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eugene mccarthy
Thank You, President Biden. Now Do the Right Thing.
Don't let history fool you. Trump can be destroyed, but only if those in a position of power show the courage that's needed. It’s now up to Biden's inner circle and the leaders of the Democratic Party to make the correct decision.
Jun 30, 2024
By showing his age and fragility in the debate, President Joe Biden did us all a big favor. There now is a possibility, still slight but higher than before, that he will bow out of the race and not run again.
On November 20, 2023, I wrote a column—titled "Who Has the Courage to Tell Joe Biden Not to Run?"—that asked Biden to drop out. I took heat for that, even from my friends and colleagues. I heard all kinds of arguments, ranging from “He’s a great president and deserves another term,” to “It’s too late to do anything about it.” I was also accused of being a defeatist and some said that my attitude would weaken Biden and help Trump win.
After Biden gave his energetic State of the Union address, the finger wagging accelerated: “See, Biden clearly has the wherewithal to crush Trump,” friends said. I was not convinced. But, after Biden’s Thursday night debate performance, a lot more people became unconvinced. He looked old and spoke even older, that was undeniable.
It’s now up to Biden and the leaders of the Democratic Party. Do they have the guts to tell Biden not to run? Do any of the younger presidential hopefuls have the nerve to speak out? Does Biden have the guts to withdraw?
It is past time to listen to what the Democratic rank and file have been saying all along. They want someone younger to do combat with Trump. While I’m usually a poll skeptic, Biden’s approval numbers are pathetic. The president stood at just 37 percent as of June 24, and that number hardly budged even after the surprisingly strong SOTU address. That polling weakness, I believe, reflects less on the president’s job performance than on how he looks and acts on the job.
Unfortunately, the primaries have been completed and no significant Democrat has showed the nerve to oppose him. That leaves it up to Biden to decide, and in the aftermath of the debate debacle, he and his team say they’re running harder than ever... right over the cliff!
But that could change if his poll numbers further deteriorate and if enough Democratic leaders feel they might lose as well in the fall if Biden heads the ticket.
Misreading History
Pundits have encouraged the Democrat’s cowardice by claiming that defeat always follows when a sitting president is challenged by one of his own party. The poster child for this story is 1968, when Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota took on President Lyndon Johnson in the primaries. McCarthy’s strength led Johnson to withdraw, and for party regulars to engineer the nomination of Vice President Hubert Humphrey. This ended with the victory of Richard Nixon in the general election.
That’s not the way I see it. I challenge all comers to a historical duel about 1968 politics. I think that election was entirely winnable by Humphrey had he taken a mild anti-Vietnam War position a bit sooner during his fall campaign.
That pivotal year is worth reviewing. In 1968, there were 536,000 U.S. troops in Vietnam killing and being killed in large numbers. The Tet Offensive showed the American public that the Johnson administration had been lying when describing our success conducting the war. It was clear that America was not winning. McCarthy challenged the sitting president with a strong anti-war message, appealing to the support of young people in the growing anti-war movement. (About one million men were drafted into the armed forces from 1965 to 1968.) Thousands flocked to his campaign, going door-to-door in New Hampshire where McCarthy gained 42 percent of the Democratic primary vote. The next primary was to take place in Wisconsin and following his New Hampshire scare Johnson knew he was sure to lose. On March 30, LBJ dropped out of the race, and on April 2 McCarthy won Wisconsin by 57 to 35 percent.
With Johnson out, Humphrey became the Democratic Party establishment candidate, but then Robert Kennedy jumped in, making it a three-man race. On April 4, Dr. Martin King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis and riots broke out in 100 cities across the country, leading to 43 deaths and the mobilization of National Guard units and the military occupation of several U.S. cities. Disruption and chaos had the upper hand, and by the time of the California primary, on June 4, it was clear that Kennedy, would defeat McCarthy and become the leader of the anti-war Democrats. Sadly, he was assassinated that night in Los Angeles, greatly weakening the anti-war electoral efforts.
The August 26-29 Democratic convention, held in Chicago, turned into a riot, a police riot, as the Chicago police—under the control of Mayor Richard Daley—viciously attacked the generally peaceful anti-war demonstrators. Anti-war convention delegates, and even CBS’s Dan Rather, were beaten as Daley turned his political machine into a ramrod for the Humphrey campaign. The carnage was broadcast live on TV.
After Kennedy’s murder it was a forgone conclusion that Humphrey would become the Democratic nominee. But the key political event at the tumultuous convention turned out to be the vote on a rather mild peace plank for the Democratic Party platform, something that the Kennedy and McCarthy delegates hoped to salvage for their efforts. But LBJ, pulling the strings, refused to compromise and the plank was narrowly defeated.
I try to avoid the prediction game, but I am willing to go out on a limb on this one: If Biden stays in, we get Trump. If a younger Democrat becomes the nominee, Trump will get crushed.
That fall, Vice President Humphrey ran against the former Vice President Nixon, who based his campaign on law and order, scaring the newly concocted “Silent Majority,” and criticizing the riots and anti-war demonstrations that were ripping through the country. Nixon also claimed to have a plan to end the war in Vietnam that he would reveal at his inauguration, which turned out to be an appealing lie. Humphrey, an organization man nearly to the end, stayed loyal to the unpopular LBJ positions and fell behind by 44 to 27 percent in a September 27 Gallop poll.
On September 30, 1968, Humphrey finally broke ranks with LBJ in a nationwide speech. He announced that he would put an end to the bombing in Vietnam and would call for a ceasefire. This brought McCarthy and many of his supporters, as well as Kennedy supporters, into the Humphrey campaign, quickly narrowing the gap. But with only a month to go Humphrey didn’t quite get there: Nixon won 43.4 percent to Humphrey’s 42.7 percent, with segregationist George Wallace netting 15.5 percent.
I believe any objective analyst would conclude that had Democrats supported the peace plank at the convention or had Humphrey offered his peace plan sooner, he would have won. So please don’t use 1968 to tell us that if Biden withdraws, the Democrats are sure to lose, (which is what Kaitlin Collins said on CNN the night after the debate.)
I try to avoid the prediction game, but I am willing to go out on a limb on this one: If Biden stays in, we get Trump. If a younger Democrat becomes the nominee, Trump will get crushed.
It’s now up to Biden and the leaders of the Democratic Party. Do they have the guts to tell Biden not to run? Do any of the younger presidential hopefuls have the nerve to speak out? Does Biden have the guts to withdraw?
President Biden, we thank you for your service. Now give us the chance to thank you again for protecting democracy by stepping aside.
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1968 and 2024: Déjà Vu All Over Again?
The Gaza War has not created the kind of turmoil that nearly ripped apart the country in 1968, at least not yet.
May 11, 2024
The similarities are eerie:
Then and now, student anti-war demonstrations disrupted college campuses.
Then and now, the police were called in to arrest students, and often used excessive force.
Then and now, the Democratic sitting president was unpopular, and the Republican challenger was an extreme law and order conservative out for revenge against liberals.
Then and now, there were major ideological differences about a war between the young and the old.
But these similarities are largely superficial. 1968 was different.
Then there were 536,000 U.S. troops stationed in Vietnam, and the American population was deeply divided about not only whether the war should be continued, but whether it was justified in the first place. The Vietnam War was the salient political issue of the day, and young had to decide whether to serve or dodge the draft.
So far, despite the campus protests and coverage of the devastation, the war in Gaza ranks near the bottom on the list of concerns of the average American, even among young voters.
In 1968, the anti-war movement was part of a widespread rebellion against the anti-communist, hierarchical structure of society. The edifice of traditional authority was under siege. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll were perceived as forms of liberation and a direct threat to the established order. Having long hair could get you pulled in by the police or beat up by a hard-hat.
The threat of violence was palpable, and eruptions were not rare. Two of the most prominent anti-war and civil rights leaders of the era, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, were assassinated in 1968. The Democratic Convention in Chicago turned into a sprawling police riot. Convention delegates and journalists, as well as protestors, were punched and manhandled. (I was an eyewitness to both.)
Some groups, like the Weathermen, believed that violent acts were necessary to “bring the war home.” Bank of America branches were attacked with some regularity, often by bombing.
Perhaps the biggest difference between then and now is politics. Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ), the sitting president, had crushed the ultra-conservative Barry Goldwater in the 1964 election, winning 60 percent of the popular vote and 496 of the 548 electoral votes. Johnson, who had been John F. Kennedy’s vice-president and took office after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, went on to pass major civil rights and anti-poverty legislation. He was viewed as the most progressive president since Franklin Roosevelt. Many believed he was even more progressive because of his courage enacting strong anti-segregation legislation that he knew would turn the Southern states away from the Democratic Party.
You want to know what fascism in America might look like? It was 1968 in Chicago.
Biden, who won a much narrower victory over Trump in 2016, has gained fame among progressives and labor leaders through the passage of his infrastructure and climate bills. He also provided more labor support in key agencies like that National Labor Relations Board, and is being hailed as the greatest labor-oriented president since Franklin Roosevelt.
Johnson’s opponent in 1968 was expected to be Richard Nixon, a polarizing conservative political figure who few believed stood a chance against such a popular sitting president. The Vietnam War, however, eroded Johnson’s popularity as he bore the blame for the continued death and destruction. The chant he often heard from protestors was, “Hey! Hey LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?!”
The political establishment in 1968, as in 2024, refused to challenge the sitting president even as his popularity plummeted. But one maverick senator, Eugene McCarthy (D: MN), threw his hat in the ring and drew the more moderate anti-war students into his campaign under the banner of “Get Clean for Gene.” By the thousands they knocked on doors during the New Hampshire primary, and the results shocked the country, with McCarthy gaining a 42 percent share of the votes compared to Johnson’s 50 percent.
Even though Johnson won New Hampshire, he was in serious political trouble. He realized he likely would lose the next primary in Wisconsin to McCarthy, and he faced a formidable challenge from Bobby Kennedy, who jumped into the race after the New Hampshire close call. Johnson then did the unthinkable – he withdrew. This was quite unbelievable. In less than four years, one of the most popular presidents in American history was forced out of office by the anti-Vietnam War movement.
Hubert Humphry, Johnson’s V.P., and former liberal senator from Minnesota, became the Democratic establishment candidate and was tightly controlled by Johnson. “I’ve got his pecker in my pocket,” Johnson supposedly said. Kennedy, who was assassinated the night he beat McCarthy in the June California primary, would have been a formidable challenger to Humphry, but McCarthy didn’t have the votes at the convention to defeat the vice president.
The Democratic convention was a nightmare, one I experienced first-hand. The police were out to beat up anyone who looked like a protester. They even pummeled reporters and attacked McCarthy delegates at the convention. You want to know what fascism in America might look like? It was 1968 in Chicago.
The Johnson/Humphry forces, fully in control, refused to compromise with the anti-war faction and shot down a rather mild platform peace plank that called for an end to the bombing of North Vietnam and a negotiated withdrawal of American troops. The anti-war delegates and protesters left Chicago with nothing, beaten and in despair.
As a result of the violent convention, captured live on TV, Nixon was way up in the polls, and seemed to be cruising to an easy victory. Even though the police caused nearly all of the violence in Chicago, it looked like an enormous breakdown of law and order, a key element in Nixon’s platform.
But in the last few weeks before the November 1968 election, Humphry moved towards the peace plank that had been rejected at the convention, and his poll numbers improved to the point where Nixon’s enormous lead evaporated. Had Humphry got his pecker out of Johnson’s pocket a month or so earlier, I’m quite certain he would have won.
Ultimately it was an election about the Vietnam War and law and order. Nixon had the edge in the former by pretending to be more of a dove than Humphry, who had so much difficulty separating himself from Johnson’s war. Nixon gained, too, on the latter issue, as images of the Chicago riots and the Black revolts in dozens of cities across the country after King was assassinated made his “silent majority” fearful.
The Gaza War has not created the kind of turmoil that nearly ripped apart the country in 1968, at least not yet. Even the current campus conflicts, fortunately, don’t match the catastrophic clashes that reached their peak in 1970 when National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of demonstrators at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine unarmed students.
Today, there are no courageous and credible Democratic challengers willing to take on a sitting president, even a president who is 81 years old and running behind the election-denying Donald Trump in the polls.
I’m struck by the contemporary sound of the words Johnson used to announce his withdrawal from his re-election campaign on March 31, 1968.
“… I would ask all Americans, whatever their personal interests or concern, to guard against divisiveness and all of its ugly consequences.
What we won when all of our people united just must not now be lost in suspicion, and distrust, and selfishness, and politics among any of our people.
And believing this as I do, I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year. …
I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office–the Presidency of your country.
Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
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The Year That Changed Everything: A Personal Memory of 1968
No other year has left such vivid memories for me, though it may be that this year, 2018, will be even more decisive for the future of America
Oct 04, 2018
Fifty years have passed since the one that changed everything for my generation, the crucial turning point when the promise of the 1960s turned to a defeat and despair that still weighs on our thoughts of what might have been. It was a roller coaster year of emotional highs and lows, when unlikely dreams suddenly seemed possible, only to be dashed time and again. It marked the end of my political innocence, born in the magic of John Kennedy's Camelot. No other year has left such vivid memories for me, though it may be that this year, 2018, will be even more decisive for the future of America.
The year began with great hopes that the seemingly endless war in Vietnam might end soon. An anti-war Democrat, the cerebral Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, had challenged President Johnson in the upcoming presidential primary election. Soft-spoken and anything but radical, he impressed on us the necessity of cutting long hair and beards and putting on white shirts and ties to go "Clean for Gene" when we knocked on doors to get out the vote. Given little chance at first, his popularity was suddenly enhanced by developments across the Pacific.
In early February, during the Vietnamese New Year's celebration, National Liberation Front (the Americans called them "Viet Cong") troops attacked throughout South Vietnam, capturing the famed "Citadel" in Hue and other prominent posts formerly thought impregnable. Although their casualties in the so-called "Tet Offensive" were enormous, the Vietnamese struck fear into American troops and their supporters back home. President Johnson had claimed we were winning the war and our enemies would soon be on their knees. There was a "light at the end of the tunnel," he said. Just be a bit more patient and we'd all see it.
But the light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be the headlights of an onrushing train. If the enemy was indeed mortally wounded, it could not have mounted so many attacks in so many places at once, often with the inside help of South Vietnamese Army soldiers thought loyal to the U.S. The American response was to inflict horrible casualties on combatants and non-combatants alike. Since it was often impossible to know which Vietnamese were loyal to us and which were not, it was deemed necessary to kill everyone who might be suspect, destroying whole villages to "save" them. Napalm, a terrifying jellied gasoline that cooked people alive, was dropped indiscriminately.
Shocking photographs surfaced, of young girls running naked from a wall of flames, of suspected traitors being summarily assassinated without investigation of their supposed disloyalty; in one case, in lurid, living color, crimson gushed like a fountain from the head of a man shot at point-blank range. These images, and the Tet Offensive, shocked many otherwise placid Americans and led to a shift in public opinion. Then too, the coffins continued to return home in large numbers, carrying the bodies of sons and husbands, fresh-faced children barely out of their teens, if that.
An anti-war activist, I was 21 then and about to vote in my first election. I began door-belling for McCarthy shortly after Tet, in Superior, Wisconsin, an industrial port city, while I was attending Wisconsin State University there. While most pollsters expected McCarthy to be trounced by Johnson in the first primary election in New Hampshire on March 14, he ran a close race trailing the President by only seven percentage points. Might he have a chance? Opportunistically or otherwise, another critic of the war, New York senator Robert Kennedy, then entered the race. Now, the leading living scion of one of America's most beloved political families was also hammering Johnson from the campaign trail.
With the Wisconsin primary scheduled for early April, I traveled to Madison in late March to meet with other McCarthy organizers. While things were looking up, we had no idea of what to expect on the evening of March 31, when we gathered in the student union at the University of Wisconsin to watch a "special announcement" from the president. First, Johnson declared a moratorium on bombing attacks on North Vietnam; the anti-war pressure was getting to him. Then, we sat in stunned silence while Johnson announced his withdrawal from the race. "I shall not seek, nor will I accept my party's nomination for President of the United States," he said, looking haggard and defeated.
It seemed unreal. Johnson had surrendered; the war would end. I think now of LBJ as the lead victim in a Greek tragedy. But for his hubris in persisting to escalate the Vietnam War, Johnson might have entered the history books as one of America's greatest presidents, carried there by his commitment to civil rights and the elimination of poverty. Instead, he died reviled and almost forgotten. Even then, I felt a bit sorry for him. But that night we dashed by the hundreds into the streets cheering, singing and dancing. No more would the anti-war protestors be chanting "Hey, hey LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" It was bitterly cold in the snowy streets of Madison that night, but none of us noticed. We celebrated with pitchers of beer and drove back to Superior with headaches the next day, happy to have them.
Memphis and its aftermath
On April 2, I voted in my first election ever. With Johnson still on the ballot, McCarthy won an overwhelming victory in the Wisconsin primary. Now, the contest would be between him and Kennedy, and I would have been happy with either of them. But my euphoria was short-lived. Only two days later, civil rights leader Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, where he'd gone to support striking sanitary workers. Some inner cities exploded in anger. In Indianapolis, Bobby Kennedy braved an angry crowd to urge the non-violence that King had espoused. The next morning a hushed pall hovered over the university student union in Superior. Several of the black students were fighting back tears; knowing the anger they must be feeling. Feared they might hold all whites responsible for the slaying. Shockingly, I also overheard several fraternity boys at one table suggesting that King had gotten what was coming to him. Their dialogue was peppered with the N word and references to "good riddance."
I found it hard to concentrate on schoolwork the rest of that semester. But despite the King tragedy, my overall mood remained hopeful. Students were beginning to exercise power in American universities, carrying out sit-down strikes at prestigious academic institutions like Columbia. Women and gays were protesting discrimination. In France, the students were joining factory workers in a general strike, and in Communist Czechoslovakia, they were deeply engaged in a reform process called "Prague Spring," which promised "Socialism with a human face." Polls began showing that a majority of voters opposed the war, and the victory of either McCarthy or Kennedy seemed almost inevitable.
In May, McCarthy soundly defeated Kennedy in the Oregon primary. But by that time, my allegiance had shifted to Bobby. I was appalled when McCarthy, after his victory in solidly white, middle-class Oregon, suggested that only the ignorant and uneducated supported his rival. It struck me as a putdown of the poor, and racist as well. I was impressed by Kennedy's compassion for the poverty-stricken miners of Appalachia, the Hispanic farm workers of California and their charismatic leader, Cesar Chavez, inner-city African-Americans and the hidden poor on Indian reservations. While McCarthy was eloquent about the fiasco in Vietnam, Kennedy offered more hope of uniting the war protestors with union members, minorities and the poor.
When school ended, I hitchhiked home to visit my family in San Francisco. I arrived in California just as its Presidential primary election was ending on June 5. The last person who gave me a ride told me Kennedy was leading in the exit polls and dropped me off at a campsite near Donner Lake, barely over the border from Nevada. The next morning, the first driver to give me a ride was surprised that I hadn't heard the news. "They killed Kennedy," he said. "Shot him in LA last night just as he was about to claim victory."
During the next week I could barely contain my grief. I watched the news footage of Kennedy on the floor of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, bleeding to death. The reports suggested a lone gunman, Sirhan Sirhan, but I suspected that someone or something must have been behind him. With his big victory in California, Kennedy would surely have sailed to the Democratic nomination and almost certainly defeated his Republican opponent.
Kennedy's funeral seemed surreal. Even Tom Hayden, the SDS radical, was a pallbearer. He had come to trust Bobby, despite the latter's wealth and establishment connections. Kennedy's brother Edward eulogized him simply as a man who "saw wrong and tried to right it, saw pain and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it."
While at home for a month, I read constantly--the literature of the New Left. A growing body of New Left analysis, including C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite and G. William Domhoff's Who Rules America? argued that our democracy was largely an illusion. A "military-industrial complex" of interlocking boards of directors containing the same elite players, dominated our politics as a "ruling class." Eisenhower had warned of its dangerous influence in his farewell presidential address. Other books documented the power of this elite over foreign policy, describing how the CIA had overthrown Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran, and other elected leaders, to protect the profits of American corporations.
At the same time, most of these writers acknowledged that Soviet "socialism" was certainly no better, and probably even worse, than the corporate capitalism they challenged at home. Their hopes were buoyed by the July publication of Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov's samizdat, On Progress, Peaceful Co-existence and Intellectual Freedom. A powerful critic of Stalinism in Russia, Sakharov suggested a middle way between Communist dictatorships and capitalist inequality. It seemed to be emerging in places like Sweden and Czechoslovakia.
Beginning of the end
Back in Superior, my friends and I watched troubling news on television, when on August 21, Soviet tanks crushed the democratic uprising in Prague. A few days later, the Democratic Convention began in Chicago. While Hubert Humphrey's nomination was a foregone conclusion with Kennedy gone from the race, Eugene McCarthy still had considerable support for a floor fight. I watched with pride as Don Peterson, a Wisconsin businessman I'd worked with on the McCarthy campaign, nominated the brilliant African-American leader Julian Bond as a Vice Presidential candidate. But Humphrey and his chosen running mate, Ed Muskie, were anointed as the nominees by the Party's conservative establishment, who controlled most of the delegates.
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, an old-liner, ran the convention with an iron fist. Protestors gathered outside, some of them "Yippies" (for "Youth International Party") who had nominated a pig for President. But there were many others who still believed in the system and had worked hard for McCarthy or Kennedy. They shouted their opposition to the undemocratic nature of the convention. Like Bull Connor in the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, Daley sent his police to gas and club them--an investigative committee later called the action "a police riot."
On the convention floor, Peterson and Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff rose to report that the police were beating people up outside. Mayor Daley audibly shouted a Jewish slur at Ribicoff. Reporters covering the convention were roughed up by Daley's police. The battle inside and out stretched into the night. When it was over, I felt a slow realization that the times we thought were changing would change glacially if at all.
The Fall of our discontent
That fall, my friends and I continued to organize vigils and protests. Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee for President, promised a "secret plan" to end the war while condemning antiwar protestors in the name of what he termed "the silent majority." Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate, was a mixed bag at best, in the thinking of my friends and myself. We admired his earlier stand for civil rights, dating back to 1948. He was also a strong advocate of anti-poverty measures. But he'd stuck with Johnson on the war. I made up my mind to vote for a third-party candidate, the comedian Dick Gregory. But considering the alternative of a Nixon presidency, I still hoped Humphrey would prevail. He didn't; in November, Hubert Humphrey lost by a whisker to Nixon.
Salvador and Luz
At the end of the month, I was invited to attend an event called the Hemispheric Conference Against the War in Vietnam being held in the Canadian city of Montreal. A group of us from Superior joined another from our twin city of Duluth, Minnesota, for a long bus ride to the conference. It was held in a cavernous auditorium with perhaps a thousand people in attendance. Speakers included well-known American radicals such as the Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver. Their rhetoric was loudly anti-American and pro-socialist. The war in Vietnam was described as an imperial venture fought for oil and other resources. The most revered of the speakers was a man I'd never heard of until then. An elderly and elegant gentleman wearing a fine wool sweater and dark-rimmed glasses, he spoke in Spanish, with translation. His speech was strongly-worded, but thoughtful and not merely rhetorical. I was able to shake his hand later and tell him I appreciated it.
His name was Salvador Allende, and he was, at that time, a senator in the Chilean government and the leader of its Socialist Party. Two years later, he would be elected president of Chile, thus setting off a three-year American effort to destabilize his government. He died in the bloody military coup that overthrew him on September 11, 1973. I will always consider it an honor to have met him.
But what I remember most from the conference was the small, sad-eyed young woman from Mexico that I also met there. She had short dark hair and big eyes that seemed to be searching for something far away. In broken and halting English, she told me a story. Her name was Luz, which means "light" in Spanish, but her story was decidedly dark.
Two months earlier, on the night of October 2, she and other Mexican university students had gathered in a great open space called the Plaza of the Three Cultures near the center of Mexico City. They had marched there from several universities to protest the upcoming Olympic Games, which had displaced hundreds of poor Mexico City residents from their homes. Their protest was completely peaceful, but the response of the police and guardsmen sent by the government to control them was not. Snipers fired randomly into the crowd, killing hundreds of students and bystanders. With the size of the crowd, it was difficult to flee. Some of her friends were killed; she watched their blood darken the stones in the plaza before finally escaping the violence.
She was fighting hard to hold back tears as she told me her horrifying tale. I found her inexpressibly lovely and wanted only to tell her things would be all right. She had come to the conference with several other student leaders from the Olympic protest. I told her I had watched the games on television and she brightened when I mentioned the black-gloved protest by two of the United States' finest sprinters, Tommie Smith and Jon Carlos, as they received their medals on the podium while the Star-Spangled Banner blared behind them, a protest similar to Colin Kaepernick's half a century later. Luz, too, had watched it. It was her only positive memory of the games.
I never saw Luz again after that night. On the long bus trip back to Wisconsin, I couldn't get her out of my mind and a song came to me. I wrote it down as soon as I got back home, and later sang it for my friends in the little coffeehouse on campus.
SONG FOR LUZ, 1968
From the bridges of Prague
To the boulevards of Paris
To the dusty streets of Mexico,
And all across my country from Boston to Berkeley
There's a feeling of change in the winds that blow.
There's a generation looking for a new beginning
And a glimmer of hope in the rising sun
And our sparkling eyes and songs prophesize
That a whole new way of life has begun.
And you in your city and I in mine
Are adding our bodies to the protest line
And dreaming of a time when all humankind will be free.
Oh, but in between, so many troubles you've seen.
So many bombs...so many bullets...so many shattered dreams...
In the Three Cultures Plaza you gathered to meet.
They met you, but with snipers, and left your friends all dead in the street.
"Now don't disturb the Olympics," the imperial orders came,
"Anybody who protests will receive still more of the same,
We'll stop your life's flicker and we'll even erase your name."
They released the doves to fly. You watched them in the sky
And you wanted to try to catch what they symbolize.
But your dove couldn't sing. She had blood on her broken wing
And you started to cry, but now dry out your eyes.
For maybe tomorrow you'll wake up and find
The long years of sorrow were worth all the pain
For all of your struggles have been left behind
Though memories remain, it wasn't in vain.
And because of you, and what you've been through,
The ones who are born then will sing in the rain.
I wanted to believe the words of the song were true, but I really didn't feel that way. A month later, a year that began with great hope, ended with little. The New Left would splinter and descend into violence as Nixon escalated the war. Forty years would pass before I would experience again the hope I had before August of 1968, before we would dance in the streets again, as so many did when Obama was elected. Suddenly it was possible to believe again, but the forces of hate and greed did not go quietly into that magic night. They have come back with a vengeance and a cruelty that makes Nixon seem benign by comparison.
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