Free Republic

The Democrats head for their convention beset by splits and overshadowed by a war, just as they did 40 years ago when Chicago became the focus for extraordinary anti-Vietnam riots. As two films recall those tumultuous events, veterans are reflecting on the similarities with the conflicts of 2008Forty years ago, John Froines was a Sixties radical leading anti-war hippie protests to the Chicago Democratic Convention. After the 1968 convention descended into riots and more than 25,000 troops and police were deployed on the streets, Froines became one of the famed 'Chicago Eight'. He was put on trial for inciting the...

Denver '08 bring up memories of Chicago '68? It will if a group called Re-create 68 have anything to say about it. The group is promising "demonstrations that will rival those at the bloody 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago" at the August's Democratic National Convention in Denver, according to the Rocky Mountain News. The Re-create 68 Alliance is upset that a permit for the Civic Center, a "spacious plaza" that "has been used for major public events and celebrations representing the diversity and cultural heritage of Colorado and Denver," according to the city of Denver's Web site, went to the...

The student unrest in Paris and London 40 years ago filled our writer with revulsion. The protesters enjoyed enviable freedom and had no idea how lucky they were. In 1968 I was living the good life with my first wife and first baby in our first house on the swell of my first play and was beginning to be noted by my peers as someone who was politically dubious. It was to be some years before a well known left-wing director, asked to typify a “Royal Court play”, replied that it was a play not written by Tom Stoppard, but...

The road to the White House was filled with a lot more backrooms in the past. Most of the delegates to political conventions were "superdelegates" in those times. For candidates in 1968 only a handful of primaries existed with New Hampshire leading off the six that had any meaning (linking votes and delegates). Into this situation entered Democrat Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, running an anti-Vietnam War campaign against incumbent Lyndon Johnson. The first big anti-war protests began in 1967, but those protesting were countered by a large demonstration supporting America's Vietnam War effort in New York City. The street...

In 1944 with his chips down Adolf Hitler made a big gamble to try to defeat the Western Allies and force them out of World War II. The Nazis launched a desperate offensive in the Ardennes Forest hoping to cut the Allied armies in two. Covering the Battle of the Bulge was a reporter for the United Press named Walter Cronkite. Just over 23 years later Cronkite, now America's most popular television newsman, would visit Vietnam to witness the another desperate offensive against American forces. This time it was launched by the Vietnamese Communists and was called the Tet Offensive....

People worldwide -- and indeed, most Americans -- are under the impression that whichever party candidate has the most delegates at the end of the primary elections is assured the party nomination for president. And who can blame them? In a typical year, one candidate will emerge from the primary campaign with a majority of the delegates, and he will have the nomination secured. But this year's race is unprecedented; a woman and black man, running neck to neck against each other to try and reach the magic number of 2025 delegates to lock the nomination. There are 4,049 total...

John F. Kennedy's "New Frontier" – so named by the dashing young candidate at the Democratic leadership convention of 1960 – was barely two years old when veteran filmmaker John Ford suggested the whole thing might be a lie. The context was a 1962 Ford movie called The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, a Western about a lawyer (played by James Stewart) who negotiates a bogus claim to heroism to a seat in the U.S. Senate. At the movie's climax, a newspaper editor is informed that the real man who shot the desperado Liberty Valance isn't the man everybody thinks...

It was 40 years today that the film from the first day of the Tet Offensive (January 30th) made it onto our television screens. Back then there was no live satellite link from Vietnam so the newsfilm of the war was flown to Hong Kong or Tokyo for satellite transmission to the United States. I sat as a seven year old transfixed by the exciting pictures of the kamikaze style attack by the Vietcong on the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. Militarily speaking the attack was an utter failure, but visually speaking the attack was shocking to Americans sitting in their...

I was seven years old in early 1968 watching lots of television on a black and white picture set in my bedroom. One of my favorites was the "Batman" series on ABC with Adam West in the title role and Burt Ward as Robin. One of the guest villains on the program was "Catwoman" Eartha Kitt, whose entertainment career blossomed in the 1950's. Kitt, was black and a woman, which clearly qualified her for an invitation to the White House for a ladies luncheon in January of the election year, 1968. The First Lady, who was known by her nickname...

(This is part of an actual newscast from 40 years ago today as broadcast in Los Angeles at 1pm Pacific Time.) "Its 1pm, 61 degrees at Civic Center, no smog, this is David Rogers, KFWB News..... California seems to be a veritable stomping ground for those who desire White House occupancy. The most recent to be hitting the hustings, one who doesn't like the way the current chief executive is handling things across the Pacific. KFWB's Charles Arlington has details of what he has to say: 'Minnesota's Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy in Los Angeles to campaign to get on the...

January 9, 2008 This 40th anniversary of the turbulent year 1968 is already starting to spawn nostalgic accounts of that year. We can look for more during this year in articles, books, and TV specials, featuring aging 1960s radicals seeking to relive their youth. The events of 1968 have continuing implications for our times but not the implications drawn by those with romantic myths about 1968 and about themselves. The first of the shocks of 1968 was the sudden eruption of violent attacks by Communist guerillas in the cities of South Vietnam, known as the "Tet offensive," after a local...

Today, we are on the verge of the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire Primary, but 40 years ago today the campaigns were just beginning. The Democrat who had dared to challenge incumbent president Lyndon Johnson, Eugene McCarthy, was just opening a campaign office in New Hampshire. That's where voters would go to the polls in the first primary on March 12, 1968. There were only a handful of primaries back then. Only 7 had real meaning and were seriously contested by any prospective candidates.(New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Indiana, Nebraska, Oregon, South Dakota and California) California's primary was the last one and...

Tom Brokaw's two-hour flashback to 1968 is refreshingly far more complex than simply one of those groovy nostalgia pieces on those wacky days of sex love and rock 'n' roll.Viewers will get the good, the bad and the cultural confusion of the time in the compelling History Channel special "1968 with Tom Brokaw" (9 p.m. Sunday). Brokaw connects the period to the present - "1968" becomes a kind of Rorschach test for one's current political and social values."I think 1968 was probably the worst year in this nation's history," conservative Pat Buchanan says in the film.On the other hand: "It...

Can America rise above the divisions of the 1960s? Not yet. . . . What fell out of 1968 was a profound division over what I would call civic vision. One side, which took to the streets in Chicago or occupied Columbia University, concluded from Vietnam and the race riots that America, in its relations with the world and its own citizens, was flawed and required big changes. Their defining document was the March 1968 Kerner Commission report, announcing "two societies," separate and unequal. The press, incidentally, emerged from Vietnam and the riots joined to this new, permanent template. That,...

Denver chief asks metro agencies to send officers. Denver won't have enough cops of its own to police the 2008 Democratic National Convention, so Chief Gerry Whitman has called on suburban police departments to help carry the load. In a recent letter, Whitman asked various metro area police chiefs to pledge forces for the convention next August... Aurora Police Chief Daniel Oates has responded by pledging 300 officers - 50 percent of his street force - for five days. Denver police declined to release a copy of the letter or to discuss convention security plans. "We won't talk a lot...

A city councilman expressed outrage today that the council will consider a proclamation initially drafted by a protest group that calls for restricting police tactics during the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. The one-page proclamation headed for a council vote next Monday is based on a compromise version of the original statement proposed by the Recreate 68 Alliance, which is organizing protests for the 2008 Denver convention. The group's Web site vows to make Chicago's 1968 Democratic National Convention — notorious for its brutal, bloody clashes between Chicago police and anti-Vietnam War protesters — "look like a small get-together...

BOBBY Bobby uses an all-star cast to follow more than twenty characters through one of the most fateful days in American history. CLIP: “Senator Kennedy, welcome to the Ambassador Hotel.” “Thank you very much.” That’s Anthony Hopkins as a hotel doorman who joins Sharon Stone, Demi Moore, Lawrence Fishburne, Christian Slater, and many others to dramatize the night of Robert Kennedy’s assassination at his LA victory celebration in 1968. CLIP: “What if Kennedy loses?” “We can all forget it now. I’m 19, Jimmy, I don’t want to go to Vietnam.” “Do you?” “Now that Dr. King is gone, I don’t...

This Day In History SOVIETS INVADE CZECHOSLOVAKIA: August 20, 1968 On the night of August 20, 1968, approximately 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invade Czechoslovakia to crush the "Prague Spring"--a brief period of liberalization in the communist country. Czechoslovakians protested the invasion with public demonstrations and other non-violent tactics, but they were no match for the Soviet tanks. The liberal reforms of First Secretary Alexander Dubcek were repealed and "normalization" began under his successor Gustav Husak. Pro-Soviet communists seized control of Czechoslovakia's democratic government in 1948. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin imposed his will on Czechoslovakia's communist leaders, and...

The government of Iraq is secretly holding a Baathist cabal of military officers it claims attempted a coup against Prime Minister al-Maliki. The plotters were rounded up July 5 with the help of American military authorities after the Iraqi government's security warning center sent word to Mr. Maliki, who was in Kuwait on his first official visit as head of state, two highly placed Iraqi sources said. The prime minister quickly canceled a scheduled trip to Amman, Jordan, and returned to Baghdad to attend to the matter. At the time, Mr. Maliki's staff told reporters that the prime minister was...

I've been rummaging in the TIME archives and came across an article from 1968 entitled "Freedom vs Authority in the Catholic Church". Here some excerpts (article is subscribers-only) - it's scary that some of the same guys are still around kvetching. JULY 29, 1968, may prove to be a major landmark in the long history of the Roman Catholic Church—as significant, perhaps, as the moment when Martin Luther decided to post his theses on indulgences at Wittenberg Castle Church. On that day last summer, Pope Paul VI promulgated his seventh encyclical, Humanae Vitae (Of Human Life), which condemned all...