Goodbye to 1968

Daniel Henninger:

It's too bad Barack Obama wasn't able to meet Abbie Hoffman. I don't know if Hillary Clinton ever met Hoffman, who died in 1989, but like any young person up and running in America in the late 1960s, she knows him well.

One of the touchstone events in U.S. political history was the Democratic convention in Chicago in the summer of 1968. Among the demonstrators arrested, put on trial and acquitted for battling the police amid photogenic clouds of tear gas was Abbie Hoffman, a founder of the Youth International Party, a k a the Yippies. Years later, Hoffman said: "Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit."

Last weekend, Sen. Obama said this is more or less bunk. What he actually said on Fox News was: "There is no doubt that we represent the kind of change that Senator Clinton cannot deliver on. And part of it is generational. Senator Clinton and others, they have been fighting some of the same fights since the '60s. And it makes it very difficult for them to bring the country together to get things done."

After Sen. Obama said that the '60s were so over, Sen. Clinton's camp counter-spun that he had alienated voters over 50. Really?

In this age of paint-by-the-numbers political campaigns, there is no chance we'd ever get to hear Sens. Obama and Clinton discuss whether the 1960s belong in the doggie bag of history. Still there are a few other interested parties we would want to invite to our mythical summit on the '60s. Such as John McCain.

During an October TV debate, Sen. McCain noted that Sen. Clinton wanted to spend $1 million on a museum at Woodstock, a concert he missed because "I was tied up at the time." His quip about being held in a North Vietnamese prison camp from 1967 to 1973 may have been scripted, but boy did it hit the target.

There should be one more participant, a man who won't mince words about the Age of Aquarius--Nicolas Sarkozy, the new president of France. When Mr. Sarkozy was campaigning in April against the Socialist Ségolène Royal, he said: "In this election, it is a question of whether the heritage of May '68 should be perpetuated or if it should be liquidated once and for all." He described the political Left born out of that period as "cynical" and "immoral."

In 1968, Nicolas Sarkozy was 13 years old. John McCain was 32 and Hillary Clinton was 21. Barack Obama was 7. It is not beyond imagining that the precocious Messrs. Sarkozy and Obama were alert to events in 1968, but for the first wave of baby boomers just touching adulthood that year, it was the beginning of a strange journey.

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I have an unique perspective on the summer of 1968. I spent most of it in northern I Corps along the border with North Vietnam with a Mike company 3/3 as a Marine 1st Lieutenant. In August, I was wounded in a mortar attack and eventually medivaced to Bethesda Navel Hospital outside of Washington, DC. I saw most of the events Henninger describes on TV while in the hospital. Certainly Hoffman was no hero to me. He was trying to lose a war I had been trying to win. I did not want to be "saved" by him and the other hippie warriors.

I actually graduated from college in three years instead of taking deferments as some did. I had to go on a diet to gain weight to get into Marine Corps OCS and gained another 25 pounds of muscle while completing the program.

What I saw that summer was the Democrat party going through what it has been going trough in 2004 and now will be going through in 2008. It is trying to appease the anti war puke base and still look robust in the defense of the country. It is an impossible task, but they do remain more competitive now than they did four years after 1968 when they gave up on the robust defense of the country part and lost in a landslide.

The Democrat party still faces that dilemma. Obama is more of the McGovern type, thoough he tries to cover it by sounding tough on Pakistan. Hillary Clinton is still trying to square the circle Kerry tried to draw in 2004 without the phony hero shtick. You still get the impression that she agreed with Kerry's slander of the troops before Congress in the early 1970s, but she was not on the record with her insults to those of us who fought honorably.

BTW, Henninger mistakenly says that George Wallace was shot dead in 1972. He was shot and seriously wounded but survived as a paraplegic for several years.