1968: The Year That Rocked the World
By Mark Kurlansky
Ballantine, 441 pages, $26.95
Mark Kurlansky writes history as verbal collage. He begins with a grand subject, creates or borrows shards of narrative and character and dramatic occasion, then arranges the pieces so they touch and merge with one another in innovative ways. The resulting pastiche delights and informs, even if one cares little about the history of cod or salt or the Basques–to name Kurlansky’s most celebrated efforts.
The student rebellion that peaked in 1968 seems well-suited to his artful method. Throughout the industrial world, similar movements behaved, quite self-consciously, in similar ways: In the U.S., radicals occupied college campuses and took to the streets on Election Day to denounce the whole process of voting as a sham. In West Berlin, thousands braved high-pressure water cannons to attack the state for employing former Nazis and a conservative media magnate for inciting violence against the left. Outside Tokyo, snake-dancing demonstrators tried to stop the building of a mammoth new airport on land that belonged to small farmers. In France, a demand for co-ed dormitories mushroomed into a national student strike that aimed to topple President Charles de Gaulle and, as one wall poster put it, to “decree a permanent state of happiness.” In Prague, collegians spent the spring debating how to create “socialism with a human face”; then, in August, they faced down the crews of invading Soviet tanks.
Everywhere, earnest militancy mingled with the pleasure of forbidden liberties. American Yippies staged marijuana smoke-ins, while French enragees compared their head of state to a pile of excrement. Young Czechs, attired in new turtlenecks and Levis, flocked to plays that satirized the language of communist bureaucrats. Kurlansky points out that 1968 was the year of the first radical feminist demonstration (a protest against the Miss America pageant) and of the massacre of hundreds of South Vietnamese peasants at the village of My Lai. When the truth about the slaughter finally emerged from a Pentagon cover-up, it destroyed all pretense that the U.S. was protecting civilians in that country from foreign aggression.
Kurlansky is splendid at clipping key moments and telling remarks from an exhaustively documented era. He quotes Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s description of Robert Kennedy’s eyes as ” ‘two blue clots of will and anxiety.’ ” He notices that the Czech term for blue jeans was “Texasskis.” He wisely keeps a steady eye on the media savviness of young radicals from Abbie Hoffman to the Franco-German Daniel Cohn-Bendit, who understood, before most politicians, that TV craves humor, street theater and confrontations with authority. While nothing in “1968” is particularly original, no one before Kurlansky has managed to evoke so rich a set of experiences in so many different places–and to keep the story humming until it ends symbolically with the inauguration of that crafty counterrebel, Richard Milhous Nixon.
Unfortunately, the skills of a master collagist rarely include historical interpretation. Kurlansky evokes an international style of protest that bridged the barrier between East and West. To be young and educated in 1968 gave one virtual permission to act as if a transformation of the world was not just possible but imminent. But Cold War realities made for clashing political agendas. Radicals in Europe, the U.S. and Japan passionately favored a victory for the communists in Vietnam and, after the Six-Day War, had begun to take up the Palestinian cause. But dissenters in Poland and Czechoslovakia had lost faith in every legatee of Lenin and Stalin. They also looked kindly on Israel’s struggle; after all, the Soviets and their allies were arming Arab states and stirring up anti-Semitism among their own populations. Kurlansky fails to recognize that such divergent world views made a true global movement impossible, despite a shared taste for denim and electric guitars.
Neither does he explain why the rebels could not translate their anger and dreams into political power. Sympathetic with the goals of the ’68ers, Kurlansky rarely pauses to consider why anyone disagreed with them, aside from the haughty authorities they ridiculed and hoped to dethrone. At the same time, he does sprinkle around evidence of stiff class resentment against youths free to spend their days talking and protesting, and their nights–it was widely presumed–taking drugs and making love.
A plebeian backlash was gathering strength on both sides of the Iron Curtain. New York City police, almost all of whom hailed from working-class families, severely bloodied Columbia University students in the course of breaking their sit-ins. That summer, most Americans backed Mayor Richard Daley when he sent Chicago police to bludgeon thousands who had come to protest the Democratic National Convention. After the big riots in West Berlin, an opinion poll disclosed that almost 80 percent of young, working-class residents opposed the students’ actions. In Warsaw, the communist government was able to mobilize a worker’s militia to crush street demonstrators who were calling for intellectual freedom. According to Kurlansky, the militiamen “were told that the student protesters were privileged kids who lived in the best apartments and took trips to Paris, all of which was by and large true.”
Over time, the young rebels did score a major victory: Their brash words and actions–and growing prominence in the media and academia–helped greatly to minimize the sadism and intolerance of cultures that had been mired in cesspools of fascism, Stalinism and Jim Crow. But in their utopian yearnings, radicals never realized how precious civic order, sexual reticence and a steady job were to those who saw the campus as a citadel of hedonism and abstract thinking. Only a minority of young people in the U.S. or Europe attended college in the late 1960s; an even smaller one, of course, mustered the self-confidence to engage in frequent protests.
So student radicals may have rocked the world, but they seldom grew up to rule their nations. In Eastern Europe, a few former rebels like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik rose to prominence after the collapse of the Soviet empire. But in the West, it was the likes of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl who reaped the political harvest that the discontents of ’68 had sowed.
