7, as Nixon was being nominated, across the bay in Miami's predominately black Liberty City area a 'Vote Power" rally had been scheduled but never happened. Youths gathered in the streets and threw rocks at some passing cars during the afternoon. Later in the evening, a white man with a George Wallace for President bumper sticker drove into the crowd. Angry participants pulled the man out of his car, beat him, then overturned it and set it afire. Police moved in, setting off tear gas.
Gov. Kirk and SCLC leader Ralph Abernathy left the convention to walk the streets with Metro Mayor Hall, as things calmed.
But violence continued the next day, with police reacting to possible sniper fire with a barrage of bullets, resulting in two men dead and a young boy injured. National guard troops were called in. Another man had died from a stray bullet the night before. The violence abated after 150 arrests and a couple nights of curfew and rain. It was Miami's first riot.

Mailer: He (the reporter) had no idea at all if God was in the land or the Devil played the tune. And if Miami had masked the answers, then in what state of mind could one now proceed to Chicago?

17: 

August 21, 2008

 Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower remained in Walter Reed Army hospital, after being moved there in May to recover from a spring heart attack. He had another in June and two more on the 6th and 16th of August. Doctors were trying several new therapies to try to relieve the situation, but nothing was working.  One day that month, on a day off, I accompanied a Post reporter to the hospital to sit on watch. The situation was dire enough that Post reporters were staying round the clock there, just in case. The reporter who asked me to go with him was bored with the assignment and at least with me there we could play cards, probably whist, which I'd learned seemed to be the most popular card game among Washingtonians.  I remember little of the hospital except that we sat along a gallery overlooking  a large room.  Eisenhower would survive August, but die, still in Walter Reed, the next spring.

That month,  ‘Cheap Thrills,’ by Big Brother and the Holding Company,was released on Columbia Records. It would top the chart for seven weeks.

 

Other new albums we were probably listening to: the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo, and Creedence Clearwater Revival, both released in July.

Tom Wolfe published a new book, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, about Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters and their trip on the painted bus 'Further' across country.  "Are you on the bus or off the bus?"

During August, negotiations were continuing between the governments of Czechoslovakia and the Soviet Union. On August 3 they signed the Bratislava Declaration, agreeing, along with other Warsaw Pact members, to uphold Marxist-Leninist principles. But following talks were unsatisfactory and the Soviets under Leonid Brezhnev decided this rogue ally needed disciplining. On the night of August 20-21, 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 2,000 tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. 72 Czechs and Slovaks were killed and hundreds wounded. Alexander Dubček called upon his people not to resist. He was arrested and taken to Moscow along with several of his colleagues, where most of them agreed to sign a promise to give up many of their reforms. They were returned to their posts within a few days.

Many years later it was revealed that several conservative members of the Czech government had asked the Soviets to intervene to prevent 'counterrevolution'.

On Aug. 22, CBS News' Walter Cronkite demanded, and got, a 1 hr evening news broadcast because there was too much news to cover in 1/2 hour.

There would be a lot more to come.

18.
Aug 25, 2008:

The Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago on August 26.

For months, anti-war groups had petitioned the city to get space to carry out demonstrations while the convention was ongoing. The Youth International Party (YIPees) had decided to hold their own national convention, a five-day "Festival of Life" the same week as the democrats, nominating a pig as their presidential candidate.

Mayor Daley had responded by denying permits, calling out the national guard and barricading the convention sites. The city was crippled by taxi and bus strikes. The weather was hot and humid and air conditioning was erratic.

The television networks and party insiders had encouraged the Democrats to move their convention to another city, maybe Miami Beach (which President Johnson had rejected, saying 'Miami Beach is not an American city').

Yippee flyers posted around Chicago in the weekend leading up to the convention advertised "free motel...sleep with us in Lincoln Park. Vote Pig in '68". The city refused to allow any gatherings in Lincoln Park and said everyone would have to clear the park at 11 pm. On Sunday night, a concert was to be held in the park, but the unorganized event turned into a disaster, as the music lasted only a short time and police drove the crowd out with tear gas and clubs at curfew.

On Monday night, convention opening day, thousands milled around the park, where beat celebrities like Allen Ginsberg, Terry Southern, William Burroughs, and Jean Genet would speak in support of the crowd. Norman Mailer was drawn to the event, but missed the aftermath: he " ...enjoyed himself until the morning when he discovered the attack by the police had been ferocious, and Ginsberg had been targeted, his throat so injured he could barely speak....And worse. Seventeen newsmen had been attacked by the police...the counterrevolution had begun. " 

Inside the convention hall, several miles away near the stockyards, there were ' daily shouting matches between red-faced delegates and party leaders often lasting until 3 o'clock in the morning' according to Haynes Johnson, who was there. The nomination of Hubert H. Humphrey was in progress, but was not taken well by the many supporters of Eugene McCarthy and the late Robert F. Kennedy. Many supported the nomination of Kennedy's younger brother Edward. One of those pushing for Ted Kennedy's nomination: Richard J. Daley. George McGovern had also offered himself as an anti-war candidate.

On Tuesday, President Johnson's birthday (he stayed at his Texas ranch), an 'anti-birthday party' was held at the Coliseum, where attendees protested the Chicago police and their violent tactics. When protesters returned to the streets, police attacked again. Chicago streets smelled of mace, tear gas, and blood. Thousands then marched to Grant Park, across from convention headquarters at the Hilton. The National Guard moved in, and surrounded the hotel with armored car barricades. All night kids in the park sang songs and appealed to convention goers to flash their room lights in support. Tear gas drifted into hotel public areas.

When the convention leaders delayed the debate on a Vietnam platform plank, dove delegates began an impromptu demonstration, finally cut off by an order by Mayor Daley.

On Wednesday afternoon, the plank calling for an end to the war in Vietnam was defeated by a 3-2 ratio, despite many speeches in support by party leaders.  After the vote, delegates began an impromptu chorus of "We shall overcome", eventually drowned out by the convention orchestra, ordered to play loudly by mayor Daley. Delegates responded by holding up 'Stop the  War' posters.

Meanwhile, another mass meeting was held in Grant Park. Protesters started a candlelight march to the convention hall at the Stockyards. On the way, police attacked once again. Lines of police wielding billy clubs trapped the marchers at an intersection overlooked by the Hilton. Convention attendees watched in horror as protesters were mowed down. The crowd began to shout "The whole world is watching". At home, watching this on television, we began shouting it too.

At the convention, one delegate asked for the floor to enter a motion to delay the convention for two weeks, moving it to another city. Delegates kept leaving the floor to watch the mayhem on television. As the nomination speeches continued, CBS correspondent Mike Wallace was punched in the face as he tried to ask why a delegate had been turned away from the floor.

At one point, Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, in nominating McGovern, said "With George McGovern as President, we would not have to have such Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago." As the cameras turned to Mayor Daley in the front row, he could clearly be seen to be shouting 'fuck you' at Ribicoff, along with an ethnic slur. Ribicoff's answer: "How hard it is to accept the truth". 

Finally, Hubert Humphrey was nominated, with 1,761 3/4 votes, to McCarthy's 601, McGovern's 146 1/2, and 100 for other candidates. (Among the others: Rev. Channing Phillips of the District of Columbia, the first black American candidate to be put in nomination; he got 68 votes. Ted Kennedy got 12 3/4.) When, during the celebration, a picture of Humphrey's wife Muriel was splashed on the screen behind him, he ran over to kiss her image.

After the nomination, a film was shown honoring the late Bobby Kennedy. When it was finished, delegates began singing "Battle Hymn of the Republic". As convention leaders tried to gavel the demonstration to a halt, the singing got louder. After several minutes, Chicago leaders signaled their minions to start chanting, "We love Daley". The two demonstrations continued for several minutes until floor leader Carl Albert announced a tribute to Martin Luther King.

The next morning, Humphrey announced his vice presidential candidate: Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie.

After the convention adjourned that night, police who claimed someone was throwing object from rooms at the Hilton, stormed the building in the early morning hours, dragged young campaign workers from their beds to the lobby,  and beat them. Haynes Johnson, on his way to an appearance on the 'Today' show, saw the results: "They had been bludgeoned by Chicago police, and sat there with their arms around each other and their backs against the wall, bloody and sobbing, consoling one another. I don't know what I said on the "Today" show that morning. I do remember that I was filled with a furious rage. Just thinking of it now makes me angry all over again."

We watched the whole thing, in shock. Was this America? It changed everything we knew. Nothing would ever be the same.

On the last day of August, the Rolling Stones released the single 'Street Fighting Man', based on Mick Jagger's experience watching the spring antiwar demo in London's Grosvenor Square. It was the song of 1968. 

Sources: Mailer, Miami and the Siege of Chicago; Witcover, 85 Days; Haynes Johnson, Smithsonian Magazine, Aug '08, 1968 Democratic Convention: The Bosses Strike Back.

19:
Sept 23 2008

This month, Yale junior Garry Trudeau began to draw a comics series about the football team, called 'bull tales'; they would run in the Yale Daily News, starring BD and Mike Doonesbury.

On the cover of GQ, September 1968: Omar Sharif, wearing a plaid wool jacket.

On September 7 at the Miss America pageant, Atlantic City: Despite the legend, no bra burning took place. several dozen women's liberation protesters from New York City joined with women from around the country to stage a show on the boardwalk. From Jo Freeman,   who was there:  

 

Women’s liberation took advantage of this to stage several guerilla theater actions. A live sheep was crowned Miss America. Objects of female oppression – high heeled shoes, girdles, bras, curlers, tweezers – were tossed into a Freedom Trash Can. A proposal to burn the can’s contents was scuttled when the police said that a fire would pose a risk to the wooden boardwalk. Women sang songs that parodied the contest and the idea of selling women’s bodies: ‘Ain’t she sweet; making profits off her meat.’ A tall, Miss America puppet was auctioned off.

That weekend,  Led Zeppelin performed for the first time at a club in Europe; at their first show, they were billed as The Yardbirds (the Yardbirds had disbanded two months earlier, and guitarist Jimmy Page subsequently formed this new group).

On September 16, Dr. Orlando Bosch, an anti-Castro terrorist, drove his Cadillac to Dodge Island, the Port of Miami, where he and his accomplices fired a 57-millimeter bazooka, hitting the Polish freighter Polanica.  Years later a Cuban news report would accuse Bosch and cronies of being responsible for several dozen bombings or attempted bombings against countries that traded with Cuba, that year.

On September 18 presidential candidate Richard Nixon appeared on Laugh-In, sticking his head through the well-known wall of opening doors and saying “Sock it to ME?”

Protesters against the government continued in Mexico, increasing as the international focus was on the Olympics, to be held in Mexico City in October. President Díaz Ordaz ordered the army to occupy the National Autonomous University campus on the 18th. Students were beaten and arrested indiscriminately and fighting continued around the city including at Polytechnic, occupied five days later.

60 minutes debuted on CBS September 24, the first weekly news magazine on television. It was on a Tuesday.

"Funny Girl" starring Barbra Streisand, opened in theaters. Streisand had been a hit on Broadway in 1964 with this musical about the life of Fanny Brice.

On Sept. 26, President Johnson appointed Post editor J. Russell  Wiggins to be UN ambassador, after George W. Ball resigned to join the Humphrey campaign. Russ Wiggins would be sworn in on Oct. 4, leaving Ben Bradlee as the top editor of the Post 3 months early. Graham and Bradlee offered the managing editor job to Eugene Patterson, recent editor of the Atlanta Constitution. Howard Simons, passed over for the  managing editor job, would get it three years later when Patterson left the Post, disgruntled. About this time Steve Isaacs was named metropolitan editor and Richard Harwood, national editor.

September 29: “Piece of My Heart,” the lone Top Forty hit by Big Brother and the Holding Company, enters the charts. It would reach #12.

On September 30, the first Boeing 747 rolled out of the Everett, WA, factory.

On that day, the 900th US plane was shot down over Hanoi. 538 Americans were killed in action that month, highest of the year.

Sometime around this time the Post library staffer who had casualty duty went on vacation. I got to fill in, and call the Pentagon a few Fridays for 'body counts'. Many things made the war personal to me, despite not having a loved one in it. This one was deeply felt, talking to the enlisted man who read the numbers in a dull voice over the phone. Just numbers.

20.

Posted to the blog October 17, 2008

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968)
(See the posts in chronological order)

On Oct 2, US Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas withdrew his nomination as chief justice; his nomination had been held up for months by a Senate filibuster. (Six months later, he would resign from the court, admitting he'd made a financial deal with the Louis Wolfson Foundation.)

On October 2, the disturbances in Mexico leading up to the Olympics reached a head as a student procession in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, led to a bloodbath.

Supporters claimed soldiers with automatic weapons killed 300 or so students. The government claimed that only 50 students died in the five hours of gunfire. It became known as the Tlatelolco massacre.


Ten days later, the 1968 Summer Olympics opened in Mexico City. The high altitude of the venue caused problems for many athletes, but created opportunities to set records for others. American Bob Beamon jumped nearly 9 meters in the long jump. It was the first Olympics to have doping tests, resulting in expulsion of a Swedish athlete for alcohol use. the closing ceremony was broadcast around the world in color, the first time for the Olympics.

The most controversial event of the Olympics was the stand taken by two of the medalists in the 200-meter dash, Tommie Smith (gold) and John Carlos (bronze) as they raised their fists in a 'black power' salute as the national anthems were being played. (The silver medalist, an Australian, wore a human rights badge.)


Other events of October this year: the 10th anniversary of NASA, world premiere of the cult horror movie "Night of the Living Dead".

Top songs that month: "Hey Jude" and "Harper Valley PTA". Barbarella was released. Traffic released their second album, and Led Zeppelin was recording their first. The Lion in Winter came out the end of the month.

The Motion Picture Association of America adopted its film-rating system, created by Jack Valenti.
Dadaist artist Marcel Duchamp died on the 2nd.

On the 5th, police attacked demonstrators in Derry, Northern Ireland, marking the beginning of 'the troubles' there.

On the 11th, the first manned Apollo mission, Apollo 7, was launched, carrying Wally Schirra, Donn Eisele, and Walter Cunningham. They would do the first live television broadcast from orbit.

On the 14th, the Defense Department announced it would be sending 24,000 army and marines back to Vietnam on involuntary second tours.

On October 20, JFK widow Jackie Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis on Skorpios.

That month, the four American auto manufacturing companies sold 885,358 cars, a huge increase and a new record for any month. Inflation was rising prices on everything.

In the Atlantic Monthly that month: an article entitled The War Against the Young, by Richard Poirier.

Ove the last couple months, I'd gotten friendly with some people I'd been introduced to by a coworker. Mostly from the Princeton, New Jersey area, they had mostly attended, and recently graduated from, George Washington University in DC.

Some of them had an apartment near the GWU campus in Foggy Bottom, around the corner from the DAR's Constitution Hall, where I'd attend some great concerts over the coming years (The Band and Derek and the Dominos most memorable).

The apartment was also across the street from the Selective Service office so there were constant pickets and demonstrations there.

With these new friends, we got to occasionally get a car trip out of the city, towards Virginia's Blue Ridge and Skyline Drive, a welcome break especially as fall arrived.

One Sunday afternoon, probably October 20, I got to take another short road trip with them to Alexandria, Va, where there was a concert being held in the Roller Rink there. I remember that day as the first time I took some drags from a marijuana cigarette, but the concert would have been memorable anyway: the opening act was the Jeff Beck group, with Beck, Ronnie Wood, Nicky Hopkins, and (maybe?) Rod Stewart.

But the main event was the one and only Janis Joplin, with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Wow. I remember sitting on the floor to the right and very close to the acts. It was a great day.


On October 27, 50,000 people joined an anti-Vietnam war protest in London.

On October 31, President Lyndon Johnson announced his 'October surprise', designed to aid the election of his vice president, Hubert Humphrey, as president: he would end the Vietnam operation called "Rolling Thunder", basically ceasing "all air, naval, and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam". During this three year bombing campaign the U.S. had dropped the equivalent of 800 tons of bombs a day on North Vietnam. Johnson said progress in the Paris peace talks made the cease fire possible.

 

21. Posted to the blog November 4, 2008:

November 5. The election was upon us, a scary time. The choice, between LBJ's vice president Hubert Humphrey, a likable former mayor, congressman and senator from Minnesota who had for years been a reliable liberal campaigner, and Nixon. In 1948 HHH had been one of the first who stood up to the southern Democrats and demanded a civil rights plank. He introduced the bill that created the Peace Corps. He had tried for the presidential nomination in 1960 and gave up his senate post and majority whip position to become LBJ's VP in '64.
Despite all his good points, many Democrats and other voters, especially the young, deplored his complete loyalty to LBJ and support of Johnson's war effort and were upset he was the nominee instead of the dead Bobby Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy. A Tom Lehrer song "Whatever Became of Hubert?" went "I wonder how many people here tonight remember Hubert Humphrey. He used to be a senator..."

Some possible Humphrey voters were also voting for the third-party candidate George Wallace, the former Alabama governor who had attracted blue-collar voters to his campaign of racism and disgust with anti-war protests.

Nixon, on the other hand, was a polarizing candidate: you either loved him or hated him. Many voters had never forgiven him for his 'red-baiting' campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s, the Alger Hiss case, his win over Helen Gahagen Douglas for the Senate in which he accused her of being 'pink' (It was Douglas who dubbed him 'Tricky Dick', according to Wikipedia); his 'Checkers' speech.

As Eisenhower's two-time VP he was always expected to have a chance at the presidency but his close loss to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and his 1962 loss at the California gubernatorial race, in which he claimed he held his last press conference ( 'you won't have Nixon to kick around anymore') seemed to have ended his career.

His return -- and nomination -- in 1968 was a surprise to many, and disgusted many young voters in particular. He was old politics, and we didn't like his appeal to the so-called 'silent majority' and the outrageous campaign statements and attacks on anti-war protesters of his VP candidate, Spiro Agnew. Spiro Agnew watches were a popular fashion statement, by supporters but also by those who thought he was a joke (one campaign ad: "President Spiro Agnew? (laughter)).

So November 5th was an uneasy day. For my first election night in a newsroom, I discovered the library's job was to set up as an information center for Post readers. We were expected to come in a bit later that day, and work as far into the night as necessary.

We would get copies of wire reports on the returns as they came in; the copy staff had to make extra copies and drop them on our desks as quickly as they got other copies to the reporters and editors working on the night's stories. Readers had been told to call the library's number, and when a reader wanted results in Iowa, for example, we had to find whatever numbers we had amongst the piles of torn-off wire printouts. It could get frustrating, especially when callers couldn't understand why we didn't have the latest news. Even the TV in the corner with the network news coverage didn't always help.

I don't remember how late I had to work that night, or how soon we knew the results, but it was demoralizing. Nixon won with 43.4% of the vote to Humphrey's 42.6%. Wallace had taken 13.5% so may have made the difference. Worse, though, Humphrey took only 191 electoral votes from 13 states, whereas Nixon took 32 states and Wallace 5.

Headline in the New York Times the next day:

NIXON WINS BY A THIN MARGIN, PLEADS FOR REUNITED NATION; NIXON'S ELECTION EXPECTED TO SLOW PARIS NEGOTIATION
Allied Diplomats Suggest All Sides May Adopt a Wait-and-See Stance
NIXON'S ELECTION MAY SLOW TALKS

Many of my friends talked of moving to Canada, Paris, or somewhere else. A year later I'd leave for London (but stay only a few months). 1969 would be a sad year.

 

22. Posted to the blog November 21, 2008:

 

A few days after the election, as the reality of Nixon's election sunk in, Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block ran his 'free shave' cartoon: it depicted his studio, with a barber pole outside a window, and a sign on the wall: "This shop gives to every new president of the United States a free shave. H. Block, proprietor." A shaving mug and brush stood on the desk next to post of pens and bottles of ink. (For those who don't remember, Herblock's depictions of Nixon had long featured a thuggish dark-bearded character. During the campaign, Post editor Russ Wiggins had sent Block a razor with a poem asking 'Give that man a shave'. Block's response: "He's shaved with new Gillettes 'n' Shicks 'n' Still he is the same old Nix'n.")

One happy result of the election: Shirley Chisholm of New York was elected to Congress, the first black woman ever.

1968 had been a bad year for airplane hijackings to Cuba, with almost 1000 people diverted to Havana. In November at least 3 planes were hijacked, including a National Airlines plane from New Orleans, an Eastern Airlines plane from Chicago and a Pan Am plane to San Juan. Things had gotten so bad that in early December Time magazine published a guide to what to do if your plane is hijacked to Cuba:

"DO enjoy your stay. Most layovers last overnight, because Cuban authorities will not permit U.S. jets to take off with passengers from Jose Marti Airport, and it takes time for the airline involved to ferry over a substitute prop plane. Passengers meanwhile are billeted either at Jose Marti Airport or at one of two good hotels...You will probably be treated to a nightclub, complete with daiquiris, a chorus line and an audience of gaping Eastern Europeans. The shopping downtown is better..."

In Miami, Dr. Orlando Bosch was convicted in his September bazooka attack on a Polish freighter. He would serve four years of a ten year sentence and later mastermind an attack on a Cubana airlines plane that would kill 73.

In November, the first Whole Earth Catalog was issued, from Menlo Park, California, with a photo of the earth from space on the cover. The issue is dated 'Fall 1968'. The goal:

"We are as gods and might as well get used to it. So far, remotely done power and glory--as via government, big business, formal education, church--has succeeded to the point where gross obscure actual gains. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of intimate, personal power is developing--power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested. Tools that aid this process are sought and promoted by the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG."

It was a month of music: Van Morrison released his Astral Weeks album sometime in November (it had been recorded in two sessions, in September and October). It would become one of the most honored albums of the century.

Also released this month: George Harrison's soundtrack album, Wonderwall Music, some of which he had recorded in India earlier in the year. it would be the first release by the Beatles' new company, Apple Records, and the first solo Beatle recording.

The Who were in London recording their rock opera, Tommy, which would be released in 1969.

The Beatles' animated movie, Yellow Submarine, was finally released in the U.S., November 13.

The Beatles' White Album "The Beatles", their only double album, was released Nov. 22. Some of the recording sessions had been attended by John Lennon's new love, Yoko Ono, who sang some backup. On Nov. 8 John's wife Cynthia's divorce from him was finalized. About this time Yoko suffered a miscarriage.

On November 26 Cream held their farewell concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The band, consisting of Eric Clapton, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, had had a success with the release of their Wheels of Fire album over the summer. By October they had decided to break up and began a 'Farewell Tour' of the U.S. On November 3, they played the Baltimore Civic Center. Several of us rode in someone's van from DC to Baltimore where we got to see the second to last concert given in the U.S. by this astounding superstar band. I remember walking the cold downtown streets and seeing this new city for the first time.

Topping the Billboard charts in mid-November: Number 1, The Beatles' Hey Jude. Also: the Supremes' Love Child, Those Were the Days by Mary Hopkin (another Apple release),Steppenwolf's Magic Carpet Ride, White Room by Cream, Abraham, Martin and John, by Dion, and Glen Campbell's Wichita Lineman.

For Thanksgiving, I likely flew from Washington to Rochester, to spend the holiday with my family: here in our backyard, my mother is wearing a poncho I knitted, in multicolor stripes that reminded me of a Gene Davis painting. I'm wearing a coat that I think I bought at Casual Corner, near the Post's building. The fourth young man is a German exchange student who lived with my family part of this year. It was probably my first visit home after moving to DC the previous late December or early January.