1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  It was the attention paid to Christian religious belief in this production that disturbed the government, since communism rejects religion. Still, no one regarded this as an important departure from orthodoxy. Trybuna Ludu gave the production a negative but not particularly impassioned critique, simply stating that it was a mistake to think that mysticism played as big a role in the drama as politics. For the play to work, the critic argued, Mickiewicz has to be seen as a predominantly political writer. But the production was a popular success, playing to packed and enthusiastic houses and extended for months. Adam Michnik went. “I thought it was a fantastic production. Really stirring,” he said.

  Then the government did a strangely unwise thing: It closed down the revered national play at the National Theater. Worse, it gave a closing date, January 30, and leaked it to the public two weeks in advance so that everyone knew that January 30 would be the last performance by order of the police. Poles were used to censorship, but it was never announced in advance. The government almost seemed to be inviting a demonstration. Was it looking for an excuse for repression? Was this General Moczar plotting again? Historians still argue about this. Amid all the plot and counterplot theories, the possibility is often raised that the government just acted stupidly. Michnik remembered, “The decision to close the play was proof that the government was stupid and did not understand Poles. Mickiewicz is our Whitman, our Victor Hugo. . . . It was an outburst of communist barbarism to attack Mic-kiewicz.”

  The night of January 30, after the final curtain, three hundred students from the University of Warsaw and the National Theater School demonstrated in front of the nearby National Theater, marching only a few hundred yards to the statue of Adam Mickiewicz. They did not see this as a particularly defiant act. They were just communist youth reminding their parents of the ideals of communism. Michnik said, “We decided to lay flowers on the poet’s monument.” Michnik himself, known to the authorities as “a troublemaker,” did not march.

  “We thought a Czech-style evolution was possible,” said Michnik. The students did not fear a violent response. “Since 1949 there had never been a police act against students in Poland,” Michnik reasoned with perhaps too much logic. There among the willows, in front of the rose garden with Mickiewicz frozen in bronze in midrecital, his right hand touching his chest, three hundred students were beaten with clubs by truckloads of “workers” who arrived at the protest ostensibly to talk to students but clubbed them instead. Thirty-five students were arrested.

  Not surprisingly, there was no press coverage of the incident. Michnik and a fellow student dissident, Henryk Szlajfer, spoke with a Le Monde correspondent whom Michnik characterized as “an extremely dangerous man. Very reactionary and mostly interested in promoting himself.” But the two young communists had few options if they wanted the Polish people to know what had happened. From Le Monde the story would be picked up by Radio Free Europe in Vienna and broadcast throughout Poland. But the two were seen talking to the correspondent by the secret police, and when the article ran in Le Monde, Michnik and Szlajfer were expelled from the university.

  All of this connected expediently with the “anti-Zionist campaign.” Michnik, Szlajfer, and numerous students who had demonstrated were Jewish. This is not surprising considering the university dissidents were from good communist families, who had taught their children they had an obligation to fight for a more just society.

  But this was not the government’s explanation for Jews in the student movement. The government, which had been removing Jews from their jobs throughout the bureaucracy, accusing them of Zionist plots, now said that the so-called student movement had been infiltrated by Zionists. The arrested students were interrogated. If they were not Jewish, they were asked, “You are a Pole. Why are you always with the Jews?” Non-Jews were asked to give them the names of Jewish leaders.

  When interrogating a Jew, the police would begin, “You are Jew?”

  Often the student would answer, “No, I am a Pole.”

  “No, you are a Jew.”

  It was a very old dialogue in Poland.

  PART II

  PRAGUE

  SPRING

  The first thing for any revolutionary party to do would be to seize communications. Who owns communications now controls the country. Much more than it’s ever been true in history.

  —WILLIAM BURROUGHS, interviewed in 1968

  CHAPTER 5

  ON THE GEARS OF

  AN ODIOUS MACHINE

  Employees are going to love this generation. . . . They are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be any riots.

  —CLARK KERR, president of the University of California at Berkeley, 1963

  Our young people, in disturbing numbers, appear to reject all forms of authority from whatever source derived and they have taken refuge in the turbulent and inchoate nihilism whose sole objectives are destructive. I know of no time in our history when the gap between generations has been wider or more potentially dangerous.

  —GRAYSON KIRK, president of Columbia University, 1968

  BY THE SPRING OF 1968, college demonstrations had become such a commonplace event in the United States, with some thirty schools a month erupting, that even high schools and junior highs were joining in. In February, hundreds of eighth graders jammed the halls, took over classrooms, and set off fire alarms at Junior High School 258 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. They were demanding better food and more dances.

  Protesters understood that with constant protest they had to do more than just march carrying a sign in order to make the newspapers. A building had to be seized, something had to be shut down. To protest Columbia University’s plans to build a new school gymnasium displacing poor black residents of Harlem, a student hopped into the steel scoop of an earthmover to obstruct construction. In mid-March, the Columbia antiwar student movement called for a daylong boycott of classes to protest the war. In all, 3,500 students and 1,000 faculty members stayed out of classes. About 3,000 students looked on at the University of Wisconsin in Madison as antiwar protesters planted 400 white crosses on the lawn of Bascom Hill near the administration building. A sign read “Bascom Memorial Cemetery, Class of 1968.” Joseph Chandler, a former student, then working at the Madison-based Wisconsin Draft Resistance Union, said, “We thought the campus ought to look like a graveyard, because that’s where most of the seniors are headed.” The first week of spring, between 500 and 1,000 students took control of the administration building at Howard University, the leading black university, and refused to leave. They were protesting the lack of black history courses in the curriculum. Then black students seized a building at Cornell. Students blocked a building at Colgate.

  And it was not only students. The New York Times reported on March 24 that hippies had taken over New York’s Grand Central Station and “transformed a spring be-in to a militant antiwar demonstration,” which in turn led to a lengthy article on the possibility that hippies, whom the establishment had defined as undermotivated types, were turning into political activists. But these particular hippies were in fact Yippies!, from Abbie Hoffman’s Youth International Party, which had always been political.

  In Italy, students protesting inadequate facilities carried a long red flag from building to building on the University of Rome campus as the university was reopened after being closed for twelve days in mid-March because of violence. On the first day alone, two hundred students were injured by police, and by the second, faculty members protesting police brutality had joined the demonstrators. Some were calling for the resignation of the rector for having called in the police in the first place. The students made clear that they intended to continue demonstrating. The Italian communists were attempting unsuccessfully to take control of the student movement.

  By early spring 1968 a German student association had organizations in 108 German universities and represented three hundred thousand German students. They had organized around protesting the war in Vi
etnam but had started moving on to German issues such as the recognition of East Germany, the resignation of high officials with Nazi-tainted pasts, and the right of students to have more of a say in their own education.

  Meanwhile, after being quiet for a generation, Spanish students were demonstrating against an openly fascist regime that in April sanctioned a mass for Adolf Hitler in Madrid. Spring began with the University of Madrid again closed because of student demonstrations. The university did not reopen for classes until thirty-eight days later in May.

  In Brazil, armed violence that killed three protesters in the opening months of 1968 failed to keep students from protesting the four-year-old military dictatorship.

  Japanese students were violently protesting the presence on their soil of the U.S. military machine engaged with Vietnam. This generation whose parents had brought ruin on their country with militarism—a country that had suffered through history’s only nuclear attack—was vehemently antimilitary. The student organization Zengakuren was able to turn out thousands of protesters to block a U.S. aircraft carrier, in service in Vietnam, from docking in a Japanese port. The Zengakuren also protested, sometimes violently, such local issues as the confiscation of land from farmers to build an international airport at Narita, twenty-five miles east of Tokyo. The Japanese government was considering the passage of repressive security laws to control the Zengakuren.

  The Zengakuren had been the student group that made Walter Cronkite realize how television was to be used in the sixties. Cronkite had been with a CBS television crew in Japan to report a 1960 visit there by President Eisenhower. But so many Zengakuren had turned out to protest the visit that Eisenhower decided not to land. The Zengakuren, however, content that a CBS television crew was there to record their protest, remained. Tens of thousands arrived throughout the day to protest, the television crew their only audience. With no U.S. president, Cronkite wanted to leave, but his route to the CBS vehicle was blocked by the huge crowd, which was at its most dense around the cameras. “It suddenly occurred to me,” Cronkite recalled, “that the easiest way for me to get to the top of the hill was to join the Zengakuren. So I got the pictures, tucked the film in my pockets, and came down off the truck and grabbed ahold—they had all linked arms—I linked arms with one of these Japanese. He smiled at me, and he said, ‘Banzai! Banzai, Banzai!’ as he flailed his arms angrily. And I started yelling, ‘Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!’ and I went to the snake dancing up the hill shouting, ‘Banzai Banzai Banzai!’ They were all having a wonderful time with me and I got up to the top of the hill and there was our car, so I said, ‘Well, good-bye.’ And they said, ‘Good-bye.’ And I got in the car and got to the airport.”

  In the United Kingdom students had started out by demonstrating against the U.S. war in Vietnam and had moved on to local issues such as the size of government grants for education and control over the universities. By spring there had already been major protests at Oxford, Cambridge, and numerous other British universities. Of greater concern to the British government than the antiwar movement was a tendency for protesters to attack anyone who seemed to represent the British government. In March, when British defense secretary Denis Healey gave a talk at Cambridge, students broke through police lines and attempted to overturn his car. Soon after that, Home Secretary James Callaghan was heckled by students at Oxford who attempted to throw him into a fish pond. Gordon Walker, the secretary of state for education and science, was prevented from delivering a speech at Manchester University. Unable to speak, he attempted to exit but had to step over the bodies of students sprawled across his path. American officials were not immune. When an American diplomat, a press officer from the U.S. embassy, made the mistake of appearing in front of Sussex University students, they attacked him with wet paint. British protesters also had a good sense of media. In April they turned the water in the fountain in Trafalgar Square red.

  Violence requires few ideas, but nonviolent resistance requires imagination. That is one of the reasons so few rebels are willing to embrace it. The American civil rights movement learned as it went along, making many mistakes. But by the mid-1960s the movement, especially SNCC, had thrilled the world with its imagination and the daring of its ideas, inspiring students as far away as Poland to stage sit-ins. By 1968, all over the world, people with causes wanted to copy the civil rights movement. Its anthem, Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome”—a folk song turned labor song that Seeger had turned into a civil rights song when sit-ins began in 1960—was sung in English from Japan to South Africa to Mexico.

  The civil rights movement began to grab the world’s attention on February 1, 1960, when four black freshmen from the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina in Greensboro went into a Woolworth’s, bought a few items, and then sat at the “whites only” lunch counter, and one of them, Ezell Blair, Jr., asked for a cup of coffee. Refused service, they just sat there until the store closed. The technique had been tried out a number of times before by civil rights workers to test the reaction. But these four, without the backing of any organization, went much further. The next day they returned with twenty students at 10:30 in the morning and sat all day. A waitress, refusing service, explained to the press, “It’s a store regulation—a custom.” The students vowed to sit every day at the counter until they were served. Every day they jammed the Woolworth’s lunch counter with more and more students. Soon they were sitting in at other counters in Greensboro and then in other towns. Within two weeks of the first sit-in, national and international press were reporting on its broad significance. “The demonstrations were generally dismissed at first as another college fad of the ‘panty-raid’ variety,” reported The New York Times. “This opinion lost adherents, however, as the movement spread from North Carolina to Virginia, Florida, South Carolina and Tennessee and involved fifteen cities.”

  “Sit-ins took the existing civil rights organizations completely by surprise,” said Mary King, a white volunteer for SNCC. They amazed Martin Luther King’s newly established Southern Christian Leadership Conference and shocked the older organizations such as CORE. But the press was drawn to them and the public was impressed by them. SNCC was largely born out of the desire to invent stunning new approaches like this.

  In 1959 there were twenty thousand students on the sprawling leafy campus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. There was little sign of the civil rights movement or any radical politics. But in February 1960, inspired by the sit-ins in Greensboro, Robert Alan Haber, a University of Michigan undergraduate, announced the formation of a new group called Students for a Democratic Society, SDS. To start up the new organization he recruited two people with roots in the traditional Left: Sharon Jeffrey, a sophomore whose mother was an important figure in the United Auto Workers union, and Bob Ross from the South Bronx, whose grandparents’ circle had been Russian revolutionaries and who loved jazz and beat poetry. They had also approached the studious, hardworking editor of the Michigan Daily, Tom Hayden. Hayden, who came from a small town not far from Ann Arbor, was consumed with his newspaper, a professional operation considered one of the best college papers in the country. He was more interested in another organization that began at the University of Michigan, a group that lobbied for the founding of a Peace Corps.

  SDS wanted to recruit a network of student leaders across the country. Their timing was perfect. The February sit-ins in Greensboro had inspired American youth, made them long to be doing something, too. Hayden later wrote, “As thousands of Southern students were arrested and many beaten, my respect and identification with their courage and conviction deepened.” Haber, Jeffrey, and Ross began by joining picket lines in Ann Arbor in solidarity with the sit-ins in Greensboro. Hayden covered them for the Daily and wrote sympathetic editorials. In the spring, SDS invited black civil rights workers from the South to come to Ann Arbor and meet northern white students. Hayden covered the event, although he was by now the editor in chief of the paper, an ambition he had worked hard to fu
lfill.

  Hayden, age twenty, had a transforming summer in California. He went to Berkeley, was handed a leaflet, asked for a place to stay, and found himself living with student activists. The Berkeley campus was well organized, and he wrote a series of long articles for the Daily about “the new student movement.” He went to the Livermore laboratories, where America’s nuclear arsenal had been developed. He interviewed nuclear scientist Edward Teller, who madly explained how nuclear war could be survived and how one was “better dead than Red.” At the 1960 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, he met Robert Kennedy, who at thirty-nine seemed to Hayden very young for a politician. Hayden watched Kennedy’s older brother get nominated and was deeply moved by John Kennedy’s speech, even though his new radical friends had already dismissed Kennedy as a “phony liberal.” Hayden had not yet learned that liberals were not to be trusted. He also interviewed Martin Luther King, who told him, “Ultimately, you have to take a stand with your life.”

  1968 poster

  (Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture)

  He sent articles to the Daily about the emerging new Left. Back in Michigan, the university administration accused him of inventing the news rather than reporting on it. He knew that there was a new Left, but he realized that the faculty and most people in America were still completely unaware of it.

  Hayden spent his senior year dreaming of going south and participating. He took food to blacks in Tennessee driven out of their homes for registering to vote. But he wanted to do more. “I was chafing to graduate; the South was beckoning,” he later wrote. He did graduate and went south as an SDS liaison with SNCC. But he quickly learned that SNCC was well staffed and didn’t need him. Hayden felt alone in his very arduous and at times dangerous task in the South. “I didn’t want to go from beating to beating, jail to jail,” Hayden wrote. In December 1961, from a jail cell in Albany, Georgia, he wrote to his fellow SDS organizers in Michigan proposing a meeting to try to make SDS a larger, more important organization like SNCC. SDS had eight hundred members around the United States paying $1 in dues a year. It needed to define itself in order to grow.