1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  By the end of the year, women’s fashions were indicating that the times were “a-changin’ ” again. It was only back in March that New York had the “Down with Dirndl” movement against “those fat, gathering balloon skirts and dirndls, dresses with old-fashioned waistlines. . . . Big ugly belts in the middle of dresses and coats make women look like mastodons in full retreat,” read a petition with sixty-six signatures, of which seventeen were men. The movement was led by Dona Fowler Kaminsky, a twenty-eight-year-old Berkeley graduate who went to department stores to protest the new fashion that had turned from miniskirts toward the long-skirted “maxi.” They threatened to picket department stores with signs that read, “Maxis Are Monstrous.” In the early spring, Time magazine fashion writers were predicting the summer season to be “the barest in memory”—with see-through blouses with nothing underneath, bare midriffs, wide and plunging necklines, and backs open, as Time put it, “right down to the coccyx.” Rudi Gernreich, who in 1964 came out with the topless bathing suit, which the Soviets called “barbarous” and was even banned in the south of France, now predicted that “the bare bosom look” would gain complete acceptance in the next five years. Chicago designer Walter Holmes came out with the miniskirted nun’s habit, also a miniskirted monk’s cowl, both with removable hoods to show plunging necklines, with neither design intended for nuns.

  But by the end of the year, to the consternation of many men, the pantsuit had become the “in” look. Women wanted to be taken seriously and compete with men, and that is more difficult to do in a miniskirt. Few noticed that in society something new and exciting was about to happen for women even if it translated badly into fashion. Somehow it seemed that both the unfairness and the fun were going to be over, that the sixties were drawing to a close. William Zinsser wrote in Life magazine, “The city pantsuit is the Richard Nixon of high fashion. Send it away once, unwanted. Send it away twice, unloved. No matter: it will return in slightly different form, to beg approval still another time. Nixonlike, the pantsuit knows that it’s now or never, and I’m very much afraid it’s now.”

  CHAPTER 19

  IN AN AZTEC PLACE

  All the history of every people is symbolic. This is to say: history and its events and its protagonists allude to another concealed history, are the visible manifestation of a hidden reality.

  —OCTAVIO PAZ, Posdata, 1970

  GUSTAVO DíAZ ORDAZ was a very ugly man. Mexicans were divided into two camps about their president: those who thought he resembled a bat and those who thought he was more like a monkey. His small frame, little snipped nose, long teeth, and thick-lensed glasses that magnified his irises to a primordial size all contributed to this debate. The monkey side gave him his nickname, El Chango, a Mexican word for a monkey, though his long, flapping arm gestures were suggestive of bat wings. But he was credited with a good sense of humor and reputedly once responded to the accusation of being “two-faced” by saying, “Ridiculous, if I had another one don’t you think I would use it?” And though not especially skilled with language, he had a powerful, booming speaking voice. His voice was the only physical attribute in his favor. But a good voice is an important attribute for a president of Mexico. The Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote, “Accustomed as they are to delivering only monologues, intoxicated by a lofty rhetoric that envelops them like a cloud, our presidents and leaders find it well-nigh impossible to believe that aspirations and opinions that are different than their own even exist.”

  In 1968 the president of Mexico was worried. Some of the things that worried him were in his own mind and some were real. He had reason to worry about the Olympics. So far this year, almost every cultural and sporting event had been disrupted. The winter games in Grenoble, France, had gone well, though perhaps too much attention had been paid to Soviet-Czech competition. But the games had taken place before April, when the French were still bored. The April Academy Awards were postponed two days to mourn the death of Martin Luther King and then were overshadowed by politics. Bob Hope, not well liked on the Left for his girlie shows for the troops in Vietnam, appalled the audience with jokes about the postponement. Two films about race relations, albeit simplistic stories almost silly with didacticism—In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner—won awards. In a positive touch of the times, Czech director Jirí Menzel won the Oscar for best foreign language film for Closely Watched Trains, and he was free to travel to receive it. It was a completely politicized event.

  “Let’s demand to know who is responsible.” 1968 Mexican student silk-screen poster depicting President Díaz Ordaz as a monkey.

  (Amigos de la Unidad de Postgrado de la Escuela de Diseño A.C.)

  Disruption would be even worse than politicization. Protesters had closed the annual Venice Biennale art show and the Cannes Film Festival, attacked the Frankfurt Book Fair, and even disrupted the Miss America pageant. Even the winner of the Kentucky Derby was disqualified for drug use. And of course there was the Chicago convention. Nothing like that was to happen in Mexico.

  Díaz Ordaz, as president of Mexico, the appointed leader of the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, was heir to the revolution and guardian of the stated contradiction in the ruling party’s carefully worded name. In 1910 Mexico had been a labyrinth of political chaos and social injustice. Centuries of inept colonial rule followed by corrupt dictatorships and foreign occupations then culminated in thirty years of one-man rule. It was a familiar pattern. After years of chaos, the dictator Porfirio Díaz offered stability. But in 1910 he was eighty years old and had arranged for no successor or any institutions to outlast him. There were no political parties, and he represented no ideology. Mexico was divided by different cultures, ethnic groups, and social classes, all with dramatically different needs and demands. When the country erupted into what was called the Mexican revolution that year, it was an endless series of highly destructive civil wars, most of them fought on a regional basis. There were many leaders and many armies. But this was the Mexico Hernán Cortés had found in the early sixteenth century. The Aztecs had ruled by managing a coalition of leaders from different groups. Cortés had defeated the Aztecs by dividing his coalition, gaining the loyalty of some of the leaders. That was how politics was played in Mexico.

  Francisco Madero, a bourgeois from the north, led one faction. He attracted upper-class, middle-class, and working-class Mexicans of moderate politics. Also in the north were tough, mounted guerrilla fighters—bandits who took up the cause of the revolution, in some cases as paid mercenaries. The most brilliant of these was Pancho Villa. Villa was the only revolutionary leader to get good American press. Even Madero was criticized bitterly for suggesting a minuscule tax on the Mexican oil that was controlled and imported to the United States by American oil companies. But Pancho Villa had little of the “anti-Americanism” of which Washington suspected all the others. He did personally rape hundreds of women and murder according to whim, and he was a racist who killed Chinese people whenever he found them working in mining camps. His lieutenants were even more murderous and sadistic, devising hideous tortures. But General Villa was not anti-American. The Americans supplied his weapons and ammunition. Ten thousand men rode with Villa, mostly in the northern state of Chihuahua. They robbed and raided, did as they wanted, and once even won a spectacular military victory for the revolution at Zacatecas.

  In the central area, in Morelos, was Emiliano Zapata, who did not fit in with any of the others, aside from the fact that they were all mestizo—of mixed European and indigenous blood. Zapata with his big, sad eyes was leading a peasant revolt in the central highlands. His followers were agrarian Mexicans, either mestizo or from indigenous non-Spanish-speaking tribes, of which there are still many in Mexico, fighting for land. His goal was to have the arable land of Mexico taken away from wealthy landowners and distributed equally among the peasants. He and his followers intended to go on fighting regardless of what the others did, until the farmers got their land.

&nb
sp; Fighting continued after Madero became president in 1911, and he was helpless to stop it. Madero, for whom Zapata had a great fondness, was from the wrong class. He was a landowner with a large ranch in the north, and he was surrounded by other figures such as Venustiano Carranza, who had interests in the moneyed classes and were disturbed at the way this Zapata was trying to turn the Revolution into a revolution. Madero could not give Zapata his land, and he could not bribe the bandits, the “generals” in the north, enough to make peace seem profitable to them. Like many revolutionary figures, Madero was murdered by supporters of the Revolution.

  By the end of 1914 the combined forces of the revolutionary armies of Carranza and Pancho Villa and Zapata had secured control of Mexico and defeated the federal army that Porfirio Díaz had left behind. Zapata and Villa moved their armies into the capital as a new revolutionary government was formed. Carranza declared himself president and reluctantly and under great pressure adopted Zapata’s land reform program, though he did little to put it into action.

  Álvaro Obregón, who, like most leading figures of the period, held the title of general, was a schoolteacher from the northern state of Sonora who had started out with a guerrilla army but had learned the modern warfare of machine guns and trenches. He had military advisers from Europe’s “Great War.” His temperament and politics, which had a huge influence on the shaping of modern Mexico, were resolutely moderate. He had sympathy for workers and peasants but was not about to do anything too revolutionary. He had considerable worker support and enlisted them in his army as “Red Battalions.” In April 1915 Villa had a showdown with Obregón, who surrounded the mounted bandits with barbed wire and trenches with machine-gun emplacements. Villa used his field artillery effectively and fought furiously, but he never understood modern tactics. His men were cut down by the machine guns and cut up by the barbed wire. Obregón himself had an arm blown off, and the partial limb in a pickling jar became the emblem of Obregón’s Red Battalions, which was later fashioned into the Revolutionary Army of Mexico, supposedly an “Army of the People” that embodied the ideals of the revolution.

  Zapata stuck to his land reform goals. Such stubborn local chieftains could usually be bought off. But Zapata would not take money or accept compromise. His organization was infiltrated by an army double agent who was allowed to carry out several sneak attacks, killing large numbers of soldiers, to prove his authenticity to Zapata. Once Zapata trusted him, the agent led Zapata, looking splendid as always in his dark riding clothes on his sorrel horse, into six hundred army rifles that opened fire. Upon his death in 1919, the murdered revolutionary became the Che of his day, the youthful poster boy for a new revolutionary government that had killed him rather than carry out his revolution.

  There was a lot of killing going on in Mexico—so much so that from 1910 to 1920 the total population of the country declined by several hundred thousand. In November 1920 the one-armed Obregón became president. He legalized all the land confiscations that had taken place, something Carranza had refused to do. By this act, along with having the man who set up Zapata’s murder shot, he finally obtained a peace settlement with Zapata’s fighters in Morelos, even though most of the land was getting distributed to generals and only small patches to the poor. Villa was bought off and agreed to spend the rest of his days as a comfortable rancher. But in 1923, friends and family of people he had murdered and raped over the years shot him as he passed by in his new automobile.

  Some can be bought off, and some have to be shot. That became the Mexican way. “No general can withstand a cannonade of a hundred thousand pesos,” Obregón once said. By 1924 a fourth of the national budget went to paying off generals. But many other “generals,” local chieftains with their bands of armed followers, were shot.

  Starting with the 1917 constitution, a system of government was established whose primary goal was not democracy but stability. In 1928 Mexico almost slid back into revolution. Obregón ran for president without an opponent and was elected. He might have been on his way to dictatorship were it not for the artist who, while sketching him as president, took out a pistol and shot him to death. The assassin was immediately killed.

  It seemed the changing of presidents was forever threatening the national stability. The Mexican solution was the PNR—the National Revolutionary Party—formed in 1929. Through this institution, a qualified president could be chosen and presented to the public. For six years this president would have almost absolute power. There were only three things he could not do—give territory to a foreign power, confiscate land from indigenous people, and succeed himself as president. During World War II, in an attempt to appear more stable and democratic, the PNR changed its name to that uniquely Mexican paradox, the Institutional Revolution Party.

  That is what Mexico had become, not a democracy but an institutional revolution—the Revolution that feared revolution. The PRI bought out or killed agrarian leaders, all the while paying verbal homage to Zapata and carrying out as little land reform as possible. It bought out the labor unions until they became part of the PRI. It bought out the press, one newspaper at a time, until it completely controlled them. The PRI was not violent. It tried to co-opt. Only in those rare situations where that did not work would it resort to killing.

  In 1964 the PRI chose the former minister of the interior, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, as the next president. Of all possible candidates, he was the most conservative. As minister of the interior, he had managed unusually good relations with the United States. He seemed the right choice to lead Mexico in the dangerous 1960s.

  Díaz Ordaz was eager to put Mexico on display. It was at one of its best moments of economic expansion, with annual growth rates between 5 and 6 percent, up to 7 percent for 1967. In January 1968 The New York Times reported, “Steady economic growth within a framework of political and financial stability has distinguished Mexico among the major Latin American countries.” Octavio Paz wrote with a tone of incredulity about this period, “The economy of the country had made such progress that economists and sociologists cited the case of Mexico as an example for other underdeveloped countries.”

  The 1968 summer Olympics was the first large international event hosted by Mexico since 1910, when as three decades of dictatorship was crumbling, Porfirio Díaz attempted an international celebration of the centennial of the beginning of the independence movement. The 1968 Olympics was the first time the Mexican Revolution was to show itself to the world with all its accomplishments, including an emerging middle class, the modernity of Mexico City, and the efficiency with which Mexico could run a huge international event. It would be televised to the world that Mexico was no longer backward and strife-torn but had become an emerging, successful modern country.

  But Díaz Ordaz also understood that the world was having its 1968 and there would be troubles. The most apparent controversy on the horizon, the U.S. race conflicts, had the potential to politicize the games the same way the King assassination had politicized the Oscars. The idea of a black boycott of the Olympics first emerged in a meeting of Black Power leaders in Newark after that city’s riots during the summer of 1967. In November, Harry Edwards, an amiable and popular black sociology instructor at San Jose State College in California, again raised the idea at a black youth conference. Most athletes and black leaders did not think a black boycott would be effective, but one of Edwards’s first adherents to the idea was Tommie Smith, a student at San Jose State College and an extraordinary athlete who already held two world records in track and field events. Lee Evans, another champion sprinter at San Jose State, also said he would boycott. In February fresh life was breathed into the boycott idea by the International Olympic Committee, which in exchange for a few token gestures readmitted the apartheid team of South Africa.

  Harry Edwards, a six-foot-eight, bearded twenty-five-year-old in sunglasses and black beret, was a former college athlete who insisted on referring to the U.S. president as “Lynchin’ Baines Johnson.” From his sports boyco
tt office in San Jose, he was interested not only in the Olympics, but also in boycotts of college and professional programs. In 1968, though, the big target was in Mexico City. A poster on his wall said, “Rather than run and jump for medals, we are standing up for humanity.” His wall also featured the “Negro traitor of the week,” a prominent black athlete who opposed the boycott. Among those so honored were baseball’s Willie Mays, track’s Jesse Owens, and decathlon champion Rafer Johnson. A boycott of the 1960 Olympics had been suggested to Johnson, and Dick Gregory had called for a boycott in 1964. But this year, with the help of Harry Edwards’s office, the idea seemed to be gathering force.

  In March, Life magazine published a survey of top black college athletes and was surprised to discover a widely held conviction that it would be worth giving up a chance at an Olympic medal to better conditions for their race. Life also found that black athletes were angry about their treatment at American universities. They would be promised housing but would get no help when confronted with housing discrimination. At San Jose State, white athletes were entertained by the athletic department in fraternities that did not accept black members. In the top 150 college athletic programs, there were only seven black coaches. White coaches bunched the black athletes together in locker rooms or on road trips. Academic advisers were constantly counseling them to take special easy courses so they could pass. And they would find that no one on the faculty or the student body ever talked to them about anything other than sports.