Editor remembers turmoil 40 years ago
The country is certainly going through some tough times with gas prices and unemployment escalating rapidly while stock prices and housing prices are tumbling just as swiftly. Throw in the war in Iraq and the threat of terrorism and you have a country in turmoil. Many people are saying that they’ve never seen the nation in such bad shape.
However, those people should take a look back at 1968 if they want to see a time when the country was in dire straits. It was a year like no other, full of things which would really be unimaginable today.
I started thinking back to that fateful year this past week as I read stories about the 40th anniversary of the assassination of U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy in a California hotel. I was 16 at the time and watching the “Dick Cavett’ show when it was interrupted by the news that Kennedy was shot.
I couldn’t believe it. I looked on in horror as did most people across the country. After all only five years earlier his brother, President John F. Kennedy had been gunned down and killed in Texas.
It was all a little too much, especially considering that Robert Kennedy had just won the California primary ensuring he would be the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee. Kennedy had been able to unite the various parts of the Democratic Party and was regarded by many as a certain to win the general election against Republican Richard Nixon.
Now all those hopes were suddenly and sadly dashed. It was doubly troubling considering that just several months earlier that year the legendary civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in Memphis, Tenn. That shooting was accompanied by race riots in many cities throughout the country.
It was inconceivable that two people who meant so much to so many were now dead in such a short period of time. They had given hope to an entire country and now those dreams had been quashed. While many have tried over the years, no one had really been able to fill the shoes they left behind. And 40 years later, we’re still waiting for their equals to emerge.
While those events would have been tragedy enough for any year, they were far from the only problems unfolding that year.
The year began on a sour note that January with the Viet Cong opening its Tet offensive on major cities in Vietnam. For several years, the American people had been told that victory in Vietnam was right around the corner and for the first time doubts began to surface about what we were doing in that country.
Opposition to the war grew, eventually leading to President Lyndon Johnson’s shocking decision not to seek re-election.
While the war in Iraq is a fierce and bloody conflict, it can’t begin to compare to the war in Vietnam. At its peak, there were approximately 500,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam with over 58,000 dying. In Iraq, peak numbers of troops there have totaled about 150,000 with 4,085 dying as of the end of May.
Support both for and against the war in Iraq has been hot and heavy at times, but it all pales in comparison to the battle at home waged by supporters and protestors of the Vietnam War. The country was deeply divided and at war, in a sense, with itself. Some said the country was more divided than at any time since the Civil War.
All the strife and turmoil was on display at the Democratic Party’s convention in Chicago that summer as anti-war protestors trying to disrupt the proceedings were brutally beaten back by the city’s police force. It was an ugly scene that further deepened the split between those for and against the war. It all eventually led to Nixon’s victory in November as he was able to rally the “silent majority’ as he called those who supported the war.
As a teenager, of course, I couldn’t fully appreciate everything happening that year. Having no other frame of reference, I just figured it was normal in a sense. It wasn’t until years later that I reflected on the events of 1968 and realized just what an extraordinary year it was.
There’s certainly no way that anyone born after that year can really appreciate how crazy things really were back then.
But as one who lived through that era, I can say with absolute certainty that things today aren’t as bad as they were back then.
Mark O’Keefe is the executive editor of the Herald-Standard. O’Keefe can be reached by e-mail at mo’keefe@heraldstandard.com, by phone at 724-439-7569 or by regular mail at 8-18 Church St., Uniontown, Pa., 15401. O’Keefe also has a blog on the newspaper’s Web site, heraldstandard.com.