WEEKEND COLUMNISTS The diary is full of 40th anniversaries, and the air is thick with echoes. It is not just the accident of the calendar that’s bringing back memories, but also an American election with a theatricality that hasn’t been seen in all the years since.
Ah, 1968! That year of years! I was there, you know, through it all. I was on the streets of Prague blinking in the spring sunshine amid the sudden freedom from communist repression. I was in Paris hurling cobblestones at the police. I was in the ghettoes as black America responded in fury to the murder of Martin Luther King. I was in the Ambassador Hotel amid the shrieks of horror when Bobby Kennedy was shot. I was on the streets of Chicago as Mayor Daley’s police bludgeoned the protesters. I was back in Prague to see the Soviet tanks roll in.
I don’t mean I was actually, physically, there; I was in the depths of the English countryside, a teenager stuck in an all-male boarding school. But if you were old enough to grasp the import of the news, then you lived through it. What was hard – and has got no easier – was to grasp what it all meant.
The great public dramas of 1968 were largely confined to less than half of it, from March – when the surge of global youthful discontent began to be unleashed – to August, when it was hurled back by the small-scale brutality of the Chicago cops and the grand brutality of the Soviet army, events that might have had little in common except that they occurred within days of each other.
But every week was like that. Take this one. On March 12 1968 Eugene McCarthy, an obscure senator running on an anti-Vietnam war ticket, almost defeated President Johnson in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. On March 13 Czechoslovakia relaxed press censorship and arrested the former head of the secret police. Next door in Poland there were big anti-communist riots.
On March 14 Bobby Kennedy said he would not support Johnson in the election. On March 15 – 40 years ago today – Britain’s erratic and bibulous foreign secretary George Brown resigned from the government. On March 16 Kennedy announced that he would himself run for the White House. (Johnson withdrew two weeks later.) On March 17 there was an anti-war riot in London, culminating in an attempt to storm the US Embassy. Just another week.
Yet perhaps the most important event didn’t make the news for another 18 months. What we found out then was that on the morning of the 16th – 40 years ago tomorrow – a company of US infantrymen had entered the obscure (and possibly misidentified) Vietnamese village known as My Lai and raped, clubbed, stabbed, shot, mutilated and decapitated an unknown number of unarmed men, women and children. The numbers of the dead remain vague: probably between 300 and 500.
Eventually just one man, Lt William L. Calley, was charged, and convicted of murdering 22 civilians; Calley served three-and-a-half years under house arrest and has just retired from running a jewellery store.
In 2003, a young writer, Tom Bissell, went to Vietnam with his father, who had served there as a marine, to produce a memoir*. The son forced the father to visit the memorial to the massacre. His father was unimpressed, and to him the absence of young men among the dead proved that it had been a communist village, and that they had been away fighting for the Viet Cong. In any case, it was nothing special…
“Things like My Lai happened all the time?” Bissell asked his father. “All the time, yes. Just not so severe.” “They did? All the time?” “Unfortunately, yes. That’s the reality.”
Those of us who think we lived through 1968 were not at My Lai: not George W. Bush, with his cushy number back home; not Dick Cheney or Bill Clinton, with their clever draft deferments; not Tony Blair or me, at our boarding schools.
My Lai can perhaps be compared to Abu Ghraib: it was the revelation that pierced the cloak of idealistic innocence that covered the reality of war. Yet it was still more than seven years from March 16 1968 until the US’s final, ignominious exit from Vietnam.
We should always be wary of drawing precise parallels. History doesn’t work like that, and the events of 1968 still form a tangled skein that defies clear analysis and simple theories. But if we don’t even try to learn the lessons, we are sure as hell doomed to repeat the mistakes.
* ‘The Father of All Things’ (Pantheon)
