MCMLXVIII - 1968 – FIFTY YEARS GONE BY

Historians mark 1968 as one of the most important years in the last century of our country’s history. Good things were happening, but the year was rife with hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, plane crashes and sea craft sinking, racial demonstrations, student unrest, bombings, shoot-outs, and world-wide protests against many ills. Some of my readers might be too young to remember the major events of the year, but many were in their adult years, and they well remember, if not the specific date and year, then the incident itself.

1968 started off, history wise, in January, with the Pueblo Incident. The North Koreans captured the U.S. Navy’s lightly armed intelligence ship, the USS Pueblo, in what they said were their waters, and what the U.S. maintained were international waters. The crew was detained and tortured. It took almost a year to resolve the problem and bring the men home by that Christmas. The North Koreans, still a problem, still have the ship.

In that same month, in a customary time of truce during the Lunar New Year, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive. After the incident, public support of the war began to wane, and historians see this bloody battle as the beginning of the end of the Vietnam War. The My Lai incident took place in March, and the war raged on.

While those two incidents touched many of us, they happened overseas. In the next few months, history hit right at home. We all remember where we were in 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and we likely remember where we were in April and June of 1968, when the Reverend Martin Luther King and then-Senator and presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy were also gunned down. Their assassins were found and convicted, but as with JFK’s shooting, the conspiracy theories are still with us.

In October of 1968, perhaps reacting to and empowered by the assassinations and by protests and demonstrations across our country, the gold and bronze medalists at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, in a silent protest against racial bias in the U.S., raised black-gloved fists during the playing of the “Star Spangled Banner.” We scarcely remember their sport or their names but, sadly, we can’t be unaware that such racial bias continues today.

 

In 1968, the world in continued on, as it usually does, with its basic schedule of events. There were games and awards, elections, inventions, and debuts and introductions, weddings and funerals. Among them were some of the good things:

·         The Winter Olympics were held in Grenoble, France, where Norway won the most medals

·          “60 Minutes” debuted, and is still airing, minus Mike Wallace and Andy Rooney, on CBS

·         “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In debuted on NBC” (Sock it to who?)

·         “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” debuted on network TV

·         Boeing introduce the first 747, the jumbo jet that could carry 374 passengers

·         Oscars for the best movie of 1968 went to Oliver! And Katharine Hepburn, in The Lion in Winter, and Barbra Streisand (“Hello, gorgeous.”) in Funny Girl, tied for Best Actress

·         The Beatles produced the two-record “White Album” 

·         It was the year of Super Bowl II – the Green Bay Packers beat the Oakland Raiders,

·         And the year the Detroit Tigers, down 3-1, came back to beat the St. Louis Cardinals 4-3 in the World Series

·         Richard Nixon was nominated as the Republican candidate, and Hubert Humphrey as Democratic candidate for President

·         Jacqueline Kennedy married Aristotle Onassis

·         “The Mother of All Demos” demonstrated the first computer mouse, and almost all of the other basic elements, both hardware and software, of the modern, personal computing we use today

·         The Gold Standard was repealed

·         The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index closed over 100 for the first time (It’s now way over 2500 and rising.)

And in December, the crew of Apollo 8, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first humans to travel around the moon. This very successful mission was a wonderful close to a year that had seen too many tragic events. In his book, A Man on the Moon, about the Apollo Program, Andrew Chaikin relates that after they returned home, the astronauts got hundreds of telegrams and letters, one of which was particularly meaningful. The telegram said “You saved 1968.”

                                                       “Ob-la-di  Ob-la-dah, life goes on”