What is it with 1968? It made the cover of Newsweek recently and got two hours on the History Channel last week. As long ago as 1978, it inspired a TV documentary that I remember watching, so for at least three decades, it’s been seen as a pivotal year.
Historians are fond of that. One of my favorite excursions into American history is “Year of Decision: 1846” by Bernard DeVoto.
The year 1968 got its own chapter in William Manchester’s “The Glory and The Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972,” and the title of the chapter was “The Year Everything Went Wrong.”
The first time I can recall thinking about 1968 was in the fall of 1962 when I was starting seventh grade at Evans Junior-Senior High School in Evans, Colo. Our home-room teacher told us we had to pick a class song, class colors and a class flower for our “Class of 1968,” which seemed impossibly far into a remote future.
When that year arrived, Evans High was no more; school consolidation had put us at Greeley West High, and if we had a class song, class colors or a class flower, I don’t remember them.
I do remember that 1968 got off to a dismal start. On Jan. 23, North Korea seized the U.S.S. Pueblo, a ship that gathered electronic intelligence, along with its crew. This got plenty of attention, especially in Colorado, since the ship was named for one of our major cities.
A week later, the Viet Cong launched the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, over-running much of the country and reaching the gates of the American embassy in Saigon.
What made 1968 especially cruel, as I recall it, were those moments of hope that were then dashed. In March, Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, the anti-war candidate, got 42 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary, and at the end of the month, President Lyndon Johnson announced he would not seek re-election.
So the awful Vietnam War was going to be over and the draft would end. The Cold War looked to be ending too, with the “Prague Spring” in Czechoslovakia. It was possible to feel hopeful for a few days in the early spring of 1968, and as an idealistic high-school senior, I was optimistic for about a week. What a wonderful, exciting world we were about to enter.
Then came the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King on April 4, followed on June 5 by the shooting of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. The police clubbed and gassed anti-war protesters in Chicago that summer, and Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to keep the Iron Curtain in place. Richard Nixon was elected president with a secret plan to end the war within a year, and it remained a secret.
My family’s business, the Crystal White Laundry in Greeley, went under that spring. I moved with my parents and brothers to Longmont that summer, but returned to Greeley for college that fall. What had seemed so permanent — the house in Evans that my dad had built when I was a toddler, my grandmother next door, the laundry — had all changed. The year 1968 would have been tumultuous for me even if the rest of the world had been tranquil and serene.
Thus it’s hard to be objective about how 1968 fits into American history. But if I had to come up with something, it would be this: Running as an independent candidate for president, George Wallace got 46 electoral votes from what had been the Democratic “Solid South.” Republican strategists noticed that and started pandering. The Party of Lincoln became the Party of Dixie, and American politics haven’t been the same since then.
Ed Quillen (ed@cozine.com) is a freelance writer, history buff, publisher of Colorado Central Magazine in Salida and frequent contributor to The Post.
