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Those tanks may have been a blessing for Richard Nixon. The Communists who rolled into Prague were not small peasants in black pajamas fighting in their own villages but living specters of the old cold war, of which Nixon was a ^ battle-hardened veteran. Even so, the election results in November were a portrait of a society deeply divided. Nixon and Humphrey split the popular vote almost evenly (at 43%), and George Wallace won 13.5% in the largest third-party turnout since Robert La Follette won 17% in 1924.
As the annus mirabilis drew to an end, Nixon and his aides, John Erlichman and Bob Haldeman were busy in a suite on the 39th floor of the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan, assembling the new Administration, a new cast of characters -- Henry Kissinger, John Mitchell and the rest. The nation soon would be off on a different road, or so one imagined. It would be another four years before the U.S. withdrew from Viet Nam, and another seven years before the North Vietnamese armies would sweep south and accomplish the result that American power had sought so long to prevent. During 1968, an addditional 16,000 Americans died in the war. By the time the polished black granite of the Viet Nam Memorial was installed in Washington in 1982 -- an act of national reconciliation that took years -- more than 58,000 names of the dead had to be inscribed on the stone.
On Christmas Eve 1968, three American astronauts -- Frank Borman, William Anders and James Lovell -- were making revolutions around the moon in the Apollo 8 spacecraft. Lovell, now a corporate executive in Chicago, describes the event in a charming mix of metaphors: "It was the final bright star in the last gasp of 1968." The messy earth looked different from a distance, "that bright loveliness in the eternal cold," as Archibald MacLeish wrote.
Nineteen sixty-eight was more than a densely compacted parade of events, more than the accidental alignment of planets. It was a tragedy of change, a struggle between generations, to some extent a war between the past and the future, and even, for an entire society, a violent struggle to grow up.
After 1968, much of the drama lay ahead (the Weatherman's Days of Rage, Woodstock, Altamont, Kent State), and then the long dispersals of the '60s generation into the '70s. But the events of the origin myth ended sometime around the November election of Richard Nixon, when, it may be, history seemed to have been ceded back to the fathers, and recalled from timelessness into time.
CHART: TEXT NOT AVAILABLE
CREDIT: TIME Chart by Joe Lertola
CAPTION: THE EVENTS OF 1968
DESCRIPTION: Time line shows noteworthy events of 1968.