Reflections on 1968 and Environs

...the Mexico City massacre, the Black Power fists at the Olympics, the election of Richard Nixon...

...Still, without the '68ers, American life today would be encrusted far more than is already the case by bureaucratic inertia, scandal, misery, and decay...

...It saved lives, limbs, and minds...

...With the apparatchik's contempt for democracy, Haldeman failed to grasp the essence of a working democracy: that a good many people do indeed "want to get excited about something," and even find many public issues worth getting excited about, because they have the audacity to think the government is theirs...

...The militants, largely vigorous students and exstudents, achieved the publicity, but there were a vast range of activities on the part of religious groupings...

...I wish we had quit [Vietnam] when I was there...

...It aroused still more opposition everywhere in America...

...Their triumph lies partly in their very modesty...

...the differing relations between students and workers in, say, the United States and Italy...

...Even more than Johnson, Nixon played out one classic motif in the history of failed rule: contempt for the governed...

...What if Senator Eugene McCarthy hadn't thrown in the towel in early June, walking into Hubert Humphrey's office no sooner than the body of Bobby Kennedy was cold, to say: "Hubert, it's yours...

...The sense of worlds in collision, apocalypses now, the giddy slide (or rush) toward the edge was everywhere in popular culture, from the Rolling Stones' "Street Fighting Man" and "Sympathy for the Devil" or, if you preferred, the Beatles' "You say you want a revolution...

...What if Robert Kennedy had survived, either to win the nomination or to exact concessions from Hubert Humphrey...

...There were also unacknowledged tensions—between individualist and communal forms of libertarianism...

...Because such radical self-reliance is psychologically difficult, they would also construct fantasies about revolutionary leaders abroad—Ho, Mao, Guevara, Castro...

...Would democratic socialist opposition throughout the communist world have survived as a live force to inherit the leadership of a post-communist Eastern Europe or at least to make a fight of it against today's utopian capitalists...

...forthcoming in El Socialismo del Futuro...

...From the distance of one-quarter of a century, I think it is proper to see the amalgam of movements— I speak primarily of the civil rights, antiwar, and women's movements—as something other than sectors of a failed revolution...

...Eventually, they were discredited and defeated by their own recklessness—and by the extraordinary resolve of an enemy fighting on its home ground, an enemy they did not begin to understand...

...Even if the spirit was easily caricatured (positively and negatively) and converted, thanks to the mass media, to a new consumption strategy, the expansive and generous spirit was there in the first place...

...But opportunity is only a door—the point is to walk through it...

...Some of this article is drawn from my introduction to the forthcoming book by Tom Wells, The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam...

...In the sixteen and seventeenth centuries, the Vatican regrouped...

...What if, then, enough doves had gotten off their hands to vote for Humphrey in the three states (California, Oregon, and Wisconsin) where another 334,000 votes would have deprived Nixon of a majority of the electoral college, thereby throwing the election into the House, where a Democratic majority would have elected Humphrey...

...And winning, for them, as for Vince Lombardi, was not the main thing, it was the only thing...

...the breakdown of centers of power...

...That popular movement still stalks American politics, however wishfully President Bush declared that he had "kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all...

...Still, Haldeman's view was a bad caricature of something real...

...For democracy is not simply the rule of a majority...

...The national differences are easy to talk about: the giddiness of the Westerners versus the relative modesty of the dissidents of the East...

...Democracy is not for bad nerves or ancestor worship...

...Lights...

...Indeed, at most times in most places, normal democratic life requires much steadier projects, many more supple and complex forms of popular action, than were possible in 1968...

...So the young radicals played an immense part in the antiwar movement...

...Or the last gasps of the old revolutionary mole...

...It was a seedbed of organized and not-so-organized political and cultural opposition...

...The society must also take advantage of the opportunity...

...The young radicals were available...

...It set limits to the most awesome prerogative of the chief executive: to deal death and destruction...

...He cranked up the superstate's punitive apparatus...

...It functioned as a veto force...

...The left tends not to know what to make of them...

...Most of the movement, in turn, misread the signs from the White House—they took at face value the administrations' insistence that the movement was impotent...

...Individuals who might, if they had lived, have held together the symbiotic and mutually antagonistic liberals and radicals were violently removed from the scene...

...Over many years, resisting illegitimate authority—in the language of one of its clarion calls—the movement defended the Constitution against a war that lacked constitutional warrant...

...For many decades, Reformation and Counter-Reformation can—perhaps are bound to—coexist, snaked around one another...

...They pass...

...Majority rule, if unrestricted, may lead to one episode of demagogic authoritarianism after another...

...In the conduct of foreign policy, America's rulers during the Vietnam War were (as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., wrote) imperial...

...What if, even after Humphrey had the nomination in hand, McCarthy had pressed him for concessions on the war in FALL • 1993 • 483 Reflections on 1968 exchange for an endorsement...

...Repression joined reform...

...And if established America refused to relinquish the Vietnam War, if it needed the war, then it seemed to follow that America needed more than an antiwar movement— it needed a radical revolt, or what growing numbers of activists came to call a revolution, or a demolition job...

...This opportunity comes not only through elections...

...They deceived, discouraged, tried to disrupt and suppress the usually legal opposition...

...The radical wing came to think that the war had been produced not simply by one single branch of the political establishment or even by two branches, but by the poisoned roots of American society as a whole...

...Everything lent itself to media melodrama, but this was not the fault of the events: they were born melodramatic...

...As in 1848, there resulted a sense of defeat, and a momentous breakdown in relations between reformers and revolutionaries...

...or even more than a crime, it had to be symptomatic of a rotten system or even an irredeemably monstrous civilization...

...For all the divergences from country to country, 1968 remains one of those rare moments when hope sprang alive almost everywhere: and yet, at the same time, the sense of desperation was palpable...

...to be published by the University of California Press in the winter of 1994...

...In the end, lost opportunities stand out...

...One of its prerequisites is that it afford minorities the opportunity to become, or to join, majorities...

...Nixon was more insecure, and therefore 486 • DISSENT Reflections on 1968 more erratic, than his predecessors...

...Everything seemed stripped down to elements: life and death, raw violence, grandeur and wretchedness...

...His administration's obsession with an implacable opposition drove him to overreach...

...Democratic moments are, by definition, momentary...

...The upsurge of anti-authority, in all its vigor and excess, expressed both a utopian effervescence and a resumption of the complex intertwining of deep American traditions: Emersonian expressiveness and abolitionist egalitarianism...

...MiklOs Haraszti, the Hungarian dissident who was then a Maoist, and later and still a prominent liberal, was enamored of Western underground comix and thrilled to see the West German freak left marching out of step at the otherwise deadly Communist youth festival in Sofia...

...The Reformation principles this time around are democratic: that citizens must actively engage in the decisions that affect the common life and that no authority stands exempt from the imperative of either proving itself or stepping aside...

...Democratic society is both more and different from democratic government—it requires the engagement of a whole population and, if need be, the exercise of popular sovereignty...

...All failed abysmally at one of the prerequisites of leadership in a democratic society: curiosity...

...But virtually everywhere, as Norman Birnbaum points out, there was the same discrediting of elites and the same failure of the historic reform forces, whether those of the Democratic or Social Democratic or Communist parties...

...For all their denunciations of the antiwar movement for its "negativism," they could not fathom its depth and breadth...

...Consider the movement against the Vietnam War...

...To convey that image, he sent more troops, dropped more bombs, killed more people, and made more insupportable claims about how successful this all was...

...But their memory should not be permitted to pass as well...

...Not because nostalgia is a helpful sentiment—it is at least as likely to obstruct an understanding of the present situation...

...And the governments kept thickheadedly making the case for a radical shift not only in foreign policy but in the national ethos...

...Might there have been a prospect for a cross-racial, cross-cultural Democratic alliance, a leftpopulist majority that could have outflanked Nixon's Southern Strategy, outlasted the George Wallace campaign, and given a new lease to the Democratic party's left wing...

...Recall the young playwright Vaclav Havel in New York, enraptured by Frank Zappa and the Columbia students, while, back in Prague, Czech students chose Allen Ginsberg to be their "King of May...

...There too, for many years, the mechanisms of constitutional democracy were evidently broken, and students had learned to resort to unconventional means, to "go into the streets," to arouse the collective conscience...

...Dissidents within his administration resigned (Assistant Secretary of State Rogers Hilsman) or were ignored (Under Secretary of State George Ball...

...Eventually, to increasing numbers of activists, unreason did not seem unreasonable...

...All prized secrecy...

...Travelers experienced it face to face and television watchers, image to image...

...They would go their own cultural and political way...

...Collective memory is warped by the disproportionate weight of events that were theatrical enough to be recorded by cameras and passed down through the decades as honest-to-goodness "history...

...the emergence of simultaneous centers of initiative...

...Largely because the warmakers, America's chief authorities, were smug and entrenched and apparently obdurate, many of the antiwarriors shed their FALL • 1993 • 487 Reflections on 1968 respect for authority and eventually their acknowledgement of authority...

...Despite various efforts to find a single Holy Grail to unify these movements, they were also, finally, disparate...

...They changed structures...

...The neglected side of the legacy of 1968 is the less apocalyptic, more modest side...

...What had started as a rivulet, the protest of a few, grew into the torrent of a vast majority— probably the largest and most effective antiwar movement in the history of the world...

...The radical conclusion built on the experience and sensibility of the civil rights movement...

...But his idiosyncrasies also have an ancient lineage...

...the differing proportions of individualism, egalitarianism, religiosity, calculation...

...So there will always be a poignancy to these events, a lingering question: what if...

...But these adroit maneuvers weren't enough...

...Would someone like Gorbachev have been able to come to power much sooner...

...0 488 • DISSENT...

...Whatever one concludes from the recent debate about John F. Kennedy's intentions, it is clear that at least in his early years he pursued the war with his customary vigor...

...the claim (for a while) that there were no limits to what the will could produce...

...At the remove of a quarter-century, the list boggles the imagination: the Tet offensive, the Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy campaigns, Lyndon Johnson's stepping down, the King and Kennedy assassinations, the French utopia of May and its whiff of student–worker revolution, the Columbia rebellion, Prague Spring and the Russian invasion, the Chicago Democratic Convention confrontations...

...The antiwar movement in particular was also defensive— a negation, lacking a clear affirmative idea of America's role in the world...

...Haldeman, thought of protesters as "people who want to get excited about something, and they don't really give much of a darn what it is they're excited about...

...Antiwar wives and children exercised a powerful influence on both Democratic and Republican government officials...

...Lyndon Johnson had plunged deeply into the war, multiplying the American expeditionary force from some 25,000 in 1963, at the time of Kennedy's assassination, to more than 500,000 in 1968...

...There is no Reformation without frequent incoherence and downright selfbetrayal — indeed, without Counter-Reformation...

...it comes through all the measures of popular argument, assembly, mobilization, and countermobilization...

...the intoxication of what the political scientist Aristide Zolberg later called "moments of madness...

...Not because they can or should be copied, any more than their conditions can be recreated...

...between those who fought for elemental rights and the overcoming of scarcity and those who thought that history had lifted them heavenward and deposited them in the era of postscarcity...

...It cannibalized itself through terrorism and ham-handed Marxism, and helped bury the chances for the most substantial left in American history in half a century...

...Cops...

...And there was the robust feeling that cultural and, indeed, geographical boundaries existed to be overcome: that, as the women's liberation movement was beginning to put it, the "personal" (sexual customs, gender hierarchies) was political...

...As the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) organizer Robb Burlage said at the time (drawing on the critic Van Wyck Brooks), we were "spiritually unemployed...

...In fact, it was the obsessive quality of his fear—that is, his ignorance and his lack of faith in democracy— that brought him down...

...Because they staked so much for so long on their arrogance, by the late 1960s they faced a political dilemma that offered no good solution...

...The right sees the movements as ejaculations of infantilism...

...Because the warmakers failed to grasp that the problem was their war, an unjust and (if that were not bad enough for a good American pragmatist) unwinnable war, the war ended up testing the resilience of virtually every American institution—not least the antiwar movement itself...

...What, for many organizers, started out as an antiwar movement pure and simple rapidly became more than that...

...One of the fundamental truths about these men and their inner circles is that they were not democrats...

...In the end, the Reformation had come to the West to stay...

...Because the war pitted a technologically superior, white-led juggernaut against a largely peasant Asian society, growing numbers of opponents came to see it as a racist war, the foreign component of a seamless economic and cultural system characterized by white supremacy, murderous technology, and central power devoid of an instinct for justice...

...The war had to be more than a mistake, it was a crime...

...Theories like to talk about structures — affluence, revolts against the world of consumption, the cold war, declining American hegemony in the West...

...But the history it belongs to is the history we belong to: the history of hope, error, and missed opportunities, and the history of democratic vistas...

...What was developing was the spirit, if not the program, of a general radical movement...

...As Tom Wells tells us, Haldeman's notes from a 1971 meeting with Nixon put it memorably: "Smear the liberals with the left—and keep at it...

...What if King had survived...

...To defeat the movement, Nixon shrewdly phased out the draft, "Vietnamized" the ground war (or, as the movement used to say, changed the color of the bodies), and succeeded in moving the carnage off television...

...Much commentary on the radical movements of the 1960s is colored by the disappointments of subsequent decades...

...But the antiwar movement as a whole was a considerable if partial success...

...Dissolve to Vietcong flags flapping in the breeze to the soundtrack of "Street Fighting Man...

...Camera...

...No, democracy is also to be measured by the vitality of the common life...

...In trying to comprehend the movements of the late 1960s, one must be careful not to be misled by the distorting lens of the media, which tended to prefer the garish and gaudy if unrepresentative images—the bandannas, the occasional burning flags—and today still keep them in circulation as cheap mementos to electrify otherwise mediocre documentary reminiscences...

...Other sectarians, especially those of the Socialist Workers party, woodenly repeated their formulas for decorous politics when more audacious action might have intervened more effectively...

...What if McCarthy had kept campaigning...

...They extended the boundaries of politics—and yet, for the most part, without surrendering to the temptations of totalism...

...It is a quality not of the state alone, but of the populace...

...So was the longing for personal transcendence that accompanied the sometimes exhilarating, sometimes terrifying— and frequently both—sense of events out of control...

...What if decrepit Brezhnev had decided to tolerate Dubcek and Prague Spring...

...If Nixon hadn't been elected, might the Republicans have town themselves asunder, preventing the rise of Reagan and his assembling of a Republican majority...

...Their means were self-limiting, to use the subsequent language of the Polish opposition...

...They were popular upheavals, largely nonviolent, in behalf of democratic ideals...

...They constitute one of the phenomenal episodes in the history of democracy—and I mean democracy on the world scale, democracy as an idea that has defined political life, by attraction and by repulsion, for more than two centuries...

...With their rigid designs, some sectarians conjured their own hypothetical populace, their own moment in history, into an abstract self-aggrandizement...

...It shortened subsequent wars...

...Because of the deadly combination of government repression and our own fecklessness, there was no significant Old Left of elders to lead the movement...

...What remains striking is the sheer sweep of the '68 movements...

...At age thirty-nine, could he have endured several lean years and still been in place, vigorous and electric, to retake the mantle of militancy once the Black Panthers and the various nationalist groupings had burned out...

...They brandished thousands of American casualties (the Vietnamese, of course, didn't count in their calculus) as arguments for tens of thousands more American casualties...

...It would have taken bravery...

...They tried to outflank debate by lying and lying again, and lying about their lies...

...There was the pull of generational solidarity...

...Their temper was "can-do...

...As a would-be revolution, the student movement's militant wing was a catastrophic failure...

...They would elevate themselves into the only authority they would recognize, an alluring and dangerous political principle...

...Might reform Communism have ripened and spread...

...The resulting authoritarian blunders will forever be known as the Watergate scandal...

...His chief of staff, H.R...

...Whatever Kennedy might have done had he lived, it is clear that after his assassination and for more than a decade beyond, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were hell-bent on winning—or at least, as Daniel Ellsberg has argued, refusing to lose—a war with no constitutional warrant...

...Even the boundary between East and West was penetrable...

...Special operations" like those of the Green Berets expressed his passion for guerrilla maneuver as well as the logic of his commitment to the "long, twilight strugFALL • 1993 • 485 Reflections on 1968 gle" against communism...

...Although much "movement" politics today is warped by parochialism, pettiness, and group ressentiment, America owes to the movements of the 1960s the glimmering intimation that democratic life is always a possibility —a horizon, as Vaclav Havel has said, toward which we travel although we never arrive...

...Two decades later, through Republican and Democratic administrations, many of those limits are still in force, and whatever one's view of the proper obligations of the United States in Somalia, Bosnia, or Iraq, surely the lessons of the Vietnam War are very much alive...

...After carefully sifting the documentary evidence and conducting his own interviews with many administration officials, Wells concludes that for all its miscalculations and deep divisions, and without understanding its own strength, the movement kept both Johnson and Nixon, at crucial junctures, from ratcheting up the war...

...Minorities must not only seek to make themselves into majorities, they must find, or create, the means to the achievement of the popular will...

...The Vietnam War by itself was such a towering evil that everything attached to it, and to the movement against it, had scale and extremity...

...Perhaps, after all, they were nothing but effusions of the privileged...

...Informed debate was not in their interest...

...484 • DISSENT Reflections on 1968 Nineteen sixty-eight, along with its prologues and epilogues, was a cusp in a long and partially failed Reformation...

...To keep up American morale, he had to produce victories—or the image of victories...

...The deepening commitment to war proved largely uncontroversial within his administration...

...Nineteen hundred and sixty-eight belongs to history...

...They used the immense powers of the modern executive to create "facts on the ground...

...Johnson's fundamental blunders helped wreck the Democratic party for the next quartercentury, and converted a potentially great (in the lower-case sense) society into a moral wasteland and a political swamp...

...The movement had an amazing breadth and intricacy...

...As Wells writes, President Richard Nixon's speechwriter Raymond Price thought the antiwarriors were lost in "an orgy of right-brain indulgence...

...In fact, for every prominent leader or extravagant celebrity whom the media found colorful, there were tens of thousands of Bill Clintons involved in a local antiwar project, tens of thousands of soldiers, sailors, Marines, nurses, and airmen rebelling against the war...

...For the most part, this played into the hands of the White House...

...But the events of 1968 were so powerful, they also called structures to account...

...There first, the young New Left had acquired a taste for direct action and a distaste for the euphemisms of power...

...Militancy became recklessness, even self-immolation...

...As in 1789, there was a sense of revolutionary possibility—though unlike in 1789, little violence...

...However fervently they tried to bomb and lie what Johnson called "this damn little piss-ant country" into submission, however devoutly Henry Kissinger refused to "believe that a fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn't have a breaking point," they were unable to win...

...Understand the movement and the war in relation to one another and you understand not only the disasters of war but the limits, and possibilities, of American democracy...

...They were the whiz kids (Democrats) or advertising executives (Republicans) or grandiose would-be architects of world order (Kissinger...

...This is why, in Carl Oglesby's words at the time, democracy is nothing if it is not dangerous...

...I have also benefited from an article by Norman Birnbaum, "What Can We Learn from the Movements of 1968...

...This inflammable combination was bad for political and, eventually, military morale...

...Our greatest mistake was Vietnam," said former Kennedy and Johnson national security adviser McGeorge Bundy at a Berkeley luncheon in 1992, to a question I posed...

...The longer the war went on, the more the radical wing of the antiwar movement felt in its bones that there were deep, not just transient, reasons why the national leadership was unable or unwilling to call it quits...

...There was a state of near-insurrection within the armed forces, even in Vietnam itself...

...A final note on the uses of memory...

...The movement against the Vietnam War was one of the triumphs of democratic history...

...The two together express the tangled nature of America...

...Never mind that a revolution of one's own is a contradiction in terms, since a revolution cannot be the exclusive property of any group...

...As Tom Wells shows in detail in his remarkable forthcoming study, The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam, both Johnson and Nixon were obsessed with the antiwar movement...

...And yet, for all its own sins and stupidity, the movement on the whole was ingenious— a marvel of popular inventiveness...