The Year That Changed Its Mind

...Instead, the flood of books about 1968 continues...

...Late one night a friend and I Scotch-taped an antiwar petition to the Confederate soldier monument in Pearisburg, Virginia...

...Demonstration as a substitute for politics, a psychological experience complete in itself regardless of any external results, is one of the durable legacies of the time...

...There the influence of 1968 has been profound, especially on the social sciences (apart from economics) andhumanities...

...That the northern half of Vietnam was ruled by a brutal dictatorship striving to extend its rule to the south was one of those truths antiauthoritarian idealists tacitly conceded but in practice ignored...

...Part of the purport of books like Kurlansky's lies in the tendency of unrepentant '68ers to see their struggles as continuing today...

...The rebels rejected most institutions, political leaders and political parties...

...The widespread impression that they have been simply repeating an obsolete pattern may be one reason (of many) why the "peace activists" of 2003 have so far accomplished even less than their forebears...

...Such a state of mind represents the essence of being a '68er...

...In August the Democrats nominated Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, President Johnson's chosen successor, who was equivocal about the war, at a convention so rancorous that it tore the Democrats apart and brought them disastrous publicity...

...At the age of 26,1 campaigned for Gene McCarthy, demonstrated, harangued anyone who would listen to me, raised money for Vietnamese war orphans, and indulged in whatever futile antiwar activities presented themselves...

...Contemporary political candidates who half-consciously draw on that memory during a later war will always have to defend themselves against the suspicion that they hope for the same thing...

...In June Robert Kennedy was likewise assassinated on the night he won the California Democratic primary...

...That was hardly whatthe idealists intended...

...The same month the Soviet Union and its obedient satellites invaded Czechoslovakia, deposed Dubcek and reimposed the Communist dictatorship...

...Yet drawing enthusiastic parallels between America's role in the world today and its sorrows of the '60s leads naturally to such confusions...

...Kurlansky, who was 20 years old then, treats his favorite chronological milepost as if it had witnessed the Second Coming...

...The fundamental structure of universities and their relation to corporations remains what it was before Columbia, though on a vastly largerscale and with betterpublic relations...

...The onemajor new American social movement that has flourished since 1968, feminism, was not among their major concerns...

...It was a year that seemed to be on the verge of changing everything and ended up changing very little...

...Most of the participants eventually overcame their illusions, often with regret, and grew up to lead reasonably normal lives...

...If you were there, you know...

...American participation in the Vietnam War, and with it the draft, continued for more than four years...

...But nobody commemorates a piddling year like that...

...In March Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, the hitherto obscure peace candidate of dissident Democrats, did well enough in the New Hampshire primary to make him a serious threat to President Lyndon B. Johnson's re-election hopes...

...Those Democrats who see the opportunity rather than the trap, who long for a return to 1968 with a better outcome, are hardly alone in the world...

...What is certain is that those who try to step in the same river twice are always in danger ofbeing swept away by currents they never noticed the first time...

...In April student revolutionaries with a complicated list of grievances closed Columbia University and occupied many buildings...

...Throughout the freer parts of the world, it seemed to be the year of the student...

...Whatever the outcome in any given Presidential year of this quadrennial contest, it has rarely led to victory in November...

...Even more encouraging, a faceless bureaucrat named Alexander Dubcek, who had become leader of the Czechoslovakian Communist Party in January, unexpectedly turned his country toward openness and democracy to an extent not seen in captive Eastern Europe since the Soviets had crushed the Hungarian rebellion in 1956...

...Others, especially in Western Europe and the universities, never recovered and are known to this day as '68ers...

...In Eastern Europe, when liberation eventually did come, the chief foreign architects of change were two conservatives, Pope John Paul II and President Ronald Reagan, who had little use for the legacy of'68...

...In the summer of that year I left for England and Canada, where I spent the next four years...

...A new example is Mark Kurlansky's 1968: The Year That Rocked the World (Ballantine, 464 pp., $26.95...

...If you were a student, you would of course be in favor of this particular idea quite apart from the politics...

...Some 30,000 to 40,000 young American males did head to Canada during the war to escape the draft, with smaller numbers heading for Sweden or going to jail rather than serve in Vietnam...

...Like many other nostalgists, Kurlansky draws an optimistic moral from this chronicle of futility...

...He also reminisces wistfully: "Working on this book reminded me, that there was a time whenpeople spoke their minds and were not afraid to offend—and that since then, too many truths have been buried...

...Following the death of Bobby Kennedy, Humphrey easily beat McCarthy for the nomination in 1968...

...The year seemed to begin well forthose, like Kurlansky and me, who "hated the Vietnam War, protested against it," and simultaneously saw the possibility of a new world dawning...

...True, he admits, the year really did not turn out very well...

...Similar—though usually less violent— actions followed on other campuses...

...The Democrats have never overcome the split that became evident that year between reformist "peace" candidates, favored and mostly produced by the upper middle class, and more traditional, labororiented politicians who sometimes seem to have survived from an earlier era...

...The rebels' largest goal was to remove American research universities from their central position in the militaryindustrial complex...

...In April Martin Luther King Jr., by now an antiwar as well as civil rights leader, was assassinated...

...In the United States and to some extent in Europe, rebellion was directed above all at America's participation in the Vietnam War: "At a time when colonies were struggling to recreate themselves as nations, when the " anticolonial struggle' had touched the idealism of people all over the world, here was a weak and fragile land struggling for independence...

...At the height of the 1968 fighting," he tells us, "the U.S...

...Twenty-one years would pass before the Soviet empire finally collapsed...

...Who would want to be called a '53er...

...As Peter Beinart recently pointed out in the New Republic, Dean's affluent, welleducated constituency has been becoming more Democratic, while Gephardt's blue-collar following has been declining in both numbers and loyalty to the party...

...Senator George McGovern, the party's 1972 "peace" nominee who set the pattern for this sort of campaign, won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia...

...When it comes to real politics, the most important impact of 1968 and its aftermath has been on the Democratic Party...

...In France, de Gaulle effortlessly outwitted the students and won a resounding victory in new legislative elections...

...Tariq Ali, the British radical who gloated over the Tet offensive in 1968, hailed the recent bombing of United Nations headquarters in Baghdad with identical enthusiasm...

...Curiously, writers on both subjects frequently miss the significance ofthat influence...

...France's President Charles de Gaulle found himself facing massive student demonstrations that seemed to threaten his semiauthoritarian regime...

...Nevertheless, nostalgia can get to you even if you don't wear a gray ponytail...

...Hatred can make time stand still...

...Democratic governors in the South, however, are an increasingly rare species...

...although in the end militarily unsuccessful, it suggested for the first time to most Americans that the war might go on forever without final victory...

...But it acutely raises the question, what really happened in 1968 that has such resonance a generation later, both for those who were there and for many who were not yet born...

...Much the same thing was happening in West Germany...

...Afterward, like so many others on several continents, I took refuge in the university...

...The only two successful Democratic Presidential candidates after Lyndon Johnson were Southern governors who ran as moderates against both Northeastern-elite and labor-oriented liberals in their own party...

...military was killing every week roughly the same number of people as died in the September 11, 2001 World Trade Center attack...

...Afurther unintended result of revolutionary idealism is that after 30 years of tutelage by Leftist faculty members, according to a recent Harvard poll, college students are more Republican and pro-Bush than the population as a whole...

...No, I was not dodging the draft, although I might have if my mother had not assured me I was too old and set in my ways to be of interest to the Army...

...I have something to say but I am not sure what," read one of the more revealing signs posted during the 1968 Paris student rising...

...Whether Gephardt, in many ways Humphrey's successor, can defeat McCarthy's current Vermont counterpart is much more doubtful...

...That spring things were looking up in Europe, too...

...Confusion is rarely good for the soul...

...In January the Tet offensive began...

...Most peace activists, American or otherwise, chose rather to identify the North Vietnamese as idealistic revolutionaries like themselves and cheered their victories.'A wave of joy and energy rebounds around the world," wrote a British radical named Tariq Ali during North Vietnam's Tet offensive of 1968, "and millions more are suddenly, exhilaratingly, ceasing to believe in the strength of their oppressor...

...What everyone remembers 35 years later, in exaggerated form, is the sex, the drugs, the rock and roll—in short, the parts of the revolution that took hold and lasted...

...Whether history, in this case the multiple tragedies of 1968, is once again repeating itself as farce remains to be seen in 2004...

...However unjust the charge ofbeing unpatriotic, the unresolved legacy of 1968 still constitutes one of the major problems (there are others) of the Democratic Party...

...Since McCarthy, Kennedy and Humphrey battled it out for the succession in the spring of 1968, there have been nine Presidential elections...

...An event like the Iraq war, which initially appears to many Democrats like an opportunity, usually turns out to be a trap, tempting candidates to carry opposition beyond what the larger public will tolerate...

...I still have a walletsize calendar produced by the National Liberation Front of Vietnam, evidently for distribution to American soldiers, that says in English, "happynew year 1968" followed by "GO HOME NOW...

...Apart from what are now called lifestyle issues, few of the causes '68ers foughtfor ever came about...

...For the Left to celebrate 1968 makes about as much sense as it would for the United Daughters of the Confederacy to commemorate the inspiring events of 1865...

...What went wrong...

...The Iraqi "resistance," he proclaimed, is not only "coming from the remnants of the regime...

...In February Walter Cronkite turned publicly against American participation in the war, a colossal victory for its opponents because Cronkite was so often declared by other pundits to be the most trusted man in America...

...The whole concept is laughable...

...In all likelihood, Kurlansky would, if pressed, repudiate any implication that Islamist terrorism is a continuation of anticolonial idealism, or—like all but the most vehement opponents of the war against Saddam Hussein—that the deposed Iraqi dictator represents a new version of Ho Chi Minh struggling heroically for national liberation...

...Even so, there really was an element ofbliss in that teasing false dawn of revolution...

...What was unique about 1968," he states, "was that people were rebelling about very different issues and had in common only that desire to rebel, ideas about how to do it, a sense of alienation from the established order, andaprofound distaste for authoritarianism in any form...

...Names of student leaders like Rudi Dutschke and Daniel Cohn-Bendit became, if not household words, at least tokens of being with-it to be bandied about among the enlightened...

...God help us when we reach 2018 and find ourselves remembering not the centennial of the World War I Armistice, but half a century of flower children...

...Kurlansky goes so far as to attack the Republicans for becoming a party of racists under Nixon's leadership and remaining one ever since, while he completely ignores the far more durable grip of 1968 on the party he prefers...

...In a single word, everything...

...In 1953 Stalin died, the Korean War ended, Dwight D. Eisenhower became the first Republican President since Herbert Hoover, the Rosenbergs were executed, Francis Crick and James Watson announced the double helix structure of DNA, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay conquered Mount Everest, and the Yankees won the World Series for the fifth year in a row...

...Yet all over the world people know that they are not powerless, that they can take to the streets the way people did in 1968...

...Every anniversary brings more commemorations than any intrinsic significance of the year itself couldjustify...

...Refusing to accept that one is grown up, taking permanent refuge in a Never Never Land where Johnson just announced his retirement and the millennium is finally at hand, has become an all too common characteristic among American and European liberal intellectuals in what is now, alas, late middle age...

...If not, take my word for it...

...Soon afterward Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York, brother to the late President, also declared himself a peace candidate for the Presidency...

...November brought Richard M. Nixon to the White House...

...On the last day of March Johnson announced that he had decided not to seek re-election after all, seemingly giving the peace candidates a free run for the Democratic nomination...

...Democrats have won three of them...

...Today Howard Dean and Richard Gephardt represent what has become a timeless, extremely bitter struggle for the soul and the votes of the Democratic Party...

...There are dozens of resistance organizations being formed north and south, and once the resistance starts in the south, I think that the occupation will be in very serious trouble...

...While that frame of mind is often benign—what person of good will doesn't wish things had turned out better, or still could?—it also has an ugly side...

...It might be sobering to remember that the present year happens to be not only the 35th anniversary of 1968, but the 50th anniversary of 1953...

...Where there was communism they rebelled against communism, where there was capitalism they turned against that...

...The memory of 1968 will always be a mixed one for the many antiwar Americans of the time who, whether they acknowledged it or not, were working and hoping for the defeat of their own country...

...Another danger faces those Democrats who look back to the 1968 antiwar movement for inspiration...

...The number of books written about the "'generation" of 1968, frequently by retired activists such as Paul Berman and Todd Gitlin, has already gotten out of hand...