Hearing the Voices of 1968 20 Years Later

Awoman’s voice, trembling, near tears, speaking English with a Czech accent: “You are listening to the legal free radio of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. We appeal to all radio stations in Romania, Yugoslavia. Please inform about the situation in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. Please let the whole world know the truth.”

The truth, in August, 1968, was the brutal re-subjugation of Czechoslovakia to the Russian Empire as the brief “Prague Spring” ended. The anguished words of the announcer can be heard again on Bantam audiocassette, The Incredible Year 1968 ($7.95), compiled from CBS news archives. Later in the cassette, a man’s voice--that of a German tourist, one guesses from the accent--is more specific about what was going on: “At 2:00 one Russian aeroplane after another was flying over Prague. And windows opened. And soldiers shot--first into the air and then into people.”

The cassette is in part an audio-collage in which, for example, the chant “The Whole World Is Watching!” from the Chicago streets is used as background to a speech inside the Democratic convention hall. Fortunately, the connecting text, read by Charles Kuralt, is clear and ample, proceeding in chronological order from the Pueblo Incident through the Tet Offensive, the King assassination, the Nixon nomination (speech by Spiro Agnew), the Humphrey nomination (and the riot in Grant Park), “Prague Spring,” the massive student demonstrations in Paris, the Wallace candidacy, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the Nixon election--to close, at Christmas, with the flight of Apollo 8 and the astronauts’ reaction to the first “whole Earth” views from orbit around the moon.

Bantam should have let the cassette end with the closing archival material: Archibald MacLeish reading his poem on Apollo 8, with its striking image of “Riders on the Earth.” Instead, after MacLeish, we hear an unidentified voice signing off for Bantam and a few bars of tinny, upbeat music.

But that flaw aside, the cassette is hard to top as a way of bringing 1968 back to mind for those who lived through it and perhaps introducing 1968 to those born in 1969 or later. I was especially moved to hear again Martin Luther King’s last speech, the “mountaintop” sermon on the eve of his assassination, and the speech that Robert Kennedy, in shirt sleeves on the campaign trail, delivered from the back of a truck just minutes after hearing that King had been killed. What Kennedy said, in part, was:

“For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust, at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say I feel in my heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, and he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times. My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He wrote: ‘Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’ ”

Spoken 20 years ago this spring, and well worth hearing again.