PSYCHOSCAPES: 1968: What a Year It was!

A Photo I took in 1966 outside Nhr Trang

As the Democratic Convention unfurled this week in Chicago, everyone is comparing it to the 1968 convention in that same city. But for those who lived through it, the convention was but one example of how crazy 1968 was: It wasn’t just Chicago: the whole year was a house on fire, exploding with unprecedented chaos.

Here’s how I remember it.

I was a returning Vietnam vet, getting out of the service on February 3, 1968, the bloodiest year of that seemingly endless war. Four days earlier, the North Vietnamese had launched the infamous Tet Offensive in Nha Trang, a place in Vietnam I knew well.

Tet, as it turned out, was the beginning of the end of that meat-grinder of a conflict, sacrificing the lives of 58,000 young Americans, while Vietnam, counting civilians, lost a staggering three million^⁠1. Tet was a turning point, prompting CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, “the most trusted man in America,”^⁠2 to finally confirm that Vietnam was an unwinnable debacle.

As if to buttress that claim, the photograph that won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize, graphically depicted a South Vietnamese General executing a Viet Cong prisoner. A quote by an Army major during Tet aptly summarized the damage we were doing to that small, third-world nation: Referring to a town he and his troops were trying to retake: “We had to destroy it to save it.”^⁠3

Then, the My Lai massacre happened on March 16. US ground troops from Charlie Company rampaged through the hamlet of My Lai

killing more than 500 Vietnamese civilians, from infants to the elderly.

The Vietnam War caused a degree of polarization drawfing anything we are seeing today, including upending the presidential election. A virtual unknown, Eugene McCarthy, came within 230 votes of defeating Lyndon Johnson in NH.

I happened to be watching Johnson give his address on March 31 when he unexpectedly – and shockingly – announced his decision not to seek reelection because of poor polling numbers.

That starkly contrasts with President Biden, who had to be forced by his fellow Democrats to stand down. I’ve always had a soft spot for Johnson. He thought getting involved in a land war in Asia was folly but was talked into it to avoid being accused of being soft on communism.

There is this touching story, probably apocryphal, that he went down to the operations room in the White House at 4 AM each day to see how many of ‘my boys’ had been killed that day. The weight of Vietnam weighed him down, resulting in his premature death, a broken man.

On April 4^th, Martin Luther King was gunned down in Memphis by James Earl Ray, sparking riots in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Newark, Washington, D.C., and many others. Early in the morning of June, on the night of the California Primary, RFK was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, apparently angered at several pro-Isreali speeches Kennedy had made during the campaign.

On August 26, Mayor Richard Daley opened the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Demonstrations were initially peaceful but became increasingly violent over the next two days. By most accounts, on Wednesday evening, Chicago police took action against crowds of demonstrators without provocation. The police beat some marchers unconscious and sent at least 100 to emergency rooms while arresting 175.

On October 3, George Wallace, a staunch segregationist, running an independent campaign for president, named retired Air Force Chief of Staff Curtis E. LeMay as his running mate.

When the general was asked about his position on the use of nuclear weapons, he responded: "I think most military men think it's just another weapon in the arsenal... I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons.” When Trump was president, like LeMay, he failed to understand why we couldn’t use our atomic weapons.

The Democratic convention will be over by the time you read this. While there are parallels with the 1968 convention, this one should be peaceful and healing for the party and the country.

The biggest danger is how to handle Gaza. If President Biden fails to rein in Netanyahu and demand a ceasefire, he may ignite a regional war in the Middle East, which would be disastrous for Israelis, Palestinians, and the Democrat’s chances of winning in November.

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