Our minds fix on round numbers, and so we’ve noted that this is the 50th anniversary of 1968. We recall the protests, the assassinations and the riots, and ascribe a special significance to the events of that year.
But it wasn’t such a special year after all. Not like 1969.
On college campuses in 1968, radical students occupied deans’ offices, and in France the Sorbonne was shut down by striking students. But what was exceptional about the year were the two assassinations, of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy.
King’s death was followed by riots in Detroit, Washington, Chicago and elsewhere that ripped away the illusion that the Civil Rights revolution would be entirely peaceful. What happened thereafter — the Rodney King riots, Black Lives Matter — began with the soul-shattering news from the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
Robert Kennedy announced the news of the assassination to a predominantly African-American audience in Indianapolis, with the authority of one whose brother had been assassinated, and with classical allusions quite beyond the ken of any of today’s political leaders. Two months later he, too, was killed by an assassin.
We can wonder what would have happened had King and Kennedy been permitted to live. But we already have an answer, from what followed the next year. As if recognizing the need to heal from the craziness and horror of the prior year, things quickly became quieter, more restrained, in our music, in our politics.
Popular music was different back then. It had lyrics, for example. Words and everything! Fans would play the songs backwards and forward for hints about whether Paul McCartney had gone to meet his Maker. And in 1969 the music changed.
It was the year of the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” a song about Vietnam and the betrayal of Keith Richard’s girlfriend. It was also the year The Band sang “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and Bob Dylan released Nashville Skyline. In 1969 Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young performed at Woodstock, their first gig.
What the music told us was that we had gone too far, that we needed to step back and return to the trodden path. We took a look at the Charles Manson gang and knew without thinking that they were crazy and evil. We saw how Woodstock was followed by Altamont, where the Hells Angels killed a concertgoer while the Stones sang “Under My Thumb.”
We had believed we could reinvent our morals, our politics, everything — and saw that we were wrong. The Promised Land was in sight, and then the Promised Land retreated.
In what followed, we learned that our country deserved our loyalty and love — all parts of it.
It was the beginning of what historian Shelby Foote called the Great Compromise. The Civil Rights revolution took hold throughout the country, and southerners would admit that it was good that the Union had won the Civil War.
Northerners would concede that the Confederates had fought bravely for their cause, the Sons of Confederate Veterans could hold their marches, reenactors could gather at the old camp ground, the Confederate statues would stay up.
It was the year Richard Nixon became president, and with his inauguration we had all the proof we needed that the 1960s were definitely over, that the romance had gone out of the world, that the future would be devoted to wonky things like new federalism and family-assistance programs. And with that, all the revolutionaries enrolled in law school.
But that wasn’t why 1969 was so remarkable a year in America. It was the year of the moon landing, the ultimate badge of the Right Stuff. Across America and the world, people were transfixed by the images on their television screens, by Neil Armstrong’s slow descent down the ladder to the moon, and by the first words ever spoken from its surface.
And that was the real America, not the murders, not the riots. We knew we’d cycle through periods of rebellion and restoration, but that the eternal America would strive for what had seemed the unreachable, the seemingly impossible, as we have always done.
F.H. Buckley teaches at Scalia Law School. His next book is “The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed.”