1968 (67 page)

I wanted to create a democracy, but the proof that I had not thought it through is that I thought capitalism could reform itself and everything such as self-government by workers could be accomplished later on. But then it appeared to be too late. This is proof of my own blindness. . . .

The problem of Communism is that centralization is the central dictatorship and there is no way to change it. Capitalism is the dictatorship of the rich. I don’t know what to do. Central control can’t stop it. The one thing I regret is participating in the first government [postcommunist]. My participation helped people accept capitalism.

I thought capitalism was self-reforming. It’s not. It’s like Russia—controlled by only a small group because capitalism needs capital. Here now [in Poland] half the population is on the edge of hunger and the other half feels successful.

Interviewed at the end of the year, Samuel Eliot Morison, at eighty-one one of the most respected American historians, said, “We have passed through abnormal periods before this, periods of disorder and violence that seemed horrendous and insoluble at the time. Yet we survived as a nation. The genius of our democracy is its room for compromise, our ability to balance liberty with authority. And I am convinced that we will strike a new balance this time, and achieve in the process a new awareness of human relationships among our people.”

As Jacek Kuroń discovered in Poland, the changes in the world have been very far from what the people who were out to change the world had wanted. But that is not to say that 1968 did not change the world. Antiwar activists did not end American hegemonic warfare but only changed the way it was pursued and how it was sold to the public. In opposing the draft, the antiwar activists showed the generals what they had to do to continue waging war.

In history it is always imprecise to attribute fundamental shifts to one exact moment. There was 1967 and 1969 and all the earlier years that made 1968 what it was. But 1968 was the epicenter of a shift, of a fundamental change, the birth of our postmodern media-driven world. That is why the popular music of the time, the dominant expression of popular culture in the period, has remained relevant to successive generations of youth.

“Back to normal.” 1968 Paris student silk-screen poster.

(Galerie Beaubourg, Vence)

It was the beginning of the end of the cold war and the dawn of a new geopolitical order. Within that order, the nature of politics and of leaders changed. The Trudeau approach to leadership, where a figure is known by style rather than substance, has become entrenched. Marshall McLuhan, that great prophet of the 1960s, predicted, “The politician will be only too happy to abdicate in favor of his image, because the image will be so much more powerful than he could ever be.” The political leaders of the 1968 generation who have come to power, such as Bill Clinton in the United States or Tony Blair in the United Kingdom, have shown an intuitive fluency with this concept of leadership.

In 1968 it was often said hopefully by “the establishment” that all of these radical youth were acting the way they were because they were young. When they got older, surely they would “calm down” and busy themselves earning money. The strength of capitalism, like the Mexican PRI, is its limitless belief in its own ability to buy people off. But, in fact, they have remained an activist generation. Pollsters in the United States find that it is the young voters, especially the eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds who were enfranchised because of the activism of 1968, who are least likely to participate.

In October 1968 when Hayden testified before the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, Judge A. Leon Higginbotham asked him if he believed giving the vote to eighteen-year-olds would decrease the frustration of youth. Hayden warned that if they were not given anyone to vote for it would just increase their frustration. Most of the leaders of 1968 either remained politically active like Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Tom Hayden or became journalists or teachers. Those are the more apparent ways to try to change the world. Adam Michnik, who became the editor of the largest-circulation newspaper in central Europe—a fate he never imagined befalling him—is often visited by what is known in France as “sixty-eighters.” “I can recognize a sixty-eighter in a second,” he said. “It is not the politics. It is a way of thinking. I met Bill Clinton and I could see he was one.”

Of course, one of the great lessons of 1968 was that when people try to change the world, other people who feel a vested interest in keeping the world the way it is will stop at nothing to silence them. In 1970 four antiwar demonstrators at Kent State University were shot and killed.

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. And political leaders, particularly those media-genius products of the 1960s, are very aware that popular movements are ignored at their peril. People under twenty-five do not have much influence in the world. But it is amazing what they can do if they are ready to march. Remember 1968? In the mid-1990s, when students began protesting in Paris, the Mitterrand government paid attention in a way the de Gaulle government didn’t until whole universities were shut down. Mitterrand remembered 1968, and so did everyone in his government. On November 29–December 3, 1999, when a World Trade Organization conference in Seattle was confronted by huge, angry “antiglobalization” demonstrations, it made such an impression on then president Clinton, a zealous promoter of world trade, that he has regularly discussed the movement ever since.

The year 1968 was a terrible year and yet one for which many people feel nostalgia. Despite the thousands dead in Vietnam, the million starved in Biafra, the crushing of idealism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, the massacre in Mexico, the clubbings and brutalization of dissenters all over the world, the murder of the two Americans who most offered the world hope, to many it was a year of great possibilities and is missed. As Camus wrote in
The Rebel,
those who long for peaceful times are longing for “not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.” The thrilling thing about the year 1968 was that it was a time when significant segments of population all over the globe refused to be silent about the many things that were wrong with the world. They could not be silenced. There were too many of them, and if they were given no other opportunity, they would stand in the street and shout about them. And this gave the world a sense of hope that it has rarely had, a sense that where there is wrong, there are always people who will expose it and try to change it.

But by the end of the year 1968, many people felt weary, angry, and longing for a news story that was not abysmally negative. At the very end of the year, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, provided that story. Only seven years earlier, when America seemed much younger; when political assassinations seemed to be something that happened in other, poorer, less stable countries; when the generation that was to fight, die, and protest over Vietnam were still schoolchildren—President Kennedy had promised that man would reach the moon by the end of the decade. On May 25, 1961, he had said:

I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. In a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon—it will be an entire nation.

The new sixties generation thrilled to the early space shots, which were covered by radio and broadcast in the school classrooms. There was a sense of living in a new age of exploration, comparable to that of the fifteenth century. But somehow space exploration seemed to fade away, or at least everyone’s focus had shifted. Young men weren’t going to the moon, they were going to Vietnam. Occasional articles said the NASA budget had to be cut to divert money to the Vietnam War. Kennedy’s prediction that getting to the moon would be expensive was accurate; from the creation of NASA on October 1, 1958, to its tenth anniversary on October 1, 1968, it spent $44 billion on space missions.

Then, in late September, people were allowed to slip back to that more innocent time. As though there had been no Soviet invasion, the space race to the moon was back on. The Soviets had sent
Zond 5
around the moon, and it seemed they would soon send a cosmonaut there. In October the Americans sent three men on the
Apollo 7
mission, in which they orbited the earth for eleven days in a spacecraft designed to eventually go to the moon. The craft had first been tested in January in an unmanned mission. The
Apollo 7
mission went so well, “a perfect mission,” according to NASA, that NASA decided to jump ahead.
Apollo 8,
which had been scheduled to repeat
Apollo 7
’s flight, would instead blast out of the earth’s orbit and go to the moon. Then, at the end of October the Soviets sent a man in
Soyuz 3,
the closest anyone had ever gotten to the moon.

Less romantic, but of more immediate impact, on December 18, exactly ten years after the first satellite transmission with Eisenhower’s Christmas greeting, Intelsat 3—the first of a new series of communications satellites that would extend live television transmission to the entire world—was launched. The new satellite more than doubled the capacity for television and telephone transmissions through space. The new age of television was now in place.

In time for Christmas,
Apollo 8
was scheduled for December 21. Many predicted that the Soviets would beat the three astronauts to the moon. Sir Bernard Lovell, a leading astronomer and head of the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Britain, said that the mission would not gain scientific information worth enough to justify the risk. NASA was candid that this was a more dangerous mission than usual. The craft was going to orbit the moon, which had not been done before by a manned spacecraft, and if after orbiting the spacecraft engine failed to start, the craft would be stuck in a permanent orbit, like an artificial moon of the moon. NASA also confirmed that the mission was not scientific. Its purpose was to develop and practice the necessary techniques for landing on the moon.

Apollo 8
lifted off on schedule and halfway to the moon broadcast a television program from inside the craft with a clarity that was rare in television. Millions were dazzled. As the craft approached the moon, it turned around and from space sent back to earth the first astonishing photos of our little blue-and-white planet. The pictures ran in black-and-white on the front page of newspapers around the world. The television broadcast and photographs from
Apollo 8
gave a sense in this first global year that this, too, like so many other milestones that year, was an event the whole world was watching. On Christmas Day the three astronauts flew around the moon only seventy miles above its surface, which they found to be gray, desolate, and lumpy. Then they fired their rockets and headed back to this planet of blue seas, rich vegetation, and endless strife.

Just before 1968 was over, there was a moment of tremendous excitement about the future. It was an instant when racism, poverty, the wars in Vietnam, the Middle East, and Biafra—all of it was shoved aside and the public felt what astronaut Michael Collins felt the following summer when he orbited the moon while his teammates landed:

I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let’s say, 100,000 miles, their outlook could be fundamentally changed. That all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced. The tiny globe would continue to turn, serenely ignoring its subdivisions, presenting a unified facade that would cry out for unified understanding, for homogeneous treatment. The earth must become as it appears: blue and white, not capitalist or Communist; blue and white, not rich or poor; blue and white, not envious or envied.

And so the year ended like Dante’s traveler who at last climbed back from hell and gazed on the stars.

    To get back up to the shining world from there

    My guide and I went into that hidden tunnel:

And following its path, we took no care

    To rest, but climbed: he first, then I—so far,

    Through a round aperture I saw appear

Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,

Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.

—D
ANTE,
The Inferno