STREAKING AWAY FROM EARTH, THE ASTRONAUTS left behind a deeply troubled planet at the end of a deeply troubled year.
Nineteen sixty-eight had begun on an optimistic note, with a medical miracle. At Stanford University in California, Dr. Norman Shumway performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States. A week after the operation, fifty-four-year-old steelworker Mike Kasperak appeared to be doing fine.
As America picked up the confetti from its New Year’s celebrations, the country’s presidential campaigns began in earnest. President Lyndon Johnson, who’d won in a landslide in 1964, looked to be the certain nominee for the Democrats. The early front-runner for the Republicans was former vice president Richard Nixon, who’d begun to tour the country and make his case. In Alabama, former governor George Wallace was preparing a third-party run based on a pro-segregation platform that was popular in the deep South.
Looming over the campaigns was the war in Vietnam. Half a million American troops were in country; since 1965, when official combat units arrived, nearly twenty thousand American lives had been lost in the fighting against North Vietnamese Communist and guerrilla forces. Still, President Johnson and William Westmoreland, the general in charge of U.S. forces in Vietnam, promised the public that the war was going well and that victory was on the horizon.
On January 21, fifteen days after the operation, the heart transplant recipient in California died despite having made it through “a fantastic galaxy of complications,” according to his surgeon.
Just after midnight on the final day of January, tens of thousands of North Vietnamese troops and Vietcong guerrillas launched a coordinated attack on nearly every major city and town in South Vietnam. The action came as a surprise to American troops, who were honoring a two-day cease-fire with the enemy during Tet, the country’s sacred holiday. By sunrise, over 120 population centers and military bases had been assailed by more than 80,000 North Vietnamese and Vietcong fighters, an attack now being called the Tet Offensive.
For the first time, Americans were able to watch news coverage of combat without government control of images or information, thanks to reporters and cameramen embedded with the troops. The United States was supposed to be on its way to victory—the president and his generals had sworn to it—and yet here was an enemy that had stormed the American embassy and damaged nearly every stronghold in the south.
Night after night, the evening news showed graphic footage from the battle; often, 90 percent of the telecast was devoted to the war. One image sank especially deeply into the American psyche. In a still photograph and on film, it showed a North Vietnamese prisoner, hands tied behind his back, being executed by a single pistol shot to the head, delivered from a distance of a few inches by a South Vietnamese national police chief. There had been no charges, no trial, no last words—just the raising of the gun and a single shot to the temple. The photo ran on the front page of nearly every newspaper in America on the first day of February; no one who saw it, or watched the film of the shooting on the evening news, knew that the prisoner himself had executed, in cold blood, an entire family. All that America knew was that this terrible war was more ugly and brutal than they’d imagined, and that the clean and quick ending they had been promised seemed very far away.
In Orangeburg, South Carolina, a bowling alley remained one of the few local businesses to refuse service to black patrons, despite civil rights laws prohibiting such discrimination. In early February, black students at South Carolina State University began to protest, first by sitting at the lunch counter at the bowling alley, then by gathering in larger numbers and demonstrating outside. On February 8, a melee broke out during a student rally on the SCSU campus; panicked police fired into the crowd. The gunfire lasted just ten seconds or so, but when it was over, at least thirty people had been shot, and three black teenagers died. One of them, Delano Middleton, was a high school student whose mother worked on campus. At the hospital, Delano told her, “You’ve been a good mama, but I’m going to leave you now.”
The next day, Governor Robert McNair called the episode “one of the saddest days in the history of South Carolina,” but he blamed the violence on “Black Power advocates.” At a time when hundreds of Americans were dying every week in Vietnam, the Orangeburg Massacre, as it would be called, soon faded from the headlines. But the future it foretold for 1968 was only just starting to crystallize.
During a background briefing ten days into the Tet Offensive, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk erupted at reporters who were pressing him with tough questions. “Whose side are you on?” Rusk demanded. The press was offended that Rusk would challenge their loyalties, but the reality was that the country was deeply divided about the war. Much of the difference in opinion fell along generational lines; older people tended to trust the government, younger people tended to question everything. (In fact, by 1968, a common expression among the counterculture was “Never trust anyone over thirty.” And it was around that age that political opinions seemed to divide.) Thousands of roadside billboards admonished BEAUTIFY AMERICA, GET A HAIRCUT.
By late February, the Tet Offensive had ended. By all accounts, it was a resounding American military victory. Yet that was not the message delivered by Walter Cronkite to the nation during his February 27 newscast. The CBS anchor had traveled to Vietnam during the Tet Offensive to see things for himself. Cronkite rarely offered his opinion. Now, he spoke candidly, and viewers hung on every word:
“To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion…it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then 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.
“This is Walter Cronkite. Good night.”
When President Johnson saw the broadcast, he is said to have told those around him, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”
On the same day that Cronkite addressed the nation, twenty-five-year-old Frankie Lymon was found dead on the floor of his grandmother’s New York City apartment. Lymon had been a teenage singing sensation, part of the doo-wop group the Teenagers, and had been the angelic lead voice on songs like “Why Do Fools Fall in Love?” which he’d helped write at age thirteen. As his boyish voice deepened, he faded from public favor. Depression led to a heroin addiction, but by 1968, he claimed he was clean and hoped America would give him another chance. Police who found his body discovered a needle nearby. When news broke of his passing, people around the country pulled out their old Teenagers records and listened to Frankie ask, “Why do birds sing so gay? And lovers await the break of day?” To so many of them, the nineteen-fifties sounded like a very long time ago.
In 1967, President Johnson had appointed a commission, chaired by Illinois governor Otto Kerner, to study the race riots that had erupted in several American cities since 1965. On the last day of February 1968, the Kerner Commission issued its report, along with this conclusion: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”
By March 1, after a month of news about the Tet Offensive, President Johnson’s approval ratings had dropped by double digits. Infused with new energy, supporters of peace candidate Eugene McCarthy, a quiet, intellectual senator from Minnesota, campaigned almost nonstop in advance of the New Hampshire primary. Most of them were young and fervently antiwar; many even cut their hair and put on smart clothes to be “Clean for Gene.” McCarthy was a long-shot candidate, but some thought he might get enough votes to avoid embarrassment.
On March 12, the day of the New Hampshire primary, McCarthy did much better than that. When the results came in, he’d tallied just 410 votes fewer than the president, a stunning near-upset. Immediately, New York senator Robert Kennedy announced that he would enter the race. Overnight, it seemed that an indestructible American president had turned to clay.
Nineteen days after the New Hampshire primary, President Johnson delivered an address to the nation on live television. At the end, he announced: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” Shock waves rippled through the country. In nine months, America would have a new president.
In April 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., went to Memphis, Tennessee, to support striking garbage workers. He led a march with black laborers, who held signs that read I AM A MAN. King, as always, intended to demonstrate peacefully, but the march turned violent. A black teenager was killed, and sixty protesters were injured. King himself had to be whisked away to safety.
Days later, he told a crowd at the city’s Mason Temple Church: “Something is happening in Memphis, something is happening in our world.”
He spoke of justice and fair treatment for the sanitation employees, of nonviolence, of the power of collective action. And he offered these parting words:
“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.”
The next evening, April 4, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, King prepared for another rally. As he stood on the balcony outside his second-floor room, he called down to the parking lot to Ben Branch, a musician, and asked him to sing a special song for him at the event that night, an old spiritual, “Take My Hand, Precious Lord,” one of King’s favorites. A moment later, a bullet tore through King’s jaw, severed his necktie, and ripped open his neck.
Ralph Abernathy, King’s close friend and fellow civil rights leader, rushed to King and cradled him in his arms.
“Martin, Martin, it’s going to be all right,” Abernathy said.
An hour later, King was pronounced dead at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Memphis.
That night, America started to burn.
Riots and violence broke out in 130 cities across the country. Over the next several days, 65,000 Army and National Guard troops were dispatched to try to keep the peace. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley ordered his police superintendent to shoot to kill arsonists and shoot to maim or cripple looters. In Washington, D.C., soldiers stood guard on the White House lawn as fires raged just blocks away.
On the night King was shot, Robert Kennedy was scheduled to give a speech in Indianapolis. When news of the assassination reached city officials, they warned Kennedy that his safety could not be guaranteed. He went anyway. When he arrived at the corner of Seventeenth and Broadway, he climbed onto the back of a flatbed truck and stood out in the open. Wearing his late brother John’s dark overcoat, he spoke to the mostly black crowd without looking at notes.
“For those of you who are black and are tempted to fill with—be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man.”
Never before had Kennedy spoken publicly about his brother’s assassination. He called for compassion and asked for a prayer for the King family.
By the end of a week of rioting throughout the country, thirty-nine people had died, thousands had been injured and arrested, and millions of dollars of property damage had been done. Indianapolis, however, had stayed calm.
In mid-April, John Lennon and George Harrison became the last two Beatles to leave India after traveling there in February to study meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. They’d grown disenchanted with the spiritual leader after hearing he’d made a pass at women who’d joined their pilgrimage. When asked by the Maharishi why he was departing, Lennon said, “Well, if you’re so cosmic, you’ll know why.”
Later that month, student activists occupied five buildings at Columbia University, took a dean hostage, and issued a series of demands. Among other things, the students insisted that the university end its association with a military think tank and halt its plan to build a gymnasium in Harlem on the site of a park used by lower-income residents.
Columbia officials resisted, only growing more entrenched as the students smashed furniture and shattered windows, destroyed academic research, and hung posters of Vladimir Lenin, Che Guevara, and Malcolm X on the walls. For a week, the university administration tried to wait out the protesters. Finally, they asked police to remove them.
At 2:20 A.M. on April 30, a thousand officers, many carrying flashlights and billy clubs, stormed the occupied buildings. Some students resisted passively, others by punching, biting, or throwing bottles and batteries. Many police officers used force, some of it brutal, to pull out the protesters and gain control. To some who watched, a class distinction could be seen in the collision of weathered boots with fresh faces, a working-class force smashing into private-school privilege.
The confrontation lasted past dawn. When it was over, more than seven hundred people had been arrested and nearly one hundred fifty injured, including twelve police. Shocked parents and other citizens looked at the photos of the aftermath and wondered what had become of their country.
Down Broadway from Columbia, a new musical was opening. Hair told a story of hippies, the antiwar movement, the counterculture, and the sexual revolution in 1960s America, and it featured drug references and group nudity. The sixty-seven-year-old reviewer John Chapman of the Daily News in New York called the show “vulgar, perverted, tasteless, cheap, cynical, offensive, and generally lousy” and recommended that “everybody connected with it should be washed in strong soap and hung up to dry in the sun.” But even octogenarians who saw the musical had a hard time not singing along to the hit songs Hair produced, including “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In.”
In May, CBS television aired a special in prime time, Hunger in America, which told of the growing problem of malnutrition in the world’s richest country. According to the documentary, there were ten million hungry people in the United States, a figure that stunned viewers. The filmmakers even showed footage of a dying, malnourished newborn. But perhaps the most memorable moments came in an exchange with a fourteen-year-old black student named Charles from Hale County, Alabama, who told a doctor he went hungry during the school day because he didn’t have twenty-five cents to pay for lunch:
Dr. Wheeler: Well, what do you do while the other children are eating?
Charles: Just sit there.
Dr. Wheeler: How do you feel toward the other children who are eating when you don’t have anything?
Charles: Be ashamed.
Dr. Wheeler: Are you ashamed?
Charles: Yes, they haunt you.
Dr. Wheeler: Why are you ashamed?
Charles: Because I don’t have the money.
To win the Democratic nomination for president, Robert Kennedy had to win the California primary. A week earlier, he’d lost Oregon to McCarthy, and was trailing new entrant Vice President Hubert Humphrey in delegates. For RFK, the Golden State was the crossroads. If he lost there, he’d likely drop out.
As the California returns rolled in, it was clear Kennedy would win. Just before midnight, the candidate went to the sweltering ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles and addressed a packed house of supporters. Looking more boyish than his forty-two years, Kennedy spoke of his belief that America could be healed and come together. In closing, he made a V with his raised fingers—which in 1968 stood for both peace and victory.
Followed by his entourage and a string of reporters, Kennedy made his way to the hotel’s pantry, where he reached out to shake hands with Juan Romero, a seventeen-year-old busboy who’d delivered food to his room earlier that week. As the two moved close, a man with a pistol lunged forward, pointed the gun just inches from Kennedy, and began firing, hitting the senator once in the head and twice in the right armpit. As Kennedy collapsed, Romero cradled his head to protect it from the cold concrete and tried to comfort the senator, who had been kind to him a few days earlier and had treated him as an equal.
Photographers snapped photos of Romero holding Kennedy. The images would become among the most memorable of the twentieth century.
Pandemonium erupted throughout the hotel; supporters held their heads, sobbed, and screamed “No! No!” and “Not again!” Police seized the shooter, a twenty-four-year-old Jordanian American named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. In his pocket they found a newspaper story noting Kennedy’s support for Israel.
Kennedy was rushed to the hospital, where he clung to life. In England, the British Broadcasting Corporation told its audience, “We pray for the American people that they may come to their senses.”
Early the next morning, on June 6, Kennedy died of his wounds. Across the country, people walked around dazed. In New York City, WPIX-TV broadcast the image of a single word—SHAME—and let it run for two and a half hours. People of all colors and classes and ages gathered spontaneously at railroad tracks to glimpse the train that carried Kennedy’s body from New York City to Washington. When it passed, mothers holding babies waved, children saluted, the elderly tried to stand. Black and white Americans chased the train, running on the tracks together until the last car disappeared.
Richard Nixon became the Republican nominee for president on the first ballot at the party’s national convention in Miami in early August. His running mate, Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, had backed the Civil Rights Movement but now scolded black people, and some of their leaders, for not disavowing so-called black racists. He and Nixon would run on a campaign of law and order, one aimed at a “silent majority” and voters shaken by the events of the year.
The Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago later in August. As protests erupted around the city, McCarthy seemed unwilling to seize the moment and lead the passionate supporters who’d backed him for so long. In the end, he received just 23 percent of the votes at the convention, and Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, who hadn’t entered a single primary, became the Democratic nominee, with Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine his running mate. It was a crushing blow to believers in the antiwar movement.
In London, the Beatles were set to release a new single, “Hey Jude,” written by Paul McCartney to reassure John Lennon’s son, Julian, during his parents’ divorce. It would include as its B side the John Lennon–penned song “Revolution,” which questioned the tactics of the year’s aggressive political protesters: “But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out.” It had been just four years since the Beatles had dressed in matching suits and run from screaming fans in the opening scene of the film A Hard Day’s Night. In 1968, they had long hair and flowing beards and were singing about the pain in the world. Even in music, little seemed the same anymore.
At the end of the summer, Atlantic City hosted the 1968 Miss America pageant. Outside the venue, at least a hundred women protested the event, which they deemed exploitative. Officials had feared that the demonstrators would start fires, as happened so often during protests in 1968, but the women had promised they wouldn’t do anything dangerous—“just a symbolic bra-burning.” When the event began, they tossed false eyelashes and girdles into a garbage can and crowned a sheep Miss America. But from that day forward, the concept of a “bra-burning women’s libber” gained currency in the United States, despite the fact that nothing was ever set ablaze.
In October, the Summer Olympic Games were held in Mexico City. Two American sprinters, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, won the gold and bronze medals, respectively, in the 200-meter race. Standing on the podium to receive their medals, each wearing a black glove on one hand, the two Americans bowed their heads and raised a fist in a Black Power salute during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a protest of the inequality of treatment and opportunity for black people in their home country. Immediately, the athletes were suspended from the team and sent home from Mexico City. The silent statement by the two sprinters had a polarizing and powerful effect in the United States.
On October 20, almost five years after her husband’s death, Jacqueline Kennedy became Jackie O. Everyone seemed to have an opinion—mostly negative—of the surprise wedding between the former First Lady and the Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, a man twenty-three years her senior. It was a match far from Camelot. To many, it seemed that Kennedy had traded her quiet dignity and near-saintly virtue for a life with a crude, short, cigarette-smoking man who appeared to offer little more than money. And it seemed a break with a more innocent time, one when fairy-tale stories still happened in America.
As October bled into November, and with America just days away from electing a new leader, Jimi Hendrix’s new cover of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” rang out from cars and college campuses and protests, his guitar making a sound no guitar had ever quite made before, a black man singing a white man’s song with the opening lyric, “There must be some kind of way out of here,” and a reminder, in the midst of one of America’s most volatile years, that “the hour is getting late.”
Polling at 15 percent, independent presidential candidate George Wallace controlled millions of votes, most in the deep South. At a time when many in the country were offended by what they perceived to be a disregard for decorum and civility, Wallace made no secret of his contempt for the unkempt. “You got some folks out here who know a lot of four-letter words,” he said when interrupted by hecklers. “But there are two four-letter words they don’t know: W-O-R-K and S-O-A-P.”
When the election results were tallied, Nixon received 43.4 percent of the vote, Humphrey 42.7 percent, and Wallace 13.5 percent. More than 73 million votes had been cast; Nixon’s total exceeded Humphrey’s by just 499,704—about the size of the population of Atlanta. For the first time in more than a century, a new president would not have his party control either the Senate or the House of Representatives. As with most everything in 1968, America seemed split in two.
In late November, the Beatles released their first double album. Officially titled The Beatles, it quickly came to be known as the White Album, for its stark white cover. It was worlds apart from their 1967 album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Neither the songs nor the sides seemed connected, or to flow from one another; some of the lyrics were overtly political; and each member seemed, more than ever, to be writing solo material rather than as part of a whole.
Two weeks after the White Album’s debut, the Rolling Stones released their own classic, Beggars Banquet. The LP featured the track “Sympathy for the Devil,” sung by Mick Jagger from the perspective of Lucifer, asking “Who killed the Kennedys?” and answering “After all, it was you and me.” In “Street Fighting Man,” Jagger, who admired the spirit of revolution during 1968 and had even joined big protests, seemed to lament that the best help he could give was by singing.
As America entered the final two weeks of the year, a grim statistic emerged from Vietnam. More than sixteen thousand Americans had died in the war in 1968, by far the bloodiest year to date by a factor of almost 50 percent.
At their offices in New York City, the editors of Time magazine decided on its Man of the Year. Their criteria did not include virtue—only that the selected person be the one who most affected the news and embodied what was important about the year. Previously, the magazine had named luminaries such as John F. Kennedy, Winston Churchill, and Mahatma Gandhi.
For 1968, they chose THE DISSENTER.