Television, Murder and Vietnam
http://counterpunch.com/jacobs01122008.html
By RON JACOBS
January 12 / 13, 2008
I was a kid in 1968. It was the year I turned 13 and it was the year
my dad began to prepare to go to Vietnam. The Tet offensive was on
the television in January. The picture of the South Vietnamese police
chief killing a suspected NLF fighter shook up our dinner table the
night it was in the news. After that, my father didn't watch
television news when his younger kids were around. I won grand prize
in the science fair at my junior high for an investigation into
whether or not my pet guppies talked. Then I won first place in my
division at the statewide fair held the last weekend in March of that
year at the University of Maryland's Cole Field House.
My dad picked me up after the fair closed down. After we had packed
the exhibit in the trunk of his station wagon, we got in the front
seat. On the way from College Park, MD to our house in Laurel,
MD-about ten miles away-we listened to the speech by President
Johnson where he told the nation that he would not "seek or accept
the nomination" for his party's candidacy for the presidency. After a
brief discussion with my dad about what this meant and why it
happened, we turned to a conversation about the differences between
FM and AM radio. Then he told me that he had been given orders to go
to Vietnam. I didn't say anything while he told me when he thought he
would be leaving and what it meant for the family. He never mentioned
whether he thought what he would be doing there was right or wrong.
When we got home, I talked with my parents for a few minutes and went to bed.
The next day in Social Studies class the teacher talked about how
remarkable it was that Lyndon Johnson had decided not to run for
reelection. From there, he segued into a conversation about the
elections. After a quick show of hands regarding who we supported, he
asked me why I supported Gene McCarthy. I told him it was because he
wanted to end the war in Vietnam. In fact, McCarthy was calling for a
negotiated settlement with the northern Vietnamese and the NLF while
everyone else (except for maybe Bobby Kennedy) was still talking
about some kind of victory. There was only one other person in the
class who supported McCarthy. Two or three others supported Bobby
Kennedy, who had entered the race only days before. Most supported
either Humphrey (who was LBJ's replacement) or Nixon. On the
playground at lunch that day, one of the Nixon supporters called me a
faggot because I supported McCarthy.
Three days later, April 4, 1968, I was watching TV with my older
sister when the graphic before a breaking news bulletin flashed
across the screen. I walked over to the TV and turned up the volume.
(There were no remotes back then.) A talking head came on the screen
and announced that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot in Memphis.
My sister and I looked at each other. We knew this was something big.
I sat down to watch the incoming news while my sister put our younger
siblings to bed. I knew that King had been in Memphis supporting a
strike of sanitation workers and that there had been trouble at one
of the marches. When our parents got home, I told my father what had
happened. He sat down for a few minutes and watched as news reports
filtered in about angry blacks gathering in different parts of
Washington, DC. That night, I listened to WTOP--the all news station
in DC-- relay reports on the growing insurrection in that city and
around the nation. When I got up to deliver my newspaper route the
next morning, the front page was covered with banner headlines and
full color pictures of the assassination and the angry response.
The following week, our family attended a cookout at a neighbor's
house down the block in our lily-white middle class suburban
development. Most of Maryland was under curfew, gun sales were
forbidden and liquor sales had been stopped in DC, Baltimore and
several counties. While I ate beans, salad and burgers from the paper
plate I had loaded up, some of the adults conversed about the murder
and the insurrection. The remarks I heard from some of the neighbors
changed my impression of them forever. I had never heard such racist
remarks before except from some of the working class toughs who wore
their hair greased back like early Elvis and smoked cigarettes while
hanging out in front of the Peoples Drug Store at the local shopping
center. If I learned one thing that night, it was that the ignorance
of racism knew no class boundaries. The names they called Martin
Luther King and the suggestions they had for the local police to
"keep order" in the black section of town were reminiscent of the
Klan literature one of my newspaper customers gave me almost every
time I collected his month's payment from him. Literature that I
threw away after reading it the first time and being repulsed by the
hatred therein.
After the King assassination I began to read the newspaper much more
carefully. Not just the sports section like before, but all of the
news sections as well. Prior to that, I had skimmed the front page
and the local section, but had never really read anything too
carefully. As the presidential campaign heated up, I switched my
allegiance to Bobby Kennedy. His ability to gather huge crowds no
matter where he showed up-West Virginia one day and Washington, DC
the next-was impressive. He had somehow figured out how to speak to
people on a different level than all of the other candidates and he
said he was against the war. Meanwhile, I had discovered another
newspaper that told a completely different story. That paper was
Washington DC's first underground paper, The Washington Free Press. A
friend's older brother who went to the University of Maryland used to
give me his old copies when he was done with them. Somewhere not very
far from the boring suburban redneck town that I lived in there was
something going on that was both new and connected to the revolution
I was certain had to be happening somewhere. It had to be happening
because the Beatles were singing about it, the Rolling Stones seemed
to have joined it, and the Free Press reported it. I didn't
understand why they didn't like Kennedy or thought the elections were
bullshit but I wanted to find out why.
When Bobby Kennedy was killed I was watching TV with my sister once
again. I remember feeling angry, sad and bitter all at the same time.
After he was killed I gave up on the elections for a while. No more
passing out campaign literature at the shopping center or door to
door. There was nothing left to do but wait until the convention and
hope some kind of miracle happened that would stop the war. A war my
dad was heading off to in a few short months. In late July we took a
family vacation at a beach near Norfolk, VA. My father was getting
ready to go to some kind of school there that was required before he
went away to Vietnam. The name of that school? Air War College. You
don't have to guess what the general course of studies was. After a
week, my older sister and I returned to Laurel. I delivered my
newspapers, mowed lawns for the neighbors and hung out with my
friends listening to music, reading, and watching TV. It was one of
those nights of TV watching when another news bulletin flashed across
the screen. Soviet troops had invaded Czechoslovakia. This was a year
for news bulletins. I followed this event with interest because I was
secretly hoping that the Czechs truly could find some kind of humane
alternative to both Stalinism and monopoly capitalism, even if that
terminology was unknown to me at the time.
Not long after that night, I began watching the coverage of the
Democratic Convention in Chicago. I recall a sign shown on television
that said "Welcome to Czechago." Those few nights of watching cops
beat the shit out of people and politicians showing their true
colors-be they fascist in nature or on the side of the protesters-did
more to educate and radicalize me than pretty much anything I had
ever read or would ever read in my life. The angry repartee between
William F. Buckley, Jr. and Gore Vidal on one of the networks gelled
in my mind along with pictures of tear gas, bloodied reporters,
people chanting "The whole world's watching," and my mom crying
because her country was falling to pieces. When my dad came home for
a weekend, he tried to convince me that the protesters were wrong and
that voting was the way to solve the country's problems. I was not convinced.
By this time, Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain was getting closer
and closer to a mark not reached by a major league pitcher in many
seasons. He was approaching thirty wins. Although I had given my
heart to the Red Sox the year before, I tried to watch or listen to
every game McLain pitched. If it wasn't on TV and I couldn't get the
game over my AM radio via the nighttime skip phenomenon that somehow
brought the games to my transistor, then I reconstructed the box
scores the next morning before I delivered my papers. When the World
Series came around, I was pulling for Bob Gibson and the St. Louis
Cardinals. I loved to watch Gibson pitch even though he had beat the
Red Sox the year before.
Meanwhile, in school we were composing a scrapbook for the elections.
Each of us had to choose either Nixon or Humphrey for our scrapbook
and fill it with materials related to the campaign. I chose Humphrey,
even though he was for the war, he wasn't Nixon. When it came time to
turn in the scrapbook, I covered the front of the binder with "Dick
Gregory for President" stickers. My teacher was not happy. She yelled
at me and asked how I could support someone who opposed the war when
my dad was on his way over there. I snidely suggested that the answer
was obvious and ended up being sent to the counselor. He yelled at me
and told me to get my head out of my ass. I left there thinking that
he should do the same.
On election day we watched the final returns come in over the
television in our social studies class. There weren't any exit poll
projections back then. The news people actually let the election run
its course. When Walter Cronkite said that Nixon had won I had a
feeling that the world as I knew it was over. In fact, it was only
getting worse. The difference was now I was aware of it. I didn't hit
the streets in protest for another year but I was already there in my
heart and soul.
---
Ron Jacobs is author of The Way the Wind Blew: a history of the
Weather Underground, which is just republished by Verso. Jacobs'
essay on Big Bill Broonzy is featured in CounterPunch's collection on
music, art and sex, Serpents in the Garden. His first novel, Short
Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. He can be reached at:
rjacobs3625@charter.net
.
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