By Alan Wolf
New Republic
May 18th, 2018
The world that 1968 ushered in is a far cry from the one activists imagined.
It was neither the best nor the worst of times. But in contrast to the relative placidity of the 1950s, the events of 1968 opened up previously unimaginable vistas to people all across the globe. “We knew about the Paris commune,” the surrealist artist Jean-Jacques Lebel tells Mitchell Abidor in May Made Me, a new collection of oral histories of that year. “This was going to happen again” in May 1968, he had felt. “So you could have the near orgasmic joy of taking part in something much greater than yourself.” The protests began with calls for an end to same-sex dormitories at French universities and quickly developed into a general strike involving some 10 million workers from every segment of French society. By the end of that year, students and, to a lesser degree, workers in nearly every part of the world would rise up.
The
spirit of 1968 was not merely political. Simultaneously individualist
and collectivist, as well as both sober and psychedelic, it was
cultural, economic, sexual, hedonistic, spiritual, and transcendental.
In a few of its more crucial aspects, it was a wild success. Two
68ers—Jack Straw in Britain and Joschka Fischer in Germany—became
foreign secretaries of their countries. The women’s movement, galvanized
in large part by the unrelenting male chauvinism of 1968’s leaders,
intervened in history, as did movements for racial and ethnic equality.
Protests against the war in Vietnam played a role, however indirectly,
in ending it. Soviet-style communism did, eventually, topple.
Universities were transformed, as was, for a brief moment in time, the
Catholic Church. Conscription ended. Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix
changed music.
But a powerful reaction began as early as the
first protests in Paris. After fleeing to a military base, Charles de
Gaulle announced new elections, and when they took place on June 23,
1968, his party gained even more seats. Not only did May 1968 fail to
survive the summer of its birth, but France is now led by a man born
nine years after the shock and awe of 1968 came to an end. If you utter
“insurrection” in Paris today, you will likely conjure up images of the
right-wing nationalist Marine Le Pen.
In the 50 years since
1968, many prominent radical figures of the time have turned to the
right. David Horowitz, the Trump-supporting right-wing propagandist, had
been the American New Left’s major theorist in the 1960s. His
conversion pales in comparison to that of Benny Lévy, Jean-Paul Sartre’s
last personal secretary and a self-professed Maoist, who became a
passionate Zionist and died an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem. Others did not
turn right wing per se but did become supporters of a more militaristic
turn in foreign policy in the name of humanitarian interventionism,
none better known than Bernard Kouchner, the co-founder of Doctors
Without Borders.
1968 may have ushered in a new world, but it is a
far cry from the one the activists of those years imagined then. Donald
Trump is the American president, neo-Nazis are gaining in Germany,
Britain is turning its back on Europe, and recently liberated Communist
countries compete over how far to the right they can turn. It can be no
surprise that the half-century anniversary of 1968 is producing so many
books aiming to make sense of it. What was it all about, this sudden
outburst of activity? What were its consequences, and could it happen
again? Or did it, in the end, signify very little? Both the academic I
am now and the radical I was then want to know.
Revolutions, like suicides, are contagious. George Katsiaficas, the author of The Global Imagination of 1968,
is, to modify a term from the German poet and essayist Hans Magnus
Enzensberger, a tourist of many revolutions; his book comes endorsed by a
parade of sometime-notorious activists including former Black Panther
Bobby Seale; Ward Churchill, who once called the victims of September 11
“little Eichmanns”; and Shaka Zulu of the New Afrikan Black Panther
Party and Jersey State Prison. Katsiaficas is worth reading partly for
nostalgic reasons: If you have forgotten the existence of Lotta Continua
in Italy or of the Brown Berets in California, he will remind you of
their actions.
Taking a global perspective on the events of
1968, Katsiaficas has made a somewhat obsessive accounting of all the
student demonstrations between April and June of 1968: West Germany saw
63; Japan, 9; France, 1,205. This data, culled from Le Monde, is
fascinating; every region of the world witnessed youth revolts of
assorted varieties. Richard Vinen, a historian at King’s College London,
in 1968: Radical Protest and Its Enemies, cites a diplomat who suggests
that Western Australia was the only place unaffected by the times.
There are occasions when tourists of the revolution can play a healthy
role, and this is one of them: As in 1848, when unrest in Sicily quickly
spread to every part of Europe, there really did seem to be a spirit of
1968 that included not just Western Europe and North America but
Eastern Europe and the Third World.
In retrospect, the most
important of 1968 rebellions was not the Parisian one but the Prague
one. Before Václav Havel became a household name, at least in
intellectual households, Alexander Dubček and his conception of
“socialism with a human face” became one of the most powerful sources of
resistance to the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Proceeding very
carefully, ever aware of the Soviet tanks facing in his direction,
Dubček introduced reforms designed to encourage greater freedom of
expression and a more flexible approach to industrial production.
Although the Czech reformers bent over backward to accommodate Russian
anxieties, the Soviets invaded in August 1968, bringing the dream of a
more humanistic form of socialism to an end. The rebellion and its
repression made clear that 1968 was not only a protest against
capitalism and its appetites but against Soviet-style communism as well.
The
very term “New Left” was designed to drive home that young radicals
wanted little to do with the days of fellow traveling and united fronts.
That might not have been as important in the United States, where
Communists have had so little influence, as it was in France, where the
French Communist Party (PCF) was not only large and powerful but took
upon itself the role of judging whether a movement was properly
revolutionary, concluding that all of them outside its own control were
not. In Abidor’s oral histories, the filmmaker Michel Andrieu recalls an
event on May 13 when he and his friends were confronted by henchmen
from the Communist-dominated union the Confédération Générale du
Travail, who threw them out of the demonstrations and tried to take
their cameras. Another filmmaker, Pascal Aubier, was lectured by Georges
Marchais, soon to be the leader of the French Communists, about how his
movement was going to end badly.
In August 1968, Warsaw Pact tanks invaded Czechoslovakia, putting an end to Alexander Dubček’s reforms. Josef Koudelka/Magnum
The
epicenter of early phases of the student revolt, the Paris suburb of
Nanterre, was in fact governed at the time by the PCF, making a clash
between the old and the new left inevitable. The PCF now launched at
leftist students the kind of invective they once might have directed
against capitalists. “These pseudo-revolutionaries who claim to give the
working class movement lessons … must be unmasked vigorously,”
Marchais pronounced, “because, objectively, they serve the interests of
the Gaullist power and the big capitalist monopolies…. The theses and
activities of these revolutionaries might make one laugh.” In Eastern
Europe, the students attacked the Communists. In Western Europe, the
Communists attacked the students.
Marchais, nonetheless, was
onto something when he said that the student rebels were serving the
interests of Gaullism. Unlike the United States, France, as the
sociologist Michel Crozier once pointed out, was a “blocked society.”
Because French institutions were overly bureaucratic and resistant to
change, the young and ambitious had little choice but to attack the
whole system if they hoped to rise within any part of it. For this
reason, May 1968 attracted not only protesters but potential power
brokers who, once the 1968 struggles were over, would find successful
leaders such as de Gaulle attractive. Régis Debray was in Latin America
in May 1968, but despite his support for the Cuban Revolution, he later
expressed admiration for de Gaulle, as did soixante-huitards Serge July
and Alain Geismar. This all makes a certain amount of sense to Vinen,
who notes that like the student radicals, de Gaulle “regarded the
consumer society with disdain”:
He had opposed Israel during
the 1967 war. He had opened diplomatic relations with China in 1964. He
had withdrawn France from NATO’s joint command structures in 1966, and,
most importantly, he had opposed American intervention in Vietnam.
When
activists and would-be revolutionaries have more in common with the
conservative establishment than with Communists, we know we are in
strange territory.
In style, 68ers tended to be charismatic. One
of the activists most responsible for the demonstrations in Nanterre was
Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Central casting could not have provided a better
version of a student radical: half German and half French, Jewish, and
with red hair, “Danny the Red,” who later became a Green Party
politician in Germany and a key member of the European Parliament, was
especially hated by Marchais and the Communists (and he returned the
favor). Another of the activists who talked to Abidor, Jean-Pierre
Fournier, found Cohn-Bendit refreshing, contrasting him with the more
“usual” activists such as Geismar and Jacques Sauvageot, who at the time
was a leader of the Union of French Students. “He avoids coded,
hidebound language,” Fournier recalled. “He spoke just like us.” He
distinctly remembered Cohn-Bendit confronting Louis Aragon, the
Communist poet, and calling him a “Stalinist lowlife.”
The
tone of radical politics in West Germany was far more sober than in
France. The recent memory of Nazism, defeated there little more than 20
years previously, provided an opportunity for conservatives to denounce
the radical left as little different from Hitler and his henchmen: Even
the liberal and humane philosopher Jürgen Habermas worried about the
direction 1968 would take. The man who came to symbolize the German
events of that year, Rudi Dutschke, as if to bury the shadow of Nazism
once and for all, stood in sharp contrast to the flamboyance of
Cohn-Bendit. Dutschke had little appreciation for the surreal and the
absurd sides of leftist politics, and his influence stemmed from his
modesty and inclusiveness. He was also shaped by the devout Lutheranism
of his parents, was married to an American, and was scholarly in his
interests and demeanor.
Shot during the 1968 events, Dutschke
never fully recovered and died in Aarhus, Denmark in 1979. Ultimately,
Dutschke’s major contribution was a phrase, “the long march through the
institutions,” which provided a sense of meaning to 1968 activists in
the quiet years that followed. The German Dutschke understood better
than the French radicals Crozier’s idea of a blocked society, and he
hoped to instill in the student left a sense of the seriousness of its
actions. Instead of aiming to transform all of society, it was now the
goal to transform work, the church, the university, and the family.
These were no doubt huge ambitions in themselves, but they were
nonetheless tethered to the real world.
Instead of aiming to
transform all of society, it was now the goal to transform work, the
church, the university, and the family.
In this, the 68ers did
achieve a certain success: All major institutions have opened
themselves up to change and become more meritocratic compared with how
they operated before 1968. Whether this was a result of the student
movement, or the demise of inherited privilege, the rise of affirmative
action, or the reaction against affirmative action, or the spread of the
internet, is still unanswered. But the more responsible of the 1968
protesters made it clear that they were in it for the long term. That
may help explain the interest in those events half a century later. You
never know when and where a former 68er might just pop up.
Some
were less patient. West Germany, like the United States, soon became
the home of left-wing terrorists: Here, they were called the Weathermen;
there, the Baader-Meinhof gang. (There had been some direct connections
between New Leftists in the two countries: Vinen tells the story of
Michael Vester, a young German who played an important role in drafting
the Port Huron Statement in America.) In sharp contrast to the 68ers
like Fischer who became active in the Green Party, Andreas Baader and
Gudrun Ensslin were charged with setting fire to a department store in
Frankfurt and tried in October 1968. Their legacy, the Red Army Faction,
as their gang came to be called, was, in Vinen’s accounting,
responsible for roughly 34 deaths.
Germany competed with Italy for
the most deaths produced by 1968, whether measured in police violence
against the protesters or by the actions of left-wing terrorists
themselves. Italy won hands down: By Vinen’s accounting, 419 people died
there between 1969 and 1987 as a result of left-wing terrorism. In
either case, violence could not perpetuate itself indefinitely: The Red
Army Faction committed its last violent act in 1993. Germany, a society
responsible for so much violence in its recent past, was the last place
to tolerate still more violence.
Protest and violence marked 1968
in America, too. That year, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert
Kennedy were assassinated, permanently changing the direction in which
the country was headed. It was also the year of the Tet Offensive in
Vietnam; the publication of the Kerner Commission report on urban
violence; the sentencing of four of the Boston Five, including Dr.
Benjamin Spock, for aiding draft resistance; major protests at Columbia
University; the My Lai massacre; the Catonsville Nine burning of draft
records; the premieres of the films Wild in the Streets and Night of the
Living Dead; feminist protests against the Miss America pageant in
Atlantic City; the “shot heard round the world” photo of a Vietnamese
prisoner’s execution; the Mexican Olympics and the protests of Tommie
Smith and John Carlos; the shooting of Andy Warhol by Valerie Solanas;
the release of the USS Pueblo crew by North Korea; and the arrest of
Timothy Leary in California on drug charges.
The events of
that year proved to be far too big for Lyndon Johnson. LBJ’s 1968 by
Kyle Longley, a history professor at Arizona State University, focuses
on a number of crucial decisions Johnson made in 1968—just about all of
which were disastrous. His refusal to bend over Vietnam represented
little more than the victory of hope over experience; he heard what he
wanted to hear and ignored the reality of the war America was losing.
Moreover, Johnson knew that the 1968 Republican candidate Richard Nixon
was working with Henry Kissinger to undermine peace talks with the
Vietnamese, thereby helping Nixon’s own campaign in an action bordering
on treason. Afraid that he would be viewed as trying to help Hubert
Humphrey, Johnson refused to make Nixon’s efforts public, even when the
press got wind of what was going on. For a man so adept in the ways of
power, LBJ experienced 1968 as a long year of impotence.
For a man so adept in the ways of power, Lyndon Johnson experienced 1968 as a long year of impotence.
Prague
offers one more example of Johnson’s fecklessness. Determined not to
undermine plans for a summit with Soviet leaders, Johnson chose not to
contest the claims made by Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to
the United States, that the Russians, in invading Prague, were simply
trying to protect the Czechs from their own folly. This was, as LBJ’s
adviser Clark Clifford put it, “a shattering moment, not only for Lyndon
Johnson and his dreams, but for the nation and the world. History was
taking a turn in the wrong direction that day, and there was nothing
that anyone could do about it.” As brilliant as his political instincts
were in the domestic realm, Johnson simply did not have the judgment to
deal effectively with the global challenges that 1968 posed to America.
Johnson not only botched both the war and the peace; he helped squash
Hubert Humphrey’s attempt to replace him.
Compared to Hanoi
and Prague, the Miss America contest that took place in Atlantic City in
September 1968 may seem like small potatoes. In retrospect, it was an
event of major significance. Reading all of these books on 1968, it is
astonishing to recall that all the major decision-makers in the United
States were men, with the noteworthy exception of Anna Chennault of the
“China Lobby,” who helped further Richard Nixon’s duplicity by pleading
with South Vietnamese leader Nguyen Van Thieu to resist signing any
peace deal. The most vivid example is provided by the 14 so-called “wise
men” who in March 1968 urged LBJ to begin to disengage from Vietnam;
they were all male, white, and with two exceptions (Abe Fortas, a Jew,
and Robert Murphy, a Catholic), Protestant. It is little wonder that
feminist activists chose to protest against what they called the
“degrading, mindless-boob-girlie symbol” represented by the pageant.
As
if trying to mimic the ruling class they were seeking to oust, the New
Left movements of 1968 were also dominated by men, many of them with the
most reactionary attitudes toward women one can imagine. In 1964,
Stokely Carmichael, then a field organizer for the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, declared that “the only position for women in
SNCC” was “prone.” In the early days of organizations like Students for a
Democratic Society, too, women’s voices were rarely heard, and the
issue of gender equality garnered little attention. Among young radical
men, free sex and drugs fueled fatal posturings of machismo and an
atmosphere in which women were expected to reward courageous draft
resisters with their bodies. It would not be long before those women
formed, partly from these experiences, a radical critique of power
relations between the sexes.
Richard Nixon at a campaign rally at Madison Square Garden, five days before the 1968 election Santi VisalliI/Getty
As
if the events of 1968 were taking place in a totally different world,
that year saw in the United States the election of Richard Nixon.
Lawrence O’Donnell published a history of the 1968 campaign last year,
and this year has produced, so far, at least half a dozen more
treatments. For the most part, they cover the same stories, relating how
Allard Lowenstein, an activist and aspiring politician, searched for a
protest candidate to challenge Johnson and eventually persuaded the
otherwise ambivalent Eugene McCarthy to run, and how after McCarthy’s
surprising performance in New Hampshire, Robert Kennedy jumped in.
Johnson surprised everyone by withdrawing from the race (although he
made clear that he would accept a draft); Hubert Humphrey experienced
repeated humiliation from LBJ before, at the very last minute, finding
his voice; Ronald Reagan made his first run for national office; George
Wallace and his independent candidacy displayed a bit of Trumpism before
Trump; and Nixon chose, of all potential leaders, Spiro Agnew to be his
running mate.
Charles Kaiser’s 1968 in America—published 30
years ago and now reprinted for the 50th anniversary—magically conveys
the spirit of the times, blending his treatment of the election that
gave us Nixon with the culture that gave us Grace Slick, Jim Morrison,
and Marvin Gaye. Kaiser’s chapter on rock and roll is, in fact, the best
in the book. He identifies as the “one man” who “did more than anyone
else to break down the barriers that had traditionally kept American
musicians apart” in the years before 1968 John Henry Hammond Jr. Born to
wealth—his mother was a Vanderbilt—Hammond possessed an astonishing
ability to discover talent and, more importantly, to cross racial lines
in bringing that talent together. Without him, Billie Holiday, Sonny
Terry, and Aretha Franklin, among many others, might still be unknown to
white audiences.
Kaiser downplays, wrongly I believe, just
how much white musicians essentially stole from black artists. But he
rightly understands how much the tumult of the times shook all previous
alignments, including racial ones. “Through television,” Kaiser
concludes, “the Vietnam generation participated in a terrible tide of
death and destruction as the political center repeatedly failed to hold
during the balance of the years. But in their worst moments, the
children of the sixties took solace from the music that kept rolling out
of the radio.”
So what shall we make of this year of discontent?
Richard Vinen concludes his book, easily the very best of the newly
published ones being considered here, with this observation: few 68ers
became hippies on communes, terrorists, government ministers or
multimillionaires but the majority had unspectacular careers that often
involved a degree of self-sacrifice.” I think he gets the balance
precisely correct: 1968 without question changed lives, but it is an
open question how much it changed societies—and in what direction.
1968
certainly changed me. Graduating college in 1963, the closest I had
come to politics was a brief fascination, common among young male
idealists at the time, with the novels of Ayn Rand. Having outgrown her
simplemindedness but unsure what to believe next, I traveled to
Nashville, Tennessee, to enter graduate school at Vanderbilt, a sure
way, I correctly believed, to escape the draft. What came next quickly
became obvious. Overt, explicit, state-enforced racial segregation,
which I encountered in Nashville’s streets in the year before the Civil
Rights Act of 1964 was passed, was so blatantly unjust that not
protesting against it became unthinkable.
Arrested, jailed,
and tried (fortunately the case was eventually dismissed), I encountered
among fellow protesters, many of them students at either Fisk or
Tennessee A. & I. (now Tennessee State), a sense of moral urgency, a
compelling love of gospel music, and a commitment to lives of purpose
that put me and my white, middle-class typicality to shame. When my
arrest made the hometown newspapers in my native Philadelphia, my mother
flew down to Nashville to make sure I was OK. I took her to hear Martin
Luther King Jr. preach in a black church, and she never stopped talking
about it afterward.
It was said at the time that the personal
was political, but for me that phrase took on special meaning. I left
Vanderbilt before one year was up when my wife, Brenda, who had had a
persistent cough that turned out to be a deadly form of cancer, died
soon after our marriage. Just over three years later, my sister Bonnie
was taken ill, and she too passed away, this time from an inflamed
colon. A few weeks after that, Martin Luther King was shot, then, in
just two months more, so was Robert Kennedy. I had already been involved
in left-wing politics, but the deaths that took place that year
transformed my indignation over racial discrimination in the South and
cruelty in Vietnam into powerful and frequently destructive anger: There
I was in the streets, cheering slogans, risking arrest, inhaling tear
gas, occupying buildings, flirting with Marxist theories, giving advice
to students, rejecting King’s nonviolence, and experimenting with sex
and drugs. For me, 1968 was a time of both liberation and despair. I
literally did not know which end was up.
For me, 1968 was a time of both liberation and despair. I literally did not know which end was up.
I
was all of 26 years old in 1968. I had never been outside the United
States, never lived in anything but a middle-class environment, and,
save for one week, never worked in a nine-to-five job. But here I was
telling people how to make the world a better place. I shudder now, 50
years on, to recall the know-it-all I was then. But 1968 was capable of
doing that sort of thing. Thirty, Jerry Rubin had announced, was the
cut-off point, and I still had four years to go. Because the whole world
was going up in flames, we knew we must have been doing something
right.
In subsequent years, 1968 brought about more than its
share of recriminations. A number of writers and intellectuals, some of
whom were my building-occupying comrades, expressed “second thoughts”
about the radicalism of their youth. My mind does not work that way. To
be sure, when I think back to 1968, I shudder at my immaturity,
selfishness, and lack of responsibility: The events of that year were
changing people, and I was in desperate need of change. Yet all the
mistakes I made back then leave me with little or no sense of shame:
Dostoyevskian reflections are not my cup of tea. Not even the horror of
the Trump years can make me forget all the lies told by Lyndon Baines
Johnson to justify the deaths his political cowardice caused in Vietnam.
Once
you had seen someone like Spiro Agnew elevated to the vice presidency
there seemed no bottom to how low American politics could sink. To be
sure, Sarah Palin came close, but she never actually held national
office. In 1968, the politics of race had not yet turned in a
nationalistic direction, and identity politics was just in the process
of formation. Was I wrong to have been swept up in the more exotic
manifestations of that year? Knowing how young I was then and how much
tragedy I had experienced, I do not think so. I was an idealist at an
idealistic moment. That is not a bad place to begin the process of
maturing.
Since 1968, America has gone off in a different
direction than I had hoped: Reagan, Nixon, and Trump are not the kind of
leaders we had in mind back then. In 1968, I would have settled for
nothing less than socialism. Twenty-five years after that, something
like a European welfare state would have made me happy. Today, just
having a reliable subway system appears utopian. The French Revolution,
however violent, uprooted the monarchy. The Russian Revolution, however
perverse, produced an experiment, albeit a failed one, in economic
planning. 1968 not only failed to achieve most of its goals, it set
politics off in the wrong direction.
Yet the story does not
end there. It pleases me beyond measure that young people today are
leading so much of the opposition to Trump, the reactionary right, and
the NRA. Let them have much of what I had in those glorious but also
frightening years: burning conviction, solidarity, euphoria. Only this
time, let them win.
Alan Wolfe lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and is a longtime contributor to The New Republic. He is the author of Does American Democracy Still Work? and One Nation, After All.