1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  Many students were dragged down stairways. Girls were pulled out by the hair; their arms were twisted; they were punched in the face. Faculty members were kicked in the groin, tossed through hedges, punched in the eye. A diabetic student fell into a coma. One faculty member suffered a nervous collapse. Many students bled profusely from head wounds opened by handcuffs, wielded as weapons. Dozens of moaning people lay about the grass unattended.

  The 120 charges of police brutality brought against the department were the most from any single incident in the history of the New York police.

  The public was shocked. Initially the administration had the public relations advantage, due chiefly to New York Times coverage. A photograph had caught students in Kirk’s office. Student David Shapiro, today a poet, was photographed at the president’s desk in sunglasses with a purloined cigar. The Times abandoned all objectivity when deputy managing editor A. M. Rosenthal wrote an editorial disguised as a front-page news story centered on a quote from Kirk: “My God, how could human beings do such a thing.” Vintage Kirk, the “such a thing” was not the brutal beating of hundreds of unarmed people, but acts of vandalism, which Rosenthal attributed to the students, but most witnesses—the Times didn’t mention—including faculty members who signed affidavits, attributed to the police. Despite the claims of the New Left that such coverage was adopted by the rest of the media, both the press and the public were appalled by what happened and did not entirely blame the students. Time magazine wrote, “Much of the blame falls on President Grayson Kirk, whose aloof, often bumbling administration has proved unresponsive to grievances that have long festered on campus.” The Columbia faculty formed a board that set up a commission of inquiry headed by Harvard professor Archibald Cox, who came to a similar conclusion.

  Strangely, the entire cast—the students, the administration, the police—did it all over again. There were ongoing discussions about changes at the university. But the administration, which had provoked the original incident by singling out Rudd and five others, decided in late May to suspend Rudd and four others from Columbia. Such suspensions had particularly serious implications in 1968 because they meant the end of a student draft deferment and often a sentence to the Vietnam War. How did the students respond? By demonstrating. What did Rudd and the other four do with the demonstration? They took over Hamilton Hall. So then another one thousand police attacked, in a battle in which sixty-eight people, including seventeen policemen, were injured.

  Rudd returned to campus, suspended from school and out on $2,500 bail and vowing to keep Columbia protests going through the spring and summer. Time magazine asked his parents in suburban Maplewood, New Jersey, where they had been receiving a flood of anti-Semitic letters with such phrases as “fucking Jew,” what they thought of all that had happened with their son. His father pointed out that he had spent his own youth struggling just for enough money. “We’re glad Mark has time to spend on activities like politics.” Or, as his mother kvelled, “My son, the revolutionary.”

  In August, when Kirk, to the relief of almost everyone, offered to retire at the age of sixty-four, the trustees debated for four hours whether or not accepting the offer would appear to be giving in to student rebels. In the end they accepted the resignation even though it was clear that the president had been forced out by the students.

  “The issue is not the issue,” Rudd had said. The point was not the treatment of Harlem or the fostering of the Vietnam War machine. The point was that the nature of American universities needed to be changed. Even the Cox Commission had denounced the authoritative nature of the Columbia administration, with some rules dating from the eighteenth century. Once students had a say, they could address the goal of breaking the tie between corporations and universities, getting the academy out of the business of weaponry, and getting America out of the business of war. Tom Hayden wrote in Ramparts, “The goal written on the university walls was ‘Create two, three, many Columbias’; it meant expand the strike so that the U.S. must either change or send its troops to occupy American campuses.” The goal seemed realistic.

  CHAPTER 12

  MONSIEUR, WE THINK

  YOU ARE ROTTEN

  A man is not either stupid or intelligent, he is either free or not free.

  —Written on a wall of the Faculté de Médecine,Paris, May 1968

  To be free in 1968 is to take part.

  —On a stairwell in the school of Science Politique,Paris, May 1968

  Certain French students, having found out that students in other countries have shaken up and smashed everything, want to do the same.

  —ALAIN PEYREFITTE, French minister of education,explaining events, May 4, 1968

  AS SPRING CAME to rainy Paris, France’s leader, the seventy-eight-year-old general, a man of the nineteenth century, with his near absolute power, ruling under the constitution he had written himself ten years earlier, promised stability, and delivered it.

  The not quite octogenarian, not quite king, entertained fantasies of monarchy, in fact invited the pretender to the French throne, Henri Comte de Paris, to his palace for talks from time to time—the bethroned president with no crown playing host to the king with no throne. While de Gaulle had little tolerance for opposition, he acted as though he had moved beyond politics and its constant search for supporters to a kind of inevitable permanence. In 1966, ensconced in his palace’s regal Salles des Fêtes, he was asked about his health and answered, “It is quite good—but don’t worry, I shall die sometime.”

  On March 15, 1968, while Germany, Italy, Spain, the United States, and much of the world was exploding, Le Monde journalist Pierre Viansson-Ponté wrote a now famous editorial in which he said, “France is bored.” Around this same time, de Gaulle was smugly declaring, “France is in a satisfactory situation, whereas the Germans are having their political difficulties, the Belgians their language problems, and the British their financial and economic crisis.” He continually emphasized that the French should be pleased with this dull peace that he had given them.

  While de Gaulle infuriated the rest of the world, a poll released in early March by the conservative French newspaper Le Figaro showed that 61 percent of the French approved of his foreign policy, whereas only 13 percent disapproved. Of course, disapproving of de Gaulle could be complicated in France, as François Fontievielle-Alquier, a respected journalist, found out when he was brought to court in March 1968 on an eighty-seven-year-old law against criticizing the president. Prosecutors cited twelve passages in his new book, Re-Learn Disrespect, that fell under “attacks on the honor” of the head of state. The law passed on July 29, 1881, provided for prison sentences up to three years or fines from 100 to 300,000 francs ($20 to $60,000 at 1968 exchange rates) for “offenses” in the form of “speeches, shouts, threats uttered in public places, writings, articles in the press.”

  This was the three-hundredth time the law had been invoked since de Gaulle became president. In one case a man was fined 500 francs for shouting, “Retire!” as de Gaulle’s car passed.

  If the French said they were pleased with de Gaulle’s foreign policy, almost no one else was. His peculiar brand of nationalism seemed to threaten most international organizations. The year 1967 had been particularly difficult, or at least a year in which he had been particularly difficult. He withdrew French forces from NATO, a formerly French-based organization, and threatened the survival of the European Common Market when for the second time he blocked British entry to the group. His famous statement after the Six Day War about Jews being a “domineering” people alienated French and American Jews and Gentiles. He even alienated Canadians by endorsing Québécois separatism from the town hall balcony in Montreal while on a state visit to Canada.

  “It is clear to everyone that in de Gaulle the United States is dealing with an ungrateful four-flusher whose hand should have been called years ago,” Gordon McLendon of Dallas said on his eight radio stations. Throughout the United States there were calls for boycottin
g French products. When a Gallup poll asked Americans to rate which countries they liked, France was near the bottom of the list, beating only Egypt, Russia, North Vietnam, Cuba, and the People’s Republic of China. In a poll in which the British were asked to pick the most villainous man of the twentieth century, Hitler came in first but was followed by Charles de Gaulle, who beat out Stalin. In fourth place was British prime minister Harold Wilson. The usually good-humored West German foreign minister, Willy Brandt, said in early February that de Gaulle was “obsessed with power,” though he was quickly forced to apologize for the remark.

  Nor did all criticism come from outside of France, despite de Gaulle’s tendency to prosecute. French of the next generation, the generation of John Kennedy, who should have been taking over, were anxious for their turn. This included fifty-two-year-old socialist François Mitterrand, who was still in line behind sixty-one-year-old Pierre Mendès-France, the leftist former head of government who had earned the contempt of the Right when he withdrew the French military from France’s Vietnam war. But there were also new faces. While America’s New Left was reading translations of Camus, Fanon, and Debray, France also produced a book for the establishment. A 1967 bestseller in France, Le Défi Américain by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the publisher of the slightly left-of-center weekly newsmagazine L’Express, was translated into English and in 1968 became an American bestseller known as The American Challenge. Servan-Schreiber looked to a post–de Gaulle era and his ambitions for himself in that world. His one run for elected office in 1962, a campaign for a National Assembly seat, was disastrous. But if political careers are launched with books, this one had a rare success. In France in its first three months it broke all postwar sales records. Servan-Schreiber’s thesis was that in the next thirty years the United States would become so dominant that Europe would be little more than a colony. The European Common Market, despite the fact that on July 1, 1968, customs between member countries would cease, was failing to move forward fast enough and would disintegrate from lack of momentum.

  The message of this book, often quoted in 1968 by European diplomats and entrepreneurs, was that Europe would have to become like America or would be eaten up by it. American companies, with $14 billion invested in Europe, were taking over. He warned that in the next thirty years they would all be living in what was called “the post-industrial society.” He added, “We should remember this term, for it defines our future.” Among the other prescient predictions: “Time and space will no longer be a problem in communications” and “The gap between high and low salaries in the post-industrial society will be considerably stronger than today.” But he also endorsed the widespread belief in 1968 that by the end of the century Americans would be awash in leisure time. In thirty years, Servan-Schreiber predicted, “America will be a post-industrial society with a per capita income of $7,500. There will be only four work days a week of seven hours per day. The year will be comprised of 39 work weeks and 13 weeks of vacation.”

  He quotes a White House expert predicting, “Well before 1980, computers will be small, powerful, and inexpensive. Computing power will be available to anyone who needs it, or wants it, or can use it. In many cases the user will have a small personal console connected to a large, central computing facility where enormous electronic memories will store all aspects of knowledge.”

  The book was a warning: “America today still resembles Europe—with a fifteen-year head start. She belongs to the same industrial society. But in 1980 the United States will have entered another world, and if we fail to catch up, the Americans will have a monopoly on know-how, science, and power.”

  Servan-Schreiber foresaw, though his timetable was a little fast, the dangers of America as a singular superpower. “If Europe, like the Soviet Union, is forced out of the running, the United States will stand alone in its futuristic world. This would be unacceptable for Europe, dangerous for America and disastrous for the world. . . . A nation holding a monopoly of power would look on imperialism as a kind of duty, and would take its own success as proof that the rest of the world should follow its example.”

  To Servan-Schreiber there was little time and one major obstacle in the path of France’s and Europe’s modernization: a septuagenarian nineteenth-century general. “De Gaulle is from another time, another generation,” said the forty-four-year-old editor who had flown a fighter for Free France during World War II. “He is irrational in a time that cries for rationality.” Even the General’s favorite pose, of the World War II hero, was wearing thin. Servan-Schreiber said, “I disapprove of heroes. Children who worship Batman grow up to vote for heroes. I hope that after de Gaulle the Europeans will be sick of heroes.”

  Servan-Schreiber represented a middle generation of Frenchmen, tired of the elderly de Gaulle but distrustful of the new youth culture. “I want my sons to grow up to be citizens of something that is important. I don’t want them to be second class. A twenty-five-year-old with nothing to be proud of does stupid things like becoming a hippie or going to Bolivia to fight with the guerrillas or putting up a Che Guevara poster on his wall.” Bored and suffocating France had two generation gaps: one between the World War II generation and their children, and the other between General de Gaulle and most of France.

  De Gaulle’s ten-year-old Fifth Republic and the protest movement that was about to consume the society where nothing was happening, both had their roots in Algerian independence. The French colony of Algeria, home to de Gaulle’s Free French government-in-exile for a time during the war, began demanding its independence as soon as the war ended. It was the struggle of Algeria that inspired the writing of Frantz Fanon and greatly shaped the anti-imperialist movement of the 1960s. Mendès-France, who decolonized Indochina and Tunisia, could not get the political muscle to let go of Algeria. Although almost constant local resistance continued from the moment France took over in 1848, a million Frenchmen lived there, many for generations, and the French considered Algeria to be theirs. The French army, humiliated by the Germans and then humiliated by the Vietnamese, felt Algeria to be their final and non-negotiable stand.

  At this point France was supposed to have been through with de Gaulle. After World War II he had considered it his mission to “save” France from the Left. In order to do this, he fostered the myth of the brave France resisting the Nazi occupier. In reality the bulk of the French resistance had been communist, and remembering this, a great many French were inclined to vote communist. De Gaulle offered an alternative and continued insisting for the rest of his life that he was the only alternative to a communist-run France. In the late 1940s the French had decided to take that chance and drove him from power. Though he managed to challenge the socialist governments with a contentious opposition, by 1955, at age sixty-five, he had officially retired from politics, ending a distinguished career.

  But in 1958 plots and counterplots were whispered in France and Algeria, and France was faced with the real possibility that the socialist government would be overthrown by a right-wing military coup. The army, commanded in Algeria by General Raoul Salan, would not back a French government that would let go of Algeria, and the socialists could not be trusted. How much de Gaulle was behind all of this plotting remains a mystery. A number of his known associates were clearly involved, but de Gaulle managed to stay removed from the intrigue. As head of one of several French factions during World War II, he had become skilled at this kind of international maneuvering. Now the retired general simply let it be known that if France were to need him, he would be available. There was enough suspicion of de Gaulle that the legislature openly questioned him on whether his intentions were democratic. “Do you think that, at the age of sixty-seven, I am going to begin a career as a dictator?” de Gaulle responded.

  Even when the government had decided to step down and turn over the reins to the General, it was difficult to convince the National Assembly, the powerful lower house of legislature, to approve the deal. André Le Troquer, the socialist presid
ent of the National Assembly, would not accept de Gaulle’s terms—adjournment of the parliament and the writing of a new constitution—and instead demanded that the General appear before the assembly. De Gaulle refused, replying, “I shall have nothing else to do but to leave you to have it out with the parachutists and return to the seclusion of my home to shut myself up with grief.” With that he returned to his retirement home in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises. But it was clear that only a de Gaulle government could prevent a military coup attempt. The legislators agreed to his terms, including the power to write a new constitution.

  France had turned to him to end the Algerian crisis, not to reform the French state. Few modern monarchs and no democratic heads of state have enjoyed the degree of absolute power that de Gaulle granted by constitution to the president of the Fifth Republic, who, for the foreseeable future, would be himself. The president has the right to override parliament either by calling for a referendum or by dissolving parliament. The president also sets the agenda for the legislature, decides what bills are to be discussed and what version of them. He can block proposals to reduce taxes or increase spending. If a budget is not passed in seventy days, the president has the right to decree one.