1968 started out with a massive shock erupting in Vietnam. Communist Viet Cong fighters suddenly seemed to be invading every American stronghold in Vietnam. Even the supposedly very safe South Vietnamese capital, Saigon, found itself fighting viciously in its own streets to avoid being overrun.  Viet Cong even got inside the American embassy compound and killed American marine guards there, all of it displayed graphically on the American TV evening news.  Americans were shocked because the pictures they saw seemed to contrast so sharply with the assurances of Johnson's government that America had been making good progress in the War.

Actually, this was not exactly a falsehood.  The Vietnamese Communists were themselves becoming quite exhausted.  And thus they undertook this actually rather desperate all-or-nothing assault on the American position in Vietnam in order to finally collapse a faltering American will – before their own broke.  And indeed, the well-planned but risky Communist uprising was met with such a stiff response that it almost delivered a mortal blow to the Vietnamese Communists. But that part of the story was unknown to the American press and therefore could not be shown on the evening news.

Quite visibly to Americans, the assurances of the military that all had been progressing nicely in Vietnam now appeared to be a terrible coverup of the truth, a monumental lie.  If the Vietcong could do that well, America was hardly winning the war in Vietnam.  Thus, as the Boomers suspected, the voice of Washington was not to be trusted.

Sickened by the failure of his Great Society to bring America to new social heights, but to have produced instead only deep racial conflict (and a lot of burned-out urban neighborhoods); worn out by the heavy criticism of the enormous military effort in Vietnam (with anti-war protesters gathered outside the White House to conduct non-stop campaigning, chanting "hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?"); feeling betrayed by his own generals who had been assuring Johnson that with over 500,000 American troops in Vietnam all was going as planned there; and now facing stiff criticism from even members of his own political party – Johnson, in concluding a March telecast to the nation, abruptly (and without any prior warning to the press) announced that he would not be running again for President in the elections coming up that November.  He was bailing out, presumably leaving his extensive Great Society program and his all-absorbing anti-Communist stand in Vietnam for someone else to carry on (or not).

Then in April the nation was shocked by the news that Martin Luther King had been assassinated while attending a protest in Memphis Tennessee of garbage workers striking for better pay and working conditions.¹

This was followed up in the next days by the well-televised sight of numerous American cities, including the nation's capital, being set afire (and firemen who had been sent out to put out the fires being shot at) by angry Blacks.  Washington even had to impose an emergency afternoon curfew (no one on the streets after 5:00 p.m.) to restore order – one lasting for several days.  National guardsmen were required to patrol the streets of numerous American cities (including Washington) in an effort to keep order.

Somehow the nation felt totally helpless despite these awkward displays of authority.  What was happening to America?  Was this how Dr. King would have wanted to be respected in death as in life?  Who or what was behind all of this?

Whites were blamed, of course.  But that hardly answered the questions of a largely Liberal or Humanist America as to why now, why like this?

What was happening to America?

¹Seeing his Black civil rights campaign radicalized by young Black Power activists, King had recently switched his emphasis from race to poverty, becoming more inclusive (supporting Whites as well as Blacks) in his effort to improve the lot of poorer Americans.  In fact, he was planning a major "Poor-People's March on Washington" for that coming June – very indicative of his new direction in the campaign for American civil rights. 

At the end of April, a strange event broke out on the Columbia University campus in New York City: students had taken over the administration building of the university and were trying to shut down the university (Maoist style), claiming that the university's expansion program demonstrated a racist insensitivity to Blacks living in the neighborhood.  Conservative students hoping to go through graduation ceremonies in a few weeks and thus not wanting to see the University shut down, attempted to retake the university from the "Liberal" protesters gathered in and around the university.  But the latter group continued to hold control of the university for what remained of the school year.  Almost immediately this then became the inspiration for more of this type of Boomer heroics to break out across the country, even in Europe as well as in America.  A bizarre cultural war of sorts was clearly looming.

In June another assassination struck, this time Robert Kennedy, who was clearly the front runner among the Democratic Party contenders for the Presidency, and thus very likely also to be the country's next President.  The assassination was committed by a young Palestinian-American who appeared to have no particular motive for doing so.²  The assassination seemed so pointless, so tragic ... and left the nation profoundly stunned.

²It would eventually be revealed that the assassin, Sirhan Sirhan – who had come to America when he was twelve – was angry at Kennedy's support of the decision to send 50 bombers to the Israeli air force.  As a child, he had witnessed an Israeli tank run over his older brother, and was very bitter towards Israel as a result.

Indeed, as the Democratic Party gathered in Chicago in August to nominate a presidential candidate, the convention became itself the scene of ugliness both inside and outside the convention hall.  Hippie (even more radical "Yippie") Boomers had come in from all around the country to protest the war, protest racism, protest basically anything that held sway as the patriotic ideal of the older Vet generation.  Chicago Mayor Daley had prepped the police for a tough confrontation with these "unpatriotic" youth, and the Boomers were prepped to confront these "Fascist pig" police with their own brand of militant action.  Both groups wanted a war.

Both groups got their war.  For a while, Chicago authorities lost control of events in and around the convention center as bystanders, journalists, even delegates attempting to come or go at the convention were beat up, mostly by rioting Chicago police.  The nation watched on their TV's as the violence mounted, and as Mayor Daley conducted a foul-mouth campaign of his own inside the convention hall.  What an appalling sight.

What was happening to America?

In the meantime, the Republican Party had gathered (earlier in August) in a much calmer setting in Miami to nominate Richard Nixon as their presidential candidate. Joining him on the Republican ticket as the Republicans' Vice-Presidential nominee was Maryland Governor Spiro Agnew, brought to recent political celebrity status when he publicly issued the threat that the violence of Black rioting would be met head on by equally rough police countermeasures.  His threat was convincing enough that Baltimore, Maryland, was one of the few major American cities that did not undergo the bath of fire administered in the name of "Black power."

With the Democrats in such disarray, with the Vet voters hungry to get someone into the White House that they could trust to get America back in order, Nixon upset the Democrats' expectation for an easy win for their presidential nominee, the rather academic Hubert Humphrey, a former U.S. Senator serving the past four years as Vice President.  Also the third-party run of Alabama governor George Wallace cut deeply into the reliably Democratic Party vote of the South (which actually however would soon be moving rapidly into the Republican Party camp). The popular vote favoring Nixon was a close one with Nixon drawing 43.4 percent of the popular vote to Humphrey's 42.7 percent (Wallace with 13.5 percent), although the electoral college vote was strongly in Nixon's favor 302 to 191 (Wallace with 46).

The Boomers, and their intellectual mentors (professors, journalists, and "Liberal" politicians), looked on in horror as the Vets' champion, but almost by instinct the intellectuals' Public Enemy Number One, was about to take residence in the White House.