The most traumatic year in modern American history was 1968. But what is now the second-most traumatic year, 2020, still has seven months to run. The comparison provides little comfort, and several reasons for concern.
How could any year be worse than the current one, in which more Americans are out of work than in the Great Depression, and more people are needlessly dying than in several of America’s wars combined?
But here is what anyone around at that time will remember about 1968: The assassinations. The foreign warfare. The domestic carnage and bloodshed. The political chaos and division. The way that parts of the United States have seemed in the past week, in reaction to injustices, is the way much of the U.S. seemed day after day. I think I can remember every week of that eventful year.
The assassinations: I fear even to mention this, but America is fortunate that high-profile political murders have not been turning points in its recent political history, as they were through too much of the past century.
In April of 1968, one of the greatest leaders of America’s greatest moral struggle, Martin Luther King Jr., was shot dead in Memphis—at age 39. He was a more controversial figure at the time than is convenient to remember: Controversial among many white people as an “uppity” black man. (I remember, from very conservative elders in my conservative hometown, sarcastic references to “Dr. Martin Luther Nobel” after his winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964.) Controversial even among Democrats in the year before his death, as he expanded what had been a racial-justice movement into a larger campaign against the war in Vietnam and for economic justice at home. His killing was a central event in American history—but only one of many traumas of that tumultuous year.
Two months later, Robert F. Kennedy was shot dead in Los Angeles, after winning the Democratic primary in California and becoming the leader in the race for the nomination and perhaps the presidency. No one can know how the “what if” scenarios would have played out. But perhaps if he had not been shot, there would have been no Nixon presidency, and no further five-plus years of warfare in Vietnam, and no four Nixon appointees to the Supreme Court and … We will not know. This was less than five years after American history was transformed by Lee Harvey Oswald, as it had been, a century before, by John Wilkes Booth. Politically motivated shootings were so numerous in those days—Malcolm X was killed in 1965, the American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, in 1967; later George Wallace was shot and paralyzed, in 1972—that whenever you heard “Breaking news” about a politician on a newscast, you felt a split-second dread of what that news might be.
So much time has passed that it is almost impossible now to convey how different it was, then, to have a military draft. Suppose you don’t like the president of the moment, or America’s war of the moment. Or suppose you were against the idea of armed conflict in general. Until the shift to the “volunteer army” in the early 1970s, which has had its own paradoxical set of consequences (as I have argued previously), you still would have faced the possibility of being drafted and having to fight, and potentially having to kill or be killed, in those wars.
It was different from now, and worse.
The domestic carnage: Donald Trump spoke, in his unspeakable inaugural address, about “American carnage.” Thus he prophetically began his time in office by profaning the setting from which all his predecessors had invoked American potential and American hope. Under his auspices we have seen a new kind of carnage recently.
In 1968, many American cities were literally in flames, and on a much broader scale than what we have seen in this past week. In early February of that year, three black Americans were killed and two dozen more were wounded, by highway patrolmen and police in the “Orangeburg Massacre” in South Carolina, after a desegregation protest. After the murder of Martin Luther King, protests and then violent uprisings broke out coast to coast, in more than 100 U.S. cities. (On the day King was killed my father happened to be visiting me, on a business trip to Boston from California, during my spring break in college. We went into a restaurant for dinner, not knowing what had happened. When we came out, the city had erupted.) Some of the now-most-stylish neighborhoods of Washington, D.C., were occupied by armed troops of the National Guard. I spent June through September of 1968 in Alabama and Mississippi, working for a civil-rights newspaper called The Southern Courier. In the evenings I would listen to radio shows or watch TV about disruptions in the rest of the country—including the “police riot” in Chicago at the time of the Democratic convention that summer. It went on.
I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office—the presidency of your country.
Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.
To try to approximate the surprise: Imagine turning on a standard Trump rant-speech these days, and hearing something similar at the end. Imagine, also, a leader like Johnson who had spent his entire life thinking about wielding power—and who decided, in the nation’s interest, to give it up.
Then on through the campaign, and the assassinations—both King’s and Kennedy’s came after LBJ’s announcement—and the nomination of Hubert Humphrey, and the return and rise of Richard Nixon, and a hundred other convolutions and tragedies along the way. Through that fall, the most-intrusive-ever case of foreign interference in a U.S. election occurred, although it was covered up at the time. (In brief: Richard Nixon’s campaign had back-channel connections with the South Vietnamese government, and urged it to go slow in negotiations to end the war, in hopes of better terms if it helped Nixon win.)
On Election Day, Nixon carried 32 states and 301 electoral votes, beginning a long stretch of Republican dominance of the White House (and thus the Supreme Court). The GOP won five of the six presidential races in that period—two by Nixon, two by Ronald Reagan, and one by the first George Bush, losing only to Jimmy Carter in 1976. In that 1968 race, Humphrey carried just 13 states, with 191 electoral votes. The segregationist former Democrat George Wallace, who had been governor of Alabama, took 46 electoral votes from five states in the Deep South: Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia.
In some ways, the comparison between 1968 and 2020 might make Americans today feel better, or at least consoled on the basis that things have been terrible before.
But here are two implications that cut the other way.
First, everyone contending for power in American politics in those days was competent. They all had experienced governing. And most of them—even, arguably, George Wallace, running as a proto-Trump under the banner of the American Independent Party—recognized that a leader’s duty was supposed to include representing the American public as a whole.
Each of them had, as all powerful figures do, his vanities and excesses and blind spots, plus points of corruption. Wallace, in his flagrant and pugnacious way, and Nixon, with his smarm, preyed upon American prejudices and resentments. But all of them recognized what they were expected to say. For Johnson, this was obvious, as with his “We shall overcome!” speech. For Humphrey, whose breakthrough in politics was as a young, firebrand pro-civil-rights mayor of, yes, Minneapolis in the 1940s, the pain of being lumbered with defense of the Vietnam War was visible every day.
Nixon’s breakthrough had been as a GOP dirty-tricks hit man, and he remained a master of the destructive, divisive dog whistle. But—and this is the contrast with today—he had a broader range in his register. If you read his 1968 acceptance speech at the Republican convention, and contrast it with Donald Trump’s “I alone can fix it” monstrosity from the 2016 convention in Cleveland, you will see the difference. Trump knows only how to talk about himself, and his critics. Nixon knew how to at least feign a bring us together message, as a patina on top of relentless us versus them coding. For instance: After the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it was Trump himself who tweeted about “thugs” and “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Nixon would not say things so crude himself. (Seriously, that convention speech is worth reading closely, 52 years later. I won’t go into it now, but this was a person who knew what he was saying, and doing.)
The second fact worth reflecting on is a similarity between 1968 and the present. Nixon knew that the specter of disorder—especially disorderly conduct by black Americans, face-to-face with police—was one of his strongest weapons. He said as much in his convention speech:
As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame.
We hear sirens in the night …
We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.
And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish.
Did we come all this way for this?
Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this?
When people feel afraid, they want someone who claims to be strong. Law-and-order candidates rise when confidence in regular order ebbs. Richard Nixon had much more going for him in 1968 than Donald Trump does in 2020—most of all that Nixon, as an outsider, could campaign on everything that was wrong with the country, while Trump, as the incumbent, must defend his management and record, which includes record unemployment. But protests and fear of disorder—especially fear of angry black people in disorder—drew people to Nixon as the law-and-order candidate in 1968, and he clearly knew that.
Donald Trump could not put that point as carefully as Nixon, but he must also sense that backlash against disorder, from people he has classified as the other and the enemy, is his main—indeed, his only—electoral hope. Trump promised in that inaugural address that “American carnage stops right here, right now.” Now, crassly, he seems to be trying to make it worse.
