Politics

RAMPARTS, September 1968

The editors and publishers of Ramparts–one of the most important voices of the American left in the 1960s–spent much of the first months of 1968 preparing for the Big Event of the summer, namely the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in late August.  Tom Hayden, who would later stand trial as part of the “Chicago Eight” (later, Seven) for conspiracy to incite violence at the Convention, wrote several essays on the antiwar movement for Ramparts leading up to the August debacle, in one of which he wrote: “The peace movement should catch up with the worldwide feeling that the Vietcong are the heroes of this war.”

Ramparts fielded a impressive lineup of reporters and contributors for its coverage of the convention, including Hayden, Adam Hochschild, Pete Hamill, Sidney Schanberg, and Hunter S. Thompson.  Later, Thompson wrote about his reactions to the bloody conflicts on the streets of Chicago:  ”I went from a state of Cold Shock on Monday, to Fear on Tuesday, then Rage, and finally hysteria, which lasted for nearly a month.”

The Hayden quote (from the July 1968 issue of Ramparts) comes from the wonderful history of the magazine by Peter Richardson, A Bomb in Every Issue:  How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America (New York: The New Press, 2009).  Richardson devotes almost an entire chapter to the Chicago story, which begins:

“If 1968 was the year that America had a nervous breakdown, Ramparts was its most reliable fever chart.  The national crisis had complex and interlocking causes, including policy failures, mounting frustrations, social ruptures, and political violence.  Most of these developments were reflected–and in some cases, aggravated–by Ramparts and its coverage that years.  As the nation plunged into crisis, so did the magazine.  Ramparts began 1968 in the coils of conspiracy theories, became embroiled in the nation’s most controversial and violent domestic conflicts, and finished the year in fractious, chaotic collapse.”

The September issue–pictured here–contains the magazine’s reporting on the convention, and is necessarily somewhat anti-climactic.  By the time the magazine hit the streets, the tear-gas had long dissipated, the wreckage had been cleared from Grant Park, the damage to the Democrats’ reputations had been done–and Hubert Humphrey’s promises had ended up in the trash, literally and figuratively.

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AN UNCONVENTIONAL APPROACH

Exactly 42 years ago, the nation was on state of high alert and dreaded anticipation over “what was going to happen in Chicago”–by which everyone meant the Democratic National Convention, slated to begin on August 26th.  Violent confrontations with civil authorities– read:  Chicago’s notoriously hard-bitten police–were all but promised by the thousands of antiwar demonstrators descending on the Second City.  The Republicans had, as predicted, already nominated Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in Miami, without a lot of enthusiasm.  The focus now turned to Chicago.

The nation’s magazines were filled with political news throughout the summer:  Nixon and Wallace graced LIFE covers, Agnew and Nixon raised their hands triumphantly on the cover of Time. The editors at Harper’s, however, took a more “unconventional” approach.   The left-leaning general interest magazine used their August issue to highlight “The New Mayor and the Old,” John Lindsay of New York City, and Richard J. Daley of Chicago.

While the profiles of these men may not have helped readers understand the upcoming presidential elections, they did shed light on the political climate of 1968. In many ways, Lindsay and Daley embodied much of the polarizing nature of the year’s politics.   In Harper’s, David Halberstam paints Richard Daley as a powerful, hard-hitting politician:  “The poor of his city were afraid of him and the powerful of the nation deferred to him.” John Lindsay, on the other hand, is described by Larry L. King (not THAT Larry King) as hard-working and approachable, if somewhat naïve:  ”He has gone into the streets to seek out his constituency.” Lindsay was widely portrayed as having the “soft” approach to rioters and disturbers of the peace, in contrast with Daley, whose widely known aggressive approach landed him in hot water when he was accused of espousing “shoot first, ask questions later” rhetoric to his police force.

Just as race played into the larger political picture, so did it in Daley and Lindsay’s careers. Halberstam finds Daley’s politics heavily influenced by race discrimination, Daley being the “product of a time when the American ethic was to succeed…He does not like poverty programs in part because they represent a threat to his power—federal money going directly to black neighborhoods.” Lindsay comes out on the other side of the race coin, fighting for improved race relations, responding to politicians who have downplayed America’s shift towards “two societies, one black, and one white—separate and unequal” by remarking, “Well, by God, it is so.”

Of perhaps even greater interest here, however, is  historian Arthur Schlesinger’s “America 1968: The Politics of Violence,” published here as an essay, and first delivered as a commencement address in New York on June 6, 1968, when Senator Kennedy was in a California hospital, brain-dead.  Schlesinger’s words are bleak:  Americans, he said, “are today the most frightening people on the planet,” because of assassinations, urban violence, and the Vietnam War.   The “evil is in us. . . . We are a violent people with a violent history, and the instinct for violence has seeped into the bloodstream of our national life.”

With thanks to guest blogger Katie Bates

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Robert F. Kennedy, November 20, 1925-June 6, 1968

New York senator Robert F. Kennedy was mortally wounded shortly after midnight on this date in 1968, while walking through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, just after delivering a speech declaring victory in the California presidential primary.  He had been in the race for the Democratic Party nomination for less than three months, but was already clearly the front-runner.  After the shooting– at the hands of 24-year-old Sirhan Sirhan, a Palestinian Christian who had lived in the U.S. since he was 12– Kennedy survived just over 24 hours, and the actual date of his death is June 6, 1968.

His funeral service was held two days later, on June 8, in New York, at St. Patrick’s cathedral.   Afterwards, his body was transported by train to Washington, D.C. for burial at Arlington National Cemetery, near the grave of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, assassinated less than five years earlier.  (Photographs taken from the Robert Kennedy funeral train have recently been published.)

This long-playing album (with the black-bordered collaged design motif that we have seen before) was issued in June 1968 by Columbia Records, and includes most of the music and orations from the St. Patrick’s service.  It includes the memorable eulogy by his only surviving brother, Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy, who came to be known as “The Last Kennedy.”  (His tenure as heir apparent was cut short the very next year by the incident at Chappaquiddick.)

Ted Kennedy’s eulogy was brief, and consisted in large part of extended quotations from his brother’s speeches.  He concluded:

“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. . . .

As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and sought to touch him:  ”Some men see things as they are and say ‘why?’  I dream things that never were and say ‘why not?’”

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The enormous upheavals of the late 1960s–the war in Vietnam, the urban riots, the assassinations–sent the American punditocracy into a sustained and intense period of self-examination.  Writers and critics were sent out “on the road” (where Truth presumably was to be found) to survey the American scene, to take Americans’ emotional temperature.

Supernation at Peace and War

One of the most thoroughgoing of these editorial examinations was published in the venerable magazine The Atlantic in March 1968–journalist Dan Wakefield’s “Supernation at Peace and War.”  In fact, The Atlantic (as it was then calling itself on the cover, having dropped the century-old “Monthly”) devoted this ENTIRE issue to Wakefield’s peripatetic essay, which was then published in book form.  Wakefield was 35 at the time, and had already published several perceptive essays on the American scene, and would within a few years become a best-selling novelist (Going All the Way and Starting Over).  What an extraordinary assignment this young writer got in 1967!   “No one man can cover everything, but travel and capture as much as you can of America, its people, its moods, its troubles and disillusionments, its still bright and valid dreams, its many ways of life (and not a little death); portray what you can of the entire great, ingenious, rich and poverty-stinking, beautiful and beer-can glittery, generous and selfish, mixed-up and marching straight on to what? (a bigger and better destiny or the primeval asphalt swamp?), powerful yet impotent, clear-the-slums and kill-the-goddamn-grizzlies, pick-your-1968-Choice and take-your-chances kind of country this is.”

The two wars of the 1960s

Published early in the year–and thus missing events like Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election, the assassinations of King and RFK, and the violence at both national party nominating conventions–”Supernation” is perhaps more an artifact of 1967 than 1968.  And significantly the essay is dominated by issues of race and racial conflict on the one hand, and by the war in Vietnam on the other.  Wakefield writes perceptively: “The only declared war being fought by the United States is the War on Poverty.  The President declared it in 1964, and it continues to be waged.  Unlike the war in Vietnam, the War on Poverty does not cost very much to fight.  Even so, it is not a popular war, and in fact is even less popular politically than the war in Vietnam, which must make it THE most unpopular war in the nation’s history. . . . Like the war in Vietnam, the War on Poverty seems to have no end in sight, but in both cases the President keeps predicting victory.”

War games

There are many brilliant descriptions and stories in this long essay, but one of my favorites comes near the end.  Wakefield visits a “cordon and search mission” staged at a fake Vietnamese village staged at Fort Belvoir VA, outside Washington–thatch-roofed huts, idle peasants (soldiers and WACs in costume), fake artillery fire, clouds of smoke, and clearing out the “Vee-Cee” from fake tunnels.  All of this took place in front of an audience, in bleachers, of “several hundred young men in the khaki garb of the U.S. Army.”  At the end, after the “village” was “pacified,” Wakefield writes: “It seemed awfully simple, not only to me but to many of the men in the bleachers behind me.  Beneath the groans, there were loudly whispered comments like ‘ka-rist,’ and ’shee-it,’ and after one cynical snort, one soldier said, ‘Yeah, and then they lived happily ever after.’”

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An inflammatory book of black rage

Eldridge Cleaver (1935-98) made one of the 20th century’s more unusual journeys through public life–youthful criminality and prison, radical politics, literary celebrity, presidential political campaigning, exile, born-again Christianity, conversion to Mormonism and then to conservative Republican politics, embarrassingly provocative clothing design.   American popular culture has seen its share its share of “one-book wonders,” and Cleaver fits the description.  Soul on Ice, some of which had been excerpted in Ramparts magazine (where the masses presumably had not seen it) was an extraordinary, inflammatory book of black rage, poured like gasoline on the fire of white anxiety and fear in the summer of 1968.

“A formidable analytical mind.”

White people, especially white intellectuals of the New Left, were looking for avatars to guide them through the dense thicket of black anger, for ways of knowing and thinking about black “demands” and expectations.  Here, suddenly, was the eloquent guide they were looking for.  The blurbs excerpted on the back of the book are, with one exception, by “literary” white people:  Geoffrey Wolff (praising Cleaver’s “moral energy”); Thomas Lask (”an exceptional volume”); Robert Coles (”He is full of Christian care, Christian grief and disappointment . . .”); and radical critic Maxwell Geismar, whose introduction to the book is quoted on the back:  ”Cleaver is simply one of the best cultural critics now writing. . . .”    The sole black critic is Julian Mayfield, writing in The Nation:  ”Beautifully written by a man with a formidable analytical mind.”

“What does the Negro want?”

“Cultural critic.”  ”Formidable mind.”  ”Moral energy.”  Unexpected praise for someone who writes (dated October 1965, in Folsom Prison):  ”I’m perfectly aware that I’m in prison, that I’m a Negro, that I’ve been a rapist, that I have a Higher Uneducation.”   But Soul on Ice, with its short, punchy chapters and outrageous pronouncements that somehow also ring true (”That growing numbers of white youth are repudiating their heritage of blood and taking people of color as their heroes and models is a tribute not only to their insight but to the resilience of the human spirit”) was absolutely riveting to hordes of readers, both black and white.  For blacks, here was a new literary hero–articulate and learned, but speaking in a voice that “sounded like ‘right now.’”  For whites, Cleaver was a hip, edgy answer to that desperate Sixties question:  ”What does the Negro want?”   In some ways, especially in retrospect, Soul on Ice looks like the kitchen sink.  As perhaps befits the man who became the “Minister of Information” for the Black Panthers, Cleaver has something to say about everyone and everything: Baldwin and homosexuality (he’s against it), King, Malcolm X, LeRoi Jones, the United Nations, Elijah Muhammed, LBJ, FDR, JFK, Vietnam (”The black man’s interest lies in seeing a strong Vietnam which is not the puppet of white supremacy”), Norman Mailer, Castro, Muhammed Ali, Stepin Fetchit, the New Left, beatniks and Ginsberg, World War II, colonialism, Frederick Douglass and the Civil War.  There’s even a strikingly astute riff on Ian Fleming’s James Bond, who is “offering the whites a triumphant image of themselves.”  The book ends in a couple of chapters–I’m guessing most readers skipped these–that offer meandering and deeply misogynistic rantings about white women and black women.

A summertime 1968 bestseller

Soul on Ice was a sensational publishing phenomenon.  It showed up–in hardback–in the top ten of the New York Times Best Seller List (10th, to be exact) twice in late summer 1968–not a gigantic blockbuster, but still remarkable given its fellow occupants on the list (diet books, books about rich people and money, The Naked Ape).  It was in paperback–the version depicted here– that the book’s influence was most strongly felt.  Here, indeed, is a true icon of 1968:  the Black Man with Afro and furrowed brow, liberated from prison (in the background), posed with a clutch of white lilies, symbolizing . . . well, who knows?

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Evergreen:  Intellectual celebrities and leftist politics in the 1960s

Evergreen Review (rebranded in the 1960s as simply Evergreen) was founded in 1957, and for 16 years was one of America’s leading literary magazines, heavily laced with helpings of leftist politics.  Its roster of literary contributors was so iconic that surnames suffice: Nabokov, Sartre, Beckett, Camus, Burroughs, Mailer, Borges, Neruda, Sontag, Duras, Pinter, Stoppard.  In this issue there are pieces by Jack Kerouac (an excerpt from his novel Vanity of Duluoz, which appeared later that year, his last published work), Muriel Rukeyser, and Berton Roueche.  This issue also reproduces speeches and letters by Fidel Castro and by Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, captured and killed just a few months earlier.  This issue of Evergreen — especially with the stunning portrait by illustrator Paul Davis on the cover– represented the beginning of the secular canonization of Che.  In fact, this was the first time that this iconic image (based on a 1960 photograph) was published in the United States. So enraged were anti-Castro Cuban emigrés by this issue that Evergreen offices (in Greenwich Village, of course) were firebombed.

But on the inside . . .

Evergreen seems, in retrospect, to be an almost uncannily precise evocation of that pervasive phenomenon of the 1960s, trenchantly described two years later by Tom Wolfe:  ”radical chic.”  This is not a cheap, flaming radical rag or “zine”; note the newstand price of one dollar (Life that same year was 30 cents an issue; the New Yorker that month was still 35 cents, but would jump to 50 cents in September).  There are ads inside: mostly records (Judy Collins, Arlo Guthrie, Janis Ian); book clubs and publishers, including some offering “homosexual theme fiction;” and that great 2-page ad for “art posters,” the source for the Picasso “Don Quixote” prints that hung on untold thousands of walls of of college dorm rooms.  A color ad for Grand Marnier takes up the back cover.  There is some naughty stuff, too: a 7-page comic piece by satirist Michael O’Donoghue (later known for his work at National Lampoon and Saturday Night Live) with lots of color pix of a nude “go-go” girl after-hours at a discotheque.  Very soft-core porn, but also very idiotic– and more than a little bizarre, popping up just a few pages after a 2-page reproduction of the famous UPI photograph of Che’s dead body, eyes open, surrounded by his killers.

Evergreen ceased publication in 1973–more or less the same time the Sixties ended.

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Forty-one years ago:  the Soviets’ crushing of the “Prague Spring,” the “brave rebirth of national pride and expectation”

Forty-one years ago today, LIFE published an extraordinary 19-page story, with the magazine’s vivid trademark photographs, on the crushing of the “Prague Spring,” the Czechoslovakian experiment with openness and Socialist liberalism that LIFE called a “brief idyl of liberation, the brave rebirth of national pride and expectation.” The invasion of Czechoslovakia by nearly 5,000 Soviet tanks and 165,000 troops (along with forces from four other Soviet-bloc countries) had begun 10 days earlier, on Tuesday, August 20th.  The invaders were met by thousands of mostly youthful street-protesters, and though the confrontations turned violent–thirty-eight protesters were killed–there was no massive or official retaliation.

Meanwhile, in Chicago….

Halfway around the world, in Chicago, thousands of politicians and protesters were beginning to gather in anticipation of the Democratic Party’s national nominating convention.  And the events in Czechoslovakia weighed very heavily on both sides.  Senator George McGovern, a trailing candidate for the nomination that would eventually be won by Hubert Humphrey, lashed out at the Johnson administration, saying it must “bear a considerable part of the blame of the Soviet Union’s military takeover of Czechoslovakia.”  McGovern’s and others’ efforts to obtain an antiwar plank in the party’s platform were crumbling in the face of the Soviet actions.   The story in Czechoslovakia was, in America, refracted through the lens of the ongoing American debacle in Vietnam. McGovern spoke for many when he said: “You cannot justify intervention in Vietnam on the grounds that our security is threatened by a government 10,000 miles away without inviting the Russians to intervene because they feel threatened by a government on their own border.” (NYT 8/24/68).

Czechoslovakia and Vietnam: a 1968 linkage

In a lengthy editorial in this issue of LIFE, Thomas Griffith also made the linkage between the Soviet invasion and the war in Vietnam, especially the effect of the invasion on American politicians’ constantly shifting stances on the war.  ”In the past year, this nation has undergone a remarkable swing of opinion about the war in Vietnam–so much so that names like hawk and dove no longer fit.  The longing to get out is widespread, and peace with honor the common cry.”  Still, the “tanks of Prague” made it much less likely that Americans would look favorably on an end to the Vietnam war that entailed substantial concessions to the Communist North.

Covering Prague in 1968

The convergence of events in Prague and Chicago would have another, unexpected result in the way that 1968 was “covered.”  As reported by New York Times TV critic Jack Gould on August 23, 1968, The CBS Evening News expanded the night before from a half hour (it had been a 15-minute show only 5 years earlier) to a full hour “because of the heavy volume of news,” and said that the format afforded “a less hurried presentation of the day’s developments,” and lessened “the need for the compression of stories into cryptic bulletins.”  Walter Cronkite presided over an hour of news that focused in its first half on Czechoslovakia and world reaction, and in the 2nd half to developments at the DNC in Chicago, as well as to stories from Vietnam and Bogotá (a visit by Pope Paul VI). “Easing the tyranny of time that always hangs so heavily over electronic journalists might have interesting and fruitful consequences,” Gould concluded.  The expansion of the nightly news to a full hour did not last, but exactly a month later, CBS would launch a one-hour news program called 60 Minutes.  More on the debut of that durable show in a later post.

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“Covering 1968″ will not strive to adhere to an “on this day in 1968″ pattern–but this particular cover of TV Guide just fell into my lap, and the coincidence of dates was irresistible.  Exactly 41 years ago, delegates to the Republican National Convention in Miami nominated Richard Nixon to be their candidate for president, setting into motion a tumultuous cascade of events that we will no doubt revisit again in later posts.

We will also come back to TV Guide itself again (and again) in future posts, and we’ll no doubt also revisit the two major political conventions of 1968.  For the moment, let’s just consider this image and what’s behind it– made perhaps all the more timely since the recent death of Walter Cronkite, the last survivor of this foursome.

The cover depicts the four anchor men of the three major television news shows:  David Brinkley and Chet Huntley of NBC; Cronkite of CBS; and Howard K. Smith of ABC.  In the context of TV Guide, this photo itself is extraordinary. In 1968, TV Guide was essentially the only popular magazine devoted to television–its business, programming, and celebrities.  Cover acreage was thus valuable real estate, and–not surprisingly–it usually went to television stars, often in groups, smiling and upbeat and appealing (and salesworthy).  Appearing on other summer 1968 TV Guide covers were Barbara Eden (”I Dream of Jeannie”); Johnny Carson; the stars of the various Andy Griffith shows and spinoffs; the “Gentle Ben” stars (including the eponymous bear); the “Star Trek” stars; the “Gunsmoke” stars.  Here, by contrast, is a cover with four dark-suited, middle-aged men, not looking at the camera, not particularly dour, but serious nonetheless.  In my memory (I was not quite 18 that summer), the anchors were all old men.  In fact, in August 1968, Huntley was 56; Brinkley 48; Cronkite 51; and Smith 54.  All middle-aged, male, white, World War II veterans–words that could also describe most members of Congress and anybody running for president.   These four men would be leading (”anchoring,” in the newly coined terminology) the coverage of the August conventions for the three (and only) national TV networks.  All of the networks would be liberally larding their coverage with comments from pundits– Gore Vidal, Art Buchwald, William F. Buckley, Eric Sevareid, Edwin Newman.  These four men and their acolytes were incredibly powerful cultural figures, but had become so only recently; the half-hour “CBS Nightly New with Walter Cronkite” had debuted just five years earlier.

An ad in this issue for the CBS coverage of the convention starting that week in Miami said that it would be “the most significant Republican convention of our generation.”    Television had been covering (to some extent) the national nominating conventions since 1948, and this year they would be broadcasting in color for the first time.  CBS and NBC would be offering “gavel-to-gavel” coverage, as had become their practice, and ABC would offer 90-minute nightly reports (with the option of pre-empting shows if something big happened).  As the lead article in this issue pointed out, “national political conventions are rapidly being calcified (thanks partly to TV) into ritual four-day affairs into fewer and fewer surprises”– a remarkable statement to anybody who thinks that pre-ordained, stultifying conventions are a recent phenomenon.

I was struck by the fact that ABC had already started opting out of wall-to-wall coverage of convention proceedings (or maybe they never opted in).  Surely they hoped this would be good for ratings, since ABC was always a distant third behind the two other networks.  This was also good news for TV watchers who were not fans of calcification.  On August 8, 1968, the night of Nixon’s acceptance speech in Miami (six years to the day before his resignation speech at the White House), viewers in the Twin Cities TV market could avoid NBC and CBS convention filler and catch ABC’s “Bewitched” and “That Girl” before tuning into convention coverage.  Or could flip over to NET (National Educational Television, the precursor of PBS) and watch “The French Chef” with Julia Child, followed by a show called “Yard ‘N Garden.”  Or, in Minneapolis, you could keep the dial on the local “independent” station and skip Nixon’s speech entirely by watching a 1959 movie starring Paul Muni: “The Last Angry Man.”   Talk about coincidences.

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