Tuesday is the 50th anniversary of the Tet Offensive.
You won’t see anybody celebrating. There will be no parades. Donald Trump won’t use the occasion to talk about winning, because even though we eventually beat the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong back, the idea of such a well-planned, sustained attack pretty much refuted any propaganda that had been coming out of the Defense Department that we were winning that war.
It was the beginning of the end of mainstream public support of the so-called “conflict.”
We boomers have a mawkish habit of marking anniversaries of varying significance. So in keeping with that custom, I hereby declare 2018 its own 50th anniversary of the year 1968, in its entirety.
And heavens to murgatroyd, what a horrible year it was.
It started right in with the capture of the USS Pueblo by the North Koreans and continued through Tet — the Vietnamese New Year. The attack violated a temporary truce, and that’s what caught the United States off-guard (I urge anyone who hasn’t seen it to find “Full Metal Jacket,” which explores Tet and its aftermath in vivid detail).
In February, a South Vietnamese police captain put a bullet through the head of a suspected Viet Cong. American photographer Eddie Adams caught it, and the picture went viral. It, as much as anything, gave Americans less of a stomach for the continued escalation of this war.
Later in February, three civil rights workers were killed when police in South Carolina broke up a rally at a whites-only bowling alley. That, of course, was just the start of a terrible year in the civil rights struggle.
In March, the seeds of an entire year of political unrest and enormous tragedy were planted when Eugene McCarthy made a surprisingly strong showing against incumbent president Lyndon B. Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. In rapid-fire succession, Robert F. Kennedy declared his candidacy, and Johnson abdicated.
Ironically, the same day RFK announced he was running, the My Lai massacre took place in Vietnam. It wouldn’t become public for almost a year.
Our culture continued to evolve in 1968, and one of its highest points occurred in April, with the release of Stanley Kubrick’s breathtaking “2001: A Space Odyssey.” But we didn’t get to appreciate it for too long, as on April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. By this time, even the most obtuse person would have had to conclude that 1968 was shaping up to be among the worst years in US history — right up there with 1861 for tragic, seemingly unresolvable conflicts.
April proved to be a herky-jerky month. Students took over the administration building at Columbia University while protesting the war (chronicled in the book “The Strawberry Statement”) and “Hair” opened on Broadway.
Oh, and one more horrendous event in April: Richard Harris’ “MacArthur Park” was foisted onto an unsuspecting American public. Regardless of what it meant (something about cakes being left out in the rain), it was seven-plus minutes of sheer torture.
A much better seven-minute song came out in October, when the Beatles released “Hey, Jude.”
But oh, what we had to go through to get to October.
On June 5, Robert F. Kennedy, having just won the California primary, was shot in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. He died the next day. Three days after that, James Earl Ray was arrested for the slaying of Martin Luther King.
In July, Saddam Hussein became head of the Revolutionary Council in Iraq — an eerie portent of things to come.
With RFK dead, Hubert Humphrey, who threw his hat into the ring after Johnson withdrew from running, won the Democratic nomination at an embarrassing and raucous convention in Chicago between Aug. 22-30 that laid bare the bigotry and hatred among the party’s older guard. If nobody had heard of Richard J. Daley prior to August 1968, they certainly knew about him afterward.
The split in the Democratic party led to the election of Richard M. Nixon in November — the same Nixon who ended up resigning in disgrace just six years later.
Thankfully, the rest of the year wasn’t quite as tragically adventurous as the first eight months, but 1968 was still one for the books. The show “60 Minutes” debuted in the fall of 1968, and it’s still going strong. There will be a big celebration over that milestone, even if our president might ruminate more about its veracity than its longevity.
Also in ’68: Denny McLain of the Detroit Tigers won 30 games; Led Zeppelin made its debut; the Oakland Raiders beat the New York Jets in the “Heidi” game; and two of rock’s most iconic groups released albums within a month of each other, the Beatles (the so-called “White Album”) and the Rolling Stones (“Beggars Banquet”).
If 1968 started ominously, it ended magnificently, however, with astronaut Frank Borman reading from the Book of Genesis as the Apollo 8 spacecraft circled the far (dark) side of the moon.
Every month in 1968 something significant happened and it kind of makes you realize that this country endured what it’s going through now. We got through it, and with any luck at all we’ll get through it again.
