1968

From the sight lines in Berkeley, California, where I lived then and live now, I recall 1968 as a year of horror and bad faith, fervor and despair. Most of all, there was the sense of knowing that when you drew a breath you were breathing history along with the air, or the smoke—but that doesn’t mean you knew what history was, or would be. History was being made in the instant, which said nothing about what would be included in the books yet to be written, or left out of them, as if what goes in or what goes out stays the same. These names made history in 1968: John Carlos, Bob Beamon, Tommie Smith. They were shouted around the world. Which of them still echoes, which is barely a name at all? “Still the spirit of ’68,” John Lydon, born to the world as Johnny Rotten, sang in 1979 with his band PiL, when 1968, not a concept but a year, a real time, seemed much farther away than, as I write in 2008, in this year of media anniversaries, it does now. The song was “Albatross”; the singer sounded beaten down by history, 1968 a huge dead bird around his neck, but he also sounded as if he knew it was the wind at his back.

Berkeley was a lookout and a hideout. The great storm of student protest that would convulse the United States and nations well beyond it had begun there in 1964 with the Free Speech Movement. It was three months of daily speeches, marches, building occupations, and finally, played out in a Greek theater, high drama. That drama—a university in convocation with itself, everyone present, the leaders of the institution speaking quieting words, then a single student, standing to speak, immediately seized by police, an act of violence actually revealing the face of power behind the face of reasonableness—brought the moment to a close and opened a field that in the years to come would be crossed by thousands. But in 1968 the spirit that animated a simple demand for the free exercise of rights that students had assumed were theirs—because they had learned such a story in their classrooms and then, as if by instinct, began to put it into practice—had in the most familiar arena long since turned cheap and rote.

When in May of 1968 a rally was held in Berkeley to celebrate the poorly understood but exciting revolt taking place in France, activists distributed leaflets denouncing the police violence that had dispersed the rally before the rally had actually taken place. When students at Columbia University in New York, protesting what they saw as the university’s colonialist appropriation of property in Harlem, shut the school down—with the novel technique of occupying one building and then, when the police arrived, filing out, only to seize another building, and then another, and another—Berkeley radicals called on their fellows to “do a Columbia”: not for any reason, not in the face of any injustice or insult, but for lack of anything better to do.

With the Vietnam War all but rolling back across the Pacific to poison the United States itself, it was as if people turned to spectacular lies and glamorous trivialities to hide from themselves the fact that their imaginations had turned to ice. Truly enormous events taking place elsewhere did not travel. Word of the Prague Spring, even the meaning of the Soviet invasion that crushed it, arrived only in fragments, and no speaker stood up to put the pieces together. News of the massacre of scores—no, hundreds—of students in Mexico City, just before the Olympic Games were to begin there, was suppressed from the start, and so profoundly that the facts would take nearly forty years to come out of the ground. But in the United States few if any looked; curiosity about the world withered.

It’s clear now that the signal song of that year, the song with which Bob Dylan has for years, to this day, closed his concerts, was “All along the Watchtower”—a song that...