THE CHILDREN OF '68

Christopher Hitchens

Forget "the 60s," that sloppy, self-indulgent evocation of a decade, and hold tight to the diamond-hard legacy of 1968. In that year of assassination, invasion, massacre, and revolution, even a callow 19-year-old on the fringe knew the world had been turned upside down

'Get up! Get up now! The Red Army has invaded Czechoslovakia!" On my humid bunk, I gave a galvanic twitch. I was in a camp in the mountains of Pinar del Rio, at the western end of that great green caiman—the alligatorshaped silhouette of revolutionary Cuba— and not even the spartan demands of a supposedly idealist environment had been enough to break my petit bourgeois custom of a late levee. The scheme was to wake at dawn's early light and to plant the seedlings of a future coffee crop, the better to help insurgent Cuba terminate its dependence on sugar, rum, tobacco, and other colonial poisons. (This also gave me a lofty justification for my reluctance to perform anything in the nature of cane-cutting duties.) The material reality, an early education for me in the harsh distinction between theory and practice, was to retire somewhat late after much too much rum and tobacco, and then upon arising to discover that if I wanted coffee I would have to grow it myself. From each according to his ability, I would mutter—but what about my needs? Yet this was serious.

The day was August 21, 1968, with Cuba many time zones behind Prague, and here is how I spent it. First, an intense ideological shouting match. There were those in the camp who felt they should "know more" before condemning the Soviet "intervention." And there were also those, many of them Cuban, who felt that they knew enough already about the great Soviet "experiment." Only a few days earlier, I myself had been denounced as counterrevolutionary, for a public disagreement with the great Cuban director Santiago Alvarez. His agitprop film LBJ anticipated Oliver Stone by several decades in blaming the droop-faced Texan bully for the murders of "Luther, Bobby, and Jack." Che Guevara had been in his unmarked grave for only a few months, and hoarse and tearful were the voices of those who said he would never have condoned such superpower thuggery as the Russians were now committing. (He's a myth today, an "icon" even, but in those days he might have just left the room.) Castro himself wasn't going to pronounce until his lateevening TV diatribe, which meant that we had the unique experience of passing a whole day in a Communist state which had adopted no official "line."

But I was pretty sure by then what the Maximum Leader was going to say. My most pressing desire was to get to the office of the Czech airline in Havana, because I had an invitation to visit the "Prague Spring," and indeed a free ticket to ride, and it suddenly looked as if winter had set in early. When I got to that sad, hushed office near Malecon, the main boulevard, it was to be told, by a young woman not very far from helpless weeping, that the tanks of the Warsaw Pact had plowed up the tarmac at the Prague airport. The flight and the invitation were canceled. Outside, a group of Cuban students—where are they now?— tried a spontaneous rally for Czechoslovakia, but were dispersed without undue difficulty. The only chance was a charter plane to Canada. Aha! From there it might at least be possible to get quickly across the border—the frontier, as I then thought of it—to Chicago. Some friends of mine were planning to catch the attention of the Democratic convention, which chanced to be opening that week to a packed international house. Back in the lobby of the Havana Libre hotel, Black Panthers and American draft resisters, and some of the future leadership of South Africa, Angola, and Mozambique, held impromptu seminars. The North Vietnamese, we learned at midday, had endorsed the Soviet invasion. The Chinese had anathematized it. Later, in grainy shots transmitted from Illinois, billy clubs rose and fell and tear gas erupted as young Americans chanted, "The whole world is watching."

Billy clubs rose and fell and tear gas erupted.~

) eflecting on it all now, K I am astonished mainly 11 by how little astonished I was. I was 19 years old. It didn't seem at all abnormal to be involved in about three dramas a day. One had become accustomed to registering the extraordinary. The magnetic polarities had, it seemed, gone wild. The compass needle was doing its own thing. And yet, precisely as things fell apart, they appeared to exhibit a fearful symmetry, or synchronicity.

Please understand: I am not trying to channel "the 60s," that large and fuzzy and baggy conceit which is capacious enough to hold any free-floating cultural "concept." I am talking about 1968, or '68: that diamond-hard and definable 12 months which intervened between the croons of "The Summer of Love" and the moans of Woodstock. In Berkeley (then known as Berserkeley), where I happen to be teaching this year, the old hands have a standing joke that if you claim to remember the 60s, then you weren't really there. Of some of them, I can well believe it. But if you were a '68-er, you would cheerfully forget much of the decade just to keep alive the pure, crystalline pleasure of the gift that keeps on giving—a memory of revolution.

For years, just outside Berkeley, a daubed slogan graced a bridge on the approach road: VOTE PEACE, it said, its uneven lettering a mute testimony to the intrepid soul who must have hung upside down to inscribe it. In late February of this year, as a new bombing of Iraq impended, the sign was amended overnight to read INVOKE PEACE. And Ron Kovic, author of Born on the Fourth of July, turned up in his wheelchair in downtown San Francisco to protest Bill Clinton's synthetic "stand tall" rhetoric. Kovic was shot and disabled near Vietnam's "Demilitarized Zone" (DMZ) on January 20, 1968. (The black Marine who carried him to safety was killed later on the same day.) He comes by his '68 credentials honorably, and the hard way. No yuppie he. "It was a year of awakening, for me and the country both," he told me recently as he prepared to set off and give a keynote speech at this year's commemoration of the shootings at Kent State.

11 ere's an item, more or H less at random, from II The New York Times "Editorial Notebook" of February 21, 1998:

After three decades of official silence, Mexicans may soon learn crucial facts about a spasm of government violence that changed their history. The event was the army massacre of students on October 2, 1968, barely a week before the opening of the Mexico City Olympic Games. The bloodshed that night brought a demand for democracy and accountability that grew over the years.

This item was like a madeleine right under my nose. Mexico in October! Other images could readily be added. (Those brave black American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos, holding gloved and clenched fists aloft as they waited on the Olympic podium for their gold and bronze medals before being abruptly sent home.) "The generation of 1968," said the article, is the one that "provoked the outcry for greater democracy in Mexico." I have also sat in Prague and heard Vaclav Havel proudly refer to himself as "a child of 1968." And while Mikhail Gorbachev described himself less exactly as one of the shestidesyatniki—"men of the 1960s"—we know from other evidence that 1968 was the year of his crucial intellectual and emotional transformation. Everywhere I have been, from Bosnia to Bombay, you have to check in with the members of Club '68 if you desire to be elucidated.

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⅛ Just to blink in 1968 was to risk missing something.^

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hat was it like? I can speak only as a bit player. Aside from my formative crunch moments with the Cubans and the Czechs, I first had my collar pulled by a cop that year. It was a small matter in historical terms, just a mediocre Oxford store that thought it was too good to serve black customers. Yet the tussle on that picket line, I sincerely thought, was part of a global battle against racism that was on the verge of a complete moral victory.

Outside the United States Embassy on Saint Patrick's Day, I was nearly trampled by an angry police horse while attempting to make what I thought was a simple point about the American presence in Vietnam. (Give it up! Go home!) The next day the papers were full of angst about how my generation was sullen and violent: nobody was to discover for more than a year that the My Lai massacre had taken place the day before. Mick Jagger gave the scrawled original of his song "Street Fighting Man" to my friend Tariq Ali—co-author of this year's 1968: Marching in the Streets—to be printed in Black Dwarf, his subversive publication, because, in a fit of nerves, the BBC had banned the song. I helped organize a meeting for Danny CohnBendit, whose fox-colored hair made it easy for the tabloids to style him "Danny La Rouge," whose "Movement of 22 March" had almost succeeded in inverting General de Gaulle's Fifth Republic, and who was slandered by both the French Stalinists and the French chauvinists as a sinister German-Jewish conspirator. (He is now a much-respected figure, who among other things has the not ignoble task of supervising multicultural ism in the once monochrome city of Frankfurt.) That year in France, when nine million workers went on strike and occupied their factories, the workers at the Berliet plant re-arranged the big company sign over the gates so that the letters spelled LIBERTE.

Apocalypse "Then"? I admit to some such folly. Before that Vietnam demonstration, I had seriously discussed the possibility of people being killed in a London square. Not by our side, of course, but still—what was I thinking? I utterly neglected the studies that I was being subsidized by the taxpayers to pursue, at a great university which many less fortunate people would have given a limb to attend. I may have used my limited gifts as a public speaker in order to make loud and simplistic statements and even, on at least one occasion, to get a member of the audience to disrobe. (No, you fool, not at the meeting itself.) However, it remains the only time in my life when I was consistently thinking and acting with relative unselfishness. Of a bitter nearby strike by some shockingly underpaid women factory workers—where yet again I was to have my collar felt by cops and by scabs—I quite distinctly remember deciding that I would sacrifice my midtermexam results to see the damned thing through. And these were thoughts, thanks very much, not just feelings.

I wasn't to know it, but I was among I the last postwar 19-year-olds to be deI nied the vote. "Old enough to kill, but not for voting," as Barry McGuire phrased it in his gritty version of P. F. Sloan's "Eve of Destruction." It's impossible to exaggerate this forgotten element—we were in politics but not allowed to be "of" it, and it was the Democrats and the Labour Party, not the Republicans and the Tories, who held power. (Votes at 18 didn't come until Nixon, and until I was just out of my teens.) But that year, let it never be forgotten, young people, who were denied the franchise yet were subjected to a capricious draft, actually cut their hair and went to work selflessly in democratic politics. In my cohort, too, narcissism was frowned upon. Sex—yes. Rock 'n' roll—by all means. Drugs—no. Drugs rot the brain, and give opportunities to the forces of law and order, and are selfindulgent. I have the perfect control experiment at hand, since I was a contemporary of Bill Clinton's at Oxford. He did indeed refuse to inhale—he's famously allergic to smoke, in any case—but he didn't need to. Instead, he crammed down mass quantities of hash-laden brownies. His pseudo-clever cover story about that, and his mess of similar evasions about the draft and everything else, make him my exemplar of a spoiled 60s person who wasn't a '68-er.

ationalist though we tried to be, it was sometimes hard not to believe that an engine of history was pounding away on its own. There were political and cultural convergences that could make you superstitious. At the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, Mahalia Jackson had sung "Take My Hand, Precious Lord" and Martin Luther King, waiting to deliver a famous speech, had said to her, "If I go before you do, I want you to sing that at my funeral." Which, in April 1968, in Atlanta, and very much to her distress, she did. On his last night on earth, June 4, 1968, Bobby Kennedy stayed at the Malibu home of John Frankenheimer, director of The Manchurian Candidate. And, suffused with optimism about the California primary, Frankenheimer invited some stars over for dinner, including Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate. {Rosemary's Baby was big that year—"A Bun in the Coven," as a friend of mine said in an attempt to dispel the New Age before it could get started.) As Andy Warhol lay punctured and crippled and near to death in New York after a fusillade from a banshee who had wanted him to "make her a star," he was distantly aware of a Kennedy murder on the news, stealing his 15 minutes in the limelight, but thought with vague irritation that the networks must be showing a replay of Dallas. And as Bobby's funeral was in progress, the assassin of Martin Luther King was apprehended at the London airport and upstaged those obsequies in their turn. Just to blink in 1968, a year in which I always kept a transistor radio by my bed, was to risk missing something that would have kept a "normal" news cycle going for a month.

⅛ Dont ever say 1968 was a frivolous year.

An exhilarating thing was the obvious confounding of all the "experts" and fixers and consultants and pundits and tame intellectuals, none of whom had the smallest idea of what was breaking loose. I have never since been impressed by any kind of academic or professional authority—there's nothing like seeing those pants well and truly down, and hearing the heartening crash of collapsing scenery. Walter Cronkite threw up his hands on CBS, jolting the president himself by his conclusion that the Vietnam War was "immoral" as well as a lost cause. Later in the year, live on prime time at the Chicago convention, William Buckley and Gore Vidal almost traded punches and did trade raw, unfaked ideological hatred, leaving the presenter slack-jawed on airwaves where the usual "bipartisan" script had been mislaid. (That's a thing, I tell my envious students now, that you will never see allowed to happen again.) Even the Academy took leave of its usual senses and nominated, for best picture, The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night, Cool Hand Luke, and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Don't ever say this was a frivolous year.

The Joint Chiefs, the planners, the economists, the polltakers—their abject failure to guess who might be coming to dinner was the least of it.

January. Dr. Benjamin Spock goes on trial for inciting American youth to refuse the military draft. In Saigon, the yard of the American Embassy is seized by a Vietcong assault that "intelligence" never saw coming.

February. Vietnam burns from end to end in the Tet offensive, and the expression "light at the end of the tunnel" enters the lexicon of official fatuity.

March. Student and worker protests in Poland are repressed by a Communist regime using bare-knuckle antiSemitic tactics. The My Lai massacre occurs, to be reported 18 months later. L.B.J. throws in the towel on his reelection bid.

April. Martin Luther King is assassinated, with much consequent rioting that nearly engulfs the Capitol. British politician Enoch Powell breaks consensus by attacking "colored" immigration. Rudi Dutschke, leader of the German student movement, is shot down by a neo-Nazi fanatic.

May. General rebellion in France, with barricades in Paris and a takeover of factories by workers.

June. General de Gaulle is forced to call on his armed forces to guarantee his rule.

August. Russians invade Czechoslovakia. Chicago police beat puddles of blood out of demonstrators, journalists, and some delegates at the Democratic convention.

September. Fierce female protests at the Miss America pageant, inaugurating the active phase of the women's movement. The Beatles record "Helter Skelter."

October. The civil-rights movement in Northern Ireland, modeled on the American one, begins. For the first and last time in decades, Catholic and Protestant activists march together. The moment evokes a violent response from authority. Massacre of students in Mexico City. Black Power salutes from victorious U.S. athletes at the Mexico City Olympics.

November. Richard Nixon elected after making a secret and illegal agreement with the South Vietnamese generals to continue the war they have lost.

December. Apollo 8 orbits the moon for the first time, and Captain James Lovell Jr. helps inaugurate the "one world" ethos by artlessly describing our green planetary home as "a grand oasis in the big vastness of space."

It was the world turned upside down. Never, since, has it looked quite stable to me when turned "right" side up again.

n Ed Sanders's long poem 1968: A History in Verse, the remains of the year dissipate in a sort of free-verse meltdown, with Nixon becoming president by a whisker, Eldridge Cleaver fleeing the country, and Janis Joplin making some incautious career moves. As after every moment of surfeit or saturnalia, there was a feeling, which I remember in the pit of my own stomach, of exhaustion and even of faint embarrassment. Had it all been a huge put-on, a fiesta of bullshit? It certainly became the vogue to say so. As the years went by and I gradually got myself a "proper" life, I joined in a conventional smirk or two. In the course of a chat with Senator Eugene McCarthy, I laughed out loud when he told me what he'd always thought. He had done so well in that famously "idealistic" New Hampshire primary only because so many Granite State voters had him confused with the gruesome Senator Joe McCarthy. How we both laughed.

But, in some recess of myself, I was sneer-proof. I wasn't ashamed at all, except of having done so little. I met Peter Arnett of CNN in some hellhole or other, and he told me of the indelible moment when, surveying the smoking ruins of the Vietnamese town of Ben Tre, a stricken American major had blurted to him, "We had to destroy it in order to save it." In a microsecond it all came back to me, not just the atrocity itself but the way one had been prepared for it by reading Catch-22. I didn't feel I'd been on the wrong side of that argument. In Chicago, where the crowd of dissidents included Robert Lowell, Norman Mailer, Terry Southern, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet, and William Burroughs, a colleague recalled the remark made by Lowell earlier in the year: "I fear, if we fail, the imposition of a new reign of piety and iron." Piety and iron—a perfect precognition of the dark Nixonian years, which seemed, that winter, to begin to make nonsense of our pathetic spring.

kit was the world turned upside down.

T here was indeed some seriousness in I those times. Even Bobby Kennedy, I who had secretly bugged Martin Luther King, and whom we saw as running to spoil the McCarthy anti-war movement, was forced to orate without notice and without a speechwriter on the night of the King murder. He surveyed a freezing crowd in Indianapolis and found himself quoting Aeschylus about the pain which cannot forget and falls drop by drop upon the heart. Has there been an election since where such a thing could even be imagined? Has there been an election since where a presidential incumbent would even consider dropping out because he couldn't look the disenfranchised and the young in the face anymore? I try to tell my students about it, and find rather absurdly that I am not all that very far from tears. "So let us not talk falsely now, / The hour is getting late." That was Bob Dylan's 1968 album, John Wesley Harding, the first plangent lyrics after his near-fatal motorcycle nightmare outside the then obscure town of Woodstock. Even the apparently debauched stuff, such as the frenzied artistry of R. Crumb (the sort of guy Terry Southern used to call "a veritable dee-ment"), had, and retains, its durable aesthetic upside.

One thing I confess to discounting in 1968 was the concept of irony. Irony is for losers. We weren't just serious. We could be solemn. (Excuse me, but this is a revolution we are having here.) So I slightly sat out the 1988 observances of the 20th anniversary, even though these included some brilliant retrospectives, such as Todd Gitlin's The Sixties: Years of Hope; Days of Rage. The irony, however, wasn't long in catching up. One year later came the magic year of 1989. If you are interested in hieroglyphs, take 68 and turn not the world but this page upside down. You are looking at 89. And in that year, there really was a revolution-one of the greatest moments of emancipation in human history. From Berlin to the Urals, to the sound of music, the whole wall and edifice of brute power came crashing down, or rather evaporated, before the onslaught of blue-jeaned hordes accoutred with nothing but irony and optimism, and a good bit of sex and rock 'n' roll. Czechs I had known decades before, in the leanest possible years, became deputies and even ministers overnight. So did some Poles and Germans and Hungarians. When I had that meeting with Vaclav Havel, in a wine cellar at the foot of Kafka's castle, he even praised the influence of Frank Zappa and the Velvet Underground. He'd invited them to help exorcise the old fortress, and one of his first acts in power was to present a Native American "pipe of peace," the gift of his American admirers, to his fellow '68 alumnus Mikhail Gorbachev. (Gorbachev, he confided, had almost ruined the moment by saying that he didn't smoke. But I knew from Clinton that power will do that to people.)

share in two revolutions," said Thomas Paine, "is living to some purpose." To have been a minor participating witness in 1968 and 1989, and to have seen the point of the first being vindicated however obliquely by the second, is at least to have drunk deeply. I quite understand that much of the irony is at my own expense. A few years ago, a comrade of mine—now a member of Tony Blair's government—revisited that torpid Cuban plantation and reported that our coffeeplant seedlings had utterly failed to thrive. Probably the soil hadn't been right. Never mind. Unintended consequences aren't always disastrous. The other seedlings of that time, from Cory Aquino's "people power" in the Philippines all the way through 1989 and to those still waiting to flower in Mexico and—who knows?—even in China, were and are worth waiting for.

Nineteen sixty-eight was a universal year, but it was above all an American year, and it was what determined me that America was the territory of liberty. A country that could convulse over an unjust war, engage in the most profound election of the century, become embattled over civil rights, and give birth to a women's movement all at the same time was, I decided there and then, for me. BE REALISTIC, said the gallant Paris wall posters in 1968. DEMAND THE IMPOSSIBLE. There was and is only one place where that slogan could be made to make sense. Man cannot live on Utopias alone. But as Oscar Wilde so shrewdly remarked, a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at. I once had a glimpse of that map in real time.