Editor’s Note: This column appeared in the Jan. 1, 1969 combined The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution.
So the new Year has come — has begun.
Before committing ourselves to it, let us look back one more time at the year now packed in the vaults of history. It is inevitable, of course, we shall in 1969 look backward many times to 1968. We shall seek from it answers and explanations. Many ghosts shall crawl from its tomb to frighten us. The portents of 1968 may fade or flower. Only the three sisters who spin the thread of life can answer, and they are myths.
The decade’s end is two years away.
But even so, it may be said that 1968 was the year when events of previous years at last limited the British empire to its legendary and magnificent islands, bereft of military power and weakened politically. An old, even ancient, order of paternalistic, parliamentary autocracy had ended with dignity and honor.
Mao and Soviets
It was in 1968 that Mao’s out-of-control revolution and his possession of a few nuclear devices convinced the Soviets that war was a possibility. Stress between the Kremlin and Peking was very, very persistent.
Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia was a product of 1968. This move, skillfully made, revealing to Western observers a well trained army and logistic readiness, was tied to the Sino-Soviet dilemma. With war a possibility, the Kremlin could not permit its Western bloc of allied Communist states to erode away the Communist party hold in any one of them.
It was the Soviet confrontation with the puzzle and threat of China that led them to lend substantial pressure on North Vietnam in 1968 to begin negotiations about Vietnam.
Tied closely to this was a rising fear, as 1968 was ending, in Japan, Indonesia, and other Asian states. They began to see that a United States abandonment of its presence and influence in Asia might lead to a much more disturbed Eastern world. In time, of course, the great powers, the USA and the USSR, would be involved.
In June, 1967, Egypt began a war with Israel. It was over in six days with Egyptian power shattered and humiliated. It was 1968 when the Soviets moved a formidable fleet and air force into the Mediterranean.
This maneuver moved the Russian “shore” into Africa. It touched Europe at Spain. This maneuver made possible, perhaps probable, a slow push of Soviet pressure down into the interior of Africa toward the strategic Chad-Congo area.
The dear, just-departed 1968 was also the year when the adolescent revolt against the old world reached a new, revolutionary peak. Change, or revolutionary forces, brought on action in education, the social order, and in the Christian church.
Civil rights and voting rights were not really well established until 1964-65. In 1968 there were more than 500 elected black officials in the Southern states, some of them legislators, city and county officers. But 1968 also was the peak year of militancy against the slowness with which Americans were moving to make their society a truly open one.
In some cities and in many areas of the South there were still communities which fought to keep the Negro in the historic “place” of inferiority and discrimination. Their folly and blindness is one of the fearful portents for 1969.
Murder of Dr. Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy and the ominous auguries therein were 1968 events.
A new national administration is a product of 1968. Elected last November, it will take office January 20. Hope goes with it — also fear and concern it may have misread the past — and future.
There is more to the story of 1968.
It was, any way one looks at it, quite a year.
About the Author
