The turbulent 1960s reached a boiling point in 1968, when world history seemed to change daily, often in dramatic and consequential ways.
From the growing disenchantment and protests surrounding the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in April and of Robert F. Kennedy in June, to the Prague Spring, the Tet Offensive, riots in cities nationwide, and the violence at the Democratic National Committee in Chicago, it seemed, in the words of author Mark Kurlansky, “that there really wasn’t almost a single day in 1968 that something big wasn’t happening somewhere.”
It's not hard to see the links between what happened than and where we are today. "There is a really strong parallel between then and now," professor Laura Belmonte, head of Oklahoma State University’s history department, said. "In 1968 these changes were driven by the youth rebellion and challenging the cold war consensus and policy making by leaders."
Today, CNHI begins a quarterly look back at 1968 and its impact.
FIRST OF FOUR PARTS: It was perhaps the most turbulent year in modern history — the deadlies…
There is no question 1968 was one of the most divisive years in history, Belmonte said. “But it was a divisive year internationally as well as domestically," she said.
In addition to all that was going on in America, 1968 brought a shift of the political culture, driven by young people rebelling and challenging the cold war consensus and policy making by leaders, Belmonte said. These youths, she added, were the baby boomers who were pushing for change in the United States, Mexico, Japan, Germany and France.
Kurlansky, author of the best-selling book, "1968: the Year that Rocked the World" believes “the most important and enduring thing that happened in 1968 was the Prague Spring, which was really the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union.
Czechoslovakia was always one of the Soviet Union’s staunchest allies, Kurlansky said. “They had freely elected to remain communists.” They famously once threw flowers at the Red Army when they marched into Prague.
"Those involved in the Prague Spring, the children of communist party members, the privileged kids, didn’t originally want to overthrow the Soviet Union; it was never about that. They just wanted to reform it,” Kurlansky explained. “Communism wasn’t what their parents had sold to them, so they wanted to fix it. Meanwhile, Czech writers were demanding more freedom of expression
It all fell apart in 1968.
Antonin Novotny, the Stalinist ruler of Czechoslovakia, was succeeded as first secretary by Alexander Dubcek, a Slovak who supported liberal reforms. Dubcek introduced a series of far-reaching political and economic reforms, Kurlansky said, including increased freedom of speech and the rehabilitation of political dissidents.
Dubcek’s attempt to establish “communism with a human face” was celebrated across the country, and the brief period of freedom became known as the Prague Spring. It ended abruptly on Aug. 20, Kurlansky said, when Czechoslovakia was invaded by 600,000 Warsaw Pact troops. Student resistance was no match for Soviet tanks.
“Prague had always been the place for young people to go. I was in college in ’68 and I remember people being in tears because the Soviets had come into Prague,” Kurlansky said. "Afterward, you saw worldwide protests. Mikhail Gorbachev, the Soviet head of state in the 1980s was just a young party member at the time, but he went to Czechoslovakia during Prague Spring and in his biography, written years later, said it was then that he began to realize it [the Soviet Union] was all over."
Tragedy, violence
Domestically, 1968 was marked by tragedy and violence, including the assassinations of King and Kennedy.
King was shot and killed at Memphis hotel in April. Kennedy delivered a powerful speech upon hearing the news that night, words which still resonate today. "In this difficult day, in this difficult time for the United States, it is perhaps well to ask what kind of a nation we are and what direction we want to move in," he said on April 4, 1968 on the campaign trail in Indianapolis, Indiana. "For those of you who are black — considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible — you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization — black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love."
Two months later, Kennedy was dead, gunned down by Sirhan Sirhan the night Kennedy won the California primary.
"Think of how our history might be different, when you realize that biologically there is no reason why Martin Luther King couldn’t still be with us and been around fighting for things for all these 50 years," Kurlansky said. "I also believe that if Bobby Kennedy had been elected the Vietnam War would have ended in 1969.”
President Johnson’s decision on March 31, 1968, not to run for another term was a shocking decision at the time, Belmonte said. “People forget, because of the controversy of Vietnam, that Lyndon Johnson was the darling of liberals at the beginning of his presidency with his Great Society program: when he signed the Social Security amendments, which established Medicare and Medicaid on July 30,1965 and helped pass the civil right act (1964). But by 1968 those accomplishments were overwhelmed with the anti-war protests, which actually began in 1965.”
The Tet Offensive, which began in January, proved to many people that the policy makers were misleading the public about the progress we were making in the Vietnam war, Belmonte said. “But the Tet Offensive actually was a military catastrophe for the Vietcong, so people on the conservative side said just at the point where we had them on the run the political wind shifted and they were no longer willing to prosecute the war as vigorously. This became a divisive point.”
At the same time, the Mỹ Lai Massacre — the Vietnam War mass murder of between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians in South Vietnam on March 16, 1968 — occurred. But it wasn’t known by the public until 1971.
Meanwhile in the states, protests and marches turned violent.
“In 1968,” Belmonte said, “you had a wave of urban unrest, which began in Watts, Los Angeles in 1964, but continued onward in Newark and Detroit, and a wave of riots following the King assassination. The one in Washington, D.C., was particularly bad. More than 100 major U.S. cities experienced disturbances, resulting in roughly $50 million in damage."
The assassinations of King followed so closely by the assassination of Kennedy was a one-two body blow to the political left in the country that culminated in the cataclysm of the 1968 Democratic convention.
It changed the political landscape within the party, Belmonte said. “I can make the argument that the Democratic Party is vying with the legacy of that ever since. The party made substantive changes in the delegate makeup starting in 1972 and nominated a much more leftist type of candidate than it had with Johnson, Kennedy, or Adlai Stevenson. And now there are some similar currents running through the party, where people are calling for an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders, someone who is not going to be a centrist Democrat, such as was Hilary Clinton, Bill Clinton, or Al Gore.”
Culture shift
The black power movement, which started in 1964, also came of age in 1968.
“You had an emergence of black power on the west coast and in urban areas,” said Amira Rose Davis, assistant professor of history and women's, gender and sexuality studies, Penn State University "On a global scale, you had demonstrations at the Olympics in Mexico, the renaissance of athletic protest, which was not just Tommie Smith and John Carlos. Black women protested after the 1968 games. You had a black Cuban team that donated their medals to Stokely Carmichael, an American civil rights activist. And there were protests about the IOC allowing Rhodesia and South Africa sending segregated teams to the games.”
Another event that doesn’t get talked about much, Belmonte said, is the Miss America protests in September. "It was really beginning the more radical turn of the women’s liberation movement," Belmonte said. "This was the seminal event in a much more confrontational style of activism. Infiltrating all male bars. Burning the trappings of male patriarchy, and setting the stage for the women’s march in 1970 followed by a wave of political and legal changes, such as Congress passing the ERA in 1972."
The seeds of all that began in 1968, Belmonte said. “In the women’s movement, there was a seismic shift away from the middle ground and toward Betty Friedan and National Organization of Women, which had published a Bill of Rights at their national convention in 1967.”
This all happened in the tail end of the era of decolonization, Davis added. There were nation-states emerging in Africa deciding how they were going to govern. Throughout 1968 there was turmoil and upheaval happening both in the United States as well as around the world, and it was happening at once. “A rip in time,” Davis said. “Culturally, the new music out of the west coast moved east and then nationally.”
The world was also in the early stages of a new technology, and “setting of the stage of what will become the computer revolution in the 1970s,” Belmonte said.
In 1968 Beranek and Newman, Inc. (BBN) unveiled the final version of the Interface Message Processor (IMP) specifications. A year later, the precursor to the Internet was jump started with the U.S. Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET).
Intel was founded on July 18, 1968, by semiconductor pioneers Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore who left Fairchild Semiconductor to do so. Originally called “NM Electronics” for Noyce and Moore, the company purchased the rights to use the name “Intel.”
“But that was very much in the background, Belmonte said, “given all the political and cultural upheaval of the era.”
Not to be forgotten, however, was NASA’s Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon. The crew entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, Dec. 24, 1968. That evening, the astronauts held a live broadcast, showing pictures of the Earth and moon as seen from their spacecraft.
Rick Dandes writes for The Daily Item in Sunbury, Pa.
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