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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...

(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...

From Howard Owens: Spare me the fancy redesigns and give me some text to read . Among the gems: Spare me the big graphics and four-column photos and color splashes. Stop trying to turn your print front page into a web page. ...If they want timeliness, they’ll go online. ...News isn’t about a demographic (as in, “How do we target women, age 24 to 35, with one child and two cats?”) ...The print product should provide context and a moment’s respite. The online product should say, “this is what is happening now.” ...Try digging into your archives and looking at your newspaper from 1971. Make your 2008 paper look like that. You know, this sounds nearly right to me. I want the background and the ads (and comics, and recipes) from the paper that I get delivered by mail late in the day, and don't expect it to give me breaking news. But I also don't want briefs about national/international stories I already know about. I need the local news, the analysis, the interesting stories about p...

( 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 ) 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...

In the Miami Herald, a collaboration between long-time Herald Caribbean correspondent Don Bohning (author of The Castro Obsession: U.S. Covert Operations Against Cuba 1959-1965 ) and Jack Hawkins, paramilitary chief of the Bay of Pigs operation: Kennedy, Bush made similar mistakes in Cuba, Iraq . From Hawkins: Key high-level civilian officials of both the Kennedy and Bush administrations had similar characteristics which caused them to make serious mistakes in the management of the Cuba operation in 1961 and the ongoing Iraq War: They had little or no military experience but were inclined to make important decisions about military operational matters against the advice of experienced military officers. In both administrations, the Secretary of Defense tended to suppress the free expression of opinions by members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to isolate them from the President, who needed to know their opinions first-hand and unfiltered.

Lots of interesting postings on Hullaballoo recently, including this one on how John McCain's 'Biography' tour seems to be an appeal to show he's a descendant of America's Cavalier tribe: Courting the Cavaliers . Digby cites Ed Kilgore , but finds a further explanation in a 2001 essay by Michael Lind, America's Tribes . Interesting thoughts. Several years ago I read a book on this topic, too, probably Kevin Phillips' The Cousins' Wars : The story being that the old wars between the Puritans and Cavaliers in England led to the divisions in American society, the Revolution and Civil War. Lind calls them the Cavaliers and the Yankees. Seems calling the Yankees 'Puritans' makes more sense. At any rate, Republicans are now the Cavaliers (or the South) and Democrats are now the Yankees (North, of course), the reverse of the party lineup as it was just a couple generations ago. It's a stretch but it seems it may help us to understand each other. ...

(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...

(An occasional reminiscence on the events of 1968 ) Monday, April 1, started out as a normal work week. It may have been my first day in the Washington Post's library, although I might have started the week before. Whichever, I was in a strange new job working with people I was just getting to know, in a city I didn't yet know well. This week would be a defining time. In Vietnam, troops in Operation Pegasus began the fight to open the road to Khe Sanh. On Tuesday, April 2, the film 2001 Space Odyssey , based on writings by Arthur C. Clark (who died last week) had its world premiere at the Uptown Theater in Washington. General release --with 19 minutes deleted -- would be April 6. That day, Sen. McCarthy got 56 percent of the vote in the Wisconsin primary. On Wednesday, Martin Luther King returned to Memphis and that evening gave his 'I have been to the mountaintop' speech . Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world....the world is all messe...