1968 (62 page)

When Trudeau died in 2000 at the age of eighty, both former
president Jimmy Carter and Cuban leader Fidel Castro were
honorary pallbearers.

The Beatles also surprised everyone with their lack of
stridency, or lack of commitment, depending on the point of
view. In the fall of 1968 they released their first
self-produced record—a single with
“Revolution” on one side and “Hey,
Jude” on the other. “Revolution” carried the
message “We all want to change the world”—but
we should do it moderately and slowly. The Beatles were
attacked for the stance in many places, including the official
Soviet press, but by the end of 1968 many people agreed. By the
fall, when there is usually a sense of renewal, there was
instead a feeling of weariness.

Not everyone felt it. Student activists returned to school
hoping to resume where they had left off in the spring, while
the schools hoped to go back to the way things were before.
When the Free University of Berlin opened in mid-October, the
women’s dormitories had been occupied by men for most of
the summer. The university gave in and announced that the
dormitories would henceforth be coeducational.

At Columbia, the radical students hoped to continue and
even internationalize the movement. In June the London School
of Economics and the BBC had invited New Left leaders from ten
countries to a debate it called “Students in
Revolt.” Student movements seized on this opportunity.
Opponents such as de Gaulle talked of an international
conspiracy, and the students thought this might be a good idea.
The fact was, they had mostly never met one another, except
those who had gone to Berlin for the spring anti-Vietnam
march.

Columbia SDS had decided to send Lewis Cole, as Rudd said
impatiently, “because he chain-smoked
Gauloises.
” In truth, Cole was the group intellectual most fluent
in Marxist theory. Cole and Rudd were being regularly invited
on the better talk shows such as David Susskind and William
Buckley.

At Columbia, SDS students felt the need for an ideology
that fit their action program. Martin Luther King had had his
moral imperative, but since these students hadn’t come
from religious backgrounds, this approach did not suit most of
them. The communist approach of being part of a great party,
the great movement—was too authoritarian. The Cuban
approach was too militaristic. “There was an idea in SDS
that we have the practice but the Europeans have the
theory,” said Cole. Cohn-Bendit had the same view. He
said, “The Americans have no patience for theory. They
just act. I was very impressed with this American Jerry Rubin,
just do it.” But at Columbia, where the students had been
so successful at getting attention, they were feeling the need
for an underlying theory that could explain why they were doing
the things they did. Cole admitted to a feeling of intimidation
at the prospect of debating with skilled European
theoreticians.

The London meeting was almost stopped by British
immigration, which tried to keep the radicals out. The Tories
did not want to let Cohn-Bendit in, but James Callaghan, the
home secretary, interceded on his behalf, saying that exposure
to British democracy would be good for him. Lewis Cole was
stopped at the airport, and the BBC had to contact the
government to get him in.

Cohn-Bendit immediately clarified to the press that they
were not leaders but rather “megaphones, you know,
loudspeakers of the movement,” which was an accurate
description of himself and many of the others. Cohn-Bendit
engaged in a put-on. De Gaulle had first come to prominence in
June 1940 when he left France, and in exile in Britain he made
a famous broadcast to the French people asking them to keep
resisting the Germans and not to follow the collaborationist
government of Philippe Pétain. Cohn-Bendit now announced
that he was asking for British asylum. “I will ask the
BBC to reorganize the Free French radio as they did during the
war.” He said that he would copy de Gaulle’s exact
message, except that where he had said “Nazis” he
would say “French fascists” and where he had said
“Pétain” he would say “de
Gaulle.”

The debate was dominated by Tariq Ali, the Pakistani-born
British leader who had once been president of the famous
debating society the Oxford Union. Ali said that students
renounced elections as a means for social change.

Afterward they all went to the grave of Karl Marx and had
their picture taken.

Cohn-Bendit returned to Germany vowing that he would
renounce his leadership and disappear into the movement. He
said that he had fallen prey to “the cult of
personalities” and that “power corrupts.” He
told the
Sunday Times
of London, “They don’t need me. Whoever heard of
Cohn-Bendit five months ago? Or even two months
ago?”

Cole found it a confusing experience. He never did
understand what Cohn-Bendit’s ideology was, and he found
Tariq Ali’s debating skills offputting. The people he
connected with most were from the German SDS, and he toured
Germany afterward with “Kaday” Wolf. “In the
end,” he said, “the ones with the greatest
similarities were the Germans. And the Germans had a lot of the
same cultural influences—Marcuse and Marx. And an intense
feeling of youth being incredibly alienated. A young person in
young dress walks down a street in Germany and the older
Germans just glared at him.”

But by fall Cole was back at Columbia with a theory he had
gleaned from the French called “exemplary action.”
The French had done exactly what the Columbia students were
trying to do—analyze what they had done and evolve a
theory from their actions. The theory of “exemplary
action” was that a small group could take an action that
would serve as a model for larger groups. Seizing Nanterre had
been such an action.

Traditional Marxist-Leninism is contemptuous of such
theories, which it labels “infantilism.” In June
Giorgio Amendola, a theoretician and member of the steering
committee of the Italian Communist Party, the largest Communist
Party in the West, attacked the Italian student movement for
“extremist infantilism” and scoffed at the idea
that they were qualified to lead a revolution without having
built their mass base in the traditional Marxist approach. He
termed it “revolutionary dilettantism.” Lewis Cole
said, “Exemplary action gave us our first theory. That
was why we had so many meetings. The question was always, what
do we do now?”

SDS poster announcing a demonstration before election
day, 1968

(Center for the Study of Political Graphics)

With their theory now in place, they were ready to be a
revolutionary center to prepare, as Hayden had said,
“two, three, many Columbias.” The theory also
helped the national office of the rapidly growing SDS become
more of a command center. The first action at Columbia was a
demonstration against the invasion of Prague. But that was
still in August, and few people came. According to Cole,
“It wasn’t very well done. The slogan was
‘Saigon, Prague, the pig is the same all over the
world.’”

Columbia SDS, looking for an event to restart the movement,
came up with the idea of hosting a student international, but
from the outset it was a disaster. Two days before the
conference began, the news broke of the student massacre in
Mexico. Columbia students, feeling guilty because they had not
even known that there was a student movement in Mexico, tried
to organize a demonstration at the conference. But they were
unable to come up with any consensus. The French situationists
spent the second day doing parodies of everyone who spoke. To
some, it was a welcome diversion from too much speaking. Cole
recalled, “We found that there were huge differences
between all of us. All we could agree on was
antiauthoritarianism, and alienation from society, these sorts
of cultural issues.” Increasingly, the other delegations
grew irritated at the French, especially the Americans, who
felt the French were lecturing them on Vietnam and failing to
understand what a burning issue it was in the United
States.

In Mark Rudd’s assessment, “The Europeans were
too pretentious, too intellectual. They only wanted to talk. It
was more talk. People made speeches, but I realized nothing
would happen.”

Rudd had no doubt that he was at a historic moment, that a
revolution was slowly unfolding and his job was to help it
along. A bit of Che—“The first duty of a
revolutionary is to make a revolution”—mixed with
the notion called “bringing the war home” and the
theory of exemplary action, and in June 1969 he came up with
the Weathermen, a violent underground guerrilla group named
after the Bob Dylan lyrics “You don’t need a
weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” In March
1970 they changed their name to the Weather Underground because
they realized that the original name was sexist. In hindsight,
it seems evident that a guerrilla group started by middle-class
men and women who name their group from a Bob Dylan song will
likely be their own worst enemies. Their only victims were
three of their own, who blew themselves up making bombs in a
house in Greenwich Village. But others turned to violence as
well. The government was violent. The police were violent. The
times were violent and revolution was so close. David Gilbert,
who had first knocked on Rudd’s dormitory door to recruit
him for SDS, continued after the mid-1970s when the Weather
Underground dissolved and more than twenty years later was
still in prison for his part in a fatal 1981 shootout. Many
1968 student radicals became 1970s underground guerrilla
fighters in Mexico, Central America, France, Spain, Germany,
and Italy.

Politics sometimes has longer tentacles than imagined.
That fateful first day of spring when Rockefeller collapsed the
earth from under the liberal wing of the Republican Party
unleashed a chain of events that the United States has been
living with ever since. A new kind of Republican was born in
1968. That became clear at the end of June, when President
Johnson appointed Justice Abe Fortas to succeed Earl Warren as
chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Warren had resigned
before the close of the Johnson administration because he
believed Nixon would win and he did not want to see his seat
taken over by a Nixon appointee. Fortas was a predictable
choice, a friend of Johnson, who had appointed him to replace
Arthur Goldberg three years earlier. Fortas had distinguished
himself as a leader of the liberal activist judges who had
characterized the Court since the mid-1950s. Although he was
the fifth Jewish justice on the Court, he would have been the
first Jewish chief justice.

At the time, the Senate rarely battled over Court
appointments. Both Republican and Democratic senators
recognized the right of the president to have his choice. In
fact, there had not been a battle since John J. Parker, Herbert
Hoover’s appointee, was rejected by two votes in
1930.

But when Fortas was named there was an immediate outcry of
“cronyism.” Fortas was a long-standing friend and
adviser to the president, but he was also eminently qualified.
The charge of cronyism was more effective against
Johnson’s other appointment to take Fortas’s seat,
Homer Thornberry. Thornberry was an old friend of Johnson, who
had advised him not to accept the vice presidential nomination
and then changed his mind and was at Johnson’s side when
he was sworn in as president after John Kennedy’s death.
A congressman for fourteen years, he became an undistinguished
circuit court judge. He had been a segregationist until Johnson
came to power and then reversed his stance, coming out on the
desegregation side of several notable cases.

But cronyism was not the main issue; it was the right of
Johnson to appoint Supreme Court justices. Republicans, who had
been in the White House only eight of the past thirty-six
years, felt they had a good chance of taking over in 1968, and
some Republicans wanted their own judges. Robert Griffin,
Republican from Michigan, got nineteen Republican senators to
sign a petition saying that Johnson, with only seven months
left in office, should not get to pick two judges. There was
absolutely nothing in law or tradition to back up this
position. At that point in the twentieth century, Supreme Court
judges had been appointed in election years six times. William
Brennan had been named by Eisenhower one month before the
election. John Adams picked his friend John Marshall, one of
the most respected appointments in history, only weeks before
Jefferson was to take office. Griffin simply wished to deny
Johnson his appointments. “Of course, a lame duck
president has the constitutional power to submit nominations
for the Supreme Court,” argued Griffin, “but the
Senate need not confirm them.” But Griffin and his
coalition of right-wing Republicans and southern Democrats were
not doing this completely on their own. According to John Dean,
who later served as special counsel to President Nixon,
candidate Nixon kept in regular contact with Griffin through
John Ehrlichman, later the president’s chief adviser on
domestic affairs.