1968
Tet Offensive stuns America
On the Vietnamese lunar new year, eighty-five thousand Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops attacked cities and bases across South Vietnam, including the US embassy in Saigon. Militarily they were pushed back; politically they won the war. Americans watching television concluded the generals had been lying about the light at the end of the tunnel.
Martin Luther King assassinated
Standing on the balcony of a Memphis motel where he had come to support striking sanitation workers, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed by a single rifle shot. He was thirty-nine. American cities burned that week in grief and rage. Robert Kennedy, speaking to a Black audience in Indianapolis that night, broke the news himself.
Soviet tanks crush Prague Spring
Alexander Dubcek's reformist Czechoslovak government had tried to build socialism with a human face: censorship lifted, debate opened, reform promised. The Soviet Union sent two hundred thousand Warsaw Pact troops across the border overnight. Czechs stood in front of tanks with flowers. The thaw ended and the Brezhnev Doctrine was born.
My Lai massacre
American soldiers from Charlie Company entered a South Vietnamese hamlet on a search-and-destroy mission and, over the course of a morning, killed between three hundred and five hundred unarmed villagers, mostly women, children, and elderly men. A helicopter pilot named Hugh Thompson intervened to stop some of the killings. The cover-up unraveled slowly, and the revelation shattered what remained of American innocence about the war.
Paris erupts in May 1968
Student protests at Nanterre spread to the Sorbonne and then to factories across France. Ten million workers struck. De Gaulle briefly fled to a French army base in Germany to make sure the troops would still obey him. The uprising collapsed, but something had broken in Western European assumptions about authority and the good life.
RFK assassinated in Los Angeles
Minutes after winning the California Democratic primary, Robert Kennedy was shot in a hotel kitchen by a young Palestinian named Sirhan Sirhan. He died the next morning. Two months after King, a second American political hope was gone. The sixties stopped feeling hopeful, and the country seemed to be flying apart.
Tlatelolco massacre in Mexico
Ten days before the Olympic Games were to open in Mexico City, government troops opened fire on a student protest in the Plaza of the Three Cultures, killing perhaps three hundred. The authorities suppressed the story for decades. The Olympics proceeded on schedule. Mexican politics carried the wound for the rest of the century.