Charles Dickens, at the start of A Tale of Two Cities, his novel of the French Revolution, portrays 1789 as a magical year that crystallized “the best of times” and “the worst of times” within itself. Living through 1968 in America felt like this, though “the best” was concentrated in the year’s first half, and “the worst” in its last. “The best” of 1968—indeed, the whole idea of “1968”—lay in the fusion of the mass movement against the Vietnam War with cultural currents that had flourished and grown all through the 1960s. The clichés that our mass media used to describe them—“the counterculture,” “sex, drugs, rock-and-roll,” “the greening of America”—for once conveyed something real. The uncanny feeling of “1968,” of what it was like to be here then, was that somehow, maybe for fifteen minutes, all these pretentious labels were real.

In America, the cauldron that overflowed in ’68 had been boiling for years before. I think it started in the late 1950s, when the small, student-run civil rights movement started stopping traffic on street corners, in bus terminals, in front of department stores. Their crucial idea, which they themselves may not have fully grasped, was doing politics in the street. Street life gradually took on a new meaning, a new gravity and depth. Early in the sixties, street fairs came from nowhere and throve everywhere, in cities all over the country; everywhere they revealed a thickness and richness of street life that nobody had thought was there. This surprise upgrading of the street was the back-story behind the great sixties street romances of Jane Jacobs, of Paul Goodman, of Motown’s “Dancing in the Street.” Our real “urban renewal” was that Americans came to recognize their city streets as public space, as the heart of democratic life. Without anybody planning it, the streets of the sixties became the greenhouses where both our antiwar movement and our counter-culture grew.

The early months of 1968 unfolded a series of thrilling moments. First, Senator Eugene McCarthy dared to challenge President Lyndon Johnson, made a trenchant analysis of the war, and then, in early primaries, did remarkably well. Then Robert Kennedy finally entered the presidential race and spoke with a horizon far wider than McCarthy’s; he addressed not only the war, but what was wrong in the country as a whole, and how the whole of American society was falling apart. Martin Luther King, Jr., wasn’t running for office, but trying to lead a Poor People’s Campaign; he made the connection clear between America’s racism, its exploitation of workers, and its imperial destruction of large parts of the world. What made early 1968 such a thrill was that these great men were acting heroically, taking risks, stretching themselves; that they were not only telling the truth, but telling complex truths that didn’t fit easy formulas; and that truth was paying off for them. At the end of March, Johnson performed his own one heroic act: he recognized himself as an obstacle to peace and took himself out of the presidential campaign. My mother and I saw him say this on television, and we both thought, “Wow!” Maybe now our country could find a way out of its maze? It felt like a terrific moment to be alive.

But then King was killed, and hundreds of blocks around the country were burned down. And then, for the next two months, supporters of McCarthy and supporters of Kennedy acted like they could kill each other. In fact, these two groups of liberal Democrats stood for very similar things. By challenging a popular president, both had shown plenty of guts. (McCarthy, who had moved first with few resources of his own, showed more guts, but I thought Kennedy would make a better president.) But both groups of supporters had whipped themselves up into frenzies of rage and hate, and convinced themselves there was no way they could live with each other; if their man lost, they would vote for Nixon—since the other was just as bad as Nixon—or else they would vote for a third-party candidate (lethal in a close election), or they would stay home and abstain. In the end, after Kennedy was assassinated and the Democratic National Convention chose Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, as the candidate, the poison spread through the summer and into the fall. Democratic peaceniks destroyed each other, and the truly dangerous Nixon stepped over the bodies.

The presidential election that brought Nixon to power, and 1968 to an end, disclosed another crucial feature of the sixties that I and people on the left would rather leave out: our streets and our cities were turning into very violent places; if they were greenhouses, many of their plants were poison. Then as now, most discourse about urban violence (and there was plenty) blamed lower-class blacks. But the November triumph of Nixon and his demagogic “Southern strategy,” a long-term disaster that still poisons American political life, grew directly out of violence perpetrated by left/liberal middle-class whites against other left/liberal middle-class whites.

As Peter Fonda’s character proclaims in the last line of Easy Rider, the cinematic hit of 1969, “We blew it.” With all our degrees, we didn’t know who we were. With all our greening, we burned and crashed in self-destructive rage. The great Walt Kelly, creator of Pogo Possum, offers a line that tells us more about 1968 than we want to know: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”


A YEAR or two ago, a couple of years into the Iraq War, I felt we were learning. There was a brilliant song by John Fogerty, “Déjà Vu (All Over Again),” that compared what we were learning from the Iraq War today with the knowledge we achieved in the Vietnam War. “Day by day,” he sang, “I hear the voices rising/Started with a whisper like it did before/Day by day we count the dead and dying.” The song’s refrain is



It’s a sad song, sung like a dirge, yet optimistic, affirming faith in “that voice inside you” and in our capacity to read “the writing on the wall,” to see through what is being done to us and done in our name. It’s saturated with irony: Fogerty in his youth was a star, right in the middle of the Vietnam War—his songs were loved by soldiers, it was said; then, for years, he disappeared from sight; now, in the midst of another imperial war, he is hoping to be heard again.

As the Iraq War went on, several strong Democratic candidates emerged, all offering powerful critiques of the war and promises to end it soon. Two of these candidates, Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, supported President Bush and his call to war in 2003. (I thought that Hillary was signaling her supporters that it was Against Her Better Judgment; Edwards-watchers say the same about him.) Barack Obama was against the war from the start, and predicted exactly what was going to happen; but it could be that he felt freer to speak precisely because he was out of federal office in 2003, and so beyond presidential reprisal. The point is, their positions aren’t all that different. This is also true about their positions on health care, on education, and so on. But their supporters overflow with spleen and malice. With such friends, they don’t need enemies! Thus Clinton supporters insinuate that Obama is a secret Muslim, subsidized by various Arab dictators; Obama supporters vilify Bill Clinton more or less in GOP language, and say that he simply dictates Hillary’s positions on everything, and that she has no mind of her own. Both candidates are smart, sophisticated people, but both are surrounded by followers who are dragging them (and us) down.

Can’t they see that whoever gets nominated, these two will have to work together over the long haul? Don’t they know they need each other? They have a future together, and all of us have a future with them—and with John Edwards as well. In the winter of ’08, many smart people seem to be losing touch with what they know. The learned ignorance of this moment gives me the creeps. It takes me back to the McCarthy-Kennedy campaign, and the Siege of Chicago, and “We blew it,” and Nixon taking over; that’s my Déjà vu All Over Again. I hope Clinton and Obama will get a grip, and help us all overcome 1968.

Marshall Berman’s latest book is New York Calling, co-edited with Brian Berger.

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