1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  In the year 2000, Myrthokleia González Gallardo happened across a friend from student times who was amazed to see her. All these years the friend had assumed Myrthokleia had been killed in the plaza.

  In 1993, for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the massacre, the government gave permission for a monument to be placed in the plaza. Survivors, historians, and journalists searched for the names of victims but could come up with only twenty names. There was another effort in 1998 that yielded only a few more names. Most Mexicans who have tried to unravel the mystery estimate that between one hundred and two hundred people were killed. Some estimates are higher still. Someone was seen filming from a distance on one of the high floors of the Foreign Ministry, but the film has never been found.

  After October 2, the student movement dissolved. The Olympics progressed without any local disturbances. Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s chosen successor was Luis Echeverria, the minister of the interior who worked with him on repressing the student movement. Until he died in 1979, Díaz Ordaz insisted that one of his great accomplishments as president was the way he handled the student movement and averted any embarrassment during the games.

  But very much in the same way that the invasion of Czechoslovakia was the end of the Soviet Union, Tlatelolco was the unseen beginning of the end of the PRI. Álvarez Garín said in a remarkably bold 1971 book on the massacre by Mexican journalist Elena Poniatowska, “All of us were reborn on October 2. And on that day we also decided how we are all going to die; fighting for genuine justice and democracy.”

  In July 2000, for the first time in seventy-one years of existence, the PRI was voted out of power, and it was done democratically, in a slow process over decades, without the use of violence. Today the press is far more free and Mexico much closer to being a true democracy. But it is significant that even with the PRI out of power, many Mexicans said they were afraid to be interviewed for this book, and some who had agreed, upon reflection, backed out.

  The tall rectangular slab erected for the twenty-fifth anniversary lists the ages of the twenty victims. Many were eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old. At the bottom it adds, “y muchos otros campañeros cuyos nombres y edades aún no conocemos”—and many more comrades whose names and ages are unknown.

  Every year in October, Mexicans of the ’68 generation start crying. Mexicans have a very long memory. They still remember how the Aztecs abused other tribes and argue over whether the princess Malinche’s collaboration with Cortés, betraying the Aztec alliance, was justifiable. There is still lingering bitterness about Cortés. Nor is it forgotten how the French connived to take over Mexico in 1862. The peasants still remember the unfulfilled promises of Emiliano Zapata. And it is absolutely certain that Mexicans will long remember what happened on October 2, 1968, amid the Aztec ruins of Tlatelolco.

  PART IV

  THE FALL

  OF NIXON

  It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jet liner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot’s seat.

  —ELDRIDGE CLEAVER, Soul on Ice, 1968

  CHAPTER 20

  THEORY AND PRACTICE

  FOR THE FALL SEMESTER

  Do you realize the responsibility I carry? I am the only person standing between Nixon and the White House.

  —JOHN FITZGERALD KENNEDY, 1960

  I believe that if my judgment and my intuition, my gut feeling, so to speak about America and American political tradition is right, this is the year that I will win.

  —RICHARD M. NIXON, 1968

  PRESIDENT GUSTAVO DíAZ ORDAZ of Mexico formally proclaimed the opening of the games of the XIX Olympiad yesterday in a setting of pageantry, brotherhood and peace before a crowd of 100,000 at the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City.” So read the lead on page one of The New York Times and in major newspapers around the world. Díaz Ordaz got the coverage he had killed for. The dove of peace was the symbol of the games, decorating the boulevards where students were lately beaten, and billboards proclaimed, “Everything Is Possible with Peace.” It was generally agreed that the Mexicans were running a good show, and the opening ceremonies were hailed for pomp as each team presented its flag to the regally perched Díaz Ordaz, El Presidente, the former El Chango. And no one could help but be moved as the Czechoslovakian team marched into the stadium to an international standing ovation. For the first time in history, the Olympic torch was lit by a woman, which was deemed considerable progress since the ancient Greek Olympics, where a woman caught at an Olympiad was executed. There was no longer any sign of the student movement in Mexico, and if it was mentioned, the government simply explained in the face of all logic that the movement had been an international communist plot hatched by the CIA. Yet the size of the crowd was disappointing to the Mexican planners. There were even empty hotel rooms in Mexico City.

  “Freedom of expression.” 1968 student silk-screen poster with the logo of the Mexico City Olympics at the bottom

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

  The United States, as predicted, assembled one of the best track and field teams in history. But then politics began to chip away at it. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, receiving gold and bronze medals for the 200-meter dash, came to the medal presentation shoeless, wearing long black socks. As the U.S. national anthem played, each raised one black gloved hand in the fist that symbolized Black Power. It looked like a spontaneous gesture, but in the political tradition of 1968, the act was actually the result of a series of meetings between the athletes. The black gloves had been bought because they had anticipated receiving the medals from eighty-one-year-old Avery Brundage, the president of the International Olympic Committee, who had spent most of the year trying to get South Africa’s segregated team into the games. Certain that they would win medals, they planned to use the gloves to refuse Brundage’s hand. But in a change of plans, Brundage was at a different event. Observant fans might have noticed that they had split one pair of gloves, Smith using the right hand and Carlos the left. The other pair of gloves was worn by 400-meter runner Lee Evans, a teammate and fellow student of Harry Edwards’s at San Jose State. Evans was in the stands returning the Black Power salute, but no one noticed.

  The next day Carlos was interviewed on one of the principal boulevards of Mexico City. He said, “We wanted all the black people in the world—the little grocer, the man with the shoe repair store—to know that when that medal hangs on my chest or Tommie’s, it hangs on his also.”

  The International Olympic Committee, especially Brundage, was furious. The American contingent was divided between those who were outraged and those who wanted to keep their extraordinary team together. But the committee threatened to ban the entire U.S. team. Instead they settled for the team banning Smith and Carlos, who were given forty-eight hours to leave the Olympic Village. Other black athletes also made political gestures, but the Olympic committee seemed to go out of its way to find reasons why these offenses were not as severe. When the American team swept the 400-meter, winners Lee Evans, Larry James, and Ron Freeman appeared at the medal ceremony wearing black berets and also raising their fists. But the International Olympic Committee was quick to point out that they didn’t do this while the national anthem was being played and therefore had not insulted the flag. They in fact removed their berets during the anthem. Also, much was made of the fact that they were smiling when they raised their fists. Smith and Carlos had been somber. And so, as in the days of slavery, the smiling Negro with a nonthreatening posture was not to be punished. Nor did bronze medal–winning long jumper Ralph Boston, going barefoot in the ceremonies, achieve condemnation for his protest. Long jumper Bob Beamon, who on his first attempt jumped 29 feet 2.5 inches, breaking the world record by almost 2 feet, received his long jump
gold medal with his sweat pants rolled up to show black socks, which was also accepted.

  The original incident at the medal presentations of Smith and Carlos attracted almost no attention in the packed Olympic stadium. It was only the television coverage, the camera zooming in on the two as though everyone in the stadium were doing the same, that made this one of the most remembered moments of the 1968 games. Smith, who had broken all records running 200 meters in 19.83 seconds, had his career in sports overshadowed by the incident, but whenever asked he has always said, “I have no regrets.” He told the Associated Press in 1998, “We were there to stand up for human rights and to stand up for black Americans.”

  On the other hand, an unknown nineteen-year-old black boxer from Houston had his career shadowed by the Olympics for doing the reverse of Smith. After George Foreman won the heavyweight gold medal in 1968 by defeating the Soviet champion Ionas Chepulis, he pulled out from somewhere a tiny American flag. Had he been carrying it during the fight? He began waving it around his head. Nixon liked the performance and contrasted him favorably with those other antiwar young Americans who were always criticizing America. Hubert Humphrey pointed out that the young man with the flag when interviewed in the ring had saluted the Job Corps that Nixon was threatening to disband. But to many boxing fans, especially black ones, it had seemed like a moment of Uncle Tomism, and when Foreman went professional some started referring to him as the Great White Hope, especially when he faced the beloved Muhammad Ali, who beat him in an upset in Zaire, where all of black Africa and much of the world cheered Ali’s victory. It was a humiliation from which Foreman did not recover for years.

  Yet through this year of upheavals and bloodshed, the baseball season glided eerily, as false and happy as a Norman Rockwell painting. Names like Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, Maris now traded to the St. Louis Cardinals, were still popping up, names that belonged to another age, before there were the sixties, before the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, when most Americans had never heard of a place called Vietnam. On April 27, less than a mile from besieged Columbia University, Mickey Mantle hit his 521st home run against the Detroit Tigers, tying Ted Williams for fourth place in career home runs. The night Bobby Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles, the Dodgers were playing in town and thirty-one-year-old right-handed pitcher Don Drysdale threw his sixth consecutive shutout, this time against the Pittsburgh Pirates. This broke Doc White’s sixty-four-year-old record for consecutive shutouts. On September 19, the day before the Mexican army seized UNAM, Mickey Mantle hit his 535th home run, breaking Jimmie Foxx’s record, to become the third-biggest career home run producer in history, behind only Willie Mays and Babe Ruth. The massacre at Tlatelolco shared front pages with the Cardinals’ Bob Gibson, who, while the massacre was unfolding, struck out seventeen Detroit Tigers in the opening game of the World Series, beating Sandy Koufax’s memorable fifteen strikeouts against the Yankees in 1963.

  Baseball was having a great season, but it was getting difficult to care. Attendance was low in almost every stadium except Detroit, where the Tigers had their first good team in memory. Some of the stadiums were in neighborhoods associated with black rioting. Some fans thought that the pitching had gotten too good at the expense of hitting. Some thought that football, with its fast-growing audience, was more violent and therefore better suited to the times. The 1968 World Series was expected to be one of history’s finest pitching duels, between Detroit’s Denny McLain and St. Louis’s Bob Gibson. It was a seven-game series in which the Tigers, after losing three out of four games, came back to win the next three, thanks to the unexpectedly brilliant pitching of Mickey Lolich. For baseball fans it was a seven-game break from the year 1968. For the rest, Gene McCarthy—who was said to have been a respectable semiprofessional first baseman—said that the best ball players were men who “were smart enough to understand the game and not smart enough to lose interest in it.”

  The only thing as out of step with the times as baseball was Canada, which was in the strange embrace of something called Trudeaumania. This country that became the home to an estimated fifty to one hundred U.S. military deserters and hundreds more draft dodgers was becoming a weirdly happy place. Pierre Elliott Trudeau became the new Liberal prime minister of Canada. Trudeau was one of the few prime ministers in the history of Canada to have been described as flashy. At forty-six and unmarried, he was the kind of politician whom people wanted to meet, touch, kiss. He was known for his unusual dress, sandals, a green leather coat, and for other unpredictable whimsy. He even once slid down the bannister of the House of Commons while holding piles of legislation. He practiced yoga, loved skin diving, and had a brown belt in karate. He had a stack of prestigious graduate degrees from Harvard, London, and Paris and until 1968 was known more as an intellectual than a politician. In fact, one of the few things he was not known to have experienced very much of was politics.

  As Americans faced the bleak choice of Humphrey or Nixon, Time magazine captured the thinking of many Americans when it wrote:

  The U.S. has seldom had occasion to look north to Canada for political excitement. Yet last week, Americans could envy Canadians the exuberant dash of their new Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau who, along with intellect and political skill, exhibits a swinger’s panache, a lively style, an imaginative approach to its nation’s problems. A great many U.S. voters yearn for a fresh political experience. . . .

  In a time of extremism, he was a moderate with a lefty style, but his exact positions were almost impossible to establish. He was from Quebec and of French origin, but he spoke both languages beautifully and it was so uncertain whose side he was on that many hoped he might be able to resolve the French-English squabble that consumed much of Canada’s political debate. While most Canadians were against the war in Vietnam, he said he thought the bombing should halt but that he was not going to tell the United States what to do. A classic Trudeauism: “We Canadians have to remember that the United States is kind of a sovereign state too.” He was once apprehended in Moscow for throwing snowballs at a statue of Stalin. But he was sometimes accused of communism. Once, when asked flat out if he was a communist, he answered: “Actually I am a canoeist. I’ve canoed down the Mackenzie, the Coppermine, the Saguenay rivers. I wanted to prove that a canoe was the most seaworthy vessel around. In 1960 I set out from Florida to Cuba—very treacherous waters down there. Some people thought I was trying to smuggle arms to Cuba. But I ask you, how much arms can you smuggle in a canoe?”

  It is a rare politician who can get away with answers like that, but in 1968, with the rest of the world turned so earnest, Canadians were laughing. Trudeau, with his lack of political experience, would say that the voters had put him up to running as a kind of joke. And now they “are stuck with me.” Fellow Canadian Marshall McLuhan described Trudeau’s face as a “corporate tribal mask.” “Nobody can penetrate it,” McLuhan said. “He has no personal point of view on anything.”

  On social issues, however, his position was clear. Despite a reputation for womanizing, he took strong stands on women’s issues, including liberalizing abortion laws, and he was also an outspoken advocate of rights for homosexuals. Prior to the April election, Trudeau had always been seen in a Mercedes sports car. A reporter asked him, now that he was prime minister, whether he was going to give up the Mercedes. Trudeau answered, “Mercedes the car or Mercedes the girl?”

  When Trudeau died in 2000 at the age of eighty, both former president Jimmy Carter and Cuban leader Fidel Castro were honorary pallbearers.

  The Beatles also surprised everyone with their lack of stridency, or lack of commitment, depending on the point of view. In the fall of 1968 they released their first self-produced record—a single with “Revolution” on one side and “Hey, Jude” on the other. “Revolution” carried the message “We all want to change the world”—but we should do it moderately and slowly. The Beatles were attacked for the stance in many places, including the official Soviet press, but by the end of 1968 many peop
le agreed. By the fall, when there is usually a sense of renewal, there was instead a feeling of weariness.

  Not everyone felt it. Student activists returned to school hoping to resume where they had left off in the spring, while the schools hoped to go back to the way things were before. When the Free University of Berlin opened in mid-October, the women’s dormitories had been occupied by men for most of the summer. The university gave in and announced that the dormitories would henceforth be coeducational.

  At Columbia, the radical students hoped to continue and even internationalize the movement. In June the London School of Economics and the BBC had invited New Left leaders from ten countries to a debate it called “Students in Revolt.” Student movements seized on this opportunity. Opponents such as de Gaulle talked of an international conspiracy, and the students thought this might be a good idea. The fact was, they had mostly never met one another, except those who had gone to Berlin for the spring anti-Vietnam march.

  Columbia SDS had decided to send Lewis Cole, as Rudd said impatiently, “because he chain-smoked Gauloises. ” In truth, Cole was the group intellectual most fluent in Marxist theory. Cole and Rudd were being regularly invited on the better talk shows such as David Susskind and William Buckley.