Election Day 1968

This week’s 2010 Congressional elections –even though it was a non-presidential year– got me to thinking about 1968, when Richard Nixon came to power, finally.  It was exactly 42 years ago today that the American electorate, battered and battle-weary from the violence of 1968, went to the polls.  But the numbers were so close that everyone went to bed on election night without a concession from the loser or a victory speech from the winner.  In the end, Republican Richard Nixon prevailed over Democratic nominee Hubert H. Humphrey by 512,000 votes–about one percent of the total popular vote.  The balance went to independent and Southern segregationist governor George Wallace.   Wallace, in fact, prevailed in five Southern states–the last third-party presidential candidate to carry any states in the Electoral College.  On the Congressional side, things didn’t look so good for the new president, either:  Nixon entered the White House as the first president in more than a century to start off without a majority of his own party in both houses of Congress.

“The Nixon Era”:  Isn’t that ALL of the 1960s?  Richard Nixon would probably have thought so.  He had run — and lost– for president in 1960, and despite his well-publicized subsequent failures–especially the humiliating loss for California governor in 1962 (”You’re not going to have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore”)–Nixon was always THERE, always plotting and scheming and politicking, and making himself the inevitable nominee at the convention in Miami in August 1968.

LIFE reminded readers in this post-election issue that the campaign had been marked by “rousing unenthusiasm” for the candidates, that “the overworked word charisma dropped from the political vocabulary, because there was no one to apply it to.”  Still, LIFE thought that Nixon was the better of the two major candidates, and they hoped that — even in a “year of such shock and cleavage”– that the new president would do as he had promised:  ”Bring us together.”

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Before the deluge:  January 1968

Fairly soon into the calendar year 1968, things began to feel a little rocky, but here, in the first week of the year, there is still an odd kind of stasis.

The cover of this Newsweek, headlined “Politics ‘68,” features only Republicans.

Of course.

Lyndon B. Johnson was still ruling the White House and the country, and although support for LBJ had been eroding steadily since his 1964 landslide–especially since the worsening news from Vietnam and the gruesome race riots of summer 1967–there was every reason to believe he would not only be the Democrats’ candidate, but also be re-elected.  So the scrappy business of “politics” was going to be left to the band of GOP hopefuls depicted here (in a cartoon instantly recognizable as David Levine’s, actually rather tame by Levine’s later, savage standards) astride an elephant’s trunk:  Nixon in the lead, as he already was in the polls, and as he would remain all the way through his victory in November, followed by three Republican governors: George Romney (MI), Nelson Rockefeller (NY), and Ronald Reagan (CA); and way at the back, Illinois senator Chuck Percy, one of the last of the dying breed of centrist, patrician Republicans.   Inside the magazine, “Dixiecrat” George Wallace’s “backlashy third-party crusade” is swatted away as “more black-humor caricature than campaign.”  (He would go on in November to carry eight states outright.)

In January 1968, this magazine could feature an article headed: “The Assassination” without causing any confusion:   The news here was about New Orleans D.A. Jim Garrison’s investigation into the “conspiracy” surrounding JFK’s murder, barely four years in the past.  In January 1968, Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., were still alive.

The big news–besides the upcoming election–was “the mighty U.S. economy, churning into its eighth straight year of unbroken prosperity.”   As The 1968 Project recalls the year’s horrors and turbulence, the inequalities and violence, it’s instructive to remember that all of this occurred against a backdrop of increasing affluence for vast numbers of Americans.  Given the recession miseries since 2008, it’s astonishing to read this statement about the country in 1968:  ”In a world of want, the booming economy had created no fewer than 3 million new jobs; those who had jobs made more money than they ever had in their lives.  With rare unanimity, economists looking to 1968 predicted . . . another flood of riches from the cornucopia.”

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TONY CURTIS 1925-2010

One of the quintessential Hollywood stars of the 20th century–Tony Curtis–died this week at age 85.  He had been a huge star, mostly in zany comedies, starting in the late 1950s.  There had been a few detours into drama and historical spectacle:  he appeared in the Roman epic Spartacus in 1960, and received an Oscar nomination (the only one of his career) for Best Actor in 1958 for The Defiant Ones, a race drama pitting him against a character played by Sidney Poitier. Poitier was also nominated, but both men lost to David Niven, who won for Separate Tables.  Other losers were Paul Newman (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof) and Spencer Tracy (Old Man and the Sea).   Good company.

Although he would saunter delightfully through comedies like Some Like it Hot and Operation Petticoat (both 1959), Tony Curtis craved that Oscar, according to Hollywood lore.  And so, with his career sliding in the late 1960s, he launched an aggressive campaign to snag the part of Albert DeSalvo, “the Boston Strangler,” in the planned biopic.  DeSalvo, convicted in 1967 of a series of rapes and murders committed in 1962-64, was, at the times of the killings, about ten years younger than Curtis (age 42) would be in 1968.   But Curtis pursued the part by losing weight and changing his face with makeup and a fake nose, and eventually beat out more than 200 other actors tested for the part–or so the PR info goes.

This cover feature in the Post is a classic “golden age” Hollywood profile– it goes on for pages, filled with loving photographs and emotionally “revealing” anecdotes.   It’s clearly part of a carefully orchestrated publicity campaign for Curtis and the movie.  The Boston Strangler, directed by Richard Fleischer, was released on October 16, 1968.  Curtis received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actor (he lost to Peter O’Toole in The Lion in Winter), but was overlooked at Oscar time that year.

For fans of Tony Curtis (and I am one of them), there’s only one thing to say here, and that’s to repeat the last line of his greatest movie, Some Like It Hot:  ”Nobody’s perfect.”

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“Are We Heading to the Day Everything Stops?” The query (the headline omitting, oddly, the question mark) comes from the editors of the venerable but by this time shaky Saturday Evening Post near the end of 1968.  The apocalyptic overtones of the headline notwithstanding, you have to admit that the cover illustration is kind of fabulous, almost festive.  Maybe they thought about this hitting the mailboxes right before Christmas, and wanted the Post’s readers to have a little fun?

Cities of Tomorrow

The cover is by illustrator Gene Holtan, and he clearly turned to classic futuristic cartoons and illustrations of the turn of the last century, ca. 1890-1910, for inspiration.  (If you want to see more of these and other visions of “yesterday’s tomorrows,” set your dial to www.paleofuture.com).  Inspired–”horrified” might be a better word–by the nightmarishly exploding growth of cities both upward and outward, illustrators conjured cities of the future jammed with impossibly tall skyscrapers, criss-crossed and pierced by fantastic transit systems, their towers strafed by phalanxes of flying machines, their streets and stacked-up highways choked with a gridlock of wheeled conveyances, their people– well, “people,” per se, can hardly be glimpsed.

Gridlock and “Near Collapse”

The editors of the Saturday Evening Post suggest here that 1968 was similarly full of warning bells–and this time the “future shock” had to do with massive infrastructural gridlock.  ”We are going very fast just to stay where we are,” the editors write.  The nation has a choice of where it will be in 25 years (that is, 1993):  ”Either an efficiently computerized and integrated transportation system . . . or an air-land-and-sea traffic jam so enormous that it will bring our entire society to a virtual standstill.”  There is an article on the nation’s urban freeways and the choking rush-hour traffic; interestingly, two of the aerial views are of jammed freeways that were, in fact, subsequently torn down or buried (San Francisco’s Embarcadero elevated freeway and Boston’s “Big Dig”).  A scary article follows about the air-traffic control system (”approaching near collapse,” with “200 near-collisions a month”).

The solution?  ”Automated highways.  500-mile-an-hour trains. Underground ‘bullets’ linking our cities. . . . But we’ve barely begun.”

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MAN OF THE YEAR

TIME magazine’s “Man of the Year” issue, begun in 1927 with its cover story on aviator Charles A. Lindbergh, has long since become an American institution, and is still the best-known feature of the magazine, now struggling for survival, like all general interest news magazines.  The annual announcement of the TIME editors’ choice was always a front-page news event in itself, though I wonder how many people were paying attention last week when this year’s choice–the Fed’s Ben Bernanke– was announced.

MEN AND WOMEN AND PEOPLE (and non-people) OF THE YEAR

Browsing the whole 82-year list is, however, an instructive way to pass the time.  (You can do it, of course, online at http://bit.ly/6PSngy).  The chosen one is supposed to be the “person who has affected our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”  (About that “good or ill” phrase:  Bad guys are rarely chosen–Hitler in 1938; Iran’s Ayatollah in 1980; and that’s about it.)  The list is a good source for trivia buffs:  the first “Woman of the Year”? Wallis Warfield Simpson, 1936; the first “Man and Wife [that's what it says] of the Year”?  Mr. and Mrs. Chiang Kai-shek,  1937; the first “collective” Man of the Year?  The American Fighting Man, 1950.  (There were other collective choices in the 1960s: “Young People,” 1966; and “Middle Americans,” 1969).  The first (and so far only) non-human?  ”The Machine of the Year,” about personal computers in 1982.   When did the feature change to “Person of the Year”?  1999, with Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com.

1968′S CHOICE:  A TOUGH DECISION

It cannot have been an easy task for the TIME editors to choose the magazine’s 1968 Man of the Year, and clearly the decision was made at the last minute–since the Apollo VIII astronauts were still in outer space during the last week of the year.  My guess is that there were many other candidates who ended up on the cutting room floor:  Martin Luther King?  (He had been the choice in 1963).  Robert Kennedy?  Richard Nixon?  (He would be named twice in the coming years). George Wallace?  The Protesters at the Democratic National Convention?  The Czech Resistance, or Alexander Dubcek?  (the “Hungarian Freedom Fighter” had been named in 1956).

Not surprisingly, given the multiple “candidates,” all of them with some potential controversial baggage, the editors made a “feel-good,” forward-looking choice with the Apollo VIII crew.  Of course, the editors were also paying homage to the American space program, heretofore absent from the “Man of the Year” rolls.  (The 1968 choice also trumped, in advance, the men who actually landed on the Moon in 1969, as well as the crew of the Challenger who died in 1986.)  As they entered their orbit of the Moon on Christmas Eve 1968, the crew, William Anders, Jim Lovell, and Frank Borman, read a passage from the book of Genesis (”In the beginning . . . “) in what became the most watched television broadcast of its time.

A NEW AGE

With its characteristically florid prose, TIME honored this 1968 crew:  ”In the closing days of 1968, all mankind could exult in the vision of a new universe. For all its upheavals and frustrations, the year would be remembered to the end of time for the dazzling skills and Promethean daring that sent mortals around the moon. It would be celebrated as the year in which men saw at first hand their little earth entire, a remote, blue-brown sphere hovering like a migrant bird in the hostile night of space.

“The year’s transcendent legacy may well be that in Christmas week 1968, the human race glimpsed not a new continent or a new colony, but a new age, one that will inevitably reshape man’s view of himself and his destiny.”

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In the years before his disturbing breakout “hit,” Eraserhead (1977), the idiosyncratic David Lynch (director of the films Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive and the creepily addictive 1980s TV series Twin Peaks) made a number of experimental short films.  ”The Alphabet” from 1968 was his second.  Along with five other works from this period, it is collected on a DVD, The Short Films of David Lynch, released in 2002.  Lynch made “The Alphabet” when he was 22 and a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia.  He submitted it to the newly formed (1967) American Film Institute, and on the strength of the film, he was awarded a grant to produce his next short film, The Grandmother.

Just under four minutes long, the film is nevertheless recognizable as pure Lynch: strange, surrealistic, dark, bloody.  With its sing-song alphabet soundtrack and gruesome imagery, it’s kind of like Le Chien Andalou meets Sesame Street.

You can watch the entire “Alphabet” online here:  http://www.openculture.com/2009/10/david_lynchs_early_short_film.html.

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Forty-one years ago today, the Army’s 25th Infantry Division–known in Vietnam as “Tropic Lightning”–published this poem in the Thanksgiving issue of their newsletter.  (The image with this post is the Division’s official 1968 Christmas card.)  Read the entire issue of the newsletter.

The Square American’s Job:
Preserve & Build Our Land

You’ve heard of the ‘Square American?’  You know him well - the farmer, factory hand, businessman, secretary or housewife, from the plains, the small towns, the crowded sidewalks of the big cities.

Since 1776 they have been doing a job without praise or fanfare - a job of building our country.  Collectively, they are the ‘Square American.’

They salute the flag in unison with a Second-Class Scout when he says, “I pledge allegiance…”

They stand each time the Colors pass at a parade.

They “oh” and “ah” at fireworks on July 4th and applaud with tears in eyes when a band plays “America the Beautiful.”

They look on in amazement and disgust as a small minority, who call themselves Americans, perform acts of civil disobedience.

These are the ‘Square Americans’; the majority of the folks back home.

They are proud of their American heritage, proud of their country’s continued fight to preserve the freedom of other nations, as well as their own.  And most of all, proud of you - the American soldier; and proud of the job you are doing in Vietnam.

Yes, we have a lot to be thankful for - we are Americans.

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Travel back in time…..

If you suddenly found yourself transported back to a scruffy college apartment in 1968 and you scanned the worn spines of the paperbacks lined up on the bricks-and-board bookshelves, you would stand an excellent chance of finding one of Richard Brautigan’s “trilogy” of 1960s novellas: A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964); Trout Fishing in America (1967), or In Watermelon Sugar, published June 14, 1968.

A far-out comic strip

Richard Brautigan, born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1935, was a struggling “Beat” poet in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s and 1960s, but struck it rich, literally, in 1967 with Trout Fishing, still considered by most critics as his seminal work.  He actually had written his next published work, In Watermelon Sugar, several years earlier–from May 13, 1964 to July 19, 1964, to be exact, a fact he adds to the book’s last page.   Sugar runs to just 137 pages, and is divided into very short chapters, some only a few words long.  Poet and longtime Brautigan friend Michael McClure has likened it to the comic strips that both he and Brautigan grew up reading in Washington State: “Part of what he did was to make far-out comic strips, but with an enormous, liberated imagination, using only words, and childhood, and everything he ever felt, or saw, or thought that fit in.”  (McClure’s memoir of Brautigan–along with many others–is available online at www.brautigan.net.)

A hippie Gothic novel?

In Watermelon Sugar is an odd tale, told by an unnamed narrator (who is also a writer), of a commune-like group of people (”There are about 375 of us here in watermelon sugar”), living amidst forests and rivers, most of them employed at the “Watermelon Works,” where watermelons are reduced to sugar that is magically transformed into just about anything: clothing, windows, entire houses.  The people work watermelon sugar “into the shape of this thing that we have: our lives.”  A group of renegade men become shiftless alcoholics and commit mass suicide.  Another character, a jilted lover of the narrator, hangs herself from a tree.  Talking tigers once roamed the area, attacking and eating people, including the narrator’s parents in one particularly gruesome scene, one of several that give the novel a kind of “hippie Gothic” feel.

Nostalgia or enduring literature?

Brautigan continued to write novels and poetry into the 1970s and 1980s, though his star dimmed quickly after about 1970. (He committed suicide in 1984.) Critically, he still appears to have some champions today–he is variously compared to everyone from Hemingway to Turgenev, from Baudelaire and Rimbaud to Kafka and Jack London.  In popular terms, my sense is that Brautigan doesn’t have much of a following. He seems to have been consigned to the netherworld of Beat/hippie nostalgia.

An Baby-boomer commenter on the GoodReads website posted this about In Watermelon Sugar:  ”I was absolutely besotted with this book and now I can’t remember why, but I carried it around with me in high school and just thumbed through it and soaked it up. I suppose it was everything I wanted, but couldn’t have–freedom on all levels for a small-town girl stuck in a small school full of small people. This was my mantra for escape and it opened up many doors–some good and some bad, but all leading to the same right place and that was my own mind and my own opinions.  Also, I loved the picture on the cover–I wanted that hair, that hippie happy dream look.  We were all so earnest then.”

The uncommon sense of the Brautigan mind

Poet, novelist and teacher Keith Abbott has written extensively about his longtime friend Richard Brautigan.  In this passage, he brilliantly links Brautigan’s language with the cultural world his readers were living in:

“His best writing came from the same source as his weakness in life: an awesome ability to ignore common sense and concentrate on the uncommon sense which his mind was constantly stewing up. If it is true that the brain contains layers of filters for experience, then Brautigan’s lacked some, for he could see things in startlingly primal ways—his major connection to the psychedelic generation. When he wrote in Trout Fishing in America that a mother’s nagging voice was ‘filled with sand and string,’ it made sense to kids who were listening to the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby keeping her face in a jar by the door or to Bob Dylan’s song about a conductor who ’smoked my eyelids and punched my cigarette.’ And, for people who were being busted down to point zero by LSD, Richard’s use of simple and direct speech was a natural. The irony is that he himself never took psychedelic drugs, preferring wine or whiskey. http://www.brautigan.net/memoirs.html

Any memories of reading Richard Brautigan?  Is anybody under thirty reading him today ?

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Comedian and actor Bill Cosby was recently awarded the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor by the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, and that reminded me of this comic book in my possession–a memento of one of his earlier public triumphs, as “Scotty” in the 1960s TV series “I Spy.”

A boatload of Bond spinoffs

Bill Cosby was already a huge pop culture star by 1965, when he was tapped–in a loudly trumpeted publicity campaign–for a new TV series to be called “I Spy,” part of the entertainment industry’s frenetic scramble to cash in on the James Bond money machine, which was in full roar by 1965. That was the year Thunderball hit the big screen, and the TV airwaves were filling up with shows like The Man from UNCLE, Wild Wild West, and Mission: Impossible.

Cosby the comic becomes Cosby the actor

By 1965, Cosby had already appeared many times on television as a standup comic, and had released three albums of his comedy routines.  He was rich, famous, and beloved by both black and white audiences and record buyers.  Although known for the hilarious characters he created for his routines in tales drawn largely from his childhood (e.g., “Fat Albert”), he was untried as an actor when he started on “I Spy.” Cosby played Alexander (”Scotty”) Scott, the trainer and buddy of international tennis bum “Kelly Robinson,” played by Robert Culp.   As the inside cover of this comic tells us:  ”Kelly and Scotty don’t like to use guns. Their chief weapons are brains and ingenuity and their camouflaged identities.”

A first for black America

Cosby was the first African-American actor to be cast in a lead role in an dramatic series on television, a fact that took on added urgency and relevance by the time “I Spy” debuted–September 15, 1965, just four weeks after the shocking and brutal riots in the crumbling black neighborhood of Watts in Los Angeles.  ”I Spy,” though featuring a black and a white actor in a close, bantering relationship, was notable for pointedly avoiding references to race and racial differences.  Cosby went on to win the Emmy award for best lead dramatic actor three times, in 1966, 1967, and 1968 (each time edging out his co-star).  The series ended in 1968, just about the time this comic was issued–the same year that Cosby pressed three more comedy albums and became America’s top-selling male recording artist.

Scotty and Kelly take on guerillas–and win, of course.

I know I watched “I Spy” devotedly, but I can’t for the life of me remember a single episode or moment.  I vaguely remember exotic locales and jocular dialogue, and that’s about it.  I didn’t expect much from the story in this comic, but it is interesting in at least one respect.  It features “the guys” on a mission that takes them to Brazil and Venezuela, which are beset by terrorist raids by Communist (though that word is never used) guerillas, using weapons smuggled in from “Iron Curtain” countries.  The leader is a man known as “K. Warra,” who bears more than a passing resemblance to Che Guevara, wearing a beret and sporting a scraggly beard.  He’s actually an American, “Clarence Copperfield,” trained by the Green Berets, who has now joined the “movement to overthrow the people’s oppressors.”   When captured, he dismisses Kelly and Scotty as “paid hirelings of the imperialist government that rules my home,”  and when he escapes (temporarily) he shouts “as long as I am free, the red tide of the future rolls on!”

Classic 1960s agitprop — pretty heady stuff for the kids reading this comic book.

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