A friend posted this. (He didn't write it either.) It's worth reading:
This is not my work. I am not attributing it because knowing who the
author is might swap some. This gives a picture of the country 50 years
ago. Read it and reflect that we healed.
1968 began with one of
the greatest humiliations in the history of the American Navy. The U.S.
spy ship Pueblo was hijacked in international waters and its crew
interned by North Korea.
A week later came the Tet Offensive,
where every provincial capital in South Vietnam was attacked. A thousand
U.S. troops died in February, 10,000 more through 1968.
On March 14, anti-war Sen. Gene McCarthy captured 42 percent of the vote in New Hampshire against President Johnson.
With LBJ wounded, Robert Kennedy leaped into the race, accusing the
president who had enacted civil rights of “dividing the country” and
removing himself from “the enduring and generous impulses that are the
soul of this nation.” Lyndon Johnson, said Kennedy, is “calling upon the
darker impulses of the American spirit.”
Today, RFK is remembered as a “uniter.”
With Gov. George Wallace tearing at Johnson from the right and Kennedy
and McCarthy attacking from the left – and Nixon having cleared the
Republican field with a landslide in New Hampshire – LBJ announced on
March 31 he would not run again.
Four days later, Martin Luther
King, leading a strike of garbage workers, was assassinated in Memphis.
One hundred U.S. cities exploded in looting, arson and riots. The
National Guard was called up everywhere and federal troops rushed to
protect Washington, D.C., long corridors of which were gutted, not to be
rebuilt for a generation.
Before April’s end, Columbia
University had exploded in the worst student uprising of the decade. It
was put down only after the NYPD was unleashed on the campus.
Nixon called the Columbia takeover by black and white radicals “the
first major skirmish in a revolutionary struggle to seize the
universities of this country and transform them into sanctuaries for
radicals and vehicles for revolutionary political and social goals.”
Which many have since become.
In June, Kennedy, after defeating
McCarthy in the crucial primary of California, was mortally wounded in
the kitchen of the hotel where he had declared victory. He was buried in
Arlington beside JFK.
Nixon, who had swept every primary, was
nominated on the first ballot in Miami Beach, and the Democratic
Convention was set for late August.
Between the conventions,
Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev sent his Warsaw Pact armies and hundreds
of tanks into Czechoslovakia to crush the peaceful uprising known as
“Prague Spring.”
With this bloodiest of military crackdowns since
the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Moscow sent a message to the West:
There will be no going back in Europe. Once a Communist state, always a
Communist state!
At the Democratic convention in Chicago, the
thousands of radicals who had come to raise hell congregated nightly in
Grant Park, across from the Hilton where the candidates were staying.
Baited day and night, the Chicago cops defending the hotel, by late in
the week, had had enough. Early one evening, platoons of fresh police
arrived and charged into the park clubbing and arresting scores of
radicals as the TV cameras rolled. It would be called a “police riot.”
When Sen. Abe Ribicoff took the podium that night, he directed his
glare at Mayor Richard J. Daley, accusing him of using “Gestapo tactics
in the streets of Chicago.” Daley’s reply from the floor was
unprintable.
Through September, Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey could not speak at a rally without being cursed and shouted down.
Describing the radicals disrupting his every event, Humphrey said,
these people “aren’t just hecklers,” but “highly disciplined,
well-organized agitators. … Some are anarchists and some of these groups
are dedicated to destroying the Democratic Party and destroying the
country.”
After his slim victory, Nixon declared that his
government would take as its theme the words on a girl’s placard that he
had seen in the Ohio town of Deshler: “Bring us together.”
Nixon tried in his first months, but it was not to be.
According to Bryan Burrough, author of “Days of Rage, America’s Radical
Underground, the FBI, and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence,”
“During an 18-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than
2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day.”
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