1968: The Year That Rocked the World

1968: The Year That Rocked the World

by Mark Kurlansky
1968: The Year That Rocked the World

1968: The Year That Rocked the World

by Mark Kurlansky

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Overview

In this monumental new book, award-winning author Mark Kurlansky has written his most ambitious work to date: a singular and ultimately definitive look at a pivotal moment in history.

With 1968, Mark Kurlansky brings to teeming life the cultural and political history of that world-changing year of social upheaval. People think of it as the year of sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Yet it was also the year of the Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy assassinations; the riots at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago; Prague Spring; the antiwar movement and the Tet Offensive; Black Power; the generation gap, avant-garde theater, the birth of the women’s movement, and the beginning of the end for the Soviet Union. From New York, Miami, Berkeley, and Chicago to Paris, Prague, Rome, Berlin, Warsaw, Tokyo, and Mexico City, spontaneous uprisings occurred simultaneously around the globe.

Everything was disrupted. In the Middle East, Yasir Arafat’s guerilla organization rose to prominence . . . both the Cannes Film Festival and the Venice Biennale were forced to shut down by protesters . . . the Kentucky Derby winner was stripped of the crown for drug use . . . the Olympics were a disaster, with the Mexican government having massacred hundreds of students protesting police brutality there . . . and the Miss America pageant was stormed by feminists carrying banners that introduced to the television-watching public the phrase “women’s liberation.”

Kurlansky shows how the coming of live television made 1968 the first global year. It was the year that an amazed world watched the first live telecast from outer space, and that TV news expanded to half an hour. For the first time, Americans watched that day’s battle–the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive–on the evening news. Television also shocked the world with seventeen minutes of police clubbing demonstrators at the Chicago convention, live film of unarmed students facing Soviet tanks in Czechoslovakia, and a war of starvation in Biafra. The impact was huge, not only on the antiwar movement, but also on the medium itself. The fact that one now needed television to make things happen was a cultural revelation with enormous consequences.

Thoroughly researched and engagingly written–full of telling anecdotes, penetrating analysis, and the author’s trademark incisive wit–1968 is the most important book yet of Kurlansky’s noteworthy career.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780345471918
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Publication date: 12/30/2003
Sold by: Random House
Format: eBook
Pages: 464
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

About The Author
Mark Kurlansky is the James A. Beard Award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World; Salt: A World History; The Basque History of the World; A Chosen Few: The Resurrection of European Jewry; A Continent of Islands: Searching for the Caribbean Destiny; a collection of stories, The White Man in the Tree; and a children’s book, The Cod’s Tale; as well as the editor of Choice Cuts: A Savory Selection of Food Writing from Around the World and Throughout History. He lives in New York City.

Hometown:

New York, NY

Date of Birth:

December 7, 1948

Place of Birth:

Hartford, CT

Education:

Butler University, B.A. in Theater, 1970

Read an Excerpt

THE WINTER OF OUR DISCONTENT

The things of the eye are done.

On the illuminated black dial,

green ciphers of a new moon-

One, two, three, four, five, six!

I breathe and cannot sleep.

Then morning comes,

saying, "This was night."


-Robert Lowell, "Myopia: a Night,"

from For the Union Dead, 1964

CHAPTER 1

THE WEEK IT BEGAN


The year 1968 began the way any well-ordered year should-on a Monday morning. It was a leap year. February would have an extra day. The headline on the front page of The New York Times read, world bids adieu to a violent year; city gets snowfall.

In Vietnam, 1968 had a quiet start. Pope Paul VI had declared January 1 a day of peace. For his day of peace, the pope had persuaded the South Vietnamese and their American allies to give a twelve-hour extension to their twenty-four-hour truce. The People's Liberation Armed Forces in South Vietnam, a pro-North Vietnamese guerrilla force in the South popularly known as the Viet Cong, announced a seventy-two-hour cease-fire. In Saigon, the South Vietnamese government had forced shop owners to display banners that predicted, "1968 Will See the Success of Allied Arms."

At the stroke of midnight in South Vietnam's Mekong Delta, the church bells in the town of Mytho rang in the new year. Ten minutes later, while the bells were still ringing, a unit of Viet Cong appeared on the edge of a rice paddy and caught the South Vietnamese 2nd Marine Battalion by surprise, killing nineteen South Vietnamese marines and wounding another seventeen.

A New York Times editorial said that although the resumption of fighting had shattered hopes for peace, another chance would come with a cease-fire in February for Tet, the Vietnamese New Year.

"L'année 1968, je la salue avec sérénité," pronounced Charles de Gaulle, the tall and regal seventy-eight-year-old president of France, on New Year's Eve. "I greet the year 1968 with serenity," he said from his ornate palace where he had been governing France since 1958. He had rewritten the constitution to make the president of France the most powerful head of state of any Western democracy. He was now three years into his second seven-year term and saw few problems on the horizon. From a gilded palace room, addressing French television-whose only two channels were entirely state controlled-he said that soon other nations would be turning to him and that he would be able to broker peace in not only Vietnam but also the Middle East. "All signs indicate, therefore, that we shall be in a position to contribute most effectively to international solutions." In recent years he had taken to referring to himself as "we."

As he gave his annual televised message to the French people, the man the French called the General or Le Grand Charles seemed "unusually mellow, almost avuncular," sparing harsh adjectives even for the United States, which of late he had been calling "odious." His tone contrasted with that of his 1967 New Year's message, when he had spoken of "the detestable unjust war" in Vietnam in which a "big nation" was destroying a small one. The French government had grown concerned at the level of animosity that France's allies had been directing at it.

France was enjoying a quiet and prosperous moment. After World War II, the Republic had fought its own Vietnam war, a fact that de Gaulle seemed to have forgotten. Ho Chi Minh, America's enemy, had been born under French colonial rule the same year as de Gaulle and had spent most of his life fighting the French. He had once lived in Paris under the pseudonym Nguyen O Phap, which means "Nguyen who hates the French." During World War II, Franklin Roosevelt had warned de Gaulle that after the war France should give Indochina its independence. But de Gaulle told Ho, even as he was enlisting his people in the fight against the Japanese, that after the war he intended to reestablish the French colony. Roosevelt argued, "The people of Indochina are entitled to something better than that." De Gaulle was determined that his Free French troops participate in any action in Indochina, saying, "French bloodshed on the soil of Indochina would constitute an impressive territorial claim."

After World War II, the French fought Ho for Vietnam and suffered bitter defeat. Then they fought and lost in Algeria. But since 1962 France had been at peace. The economy was growing, despite de Gaulle's notorious lack of interest in the fine points of economics. Between the end of the Algerian war and 1967, real wages in France rose 3.6 percent each year. There was a rapid increase in the acquisition of consumer goods-especially cars and televisions. And there was a dramatic increase in the number of young people attending universities.

De Gaulle's prime minister, Georges Pompidou, anticipated few problems for the year ahead. He predicted that the Left would be more successful in unifying than they would in actually taking power. "The opposition will harass the government this year," the prime minister announced, "but they will not succeed in provoking a crisis."

The popular weekly Paris Match placed Pompidou on a short list of politicians who would maneuver in 1968 to try to replace the General. Yet the editors predicted there would be more to watch abroad than in France. "The United States will unleash one of the fiercest electoral battles ever imagined," they announced. In addition to Vietnam, they saw the potential hot spots as a fight over gold and the dollar, growing freedom in the Soviet Union's Eastern satellite countries, and the launching of a Soviet space weapons system.

"It is impossible to see how France today could be paralyzed by crisis as she has been in the past," said de Gaulle in his New Year's message.

Paris had never looked brighter, thanks to Culture Minister André Malraux's building-cleaning campaign. The Madeleine, the Arc de Triomphe, the Pantheon, and other landmark buildings were no longer gray and charcoal but beige and buff, and this month cold-water sprays were going to remove seven hundred years of grime from Notre Dame Cathedral. It was one of the great controversies of the moment in the French capital. Would the water spray damage the building? Would it look oddly patchwork, revealing that not all the stones were originally of matching color?

De Gaulle, seated in his palace moments before midnight on the eve of 1968, was serene and optimistic. "In the midst of so many countries shaken by confusion," he promised, "ours will continue to give an example of order." France's "primordial aim" in the world is peace, the General said. "We have no enemies."

Perhaps this new Gaullian tone was influenced by dreams of a Nobel Peace Prize. Paris Match asked Pompidou if he agreed with some of the General's inner circle who had expressed outrage that de Gaulle had not already received the prize. But Pompidou answered, "Do you really think that the Nobel Prize could be meaningful to the General? The General is only concerned about history, and no jury can dictate the judgment of history."

Aside from de Gaulle, the American computer industry struck one of the new year's rare notes of optimism, predicting a record year for 1968. In the 1950s computer manufacturers had estimated that six computers could serve the needs of the entire United States. By January 1968 fifty thousand computers were operating in the country, of which fifteen thousand had been installed in the past year. The cigarette industry was also optimistic that its 2 percent growth in sales in 1967 would be repeated in 1968. The executive of one of the leading cigarette manufacturers boasted, "The more they attack us the higher our sales go."

But by most measurements, 1967 had not been a good year in the United States. A record number of violent, destructive riots had erupted in black inner cities across the country, including Boston, Kansas City, Newark, and Detroit.

1968 would be the year in which "Negroes" became "blacks." In 1965, Stokely Carmichael, an organizer for the remarkably energetic and creative civil rights group the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, invented the name Black Panthers, soon followed by the phrase Black Power. At the time, black, in this sense, was a rarely used poetic turn of phrase. The word started out in 1968 as a term for black militants, and by the end of the year it became the preferred term for the people. Negro had become a pejorative applied to those who would not stand up for themselves.

On the second day of 1968, Robert Clark, a thirty-seven-year-old schoolteacher, took his seat in the Mississippi House of Representatives without a challenge, the first black to gain a seat in the Mississippi State Legislature since 1894.

Reading Group Guide

1. How did the explosive worldwide social movements of 1968 make that year unique?

2. What was the international impact of the civil rights movement on the events of 1968?

3. What progress or setbacks have there been in the status of women since that time?

4. How did television influence that year’s events?

5. How does the mass media of today differ from 1968’s?

6. What was the global significance of the Prague Spring?

7. What events of 1968 would not occur today?

8. How is it that such a tragic year arouses nostalgia in so many people?

9. Was the world a better place before 1968, or do you feel there have been changes for the better since that year?

10. What lessons might we learn from the events of 1968?

Interviews

Why 1968?

Why the year 1968? Because it did rock the world. In addition to being the height of the Vietnam War, and the Biafran war, with the Middle East close to igniting global warfare and an incident with Korea holding a U.S. ship leading to a year-long tense negotiation, it was a year of tremendous social upheaval almost everywhere in the world -- in countries as diverse as China, Japan, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Germany, France, the United States, and Mexico.

The central question of my book 1968: The Year that Rocked the World is why did all of this happen in so many countries at the same time? The answer lies in the intersection of a number of historical forces at a time when television was just coming of age. Four of the most world-changing events in the history of television were in 1968: the coverage of the Vietnam War's Tet Offensive, bringing filmed battle into homes the same evening; the police brutality at the Chicago Convention being filmed and aired that night; smuggled film proving that the Soviets were invading Czechoslovakia without any local support and completely against the will of the Czech people; and the dazzling trick of broadcasting astronauts from outer space. In 1968 the world tumbled into a media age that only a few people understood. It was the awkward beginning of the world we live in today. But that is only one of the consequences of that pivotal year, a year of such grave seed changes that 35 years later we are only beginning to understand them.

It is now clear that the Soviet suppression of students in Poland and the invasion of Czechoslovakia were the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union. These events alienated an entire generation of young Communists. Communism was supposed to be a system for changing the world and building a better society. But in 1968 it became clear to loyal Communists that the Soviets not only were no longer interested in change, they would not allow it. They had taken away the best reason to be a Communist. It was the year that took France out of the 19th century. It was the year that Mexicans began resisting one-party rule; the recent nonviolent overthrow of the ruling party began with the massacred students of 1968.

In the United States nothing in politics has been the same since 1968. In that year Richard Nixon, who had the reputation of being a perennial loser and represented a party that had only one winning candidate since the Depression, reconfigured American politics to win the presidency and lay out a strategy followed by every Republican candidate since. Nixon realized that millions of Democratic voters, especially in the South, had been alienated by the civil rights movement. The 2004 Republican Party is a party designed by Nixon and unrecognizable to pre-Nixon Republicans. Nixon also changed the Supreme Court, deliberately packing it with anti–civil rights judges, including William Rhenquist, who worked in Nixon's attorney general's office as the legal adviser for a dirty tricks campaign that tried to sabotage liberal judges, starting with Abe Fortas in 1968.

The military certainly learned many things from 1968. The draft was abolished and is unlikely to return, because it creates activist college campuses. The practice of giving body counts was dropped. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military gave regular counts of the number of enemy killed. They may have even exaggerated the numbers. But this killing sickened people, and so the bloodless war was invented. How many people have U.S. forces killed in Afghanistan? In Iraq? No precise figures are available.

Media was so effective in 1968 because its power was not fully understood. Today it is, and the news is packaged with an eye toward public opinion in a sophisticated manner that was only in its early stages then. And government has become far more skilled at controlling news, especially war news. Journalists are not free to roam Iraq and Afghanistan the way they were in Vietnam but are generally kept in controlled situations. The journalists themselves could learn much from 1968 by studying the way the press corps at the time came to understand that they were being lied to and found a new independence that allowed the public to learn the truth about the war.

Lastly, in a world in which people are feeling disenfranchised by the power of government and corporate-controlled news, there is much to be learned from 1968, when people made themselves heard on the streets. Mark Kurlansky

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