A 40-Year Memory- LBJ

A foggy night along the Pennsylvania Turnpike, Northeast Extension. We were somewhere between the Pocono (I-80) Exit and the Lehigh Valley exit. It was one of those evenings when you had to keep your eye as much on the lines along the side of the road as the road in front of you. I think there were four of us in the car heading back to school after spring break.

March 31, 1968.

"I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President"

We had only been half-listening to the speech. Blah, blah, blah, was what he heard. We were tired of LBJ and "his war." We had heard it all before. Eugene McCarthy had stunned all of us a few weeks earlier by a fine showing in New Hampshire. Bobby Kennedy had just entered the race. It was looking interesting.

Out of the fog came those words. We weren't even sure we heard him.

He said what? What was that? Huh?

"I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President"

Did he really say that? He's not going to run again. Maybe we can win after all!!

For the first time since November 1963 many of us felt a sense of hope. The oldest group of my generation had just passed 21 the year before. I was soon to be 20. I wasn't able to vote yet, but my generation was about to undertake our great adventure in electoral politics. Or so we thought. Eugene McCarthy had rallied the young- college students leaving school to go to New Hampshire and stump for what seemed like an impossible dream.

"I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President"

They were the words that seemed like words of liberation. We were excited. It had not been a good year. The Tet Offensive in Vietnam was two months old on that night. The war was becoming less and less popular. The draft was breathing down everyone's neck. Washington wasn't listening.

Now there was hope.

"I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President"

I wish...Oh how much I wish.

Just as I do today. To be a person of hope, I believe, is just as essential today as it was then. Yes, many times over our hopes have been found wanting, and 1968 is as good a year to see that as any. But sooner or later I believe we have to come back to hope. Without it we are a lesser people.

Of course hope, as we talked about a few weeks ago, can be misused, abused and turned into rhetoric. But without it, we would be paralyzed. The hope of March 31, 1968 was a false hope- or perhaps a hope stillborn in the rush and crowding of history. Forty years later I still see hope. Some of it is a frantic grasping hope, like a last-ditch effort. I also see hope that builds out of a vision of a different world and a different way of doing things. Then there is the hope that is so easily placed upon us- the hope built on trusting in might and overpowering strength.

We will never know what the hope of March 31, 1968 may have given had it lived. We will never know how the story might have played out. We only know the story that became reality. But that doesn't mean we don't work for the hope- for the story we resonate with. To do otherwise is to give up- give in.

God forbid.