Critical Events of 1968, Essay Example

What were the critical events of 1968 that have led historians to describe it as a “watershed year”?

The hopes of the administration of Johnson for Vietnam vanished when the Viet Cong set free a huge assault, referred to as the Tet offensive, on main South Vietnam urban areas. The assault mocked official statements that America was becoming victorious in the war; this made the public opinion swing more powerfully against the warfare. The strong showing of the senator of Antiwar, Eugene J. McCarthy in the presidential primaries was a profound reflection of the dissatisfaction among the public with war’s course and pushed Senator Robert F. Kennedy into the contest on the platform of antiwar. On 31^st March 1968, Johnson surprised the country by making an announcement that he was not seeking to be re-elected; he swore to dedicate the months that he was still in office to looking for peace, and in May 1968 peace talks started. Martin Luther King was also assassinated in 1968 and the same year riots ensued; students occupied many buildings the University of Columbia; a strike by laborers and students that tumbled the government of France; and Robert Kennedy’s assassination which ruined the hopes of the people that were expecting social change by political action (Henretta and Brody 2009).

The withdrawal of Johnson and the assassination of Kennedy made it difficult for the Democratic Party to recover. During the Democratic Convention, there was a consummation of the party by political divisions engineered by the war; there was a demonstration by “yippies” outside the convention, hence attention being redirected from the more numerous and serious activists who were in Chicago as volunteers or delegates. Richard J. Daley, the Democratic Chicago mayor, called out police to end demonstrations. In what could be later referred to as “police riot”, protestors were attacked by patrolmen at the convention using clubs, mace and tear gas as viewers of television watched, which only reinforced a popular notion of Democrats as a party of chaos. Democrats dispiritedly nominated Edmund Muskie and Hubert Humphrey, and there was an approval of the platform that supported war in Vietnam as diplomatic ways of ending the fighting were being explored (Kurlansky 2005).

Bibliography

Henretta, James A., and David Brody. 2009. America: A Concise History. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martins.

Kurlansky, Mark. 2005. 1968: the year that rocked the world. New York: Random House Paperbacks.