For Many, the Longest Year of the ‘60s Hasn’t Really Ended Yet

Robert F. Kennedy knew he needed to win the 1968 California Democratic primary to keep his longshot presidential candidacy alive. The returns on the night of June 4--30 years ago next week--told him he had done that, but he also knew the odds remained stacked against him and in favor of his chief rival, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.

“It’s still an uphill climb,” Kennedy told his friend, then-Sen. George S. McGovern (D-S.D.), who called him from Washington. “But I’ll chase Hubert all over the country, and I’ve got a chance.”

It turned out Kennedy had no chance at all. Within an hour of talking to McGovern, Kennedy was felled by an assassin’s bullet in the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles; the scene of his bloodied head being cradled by horrified supporters remains etched in the national consciousness.

“I was in despair,” McGovern recently recalled. So were millions of other Americans who had regarded Kennedy as the man best able to lead the country out of the morass of the Vietnam War.

His death was one of the major traumas in a year of anguish that sent a good part of the citizenry into a deep funk about politics--a mood that for many persists at the approach of the millennium. But of broader consequence, the turbulence of 1968 touched off a tidal wave of change that engulfed the political system and swept into the nooks and crannies of national life.

“It was a defining moment for the baby boom generation,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “The country and the world have not been the same since.”

Mellman, who turned 13 that year, recalls leaving his bar mitzvah lessons in Columbus, Ohio, one spring afternoon to join a peace rally on the steps of the state Capitol addressed by Minnesota Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy. He was the first Democrat to directly challenge President Lyndon B. Johnson over the war by seeking the White House. Mellman remembers grabbing McCarthy’s hand and shouting, “Hi, Mr. President.”

The high spirits that energized the peace movement turned out to be overmatched by the entrenched power of the political establishment. But the underlying enthusiasm for change and eagerness to challenge authority and convention proved contagious and enduring.

“Enough changed so even people who wanted to repeal change have had to take account of what happened,” said Todd Gitlin, New York University social scientist and expert on the movements of the ‘60s.

Many believe that beyond the specific upheavals, the enduring legacy of that period is what Gitlin calls “the spirit of ferocious individualism, the belief that people can do whatever they please.”

That attitude energized the various assaults on established structures and ideas pressed by the radical left. But in Gitlin’s view, much the same spirit now animates such contemporary icons of the right as House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), who was finishing work on his master’s degree in 1968.

“Gingrich is a yippie in pinstripes,” Gitlin said. “He actually affirms in his behavior what was the fundamental attitude of 1968: ‘I am who I am, and I’m going to express how I feel and the hell with the consequences.’ ”

The volatile climate of 1968 did not burst upon the nation overnight. It grew out of the post-World War II decades, when America was a nation on the move--upward in education as well as economic status, outward from the cities to the suburbs, and westward and southward to the inviting climes of the Sun Belt states. The resulting erosion of longtime allegiances was exacerbated by the emergence of television, a pervasive and intrusive force, often drowning out the traditional voices of authority.

This ferment was brought to a boil by two raging national arguments--over race and Vietnam. The century-old struggle of black Americans for equality had found an impassioned champion in Johnson. But by 1968, he was in serious political trouble because of his continued escalation of the U.S. commitment in Vietnam.

In January, communist forces launched the Tet offensive, a massive surprise attack that contrasted with the reassuring picture Johnson had presented of the war and led to a surge in opposition to him. Johnson then delivered another jolt when he decided not to seek reelection.

The political turmoil was soon overshadowed by tragedy on the racial front--the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4. Outraged blacks rioted in cities around the country, infuriating whites already resentful of black militancy and bolstering Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace’s third-party bid for the presidency.

Disorder, protest and confrontation became the rule of the day. Peace activists set fire to their draft cards. Restless college students seized buildings, destroyed property and disrupted classes. Most dramatic of all was the violence in the streets at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where police and national guardsmen clashed with peace demonstrators chanting, “The whole world is watching.”

All this was grist for the mill of Richard Nixon, the Republican presidential nominee who made “law and order” the theme of his campaign and narrowly defeated Humphrey.

Nixon’s victory ushered in a 24-year period of GOP domination of the White House, broken only by the one-term presidency of Jimmy Carter. And Carter’s election was a product of the Watergate scandal, itself rooted in the domestic conflict that had reached its height in 1968.

The Democrats--their various constituencies at odds over the war and racial issues--also suffered because the traumas of 1968 undermined the public’s faith in government, long the party’s chief stock in trade. The decline gave Democrats even more reason to mourn the abrupt passing of Robert Kennedy, who many believed was the one figure who could have kept them united and overcome the disillusionment that soon plagued the citizenry at large.

“One of the things that has persisted out of that whole era is disenchantment with a large number of social and political institutions,” said Kent Jennings, a UC Santa Barbara political scientist who has conducted interviews over the years with more than 1,000 people who were high school seniors in 1965.

For all of that, liberals claim that 1968 produced lasting gains for their side. “The old barriers of legal segregation have gone down,” said Curtis Gans, a leader of the McCarthy campaign who has become one of the country’s top experts on voter turnout. Gans also contends that the peace movement produced a greater “degree of restraint in foreign policy.”

Moreover, as McGovern said, the drama of 1968 brought fresh blood into the political process on the Democratic side. “They were more cautious and more skeptical, but a lot of them stayed around.”

Some, he noted, also moved up, including the Yale Law School student who took a break from classes to run McGovern’s Texas campaign in the 1972 presidential election: Bill Clinton.