A 40-Year "Memory?"

Who even noticed at the time?

July 17 - Saddam Hussein becomes Vice Chairman of the Revolutionary Council in Iraq after a coup d'état

A 40-Year Memory - Bobby Kennedy Dies

Just about 26 hours after he was shot, Bobby Kennedy died. For many, since I can't believe I'm the only person who responded that way, this, linked forever with Martin Luther King's assassination, was one of those overpowering turning points of my life. I would guess that for many it was the final straw that led to much of what we think of as the rest of the 60s- the Chicago convention riots, the rapid expansion of the anti-Vietnam War movement, the somewhat over-played hedonism of Woodstock, and the final straws in the Kent State and Jackson State killings.

By the time Watergate ended with Nixon's resignation, it was all just a postscript to what we lost in June 1968.

Would Bobby have been a good president? Would the nation have healed differently? Who knows. It is hard to remember but at the time of his death Bobby was only 42 years old. He would have been 43 just after the election in November. Barack Obama (like Bill Clinton) will be 46 at his inauguration, if elected. No, I don't mean to suggest that Obama is another Bobby. The nation and world are different places in spite of some of the more obvious similarities. Bobby was seen by many of us as perhaps the last best hope of our youthful generation.

He was not a polished campaigner. He had a slight stutter from time to time. He was inherently shy. His speeches were given with passion but not usually with great rhetorical skills. He just seemed real. He seemed to care. He seemed convinced that something different needed to happen.

Yes, he had a history of a strong Cold War anti-communist, a ruthless person and was part of the administration that expanded the Vietnam War. And yet he changed his mind. His brother's assassination forced him into some deep re-appraisals.

So far I have not again looked on any political leader in the same way. At some deep and unconscious level I have realized as I have worked on this painful anniversary, that every one has been in one way or another compared to Bobby. Fair or unfair isn't the question. He embodied in his own imperfect way a politician who was willing to struggle with the big issues and stand up for them. Only Jimmy Carter after leaving office can come anywhere near what Bobby seemed to show.

Yes, I am sure he would not have lived up to those ideals and visions as he does in memory. Teddy Kennedy warned us of that in his eulogy at the funeral (below). But Bobby pointed us to a different and hopefully better way of being a nation. He reminded us in his own personal way that we do have values and morals to live up to as a unified nation. Had he been elected he would have been, even far more than Bill Clinton was called, the first multi-racial candidate who was seen by all as a hope for unity in diversity.

Bobby loved a quote from Aeschylus that he used, off the cuff, in his famous speech in Indianapolis when King was killed:

My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: “Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.

Perhaps in our grief 40 years ago we missed something that Bobby urged us to look for and which I have a feeling he himself found. That wisdom which comes from the "awful grace of God" can lead us to living that new way of life that he called us to see.

So, Bobby, 40 years later, many of us still miss you, and for many of us you are just another person in history. As a nation, we may still be waiting for what you brought to us so seemingly simply. I close with Teddy's closing words in New York on June 8 when Bobby's funeral was held.

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world.

As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him:

"Some men see things as they are and say why.
I dream things that never were and say why not."

A 40-Year Memory - Bobby Kennedy Shot

June 5 - U.S. presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy is shot at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California by Sirhan Sirhan.

It was 12:15 am PDT on a early Wednesday morning when Bobby Kennedy, Senator from New York, claimed victory in the tough California primary. He stood in the Ambassador Hotel and told the cheering crowd:

My thanks to all of you and now it's on to Chicago and let's win there.

A quick Kennedy wave and it was off through a back hallway.

I lived in Pennsylvania. I was home for a few weeks from college and had sat with a couple close friends watching the returns. It was almost 1:00 am when we gave up. They left and I went to bed. Just before they left I remember commenting, out of nowhere and not with any conscious or unconscious) awareness of anything prophetic:

I'm afraid he'll never live to be President.

It was probably the atmosphere of those days. The underlying violence that we saw in JFK's assassination and the response in so many cities when Martin Luther King was killed just two months earlier. Bobby would be a target.

I wanted him to be President more than just about anything else at that point. He was the last best hope in a time of turmoil and war and anti-war and black-vs-white and grape workers strike in California and oh so many things. Bobby kept Indianapolis from exploding in April after King's death. His work as New York senator had made strides in improving the ghettos of the city. He walked with Cesar Chavez in California and the migrant workers. More than any politician in a very long time he was truly a uniter.

But...

Well, it was not to be. Hope was lost for many of us that night. Many turned their back on the political system or stepped back only to be pushed further away by events in Chicago later that summer, or the ongoing war and a White House that watched football games on TV while thousands marched outside the front lawn. It was not a pretty time.

So I slept that morning of June 5, 1968. And was awakened, as I remember it, by my brother or aunt with the news. Bobby was shot. Bobby was shot.

It became a death watch that day. As the doctors spoke on TV, as the pictures were explained over and over, we all knew it was a hopeless wait. But we waited afraid, angry, struck by the unfairness of life and the complete uncertainty of everything.

I surfed over to You Tube and, needless to say, there is a three part video of the events of that night. Bobby's final speech, the joy, and then the panic and grief. I watched the first part and that same deep spot of emotion was touched. It is 40 years and it still hasn't gone away. It isn't about letting it go. It is about the feeling of what we lost and have not been able to find for 40 years. True uniters are hard to find. And those who think they are, probably aren't.

Anyway, more tomorrow. Here's the link to the first video.

Re-Create What?

From NPR, a report that a group wants to "Re-Create '68" at this year's Democratic National Convention in Denver. What struck me about the report was the feeling that this is seen as less a movement than an event. For example you can, I heard, adopt a Port-A-Potty and decorate it any way you want.

But a couple of the iconic individuals from 1968 were interviewed. One was former Black Panther Bobby Seale. He won't march, he said. He has had a heart attack and has a defibrillator. But the reported pointed out that Seale has a personal interest in the Iraq war issue. His son is army reservist who will be heading to Iraq

Then there's SDS charter member Tom Hayden. He says we shouldn't try to make comparisons between now and 1968. This is not the pressure cooker that it was 40 years ago. He did have one moment of caution. He said that if there is a theft of nomination, there will be protests that he says will be non-violent and massive.

As it is the organizers have no idea whether the turn out will be a few dozen or thousands. It is interesting that the organizers are trying to work with the local police to keep it peaceful as the story tells it. The "protest area" is to be about 15 blocks from the convention site.

Well, as one who is an intrepid survivor of at least the events of 1968 though not at the convention itself, I headed over to the website for R-68 and found first the not un-expected logo of a raised, clenched fist and this:

Welcome to the "Re-create 68" website, your virtual activists' Convergence Center for the Denver Democratic National Convention of 2008. This website was created for all the grassroots people who are tired of being sold out by the Democratic Party.

R-68 agrees with the proposition, POTESTAS IN POPULO, "all power comes from the people." What stands between the people and power are the party machines. The parties were devised as a means to represent the people. Today they represent nobody, not even party members, but only party bureaucracy. The people have been left without appropriate institutions for their representation. We intend to create those institutions!

Join us in the streets of Denver as we resist a two-party system that allows imperialism and racism to continue unrestrained.

Wow! Does that sound like 1968 or what?

Well, I for one do not want to relive 1968's Democratic Convention. I remember the anger and fear I felt while watching it on TV. (More on that in August.) And I remember the aftermath- Richard Nixon winning the election. Another convention and election like that would be a disaster.

So spare me. Do the work in your local communities. Build up the alternatives from the local on up. Protests are expressions of anger. And I fear anger never gets anything but anger in return. And this is coming from one who wanted to protest 40 years ago. Today, even more than then, it is a media circus. The media will swarm all over the protests and find, sadly, the weird, and the extreme, and make it a circus of the freaks and the ones who will draw the ratings.

The other week I happened to drive the local Planned Parenthood office. Since I am new in town I had no idea where it was. Until I saw the lone protester outside. A single individual walking back and forth with a sign saying something anti-abortion. No, such protests don't do much. Yes, I know I noticed but it only made me feel sad for the person who was carrying the sign. It gave the impression of a lost crusade with the survivor standing around.

Only massive numbers with a cause may get some positive attention. It sure doesn't sound like that's what R-68 has in mind. It might be fun naming Port-A-Pottys, but stopping war and ending racism and poverty take a lot more than that. Like perhaps the money that will be spent on these things that might be better utilized some way else.

That's my thought, anyway.

A 40-Year Memory - The Catonsville Nine

--The Catonsville Nine File

May 17, 1968 - The Catonsville Nine enter the Selective Service offices in Catonsville, Maryland, take dozens of selective service draft records, and burn them with homemade napalm as a protest against the Vietnam War.

They were: Father Daniel Berrigan, a Jesuit priest; his brother Father Philip Berrigan, a former Josephite priest; Bro. David Darst; John Hogan; Tom Lewis, an artist; Marjorie Bradford Melville; her husband, Thomas Melville, a former Maryknoll priest; George Mische; and Mary Moylan, a former nun.

Fr. Philip Berrigan and Tom Lewis had previously poured blood on draft records as part of the "Baltimore Four", and were out on bail when they burned the records at Catonsville.

The Catonsville Nine were tried in federal court October 5-9, 1968. The lead defense attorney was William Kunstler.

They were found guilty of destruction of U.S. property, destruction of Selective Service files, and interference with the Selective Service Act of 1967.
--Wikipedia

The Berrigan Brothers, Phil and Dan, were the poster children for the religious anti-war movement. They became almost like icons for those who, with deep religious convictions, opposed the war in Vietnam. Dan, who is now 87, is still a Jesuit priest, lives in New York and teaches at Fordham where he is poet in residence. His younger brother Phil, who died in 2003 at age 79, left the priesthood and was married.

A 40 Year Memory - A Merry Month

May - "May of 68" is a symbol of the resistance of that generation. Agitations and strikes in Paris lead many youth to believe that a revolution is starting. Student and worker strikes, sometimes referred to as the French May, nearly bring down the French government.
--Wikipedia

A 40 Year Memory - Aquarius Dawning

We continue the 1968 memory road with this tidbit of trivia from 40 years ago today:

April 29 - The musical Hair officially opens on Broadway.

The first Rock Musical. Counter-culture, hippie culture, anti-war culture opening on the establishment's Great White Way. I did get to see it on Broadway about a year later.

But there was a lot of controversy. The end of the first act was when they all were naked. That really shook people up, but it was so relatively minor an event that wasn't all that well-lit (for obvious reasons.) But it was the start of the new world of musicals.

A 40-Year Memory - SDS at Columbia

April 23, 1968. Columbia University, New York City. The first protest at Columbia over a proposed gym to be built in Morningside Heights. By the time spring had finished the anti-Vietnam War protests had been added and famous pictures were posted of long-haired students confronting police (or was it vice versa. Memory slips into what one wants to remember.) In many ways this protest was the first that showed what would be happening in many places. It wasn't the first student protest, but that it happened in the Ivy League made it more significant.

It was actually part of a lot longer protest that had begun a year earlier when the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) had discovered a connection between Columbia and a Defense Department think tank. A number of things occurred but the BIG DEAL hit with the gym and resulting protests. But underneath it all was the simmering of a restlessness and anger and a flexing of muscles. SDS and others were in the right place at the right time to take advantage of it.

Last month The New York Times had an article (on Easter Sunday, no less) about the SDS rebirth on the Columbia campus. They titled it "To the Ramparts (Gently)." In it they highlighted the more politically astute and community organizing style of today versus the In Your Face attitude of that other generation.


But as for Columbia, James Simon Kunen, a 19-year old at Columbia, wrote a book called The Strawberry Statement about his involvement which spawned a later movie of the same name.


James S. Kunen is a journalist who has worked for Time, Inc. and has served as a conscientious objector and a public defender.

This set of protests at Columbia lasted for a week, ending April 30. But alas it was only the beginning.

A 40-Year Memory: 2001

No that's not bad math. It was on this date in 1968 that one of the great films of all time was released, Stanley Kubrick's amazing 2001: A Space Odyssey. As Star Wars would do 9 years later, 2001 was a radical departure from its day. It was either panned or praised at that time. Yet it has stood the test of time like only the great ones do. It is on everybody's Top 100 list. It is almost iconic.

Here's the now famous opening sequence:



And The Dawn of Man sequence:



And, just for fun (since I am a PC person), here's the Apple ad that proves how iconic HAL and 2001 have become:

A 40-Year Memory- Dr. King and Bobby

The world was truly changing. LBJ had announced four days earlier that he wasn't going to run again.

Hooray!

Things were looking good. Bobby Kennedy was in the race.

Good news.

There was still hope in the world. The United States is the shining example of how democracy works. We were more convinced of it than ever.

Even if I did have to study. Well, at least act like I was studying. I was at the end of my sophomore year in college and much more interested in the band and the radio station than the engineering classes I was not cut out to do in the first place. I had been studying at the student union and, coincidentally, walking downstairs to see what was going on at the radio station where I was a newsman and disc jockey.

The memory is only vague; the specifics not real clear. I remember the bell going off on the teletype machine which is how we got all the news. I poked my head in the newsroom (a room about the size of a closet) and looked to see what the news was. I didn't save that piece of paper. I wish now I had. Or maybe my memory is false and someone else told me what was on the paper. I do remember going into the DJ on the air and asking him to interrupt the show for a news bulletin.

Martin Luther King was shot tonight in Memphis.

No. It cannot be.

Studying was over for that night. How can one study when the world is crazy. I walked back to the dorm in shock and angry. I didn't know at the time that this would be the first of many such moments in that long ago year that split the world apart. When I got back to the dorm it was even worse. No one was reacting. They were all going about their business as if nothing had happened. Oh a few were watching the news on TV in that pre-24/7 era. That only made me more angry.

Martin Luther King was gone. Killed. Murdered. My God, don't you have any feelings?

I'm a white guy and I was angry. What's it going to be like among the Black Americans. Things had already been difficult in a number of cities. Riots and death and destruction were not new. What now?

Well as we all know rioting broke out around the country. With one major exception. Indianapolis, Indiana.

Bobby Kennedy was the reason. He was scheduled to make a campaign appearance there that night.

Instead he canceled the appearance and made an impromptu appearance in the Black neighborhood and delivered what may have been his greatest speech. Here's part of it...

For those of you who are black--considering the evidence there evidently is that there were white people who were responsible--you can be filled with bitterness, with hatred, and a desire for revenge. We can move in that direction as a country, in great polarization--black people amongst black, white people amongst white, filled with hatred toward one another.

Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed that has spread across our land, with an effort to understand with compassion and love.

For those of you who are black and are tempted to be filled with hatred and distrust at the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I can only say that I feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man. But we have to make an effort in the United States, we have to make an effort to understand, to go beyond these rather difficult times.

What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or they be black.

A few weeks ago Barack Obama, in Indianapolis referred to this speech as a call to move beyond racial issues. It reminded me that even now, 40 years later, we are still trying to move beyond those same issues. Bobby Kennedy's words- and presence- probably kept Indianapolis from going the way of hundreds of other cities.

Syl Jones in today's Star-Tribune wrote:

The looting, the armed occupations, the ugliness of the act of murdering an apostle of nonviolence all took their toll on us. Hope became like the pool of blood dripping from the balcony outside the Lorraine Motel, slowly going down the drain. The dream was over. The nightmare was just beginning...The narrative of this country changed forever in 1968. We lost our innocence as children and as a nation, and once lost, a fragile thing like innocence can never be restored.
--Star-Tribune

I hope, though, that in the loss of innocence, which I, too, am painfully aware of- and trying to sort out in this series of 40-Year Memories- we don't also lose our direction. Maybe we have over the last 40 years. Maybe, as my friend G commented, it was taken from us. But that doesn't mean we can't get it back. It doesn't mean that we can't continue to be seekers - pilgrims- aware of our losses and shortcomings but also aware that people like Dr. King saw something better and greater from his moutain top.

Today as we remember that awful Thursday may we also remember his vision of what this country is supposed to be about. And remember that there have been many times when we have lived up to it. It is not too late, even now.

Bobby Kennedy's whole speech

Listen to the speech here.
Or watch part of it here.

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.