Uproar fuels '1968'

Dan Danbom, Special To The News

Published January 9, 2004 at midnight

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They say if you can remember the '60s, you weren't really there. Those of us who were there have seen our recollection dulled by time, if nothing else.

So Mark Kurlansky's year book is more than helpful in filling in the blanks, if nothing else.

By almost any measure, 1968 was a turbulent, eventful year. It began with the Viet Cong breaking a New Year's cease-fire and ended with the launch of Apollo 8. In between were the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy; the birth of the New Left in America and the resurrection of anti-communism in Europe; the twilight of Lyndon Johnson's political career and the resurgence of Richard Nixon's; the North Koreans' capture of the USS Pueblo and the release of the Kerner report on violence in America; the demise of "Negro" and the rise of "black" and the entry into our vocabulary of "Palestinian." ("Guru" was such a new word in the vernacular of the time that the press usually offered the pronunciation "goo-roo.")

But it was student unrest that reached its zenith in 1968, and it's the story of student unrest that predominates in 1968.

"By the spring of 1968," Kurlansky writes, "college demonstrations had become such a commonplace event in the United States, with some thirty schools a month erupting, that even high schools and junior highs were joining in. In February, hundreds of eighth graders jammed the halls, took over classrooms, and set off fire alarms at Junior High School 258 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. They were demanding better food and more dances."

The anti-war demonstrators in the United States owed their techniques and tactics to the hard lessons learned by civil rights demonstrators earlier in the decade. In turn, demonstrators in Poland, Spain, Germany and elsewhere in Europe took their cue from America. Not that the demonstrators were unoriginal: What they pioneered, and what their most enduring legacy may be, was how to use the medium of television to get their message across.

By 1968, the dean of American broadcast journalism, Walter Cronkite, "had reached what for him was a disturbing conclusion, that television was playing an important part not only in the reporting of events, but in the shaping of them. Increasingly around the world, public demonstrations were being staged, and it seemed clear to him that they were being staged for television."

More than the use of television left a mark beyond 1968 and the years around it. The twin social pastimes of the era - sex and drugs - left a legacy as well, although few if any people could have predicted that recreational drugs would have a lineage to crack, and unprotected sex would have a lineage to AIDS. Whether those legacies are more malevolent than manipulation of the media depends on one's point of view.

Kurlansky's earlier books included ones about salt and cod and showed his ability to take seemingly prosaic subjects and turn them into compelling reads. 1968 is thick with details, but considerably thinner on interpretation.

The recitation of fact after fact and event after event - sometimes presented in a disjointed way - cumulatively has a dulling effect.

In the end, 1968 reads like one of those ubiquitous "end of year" summaries and proves again that although it's one thing to review events, it's another to knit together the fabric of history.

Dan Danbom is a freelance writer living in Denver.

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