MEMPHIS: THE DEATH OF KING
During the Montgomery bus boycott, Bayard Rustin told Martin Luther King: “You had better prepare yourself for martyrdom, because I don’t see how you can make the challenge that you are making without a very real possibility of your being murdered, and I wonder if you have made peace with that.”1
By 1968, Martin Luther King had come to resemble a museum exhibit. Sermons on nonviolence seemed rather quaint after three successive summers of inner-city riots. King was tired, depressed, and demoralized. His people, it seemed, had given up on Gandhi. Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton, and H. Rap Brown had no trouble getting attention, since throwing a Molotov cocktail guaranteed coverage on the nightly news. A violent movement and a sensationalist media were feeding on each other. “Maybe we just have to admit that the day of violence is here,” a tired King told Ralph Abernathy in 1968. “Maybe we just have to give up and let violence take its course. The nation won’t listen to our voice. Maybe it will heed the voice of violence.”2
Death became a frequent theme in his speeches. “Well I don’t know what will happen now,” he told the congregation of the Mason Temple in Memphis on April 3, 1968. “We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind. 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.”
On the following day, King was resting in his hotel room when he was shot dead by James Earl Ray, an escaped convict. The movement which had grown tired of King now embraced him as a martyred hero. Allegations that he had sold out, that he was a stooge or an Uncle Tom, suddenly stopped. “Now that they’ve taken Dr. King off,” Carmichael shouted, “it’s time to end this nonviolence bullshit.” He was apparently unaware of the irony of that statement. In 120 cities across America, blacks rioted in King’s honor. “We know that we cannot change violent people by nonviolence,” a statement by the Black Student Union proclaimed, with depressing finality. “We must build mass armed self-defense groups. We must unite to get rid of the government and people that oppress and murder Black People.”3
King, it seems, had plagiarized his Ph.D. thesis at Boston University. In addition to being a cheat, he was also a sex addict. “Fucking’s a form of anxiety reduction,” he once confessed. His lasciviousness was not unusual; a lot of prominent people at that time freely indulged their sexual hunger and delighted in the uninhibited nature of the permissive society. What perhaps set him apart was his hypocrisy: others indulged openly, but he did so in secret, all the time trying to maintain the image of an upright, moral, Christian husband and father. His womanizing at times put his movement in danger, so much so that colleagues urged him to behave. J. Edgar Hoover leaked evidence to journalists in an attempt to destroy King, but they decided that his misbehavior was not really relevant to the larger civil rights cause. (These were old-fashioned times.) Frustrated, Hoover had evidence sent directly to King and his wife, Coretta, with the advice that the wisest course was to commit suicide.4
Does any of this matter to the judgment of a man? Heroes habitually go through a process of being worshiped, then mourned, then pilloried. Journalists and historians struggle to decide what behavior is relevant to the assessment of an individual and what is not. Hypocrisy is distasteful but, under the circumstances, pretense was probably essential for the larger good of the civil rights movement. King was not the man he pretended to be, but that pretense was itself a response to what the public demanded. Americans wanted King to be saintly and convinced themselves that he was so. A bit of make-believe strengthened the movement.
“People are often surprised to learn that I am an optimist,” King confessed shortly before his death. “Man has the capacity to do right as well as wrong, and his history is a path upward, not downward.” That sentiment seems surprising coming from a man who had seen very little of man’s goodness. The evil of those who opposed him was at times overwhelming. But it was the shortcomings of those supposedly on his side that was most difficult to bear. When King died, his movement was inherited by a collection of charlatans who exploited the cause in order to give legitimacy to self-promotion and thuggery.5
Birds shit on statues. Heroes are defenseless against Time’s erosion. Every great accomplishment is susceptible to the ravages of revisionists. In the end, King should be judged on his talents and his achievements. The world has seen few heroes like him. He, more than anyone, managed to fire the conscience of America—white and black. He made the injustice blacks were suffering impossible to ignore. His talents and achievements render him a great deal more admirable than many other Sixties heroes who also had feet of clay.
PRAGUE: SHORT SPRING
The people of Czechoslovakia were finding it increasingly difficult to maintain the pretense of Iron Curtain animosity. Polls in the 1960s showed that many Czechs actually liked the Americans and, even if they did not like them, grudgingly admired them. (Though the populace consisted of Czechs and Slovaks, the former term will be used here to describe the totality.) The West was symbolic of modernity, the USSR of stasis. Quite a few Czechs had a yearning to be modern. Leading the way were the young, insatiably hungry for everything Western. Blue jeans and rock ’n’ roll were not just cultural commodities in Czechoslovakia; they were political statements. While Czechs wanted the fruits of Western capitalism, however, most did not want to be capitalists. A poll in the summer of 1968 revealed that 89 percent wanted to remain Communist.
Czechoslovakia was not immune to the Sixties’ contagion of rebellion. East of the Iron Curtain, yearnings for freedom actually had meaning; when Czechs complained of oppression, they spoke with authority. Writers demanded relief from rigid censorship, and students took to the streets in their quest for a more open society. Mirroring protests in the West, the first student demonstrations, in November 1967, were protests over inadequate heating and lighting in dormitories. The police, unsympathetic to dissidence of any kind, reacted more harshly than was warranted, a reaction which backfired when word of the unrest leaked out.
The party secretary and president, Antonin Novotný, was a dyed-in-the-wool Stalinist. His government reacted to unrest in a manner typical of the Eastern bloc: it initially ignored the trouble, and then, when pretense crumbled, blamed it on the West. To his credit, Novotný did try to placate dissidents with promises of reform. These, he maintained, would not be confined to politics and the economy, but would apply to culture also. While politically well intentioned, Novotný was moving a bit too slowly to suit members of the Central Committee, who, fearing a repeat of Hungary 1956, removed him from the post of first secretary. In his place came Alexander Dub
ek, a Slovakian mystery man unknown to most Czechs. Meanwhile the Soviet premier, Leonid Brezhnev, kept a cold eye on the events occurring in Russia’s satellite state. Novotný had tried to win the Soviet leader’s favor with slavish loyalty, but Brezhnev wanted only a leader who could keep Czechoslovakia quiet.
Dubek was an unlikely hero. Though a tall man, he managed, for most of his political life, to go virtually unnoticed. This might have been because he was a painfully boring speaker in an age when presentation was so important—even in the Soviet bloc. Like Kennedy, he was young, but, unlike Kennedy, he was too gray to seem young. Nor was he particularly ambitious; when he took over from Novotný, it was more out of duty than desire. His people, desperate for a hero, happily threw themselves behind Dubek, while his family bemoaned their miserable luck. He inherited an impossible situation: he had to convince the increasingly dissatisfied populace that he could deliver reforms, while at the same time convincing Moscow that he could keep control. A less brave man might simply have retired from politics and let events take their course.
When the Central Committee toppled Novotný, it also proclaimed that “there must be far greater encouragement of an open exchange of views, and all officials must create the conditions for such an exchange. The qualities of a Communist include a sincere, comradely attitude toward human beings and an awareness of and respect for the needs of fellow workers.” Since the populace was inclined to agree, this made life immensely difficult for Dubek. The sudden relaxation of controls meant that the papers started carrying real stories which the people actually read. They told
of widespread corruption within the official bureaucracy, including the perfidy of the Novotný family. Much more worrying, for both Dubek and Brezhnev, were the increasingly strident editorials attacking the USSR. Criticism published in the papers, Dubek complained, sometimes displayed “an impulsive character.”6
Dubek was no revolutionary. When he told Brezhnev in January that “friendship and alliance with the Soviet Union are the cornerstone of all our activities,” he was actually being honest. He believed sincerely in Communism. A one-party state made sense to him because “we don’t know of any better party than the Communist party.” Dubek nevertheless accepted that serious problems affected the governance of Czechoslovakia and therefore the continued viability of Communism. His program of reform was based on the assumption that authority had to be earned through good example and trustworthy leadership; it must not be imposed. “We must remove, along both state and party lines, all the injustices being done to the people, and we must do so consistently and without reservation,” he announced on February 22. In practice, this meant that, “while retaining the essential centralism, we should place the emphasis on developing more and, above all, deep democratic foundations.”7
The Communist system’s faults were most apparent in the management of the economy. Centralism, Dubek argued, had brought about “slow increases in wages, . . . stagnation of living standards, . . . the present state of the transport system, poor-quality goods, and [inadequate] public services.” He even questioned the sanctity of egalitarianism, arguing that it promoted “careless workers, idlers, and irresponsible people.” Remuneration, he argued, should be linked to productivity—a proposal that fired the fears of the working class.8
Dubek wanted to create what he called “socialism with a human face.” That seemed enormously appealing to his people, not just because it promised better living standards and more political freedoms, but also because it was an assertion of independence from Moscow. The difficult part, however, lay in sustaining a harmonious relationship with the Kremlin at a time when the Czechs were determined to follow an independent road. Equally risky was the way Dubek inadvertently provided inspiration to nascent student movements across Eastern Europe. Polish students brave enough to demonstrate carried signs which read “Polska Czeka na Dubczeka!”—“Poland Awaits Its Dubek!” Those signs were like a signal to
the Soviets that the beast of rebellion had to be put down. The minute it seemed that insurgence might spread, Dubek was doomed. On March 23, he was summoned to Dresden for a tongue-lashing from his Eastern bloc colleagues. At that meeting, Brezhnev told Dubek: “No situation in Czechoslovakia justifies attacks on the party and government, because such difficulties would arise that demand the abandonment of cooperation with the socialist countries, and above all with the Soviet Union, which allegedly has been ‘robbing’ Czechoslovakia. That’s exactly the phrase used in your country. I do not know if you have enough time to read your own press. But we are obliged to read it, and we are very concerned.” Brezhnev concluded by warning Dubek “to change the course of events and stop these very dangerous developments. . . . If you disagree, we cannot remain indifferent.”9
As spring turned to summer, Dubek showed no evidence of being able to rein in his people. He realized he was walking a thin line, but thought that Czechoslovakia’s special relationship with the Soviet Union would stand the country in good stead. The Czechs had always been cooperative allies who did not make trouble. Most were loyal Communists. None of that, however, mattered to Brezhnev. On August n, 1968, the Soviets made clear their impatience. “Authoritarian power” was a favorite phrase of Sixties radicals, most of whom had no idea what they were talking about. This was the real thing. At 11:00 P.M., 165,000 soldiers and 4,600 tanks entered Czechoslovakia at twenty crossing points situated on the borders of its four Warsaw Pact neighbors. Those neighbors—Hungary, East Germany, Poland, the Soviet Union—along with Bulgaria, contributed to the invasion force, as if to suggest that the entire Warsaw Pact was unanimously condemning the actions of an errant member. The operation was essentially over the minute the troops mobilized, since resistance was futile. Dubek was quickly “taken into protective custody.”
World leaders defined themselves by their reaction. Romania’s Nicolai Ceau?escu and Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito condemned the invasion, in order to underline their cherished autonomy. Wladislaw Gomu?ka of Poland, keen to ingratiate himself with the Soviets, enthusiastically praised it, blaming Czechoslovakian behavior on Zionist influence. Harold Wilson of Britain roundly condemned the Soviet action, as did Charles de Gaulle, but the latter, in the same breath, compared the action to the American invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. This was all part of the French fantasy of nonalignment.
Dubek was a man of principle. He was not playing a power game, nor was he trying to play East off against West. While he was admired in the West because he had attempted to defy Moscow, that was a highly superficial judgment. Most Westerners would not have cared for Dubek had they bothered to notice his commitment to Communism. His dream was to bring about an improved form of the ideology—the ideals without the naked authoritarian power and the abuse of human rights. Brezhnev intervened not because he was a despot, but because he genuinely believed that Czechoslovakia posed a threat to the entire Communist bloc. In that assessment, he was probably right. By the summer, Dubek had lost control of the movement identified with him. The people were miles ahead of the party, demanding ever more radical reforms. They had developed a taste for policy making and were disinclined to relinquish their newfound freedoms. Dubek had tried to control the pace of reform, but by July seemed like a passenger in a runaway car without brakes or steering. That said, his failure presaged the end of Communism, since it suggested that Moscow would never allow significant deviation from its version of the ideology. In that sense, Dubek’s defeat also signaled the beginning of the end for the USSR.
LOS ANGELES: THE DEATH OF HOPE
For many Americans, hope died not on the streets of Dallas in 1963, but on the floor of a hotel kitchen in Los Angeles in 1968. John Kennedy’s assassination was a tragedy; his brother Robert’s a disaster. “I bottomed out and went nuts when he died,” one baby boomer recalled. Another confessed: “When they killed him, a little of my zeal and sense of hope died with him.”10
For liberals, the 1968 election was a voyage between Scylla and Charyb-dis. Johnson still offered the best hope for domestic reform, but, like some devilish bargain, his Great Society came with war attached. If the war continued, the acrimony it engendered would deepen. The only alternative, however, was Richard Nixon—the liberals’ devil incarnate. While LBJ offered war and welfare, Nixon seemed to offer only war.
Into the breach strode Eugene McCarthy, a senator hardly known outside his Minnesota constituency. He declared his candidacy on November 30,1967. That a Democrat should challenge Johnson, who had won so resoundingly in 1964, reveals just how deep were the wounds of war. McCarthy offered himself as healer: “I am hopeful that this challenge . . . may alleviate . . . [the] sense of political helplessness and restore to many people a belief in the processes of American government.” He was gentle, urbane, introspective, articulate, innocent—in every way the polar opposite of LBJ. He didn’t run for president; he walked, smelling flowers along the way. Antiwar liberals grabbed McCarthy the way a shipwrecked man lunges desperately for flotsam. Those on the far left, however, were distinctly unimpressed. Carl Oglesby thought McCarthy a bargain-basement Adlai Stevenson. He saw the same culture, urbanity, and wit, but the “edges have grown soft, . . . [the] center has grown murky.”11
The Democratic party has long had a weakness for smooth-talking Northern liberals, even though they are as dangerous as a double whiskey to an alcoholic. The party was (and remains) a collection of warring tribes. McCarthy gave expression to white, middle-class anxiety, but offered little to urban workers and poor blacks, the other tribes in Democrat Nation. In healing some wounds, he opened others. In other words, his candidacy was always doomed. No wonder, then, that Johnson at first refused to take him seriously.
Then came Tet, which changed everything. The humiliation called into question the war’s continuance. As Walter Cronkite afterward told the nation, defeat did not seem possible, but neither did victory. On March 12, 1968, came the New Hampshire primary, the first formal expression of popular opinion after Tet, and Act One in a long campaign drama. McCarthy drew 41.9 percent. Johnson was not on the ballot, but a write-in effort yielded 49.6 percent. Heavy snow on the day of the poll might have kept Johnson supporters indoors—safe in the assumption that the president did not really need their help. In truth, it was probably a meaningless result, but Americans desperately sought meaning. Johnson, pundits decided, had been dealt a severe blow. More important, the result seemed an indictment of the war. Only later was it discovered that, among McCarthy supporters, hawks outnumbered doves by three to two.
Lurking menacingly was New York senator Robert F. Kennedy, acknowledged heir to Camelot. Since entering the Senate in 1966, RFK had courted liberals by defending the Great Society and attacking the war. “We’ve got to get out of Vietnam,” he said repeatedly. “It’s destroying the country.” By early 1967, polls on university campuses revealed that Kennedy was the students’ choice. Echoing his brother John, he told Berkeley students that they had “the opportunity and the responsibility to help make the choices which will determine the greatness of this nation. . . . If you shrink from this struggle . . . you will betray the trust which your own position forces upon you.”12
At first, Kennedy ignored his own entreaties and shrank from the struggle for the White House. While he dreaded Johnson’s reelection, he refused to challenge him, fearing the damage it might cause. To enter the race would, he worried, encourage allegations “that I was splitting the party out of ambition and envy. No one would believe that I was doing it because of how I felt about Vietnam and poor people.” Kennedy must have realized that, before Tet, he had no hope of winning. He had more at stake than McCarthy, who could make his point and then return to the wilderness. New Hampshire, however, suggested that Johnson was beatable. An emboldened RFK officially entered the fray on March 16,1968, explaining: “These are not ordinary times, and this is not an ordinary election.”13
In public, Johnson pretended to be unperturbed. In private, he promised to destroy “that grandstanding little runt.” As for the war, bluster was sold as leadership. “Let’s get one thing clear!” LBJ bellowed. “I am not going to stop the bombing!” “Make no mistake about it, we are going to win!” Shouting did not, however, frighten away the demons lurking in the bamboo of Vietnam. On March 26, a more chastened Johnson summoned his “Wise Men”—the same men who had, four months earlier, overwhelmingly endorsed the war effort. On this occasion, they struggled to find good omens. “The issue is, can we do what we are trying to do in Vietnam,” Dean Acheson summarized. “I do not think we can.” Johnson had desperately hoped for different advice, but in truth was not surprised by what he heard.14
On March 31, Johnson addressed the nation. Bruised by Tet and battered by protest, he announced a halt to the bombing offensive and invited Hanoi to the conference table. Then came the most dramatic and unexpected ending to any presidential speech in American history: “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”15
Two days later, Jack Valenti, the president’s close friend, found Johnson “calm, almost serene, as if whatever plague had been visited upon him was now exiled from his mind and heart.” Valenti could not hide his dismay. “Why would you do this?” he asked. “You can beat Nixon.” The president sighed, the weariness of four years condensed in that sigh. “Yes, I think I would beat him,” he replied. “But [the race] would be too close for me to be able to govern. The nation would be polarized. Besides, the presidency isn’t fun anymore. Everything has turned mean. No matter what I accomplish, the damn war infects everything.”16
Johnson was not a coward. Bruising electoral campaigns were his forte; he was not the sort to run from a challenge. Though honesty was not his most conspicuous quality, one is inclined to believe his reasons for dropping out. He recognized that the nation’s welfare and the cause of peace would be better served if he did not run. Country was placed before ego, a priority few politicians ever manage. “I never was surer of any decision I ever made in my life,” he confessed. “I have 525,000 men whose very lives depend on what I do, and I must not be worried about primaries.”17
Johnson was out of the race, but still determined to control it through his puppet, vice president Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey declared his candidacy in late April. He was Johnson neutered and lobotomized, a decent man who lacked the ruthlessness of his mentor. “With the smell of the White House so close to him, [Humphrey] turned into ectoplasm,” the journalist Jimmy Breslin remarked. “Most people say he was rice pudding. I don’t have that much against rice pudding.” Humphrey would have made a great president in the land of make-believe where everyone was destined to live happily ever after. Homilies about restoring the “politics of happiness, the politics of purpose, and the politics of joy” were as useful to an embattled nation as a Band-Aid to a patient in cardiac arrest. Humphrey nevertheless had at his disposal those who still supported Johnson, a significant constituency. He also had behind him the Democratic city machines, particularly that of Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, where the convention would be held. Simply by existing, he became the frontrunner.18
Robert Kennedy, in contrast to McCarthy, was not simply an antiwar candidate. He recognized the necessity of a wide constituency. Yet the more he tried to widen his appeal, the more his contradictions were exposed. His support for the Great Society alienated workers fearful of higher taxes. His criticism of the war annoyed those who still supported it. Voters had every reason to be confused, but the confusion was not Kennedy’s fault. The country had changed radically since his brother’s narrow victory in 1960. The once solidly Democratic South had become alienated by civil rights legislation and Great Society programs. Yet, in the North, a plethora of interest groups, often operating at cross-purposes, pushed for big government and increased spending. Kennedy had somehow to appeal both to the future of the party and to those stuck in its past. For a liberal from New England, that feat of political alchemy was nearly impossible. “In one corner of his very complicated mind,” Tom Hayden wrote, “[Kennedy] believed he could use the structure and then destroy it. Use Mayor Daley to become president and, at the same time, encourage the ghetto to rise up against Mayor Daley. . . . It doesn’t work.”19
For a brief period, magic seemed possible. Victories in the Indiana, Nebraska, and District of Columbia primaries suggested that Kennedy might indeed have been able to turn the party’s base elements into solid gold. Then, on June 4, came the California primary, which he won with 46 percent to McCarthy’s 42. At his victory address, Kennedy called upon McCarthy supporters to cast aside their differences and join his campaign. He sensed that the momentum was his, and that he had the strength even to overwhelm Humphrey. “On to Chicago and let’s win there,” he told the cheering crowd in Los Angeles. And then he was dead.20
A few weeks before he was shot, Kennedy had confessed that he expected an attempt on his life—“Not so much for political reasons, but through contagion, through emulation.” That prediction proved eerily correct. The name of his assassin, Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, suggested a Middle Eastern connection, but no real link to the politics of Palestine has been discovered. Sirhan was just a mentally disturbed man who managed to get too close to Kennedy. In that sense, he had much in common with Lee Harvey Oswald.21
Kennedy’s quest for unity might have failed. What is certain, however, is that, after his assassination, there was no one left in the race who had even a remote chance of succeeding. Democratic disunity was agonizingly uncovered in Chicago. Though McCarthy inherited some of Kennedy’s support, Humphrey was in truth unstoppable. Victory, however, proved a far cry from unity. In Chicago, the party flailed itself while the whole world watched. Inside the convention hall, delegates used words as weapons in the bitter struggle for political hegemony. Outside, the weapons were rocks, chains, billy clubs, and tear gas.22
Leading the mayhem were the circus performers: Rubin, Hoffman, and their Yippie army. This, it seemed, would be their finest hour. The plans, such as they were, called for a virtually continuous street party—more theater than demonstration. Yippies performed for the cameras, which were ubiquitous. Outrageous plans did not actually need to be carried out in order to make the nightly news, as was demonstrated by the Yippie boast that they would put LSD in the Chicago water supply, rape the wives of convention delegates, and have a mass copulation in Lincoln Park. The main event was the nomination of a pig for president. That stunt was briefly thrown into disarray when Rubin and Hoffman both brought a pig—the former’s ugly, the latter’s cute. Rubin’s won the nomination, much to Hoffman’s disgust. Shordy after the nomination, police arrested President Pigasus.
Present in Chicago were some committed protesters armed with legitimate points. Unfortunately, their message was completely smothered by Yippie clowns whose politics had been distilled to hurling obscenities and throwing stones. A week before the convention, Rubin told his starry-eyed admirers: “Thousands of us will burn draft cards at the same time . . . and the paranoia and guilt of the government will force them to bring thousands of troops. . . . Our long hair alone will freak them out. . . . And remember—the more troops, the better the theater.” The goal, it seems, was to create a spectacle. “Like typical Americans,” one organizer proclaimed, “we got our biggest kicks from contemplating our image in the media.”23
The Yippies should have been nothing more than a nuisance. Rubin and Hoffman had failed miserably in mobilizing the force they had fantasized. But television cameras and omnipresent police made the demonstration into something altogether terrifying. Twelve thousand Chicago police were backed by 5,000 army troops and 6,000 members of the Illinois National Guard. The British journalist Max Hastings, usually a dutiful respecter of authority, reported: “Police smashed their clubs into the human mass, aiming between their legs, at their heads, shoulders—anything. They used chemical spray to disable them and were still hitting them as they lay on the floor. . . . After the events of the last few hours, it will never again be possible to think of either the city or Mayor Daley without feeling slightly sick.”24
Daley’s police behaved the way the Yippies wanted. Jimmy Breslin recalled a telling confession from Dick Fernandez, one of the protest heavyweights: “We say we want to march to the Amphitheatre. I hope they tell us no. If they tell us it’s all right for us to march, that’s the worst thing that can happen. Hell, we’re dead if they say we can march. Five or six miles of a march. The whole thing will fall apart.” Breslin concluded: “Stupidity made the night possible. A permit to march, an escorted guide to an Amphitheatre they could not have reached, would have ended it all. But we were dealing with such deep stupidity and unawareness and so many hardened brain arteries and dying brain cells in Chicago that the trouble was insured.” The apocalyptic fantasies of Rubin and Hoffman combined with the paranoia of Daley to create one of the most shameful episodes in American political history. “We want[ed] to fuck up their image on TV,” Hoffman later explained to the Walker Commission investigating the riot. “It’s all in terms of disrupting the image, the image of a democratic society being run very peacefully and orderly and everything according to business.” If that was indeed the goal, the Yippies succeeded brilliantly.25
Many protesters came itching for a fight. Richard Goldstein, a reporter for the Village Voice, observed a group in Lincoln Park preparing for a night of violence. “Not all their accoutrements were defensive,” he remarked. “I saw saps and smoke bombs, steel-tipped boots and fistfuls of tacks. My friend pulled out a small canister from his pocket. ‘Liquid pepper,’ he explained.” Goldstein struggled to understand: “Watching these kids gather sticks and stones, I realized how far we have come from that mythical summer when everyone dropped acid, sat under a tree, and communed. If there were any flower children left in America, they had heeded the underground press and stayed home. Those who came fully anticipated confrontation. There were few virgins to violence in the crowd. . . . Most had seen—if not shed—blood, and that baptism had given them a determination of sorts.” “I wish that there had been a greater turnout of people experienced in militant nonviolence,” activist David Dellinger reflected. “More, for example, who do not think it is revolutionary to taunt the police by screaming ‘oink, oink’ or ‘pig’ at them.” For Tom Hayden, on the other hand, Chicago provided a rite of passage. “It was a good test of who is serious about being in the streets and who is not, and that probably will lead to possibilities for consolidation of the movement,” he remarked with obvious pride. “In terms of American public opinion, we raised some very provocative and important questions in the best possible way.”26
The Yippies, like so many other activists of 1968, believed it was possible to expose the authoritarian nature of government by provoking violent confrontation. But violence has a way of smothering subtle political points and of making the otherwise uncommitted side with authority. Instead of opening eyes, the radicals caused ordinary people to turn away in horror. The National Commission on Violence concluded that the Chicago police had been “unrestrained and indiscriminate” in dealing with demonstrators. Yet, when polled, only one in five Americans agreed with that judgment. Within this dichotomy lay a promising political constituency. The country might have been turning against the war, but it still despised those who protested it. Two years earlier, Ronald Reagan had capitalized on this revulsion in his brilliantly successful gubernatorial campaign in California. Of the candidates who remained in the presidential race in 1968, only Nixon was able to emulate Reagan on a national scale. Only Nixon could exploit the somewhat contrary feelings of the American people—their desire for peace abroad and order at home. He built a constituency from what he called the “forgotten Americans”: “They are black and they are white. They are native-born and foreign-born. They are young and they are old. They work in America’s factories. They run America’s businesses. They serve in the government. They provide most of the soldiers who died to keep us free. They give drive to the spirit of America. They give life to the American dream.” He would later call them the Silent Majority.27
Opinion polls suggested that support for the war was hemorrhaging. But polls are easily misinterpreted. Throughout the war, pollsters asked: “Do you support continued American action in Vietnam?” Those who answered no were carelessly labeled “doves”; those who said yes were crudely termed “hawks.” But the no’s were a broad church. Some were pacifists. Others were bothered by the war’s immorality, or by its apparent futility. Others had pragmatically decided that, even if victory could be achieved, it would not be worth the cost. When a voter crossed the line from hawk to dove, he took his bedrock political principles with him, discarding only his unquestioning support for the war. The new doves, in other words, still believed in the good of their country, still cherished its institutions. They wanted an end to the war, but did not want to sacrifice American honor. This explains why the 1968 election did not produce a genuine peace candidate, despite loud demands for peace. It also explains Nixon’s appeal: he promised to withdraw the troops but would not compromise America’s reputation.
Nixon at first seemed unbeatable. He boasted of a “secret plan” to end the war, a possibility that appealed to those inclined to optimism and trust. He promised “fresh ideas” and railed against the “tired men around the president.” His campaign was aided by the independent candidacy of George Wallace, whose bigoted conservatism appealed to many working-class Democrats. In imitation of Wallace, Nixon chose as his running mate Spiro Agnew, the pit-bull governor of Maryland whose populist tirades made him an instant hero among those who liked their politics loud, crude, and simple.28
Since Americans had grown disenchanted with Johnson, they were hardly likely to get inspired by Humphrey, a pale imitation. His cozy platitudes were completely inappropriate to a country mired in confusion and torn by discord. “Put aside recrimination and disunion,” he urged. “Turn away from violence and hatred.” Had he been orbiting the Moon in an Apollo spacecraft, he could not have been more out of touch with grassroots America. Then, late in the campaign, Humphrey started to gather steam, helped in part by a slump in the Wallace vote. He began to construct an identity separate from Johnson. On September 30, he told a crowd in Salt Lake City that he would stop the bombing of North Vietnam and would call upon the South Vietnamese to “meet the responsibilities” for “their own self-defense.” While this was hardly different from what Johnson had already advocated, Americans were desperate to find difference. Humphrey’s “conversion” appealed to those wavering voters whose support for Nixon had always been heavily laden with fear.29
A sudden breakthrough in the peace negotiations, cleverly engineered by Johnson, also inspired a surge in Humphrey’s support. Under pressure from party leaders, Johnson asked Averell Harriman, the American representative at the peace talks in Paris, to indicate to his North Vietnamese counterparts that the United States would halt the bombing in exchange for concessions from them. Hanoi responded by agreeing to negotiations involving both the South Vietnamese government and the National Liberation Front. President Thieu of South Vietnam, until then an obstacle to progress, seemed amenable. Sensing a breakthrough, Johnson announced a bombing halt on October 31. But Thieu then backtracked. Anna Chan Chennault, co-chair of Republican Women for Nixon, used her Asian contacts to foment opposition to the plan in Saigon, in the process encouraging Thieu to believe that he would get a better deal from Nixon.
On November 5,1968, Nixon secured 43.4 percent of the vote, Humphrey 42.7 percent, and Wallace 13.5 percent. Given the tiny margin of victory, it is tempting to conclude that Humphrey was defeated by Chennault’s scheming. Speculation of this sort seems all the more credible given the corrupt character of Nixon. But the Democrats lost the election; it was not stolen from them. Circumstances had caused them to lose the support that had been so loyal to the party for over a century. Humphrey lost because blue-collar workers had been alienated by the attention given to “fringe” groups, because the Southern Democrat had become an endangered species, and because many blacks and antiwar liberals were not sufficiently inspired to venture out on election day.
According to Valenti, Johnson had decided not to run because he feared the election would polarize the nation. Johnson was right, but his absence did not bring about a restoration of unity. Instead of uniting the country around a single candidate, the campaign tore open wounds and poured salt on them. In that sense, Nixon suited the times: instead of healing discord, he found ways to profit from it.
MEXICO CITY: SHOOTING STUDENTS
On October 2,1968, in the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Mexico City, protesters learned that bullets have no respect for political legitimacy. Of all the student movements which erupted around the world in that terrible year, the Mexican one was the most moderate, well-organized, and serious. Mexicans did not blindly idolize Mao, nor did they allow puerile sexual fantasies to obscure political goals. Drugs were not a problem, and the “counterculture”—such as it was—was decidedly tame. Mexican activists were revolutionary only in the sense that they demanded the implementation of democratic principles clearly set out in their nation’s constitution. None of this, however, rendered them immune to tragedy.
Martyrdom was deeply imbedded in Mexican student culture. In 1929, protests over university governance and exam procedures had been viciously quashed when the government sent troops onto the campuses of the National University. The students were defeated, but they claimed victory: a subsequent reform created the National Autonomous University (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, or UNAM), which theoretically meant that the government could not intervene in campus disputes. From martyrdom sprang myth. Students henceforth saw themselves as the moral conscience of the nation, the ones to steer Mexico back to virtue whenever she strayed from the ideals of the 1910 revolution.
When Mexican students in the 1960s complained about authoritarianism, they did so with credibility. Mexico was essentially a one-party, corporate state. The Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) had in effect governed since the revolution, in the process creating the ultimate oxymoron: a revolutionary party of the status quo. The language of revolution was used constantly, but was mainly rhetorical. The PRI referred frequently to the “Revolutionary Family,” but this family had an authoritarian father. Complaint was, however, muted. In contrast to most of Latin America, Mexico was stable and prosperous. A 6 percent annual growth rate and a stable exchange rate kept the middle class happy and workers relatively quiet. Economists praised the “Mexican Miracle.” When the president, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, predicted that there would be no serious student unrest in Mexico, he came to that conclusion because he could not conceive of anything worthy of student complaint.
Mexico’s progress was validated by its selection to host the 1968 Olympic Games, the first time a developing country had been chosen. For the government, the honor implied admission to the First World. Critics, however, saw things differently. To them, the games seemed emblematic of the PRI’s distorted priorities and dictatorial rule. At the same time, however, dissidents perceived an opportunity. The PRI had, throughout its forty-year rule, been able to govern virtually free of foreign attention. The games, however, would focus awareness on Mexico. The summer of 1968 might, in other words, provide an opportunity to expose social and political inequalities, while the whole world watched.
Conscious of 1929, radical students decided to exercise their legendary role as guardians of the Mexican conscience. Events in Paris, Prague, and Berkeley also convinced them that they were part of a worldwide student revolution. “We are conscious of our historical vision: to transform reality, to transform society,” one protest document proclaimed. “And in this task we are not alone. For the first time, youth from around the world are identifying with one another in this common task.” In comparison to industrialized countries, however, Mexico severely restricted freedom of action. In Mexican society, long hair and short skirts were seen as dangerously subversive; any act of nonconformity was bound to provoke repression.30
The catalyst for unrest came on July 22, 1968, when two rival gangs of youths clashed in the Ciudadela neighborhood of Mexico City. The gang problem had been cause for concern for some time, a fact that explains why the police response was so brutal. Riot police pursued the gangs into university buildings, where innocent bystanders were sucked into an orgy of violence. On campuses, the behavior of the police caused a dam to burst. Students, who had grown increasingly restless over previous months, now had cause to unite. On July 26, a protest march by Polytechnic students linked up with a pro-Castro rally in Alameda Park. Unruly behavior on the fringes of the demonstration gave the police reason to attack. Later, a bus was burned and the first barricades appeared. The students were eventually forced to flee, but sporadic outbursts of violence continued over the following week.
Since the mayhem was occurring in the city center, where international journalists were gathering, a worried government quickly mobilized the army. Students, assuming that the autonomy of the university would provide safe refuge, holed up in campus precincts. Autonomy, however, was a thin shield. On the morning of July 30, troops armed with a bazooka smashed the heavy wooden door of the National Preparatory School No. 1, a shrine of student movements past. After gaining entry, the soldiers, in a nasty temper, went on a rampage. Anyone who strayed into their path was clubbed with a rifle butt.
The bazooka was a starter’s pistol—students and faculty at UNAM who had heretofore refused to join the protests suddenly felt an irresistible pull. Nearly 90,000 members of the campus community took to the streets. Sympathy strikes spread across the nation, with high school students joining the cause. Within a week, a National Strike Committee (Consejo National de Huelga, or CNH) emerged, representing more than 150 educational institutions.
The larger the movement grew, the more unwieldy it became. A decentralized structure was purposefully forged, partly because of a fear of demagogues, partly to protect the movement from decapitation by the government, and partly as an overt reaction to Mexico’s authoritarian political culture. The effect, however, was a movement so democratic that it was incapable of coordinated action. Some activists wanted a change in government; others wanted attention paid to social inequalities; still others wanted the autonomy of the university restored.
The CNH program, as it existed on paper, was moderate and reformist, in stark contrast to the revolutionary wet dreams of activists in France and the United States. “We insist on the principle that all discussion must be made in public,” one rather tame document proclaimed. “We want to end the corrupt practice of smoke-filled rooms or little groups, where the give-and-take excludes the masses from any participation.” The group carefully distanced itself from existing Communist and pro-Castro movements, concentrating instead on practical reforms to government. The CNH did not advocate the overthrow of Díaz Ordaz, nor did it campaign for the cancellation of the Olympics. The students were also highly nationalistic, arguing that they were the true inheritors of the revolutionary spirit of 1917. The constitution of that year, it was argued, already guaranteed basic human liberties; what was necessary was a government committed to honoring them. This, in itself, threatened a government which laid sole claim to the revolutionary mantle. One student leader remarked: “Here in our country, anything that represents a spontaneous movement on the part of the people and of students, an independent popular organization that forthrightly criticizes the despotic regime that unfortunately rules our lives, is considered dangerously militant.”31
Perhaps the most striking feature of student protest in Mexico was its respectability. Activists were not remotely interested in lifestyle revolution, therefore issues of sex and drugs did not intrude. Nor were they bent on mayhem. In this sense, the protests had more in common with the Albany Movement than with the Chicago confrontations. Men in suits and women in sober dresses were as common as those in jeans or miniskirts.
A counterculture of sorts nevertheless did exist and influenced the way the student revolt was perceived. Called “La Onda” (“The Wave”), it was a fusion of international youth culture and indigenous Mexican elements. Though the primary goal of the political movement was not a style revolution, worried parents stubbornly perceived themselves threatened by a style war—a worldwide countercultural rebellion. Students were identified as a threat not because their political demands were dangerous, but because their hair was long. Linking the political movement with La Onda made it easy for critics to dismiss the former as juvenile delinquency.
In a pathetic attempt at appeasement, Díaz Ordaz tried to appear liberal toward La Onda. “Everyone is free to let his beard, hair, or sideburns grow if he wants to, to dress well or badly as he sees fit,” he announced. On August I, he appealed for calm. “Public peace and tranquillity must be restored,” he said. “A hand is stretched out; Mexicans will say whether that hand will find a response. I have been deeply grieved by these deplorable and shameful events. Let us not further accentuate our differences.” Demonstrators, however, made clear their lack of trust. Signs reading “The outstretched hand has a pistol in it” appeared almost immediately on the streets. Another showed a bayonet with the simple caption, “Dialogue?”32
The students had reason to be suspicious. Díaz Ordaz had only one priority—namely, to make sure that the Olympics went ahead in an atmosphere of quiet. Student demonstrators could not be allowed to stand in the way. He realized that any compromise would be interpreted by students as a victory, leading to even greater demands. To negotiate in public would undermine his authority. His job was made easier by the knowledge that the vast bulk of the Mexican population supported him. Most people credited the government with the country’s dramatic economic growth. It represented stability, which the students seemed to threaten. Since higher-education students enjoyed privileges denied most citizens, jealousy encouraged intolerance. Confident of public support, Díaz Ordaz went through the motions of encouraging dialogue while preparing for a showdown. He had a timetable: the unrest had to be silenced before the world’s press arrived to cover the Olympics. The students were therefore given a few months to prepare the noose by which they would hang. Every act of protest increased the impatience of the people and strengthened the president’s mandate to take action.
During August and September, students tried desperately to forge links with local communities in order to demonstrate their legitimacy. Tactics were highly imaginative. Instead of simply marching, they used street theater to create public debates designed to encourage the people to examine the government they blindly supported. They also staged takeovers of symbolic national sites, in an effort to redefine their meaning. Carefully scripted demonstrations at the Angel of Independence statue and in Mexico City’s Zócalo (central plaza), for instance, sought to underline how the government had distorted their meaning. Inevitably, the government and loyal journalists accused students of desecrating Mexico’s past.
During one action at the Zócalo, the Maoist flag was raised and the Mexican flag torn down. This undoubtedly delighted the government, since it provided proof that the students were traitors. While the action was undoubtedly unwise and immature, the students at least had the ability to learn from their mistakes. Shordy afterward, the CNH issued a decree prohibiting the use of imagery borrowed from foreign revolutionaries. Henceforth, only Mexican heroes and symbols were to be used, a further attempt to reappropriate patriotic iconography. An official directive read: “Let’s have no more vituperative slogans, no more insults, no more violence. Don’t carry red flags. Don’t carry placards of Che or Mao! From now on, we’re going to carry placards with portraits of Hidalgo, Morelos, and Zapata, to shut them up. They’re our heroes. Viva Zapata! Viva!”33
Efforts were made to undermine the image of Díaz Ordaz as the benevolent father of the Revolutionary Family, most elementally by directly connecting him to corruption and police brutality. This shocked most Mexicans, since never before had the president been drawn into such a dispute. He was supposed to be the wise patriarch who mediated between squabbling family members. That was of course a myth, but a hugely powerful one. The students mocked the president with graffiti, jokes, and rude caricatures. “Ordaz, get your teeth pulled,” the students chanted, in a reference to his prominent overbite. In cartoons, he was frequently caricatured as a monkey. Students would steal buses, paint them with slogans, and then race them around the city with horns blazing. “Suddenly the old rules no longer applied,” recalled Evelyn Stevens. “I saw buses speeding down the avenues, their sides painted with the slogan ‘Death to Díaz Ordaz.’” Stevens was impressed by the way the CNH turned protest into carnival. At one particular event, when the police chief was burned in effigy and protesters carried aloft a coffin labeled “Dead Government,” there was raucousness but “no violence; the crowd was in excellent humor, in a mood to find each incident hilariously funny, as at a circus.”34
Alarmed by the coverage given the unrest by the world’s press, Díaz Ordaz decided to get tough. In his State of the Union address (Informe) on September 1, he warned students that “there is a limit to everything, and the irremediable violations of law and order that have occurred recently before the very eyes of the entire nation cannot be allowed to continue.” Then came the ominous bit: “We will do what we have to.” Unfortunately, after openly mocking the president for so many months, the students had difficulty taking him seriously.35
Had Mexican students been as ineffectual at broadening the base of their revolution as their colleagues in the United States or Europe, the government might have been able to ignore them. As the Olympics approached, however, militancy spread. Díaz Ordaz became convinced that an international Communist conspiracy had infiltrated his peaceful country and polluted the minds of Mexican students. In mid-September, the army raided the UNAM campus and the Polytechnic, in an attempt to decapitate the movement. Autonomy was trampled under the soldiers’ boots. For two weeks the army occupied the campus, in what was clearly intended to be a war of attrition. Each wave of arrests deprived the movement of its core activists. Others were forced underground. The students’ will began to crumble.
On October 1, the army withdrew from the UNAM campus, while remaining at the Polytechnic. Meanwhile, meetings between CNH representatives and the government stalled, for the simple reason that the government had no intention of negotiating with a movement it planned to erase. On the following day a march to the Polytechnic was canceled when rumors floated that the army was blocking the proposed route. In an attempt to avoid confrontation, the CNH decided instead to rally at the Plaza of the Three Cultures, located in the middle of a hideous public-housing project called Tlatelolco. The CNH intended to use the occasion to announce plans for protests over the ten days remaining before the start of the Olympics.
Some say that 5,000 people were present in the square; others claim double that number. Many were simply spectators—local residents who had wandered outside on a warm evening to see what was going on. At the main podium, leaders exchanged worried whispers about government forces having infiltrated the crowd. These fears were well-founded: the Olympic Battalion, specially trained for security during the games, had been sent to the scene to demonstrate its expertise in crowd control. They came wearing one white glove—the better to identify one another when all hell broke loose.
A helicopter suddenly appeared from nowhere, circled the plaza in a wide arc, and then dropped two flares—the signal for the deadly exercise to begin. Scores of troops converged on the square, in the process blocking the only avenues of escape. Then the firing began. Soldiers had placed themselves on the balconies overlooking the plaza and on the domed roof of the nearby church. They did not need to take aim, since targets were everywhere. The crowd ran wildly for the walkways between the buildings, but found escape routes blocked. Those who sought sanctuary in the church encountered bolted doors.
The soldiers conducted a clinically perfect operation—also known as a massacre. According to some witnesses, the firing continued for more than two hours. The slaughter was so horrendous that, forty years later, the Mexican government remains protective of its secrets. In a knee-jerk response, the government claimed that the students had fired first and the soldiers were merely defending themselves. Initially, it declared that just four protesters had been killed. The official death toll was eventually placed at forty-nine, but foreign journalists estimated around two hundred, with hundreds more injured.
After the massacre came the mopping up. The army hunted down protesters with the determination of bloodhounds. Arrests were indiscriminate, and so numerous that prison space was quickly exhausted. Meanwhile, troops sealed off hospitals and morgues to keep prying journalists and grieving relatives at bay. Weeks passed before all the dead were identified and all the injured found. Many of those present at the rally simply evaporated, never to be heard from again. Parents who persisted in their inquiries about a missing child were threatened with further violence.
Like nodding donkeys, the Mexican legislature, on the day after the massacre, overwhelmingly approved the use of force, which was easily blamed on Communists and foreign agitators. A short time later, the Olympics opened in a blaze of conservative glory, with the dove of peace the official symbol of the games. Everyone sang to the prescribed script—everyone pretended there was nothing rotten in the state of Mexico. Díaz Ordaz went to his grave believing that one of his most impressive achievements was the way the student movement had been defeated so that the Olympics could proceed.
“All of us were reborn on October 2,” remarked the activist Álvarez Garin. “On that day we also decided how we are going to die: fighting for genuine justice and democracy.” While that statement was suitably romantic, mbefitting a martyred movement, in truth it was fantasy. Tlatelolco was not a rebirth; it was, as Díaz Ordaz intended, eradication. The massacre and subsequent arrests broke the back of the movement. Members who had not been captured went underground, left the country, or simply retired from activism. Recognizing that there was no point in going on, the CNH officially disbanded in early December.36
The students’ grievance had been legitimate: Mexico was a genuine autocracy. But their failure reveals the strength of the PRI’s grip on the Mexican polity. Students made some inroads into the community, but the vast majority of people saw the movement the way the government wanted them to see it. A very successful propaganda campaign transformed the students’ movement into a rejection of parental authority—a generational conflict. Too many adults saw the attack upon the government as an attack upon them. “This is about a challenge of adults’ capacity for comprehension, a defiance of their imagination and of their experience at governing,” one journalist remarked on the eve of the massacre, calling the movement “The Parricides.” Students were easily dismissed as immature, rebellious kids. “It’s the miniskirt that’s to blame,” one public employee remarked.37
After the massacre, the dissidents became what their critics had always accused them of being: a counterculture. La Onda evolved into a form of symbolic protest, as long hair and loud music seemed the next best way to register objection to the PRI. Symbols provided solace, but, in truth, a government which had proved impervious to the most formidable and righteous student movement of the 1960s was never likely to get too rattled by three guitars and a set of drums.