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More broadly, Viet Nam taught America something about its fallibility. The U.S. may have overlearned the lesson, but it is an instruction that at least < tends in the right direction. Fighting Viet Nam, the U.S. squandered resources it should have devoted to its real international struggles, against Japan, Germany and other economic competitors, against poverty and other problems at home. Those who took the nation into the fetid business of Viet Nam did not look at the real world and see the real dangers to America, the economic Pearl Harbors.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Leaders kept vanishing, leaving behind them a kind of iridescent afterimage upon the retina, and a sense of wonder.
Sudden, colossal vacancies: Lyndon Johnson capitulated and removed himself from the melodrama. The nation had barely absorbed that event when, five days later, Martin Luther King Jr. leaned over the second-floor balcony of the Lorraine Motel in a black neighborhood of Memphis and was hit in the neck by a rifle bullet. He was pronounced dead an hour later.
In the years since the December day in 1955 when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus to a white man, King's moral example and leadership had begun the transformation of the South, and of America, winning for blacks the human rights that even a Civil War a century earlier had not bestowed. The civil rights movement from Montgomery to Memphis was an American epic, with a thousand evocations of place and name: the lunch counters of Greensboro in 1960; the "Freedom Riders" of 1961; SNCC; CORE; the March on Washington; James Meredith; Medgar Evers; Bull Connor in Birmingham; Philadelphia, Miss.; Schwerner, Goodman and Chaney . . . But race and slavery, America's original sin, came back always, and had begun to break into sporadic warfare in the Northern ghettos.
Secretary of Education William Bennett was teaching political philosophy at the University of Southern Mississippi when King was killed, and he spent the rest of the year trying to help his students, and himself, understand what had happened. "I went back and back again to the Yeats poem (("The Second Coming," whose lines were quoted many times that year)). It said, 'Things fall apart: the center cannot hold./ Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world/ The blood-dimmed tide of innocence is loosed and everywhere/ The ceremony of innocence is drowned./ The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ are full of passionate intensity.' " Those lines might have been written as the epigraph for 1968.
After King died, Bennett was driving his 1950 Chevrolet from Mississippi to New Orleans. As he entered Louisiana, he was run off the road -- "something like Easy Rider" -- by two white men in a pickup truck. When Bennett got out, the men apologized, saying that since he was driving such an old car, they assumed he was a "nigger." A few weeks later as he was driving the same Chevy with Mississippi license plates north to Harvard Law School, a group of college-age kids passed him on a Connecticut highway, threw a Coke bottle at his car, and yelled, "Go back to Mississippi, you damn redneck."