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( An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) ( See the posts in chronological order ) A few days after the election, as the reality of Nixon's election sunk in, Washington Post cartoonist Herb Block ran his 'free shave' cartoon: it depicted his studio, with a barber pole outside a window, and a sign on the wall: " This shop gives to every new president of the United States a free shave. H. Block, proprietor. " A shaving mug and brush stood on the desk next to post of pens and bottles of ink. (For those who don't remember, Herblock's depictions of Nixon had long featured a thuggish dark-bearded character. During the campaign, Post editor Russ Wiggins had sent Block a razor with a poem asking 'Give that man a shave'. Block's response: " He's shaved with new Gillettes 'n' Shicks 'n' Still he is the same old Nix'n. ") One happy result of the election: Shirley Chisholm of New York was elected to Congress, th...

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) (See the posts in chronological order ) November 5. The election was upon us, a scary time. The choice, between LBJ's vice president Hubert Humphrey, a likable former mayor, congressman and senator from Minnesota who had for years been a reliable liberal campaigner, and Nixon. In 1948 HHH had been one of the first who stood up to the southern Democrats and demanded a civil rights plank. He introduced the bill that created the Peace Corps. He had tried for the presidential nomination in 1960 and gave up his senate post and majority whip position to become LBJ's VP in '64. Despite all his good points, many Democrats and other voters, especially the young, deplored his complete loyalty to LBJ and support of Johnson's war effort and were upset he was the nominee instead of the dead Bobby Kennedy or Eugene McCarthy. A Tom Lehrer song " Whatever Became of Hubert? " went " I wonder how many people here tonight...

( An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) (See the posts in chronological order ) On Oct 2, US Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas withdrew his nomination as chief justice; his nomination had been held up for months by a Senate filibuster. (Six months later, he would resign from the court, admitting he'd made a financial deal with the Louis Wolfson Foundation.) On October 2, the disturbances in Mexico leading up to the Olympics reached a head as a student procession in La Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco, Mexico City, led to a bloodbath. Supporters claimed soldiers with automatic weapons killed 300 or so students. The government claimed that only 50 students died in the five hours of gunfire. It became known as the Tlatelolco massacre. Ten days later, the 1968 Summer Olympics opened in Mexico City. The high altitude of the venue caused problems for many athletes, but created opportunities to set records for others. American Bob Beamon jumped nearly 9 meters in t...

Not much to report here, except that I have added some new news researcher blog links to the NewsliBlog 's sidebar. And, for those of you reading the 1968 recaps and wanting a chronological version, I've taken all the blog postings so far and put them on the website: 40 Years Ago: 1968 . I'll copy the upcoming posts there, too, as they're published to the blog. There's a lot more to remember about 1968.

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) This month, Yale junior Garry Trudeau began to draw a comics series about the football team, called 'bull tales'; they would run in the Yale Daily News , starring BD and Mike Doonesbury. On the cover of GQ , September 1968: Omar Sharif, wearing a plaid wool jacket. On September 7 at the Miss America pageant, Atlantic City: Despite the legend, no bra burning took place. several dozen women's liberation protesters from New York City joined with women from around the country to stage a show on the boardwalk. From Jo Freeman , who was there: Women’s liberation took advantage of this to stage several guerilla theater actions. A live sheep was crowned Miss America. Objects of female oppression – high heeled shoes, girdles, bras, curlers, tweezers – were tossed into a Freedom Trash Can. A proposal to burn the can’s contents was scuttled when the police said that a fire would pose a risk to the wooden boardwalk. Women sang song...

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) The Whole World is Watching The Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago on August 26. For months, anti-war groups had petitioned the city to get space to carry out demonstrations while the convention was ongoing. The Youth International Party (YIPees) had decided to hold their own national convention, a five-day "Festival of Life" the same week as the democrats, nominating a pig as their presidential candidate. Mayor Daley had responded by denying permits, calling out the national guard and barricading the convention sites. The city was crippled by taxi and bus strikes. The weather was hot and humid and air conditioning was erratic. The television networks and party insiders had encouraged the Democrats to move their convention to another city, maybe Miami Beach (which President Johnson had rejected, saying 'Miami Beach is not an American city'). Yippee flyers posted around Chicago in the weekend leading up ...

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower remained in Walter Reed Army hospital, after being moved there in May to recover from a spring heart attack. He had another in June and two more on the 6th and 16th of August. Doctors were trying several new therapies to try to relieve the situation, but nothing was working. One day that month, on a day off, I accompanied a Post reporter to the hospital to sit on watch. The situation was dire enough that Post reporters were staying round the clock there, just in case. The reporter who asked me to go with him was bored with the assignment and at least with me there we could play cards, probably whist, which I'd learned seemed to be the most popular card game among Washingtonians. I remember little of the hospital except that we sat along a gallery overlooking a large room. Eisenhower would survive August, but die, still in Walter Reed, the next spring. That month, ‘ Cheap Thrills ,’ by Big B...

( An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) On August 5, the Republican National Convention opened its sessions at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Norman Mailer on attending that event in Miami Beach in August: The vegetal memories of that excised jungle haunted Miami Beach in a steam-pot of miasmas. Ghosts of expunged flora, the never-born groaning in vegetative chancery beneath the asphalt came up with a tropical curse, an equatorial leaden wet sweat of air which rose from the earth itself, rose right up through the baked asphalt and into the heated air which entered the lungs like a hand slipping into a rubber glove....Of course it could have been the air conditioning: natural climate transmogrified by technological climate. They say that in Miami Beach the air conditioning is pushed to that icy point where women may wear fur coats over their diamonds in the tropics. (It's no wonder for years after 1968 I considered Miami a place I would never go.) Nixon entered th...

( An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) Somehow July slipped by me, so, a bit late, here's what we were doing that month in 1968: On July 1, President Johnson signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, an agreement with 58 other countries in efforts to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons. Also that day, customs stops ended between European Common Market countries. (But the UK's admission was still being thwarted by deGaulle). Early in the month, Intel Corp. was founded. Gen. Creighton Abrams took over command in Vietnam. Congress passed a 10 percent federal income tax surcharge to help finance the cost of the war. Early in the month, North Vietnam released 3 American pilots shot down over Hanoi. Later, President Johnson met with Vietnamese president Thieu in Hawaii. In France, a new government was formed July 13. Two days later, France detonated a nuclear bomb in the Pacific. Later in July, a fight between two Mexico city schools led to a police/miliitary att...

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) Since Dr. Martin Luther King's murder in April, investigators had been following a trail of a man who seemed to have been following King, and went by the name of Eric Stavro Galt. Although information linked him to King's murder in Memphis, it was three months before he was finally caught. Police in London arrested him June 8 at Heathrow Airport, where he was trying to leave the UK with a Canadian passport under the name of Ramon George Sneyd. James Earl Ray was extradited to Tennessee and charged with King's assassination. He would confess in 1969 and be sentenced to 99 years in prison. He later recanted the confession and was supported in his effort for a retrial by King's family. 40 years later questions about James Earl Ray linger , Atlanta Journal Constitution. On June 10, Gen. Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland as military commander in Vietnam. At Walter Reed Army Hospital, former president Dwight...

I'm increasingly intrigued by the parallels between 1968 and today as commentators write about Barack Obama and Bobby Kennedy in the same breath. Something is going on here: Tom Hayden, an icon of 1968, writes in Huffington Post (as do most of the following): Bobby and Barack . There are vast differences between Bobby Kennedy and Barack Obama, owing to circumstance, though both have followed hero's journeys of the classic sort. Kennedy was shaped by his brother's murder and the climate of his times, which drove all but the most robotic towards alienation. Barack is a product of globalization, immigration, even slavery, but nonetheless a privileged inheritor of the movements for which Bobby Kennedy stood. ...My hopes for Robert Kennedy might have been dashed by his subsequent policies if he had lived to be president, but I don't think so. The best evidence is the progressive course consistently pursued by those closest to him, Ethel and Ted Kennedy, to this day. It is ha...

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) On Tuesday, June 4, California held its primary. Winning this primary was essential to Bobby Kennedy's successful nomination, to reverse the damage of his recent loss in Oregon, and he'd held rallies the day before in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Long Beach, Watts and San Diego, a grueling day. On primary day he, Ethel and six of their kids rested in a borrowed Malibu house and arrived in the evening at his LA headquarters at the Ambassador Hotel. At 10 pm. California time, he was confident of victory and gave interviews to NBC's Sander Vanocur and CBS' Roger Mudd. Just before midnight he gave a victory speech in the ballroom to his California supporters. The speech ended with "...and on to Chicago". On the way to another reception he took a detour through the hotel's kitchen pantry. It was there that Sirhan Sirhan was waiting with his gun, and there that Bobby Kennedy's campaign ended. Five other peop...

Part of the reason I've been remembering and researching the events of 1968 is because I just have a feeling about this year's race that brings up the uncomfortable events of that year. Fred Grimm, who I linked earlier today, makes the 1968 connection in his column today, Dems' future gets dimmer and dimmer : ...political rage makes up most of what I remember about the 1968 Democratic primary. I eventually voted, without enthusiasm, for Hubert Humphrey in the general election, but many of my friends, who had been so enthused about Eugene McCarthy or Robert Kennedy, couldn't bring themselves to vote for ``The Hump.'' Richard Cohen, who I first met in that year, may be having these feelings, it seems, and says this race disgusts him: A Campaign to Hate . I see little to be happy about, little that pleases my jaundiced eye. Yes, voter participation is way up and in the end, the Democrats will choose a woman or an African American and, to invoke that tiresome phras...

( An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) At the beginning of June, it was starting to feel as though the world was falling apart. France was still in an uproar, with strikes, protests, riots, and de Gaulle had just disbanded Parliament and announced a new election. Students were shutting down universities in Spain, England and Germany. Reaction to student protests in Poland had worsened anti-Semitism there and Jews were being asked to leave. There was civil war in Nigeria, where the Ibo nation of Biafra had declared its independence the previous year. A new Nigeria offensive this month led to a blockade and mass starvation. In Washington, things were a mess at Resurrection City, with rains creating a mudfield; the papers were reporting that young bored residents, some of them urban gang members, were bringing in booze and partying all night. Park Police weren't allowed inside the perimeter and fears of crime and violence were increasing. On June 3, Andy Warhol was shot ...

( An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) On May 14, The SCLC's Poor People's Campaign began its Washington marches for equal justice and economic aid to the poorest in America. Resurrection City was coming to be. On 15 acres of West Potomac Park, the grounds around the Lincoln Memorial, marchers had arrived by convoy, sometimes in wagons drawn by mules, wearing denim overalls and country clothing, and they were building a shantytown near where the Vietnam memorial would rise years later. Rows of shacks made of plywood and plastic created a 'main street'. About 2600 or so residents, from cities and small towns in the South and in the North, would live here in squalor as the May rain turned the grounds to mud. I know we went to see, as did many other Washingtonians and tourists. You couldn't get in without proper credentials, but could view from the snow fence around the outer limits. I wish I had taken pictures, but it was probably hard to get anything w...

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) In May, the turmoil continued: On May 2, in France, the university at Nanterre was shut down by its administration after several weeks of student protests. The next day, students at the Sorbonne held a protest of the events in Nanterre, and police responded by surrounding the campus and shutting it down. The National Union of French Students and the Lecturers' Union called a strike, and on May 6 they marched to the Sorbonne. Police charged the crowd and the students created barricades. Rioting and conflicts with police would continue, including an all-night riot on the rive gauche on May 10. The Communist Party responded by calling for a national one-day strike on May 13. That day, a million people marched in Paris. Workers continued the protests, shutting down factories, around the country. The situation would continue through the month. On May 7, the Indiana primary gave Robert F. Kennedy his first big win, with 42 percent of t...

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) On April 11 Defense Secretary Clark Clifford announced Gen. Westmoreland's request for 206,000 additional soldiers would not be granted. He set a ceiling of 549,500 troops in Vietnam, and a plan for Vietnamese military to take over responsibility for the war effort. Also that day, president Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which added fair housing provisions to the previous civil rights legislation of 1964: it prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion or national origin. In Germany, student leader Rudi Dutschke was shot in an attempted assassination. Riots broke out on the news. The Prague Spring was under way, since Alexander Dubcek had become first secretary of the Central Committee of Czechoslovakia in January. Novotny resigned as president the end of March and in April, Dubcek's reforms were launched. On April 20, Pierre Trudeau became prime minister of Canada, replacing Lester Pearson. On...

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) Saturday was supposed to be the big day of the Cherry Blossom Festival in Washington, but that had been canceled by now. Tourists were getting a peek at the riot areas, which were cordoned off by troops and police but could be seen on side streets in places. The worst parts, which we saw on TV and in the papers, looked like a scene from WWII, burned buildings everywhere. And fires were still breaking out, there was still sporadic looting, and some sniper incidents. The curfew started at 4 p.m. that day so downtown Washington was deserted by early evening. That night police arrested 600 for curfew violations, all over the city. There were 13,600 troops by Sunday -- Palm Sunday. Either Saturday or Sunday, we went out to see what was happening. We may have gone to the Tidal Basin to see the blossoms. But I took some pictures in the areas on the edges of the riot zone, probably mostly near our Mount Pleasant neighborhood but also in Meri...