1968 (Behind the Music) [Paperback]

Wayne Robins (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 31, 2000 | Series: Behind the Music (Book 1)

It was a shattering year in world history, as the Tet offensive turned the tide of the Vietnam War and the tide of public opinion. In the jungles of Southeast Asia and here and around the world, popular music provided the soundtrack of a generation torn by war...and desperate for change. Along with devastating events of 1968 - the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., racial unrest, the brutal police riot againt Chicago antiwar protesters, artists such as Country Joe McDonald, Curtis Mayfield, Aretha Franklin, the Beatles and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young transformed the way we looked at the world around us. The music served sometimes as commentary, sometimes as catalyst. BEHIND THE BUSIC: 1968 brings back the hope, rage and sorrow of those incredible days, one of the most fertile periods of rock, pop and soul. Containing photos and interviews not seen in the original VH1 broadcast, this is a stirring re-creation for those who were there and want to remember...and those who wish they'd been there and want to know how it felt...

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Wayne Robins is the acclaimed author of BOY GEORGE AND CULTURE CLUB, and a contributor to THE SINATRA READER. He has written about pop music for New York Daily News, Blues Access, Creem and MSNBC.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Tet Offensive

If you had to pick a single day as the turningpoint of the war that became America's most painful military defeat, it would have to be January 30, 1968: the day the Army of the Republic of Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive. This is how the year began.

The Vietnam War was an undeclared war, an American military intervention that had started in 1954 with just 400 military advisers. The former French colony in Southeast Asia had been split in two that year by treaty -- in North Vietnam, the government was Communist; in the South, an American-backed dictatorship ruled. President Eisenhower had sent the advisers to train the South Vietnamese Army against the threat of invasion from the North and a growing insurrection in South Vietnam itself, known as the Viet Cong.

The United States feared that if South Vietnam fell, the rest of Southeast Asia -- Laos, Cambodia, Thailand -- would also fall, like dominoes, to Communism...and that India and the rest of Asia would ultimately topple as well.

But the Vietnamese people largely regarded it as their own civil war, a conflict that had pitted them first against the French colonial powers and then against a Western-backed dictatorship that had been forced upon them. By the early 1960s, the Viet Cong, with support from the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, were taking control of increasing areas of South Vietnam. A troubled President Kennedy sent ever-greater numbers of military advisers in response; by 1962 they numbered 11,000, though the official line was that they were noncombat troops.

At the time of Kennedy's assassination at the end of 1963, there were 23,000 American military advisers in Vietnam. When Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson -- LBJ -- assumed the presidency, he retained the foreign policy team behind the military buildup half a world away, a group referred to with irony by writer and Vietnam war chronicler David Halberstam as "the best and the brightest." They were establishment men from the best families and the best schools. And they were sinking America deeper and deeper into a quagmire that would tear the country apart.

On August 7, 1964, the United States Congress responded to reports that North Vietnamese gunships had fired on American war ships off the Vietnamese coast by passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. In 1965, the first officially designated U.S. ground troops went to battle in South Vietnam. B52 bombers dropped tons of bombs on North Vietnam. By the end of the year there were 180,000 American troops in Vietnam. What had begun as a training mission had become a deadly shooting war for the United States fighting force in Vietnam.

During 1966 and 1967, the war had escalated further and the American force had continued to grow. There were now more than half a million U.S. soldiers in the cities, hamlets, jungles, and mountains of this small Asian land, and in 1967 alone, nearly 10,000 of them came home in body bags.

By 1968, the war was going either swell or awful, depending on whom you believed. Every day army spokesmen gave the unvaryingly optimistic line to an increasingly skeptical Saigon press corps in what had become known as the "Five O'Clock Follies." After every encounter with the Viet Cong, the army public relations specialists would report huge numbers of enemy dead and only a marginal number of American casualties. Why, then, had the enemy not been eradicated?

"They would tell you we lost twelve guys and the other side lost two thousand guys," remembers Creedence Clearwater Revival frontman John Fogerty, who spent two years in the Army reserves. "And soon it seemed like, well, the other guys have lost ten million guys, and we've lost thirty. And yet you're seeing these newsreels of devastation and our Army is being pushed back, and not doing very well."

The Vietnamese New Year, or Tet, fell on January 30, 1968. It had been customary for both sides to declare a truce on such holidays, and this Tet was no different. Despite intelligence reports showing an alarming buildup of VC soldiers and supplies throughout South Vietnam, the Americans didn't take any unusual actions.

Back in the states, MGM Records on that day released the Velvet Underground's second album, White Light, White Heat. The event went unmentioned by the CIA and military intelligence. Cause and effect cannot be proven, of course, but someone should have noticed.

On midnight of January 30, all hell broke loose in South Vietnam. Some 84,000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese attacked thirty-six of fortythree provincial capitals in South Vietnam, five of six autonomous cities, and at least fifty hamlets. For the Communist forces, it was an assault of unprecedented force and range.

And never before had America's military machine seemed so impotent. The Viet Cong attacked the presidential palace and the government radio station in the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon. They even briefly breached the perimeter of the American Embassy compound while stunned Americans back home watched the drama on television. In the provincial capital of Hue, the Viet Cong launched an onslaught that would keep American troops under siege for thirty days.

"The Tet Offensive convinced me, although I was pretty well convinced already, but it started to convince the rest of America, that we were not going to win," musician David Crosby said. "That we were being lied to. Here was supposedly, you know, a force whose body counts suddenly starts just kicking our butt all over Vietnam. Everywhere. Everybody on my end of things knew we shouldn't have been there. But now the whole country knew we were going to get our asses handed to us." Echoed writer P. J. O'Rourke, "The Tet Offensive was important because what sort of sunk in in the month or two or three that followed...was that we were not going to win that war in Vietnam."

The desperation of the effort to maintain order in the capital was conveyed by the summary public execution of a suspected Viet Cong by a Saigon policeman in front of press cameras. The act was captured on film and in still photographs. The image of the victim grimacing at the precise moment the bullet pierced his skull became an enduring symbol of a dark and murderous era.

The Viet Cong suffered enormous casualties. And their goal -- that the Tet Offensive would launch a popular uprising that would end the war with their total victory -- did not transpire. But they scored a huge psychological victory, and the war's momentum tilted in their favor. As Lance Morrow of Time magazine wrote, "Tet broke whatever residual spell was left in America's old Cold War calls to arms in the name of defending freedom around the globe. America's national morale curdled."

Walter Cronkite, the avuncular CBS News anchorman often called "the most trusted man in America" lost his cool when he heard about the Tet Offensive. "What the hell is going on?" he was heard to shout, "I thought we were winning this war."

If Cronkite, the distinguished voice of the media establishment, felt bewildered, he was not alone.

A rhetorical war raged at home, with "hawks" insisting we carry on with the war and "doves" demanding we declare peace and bring all our troops home. In 1968, after Tet, the war, in the eloquent words of Newsday reporter Fred Bruning, "split this country like an ax."

With the inverted logic that characterized the Vietnam War from its inception, the Viet Cong's battlefield "defeat" was a disaster for the American political and military establishment.

"Before the Tet Offensive the Vietnam War enjoys the support of the liberal establishment and it's being prosecuted by Lyndon Johnson," says historian Charles Kaiser. "Although he's unpopular in some quarters, virtually everybody in the beginning of 1968 thinks he is invulnerable and certain to be the Democratic nominee [for a second full term as president] in the fall."

A week after Tet started, a poll showed that for the first time, a majority of the American people believed we should get out -- and stay out -- of Vietnam.

Rock and roll was amplifying and even molding public opinion. The antiwar movement marched to the strains of artists such as Country Joe and the Fish. Country Joe McDonald, a Navy veteran, and his bandmates were associated with the hedonistic San Francisco acid rock scene, which was true to a point. But whereas the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane quartered themselves in hippie culture's ground zero -- San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury -- Country Joe and the Fish were bivouacked on the other side of the Bay Bridge in Berkeley, birthplace of the 1960s' radical movement.

Country Joe and the Fish had established themselves during the 1967 Summer of Love with an appropriately trippy album titled Electric Music for the Mind and Body. But in 1968, the group became famous for their darkly comic antiwar tune, "Fixin' to Die Rag":

And it's one-two-three
What are we fightin' for?
Don't ask me I don't give a damn
Next stop is Vietnam!

"To be perfectly blunt, the message of the song is, fuck you," McDonald says today, "Fuck you, Mr. President, fuck you, Department of Defense, fuck you, Commander in Chiefs. Fuck all you people. You want me to go out and die for something and you won't even explain it to me, you won't tell me what they did, so just fuck off."

The song resonated in the most unlikely of places. Phillip Butler, for eight years a prisoner of war (POW) in the "Hanoi Hilton," first heard the song played as propaganda by "Hanoi Hanna" on a Viet Cong radio program. He found it "compelling." He and his fellow POWs responded to its "great rhythm" and its "nice, black GI humor." Butler recalls "barefooted POWs kind of skipping around the room to, 'Altogether now, one, two, three, what are we fighting for?/Whoopie, we're all gonna die' is pretty funny when you're sitting there in a situation like that. It rings very true for you."

Butler says now that "Music like Country Joe's helped us to stay sane. What little of it we could get, it was like a gem that came through from time to time." It's a sentiment shared by many who fought in Vietnam, where armed forces radio was tightly controlled but where GIs set up bandit radio stations in the field. Recalls Vietnam veteran Michael Kelly, "I just spun the dials...lo and behold there's Midnight Jack broadcasting: 'Midnight Jack, man, I'm deep in the jungle. Oh, bad news, my man," he says. 'What can I play for you man? How about some Jimi Hendrix?' He's gone for about 30 seconds and I imagine he's putting a reel-to-reel tape on, y'know, and here comes Jimi Hendrix..."

Hendrix's music, especially his definitive cover of Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" (from John Wesley Harding) with its opening lines of "There must be some kinda way outta here..." was, for Vietnam veterans, part of the soundtrack to the war. The Doors, too, were a big part of this musical collage; their haunting, otherworldly music seemed to capture the tension and fear they were feeling. Their 1968 album Waiting for the Sun carried an explicit commentary on the war, "The Unknown Soldier": "Breakfast where the news is read/television, children fed/unborn living, living dead/bullet strikes the helmet's head...." For troops in the jungles of Southeast Asia, songs like this brought things full circle -- they were listening to a musical report of how the way they were fighting was being received back home.

Michael Kelly also remembers that "the number one anthem of all the troops when I was there was Eric Burdon and the Animals' 'We Gotta Get Out of This Place.' Anytime that we were in the rear and that song was played or it came on, everyone would stop, everyone would join in at the top of their lungs -- it was just the best, best song."

On the political front, Vietnam's civil war was becoming America's civil crisis. Liberal Democrats against the war challenged Lyndon Johnson for the party's presidential nomination. Two men in particular, antiwar activists Allard Lowenstein and Curtis Gans, led the initiative. As Charles Kaiser puts it, they had "gone around to every Democratic senator, liberal senator, antiwar senator starting with Bobby Kennedy and they've begged each of them to run for president to challenge Lyndon Johnson and each of them in turn has refused until they reach Eugene McCarthy."

McCarthy was, according to Kaiser, "like Bob Dylan, a poet from Minnesota with somewhat mystical tendencies." A stretch perhaps, but not an absurd one. McCarthy was a professorial type who disdained politics, a remarkably aloof and distant man who in a few short months turned conventional political wisdom on its head. He entered the New Hampshire presidential primary -- the first by tradition, and therefore crucial -- and came in a very strong second to incumbent LBJ.

President Johnson had the support of every elected official in New Hampshire. But across the country, even downright respectable members of the party's establishment were speaking out firmly against the war. Democratic Senator Frank Church of Idaho, who served on the powerful Senate Foreign Relations committee, called for an "agonizing reappraisal" of America's policy, and flatly stated that the U.S. goal of stabilizing that part of Asia was "a grandiose dream of men who suffer from the dangerous illusion of American omnipotence."

Johnson barely won in New Hampshire despite being the well-funded choice of the party establishment. New Hampshire was, then as now, an essentially conservative state, and McCarthy was no firebrand as a campaigner. "A terrible speaker," as historian Kaiser recalls.

Writing in The Village Voice, the liberal Kennedy friend Jack Newfield called McCarthy's speeches "Dull, vague, and without either balls or poetry." And he summed up with the wish of many when he said: "Make Bobby Kennedy run."

But Robert F. Kennedy was deeply torn. There had been bad blood, guilt, and ambivalence between President Johnson and the Kennedys ever since Johnson was sworn in on November 22, 1963, over John F. Kennedy's dead body. And many Democrats yearned for a return to the Camelot of the Kennedy years -- they felt it was manifest destiny that JFK's younger brother Robert would be president. RFK, who had been attorney general under his brother, and was in 1968 a U.S. senator from New York, never denied his hunger for the White House...but when would he run?

Robert Kennedy was still on the political sidelines while McCarthy's reputation for ineffectiveness was spreading even among his supporters. The White House, meanwhile, approached the New Hampshire primary with undisguised arrogance. John Bailey, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, even refused to allow McCarthy to discuss the opposition to Vietnam at a January 7, 1968, convention planning session. "The Democratic National Convention is as good as over." Bailey said. "It will be Lyndon Johnson again, and that's that." Famous last words.

Against this backdrop, the thousands of young college students who campaigned for McCarthy in the New Hampshire primary seemed on a fool's errand. "The polls continued to say that the senator from Minnesota had no chance to upset an incumbent president," historian Jules Witcover wrote in his book 1968: The Year the Dream Died. "But college students by the carload streaming into the state on weekends and many checking out of college for the duration of the primary, generated an almost joyful optimism in the ranks."

By mid-February, the McCarthy campaign was "a veritable army...working in church basements and sleeping in private homes, sometimes in beds, sometimes in sleeping bags on floors." From colleges in the Northeast and even as faraway as the Midwest, young men and women crisscrossed the Granite State in the cold.

By March 12, 1968, the day of the primary, McCarthy's youth army had convinced a sizable percentage of New Hampshire's skeptical Democratic voters. Despite a fierce snowstorm, the young volunteers continued to work throughout the day, even driving voters to the polls. When the votes were tallied that night, LBJ had won 49.4 percent of the Democratic vote, McCarthy 42.2 percent. With write-in votes from those voting in the Republican primary, according to Jules Witcover, McCarthy garnered just 230 fewer votes than the president of the United States.

The results were not unlike those of the Tet. True, LBJ had won more votes. But McCarthy's strength showed the president's vulnerability and marked a turning point in public perception. "Soon after the polls closed," Witcover wrote, "it was clear that they had pulled off a political upset of immense proportions."

The taste of victory for McCarthy, though sweet, did not linger. Once Bobby Kennedy saw that Johnson was vulnerable, he told Sam Donaldson of ABC News that "I am actively reconsidering" entering the Democratic primary race. He told a syndicated Washington newspaper reporter that "the divisions of the Democratic party are already there, and I can't be blamed for creating them.' McCarthy was bitter: 'He wouldn't even let me have my day of celebration, would he?" On March 16, Kennedy formally announced his candidacy.

The battleground shifted to other primary states, such as Wisconsin and even Kennedy's native Massachusetts, where he had entered too late to be on the ballot. McCarthy supporters saw Kennedy as a spoiler; but Kennedy's supporters felt that McCarthy could not win in the November election. Committed antiwar Democrats agonized over whom to back, or work for. It was hard to stay focused on the goal of defeating Lyndon Johnson's renomination as presidential candidate of the party...and the ultimate goal of winning the general election in the fall.

But on the evening of March 31, President Johnson appeared on national television. He delivered a forty-minute speech in which he talked of a limited reduction in the bombing of North Vietnam and a modest increase, 13,500, in troops sent there. (General Westmoreland had asked for more than 200,000 soldiers). Near the end of the speech, having become convinced that no one would take his desire for peace seriously as long as his political career was on the line, Johnson made the announcement that stunned the country, and the world. "Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president."

McCarthy's "children's crusade," whose goal had been considered a pipe dream just two months earlier, had triumphed beyond its wildest expectations. The end of the war seemed in sight. For a brief period much of America dared to exhale. On the radio, Otis Redding's posthumous masterpiece "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" provided a mellow accompaniment to what was, in retrospect, a lull in the storm. The good feelings would last exactly five days.

Copyright © 2000 by Viacom International Inc. VH-1: Music First, Behind the Music and all related titles, logos, and characters are trademarks of Viacom International Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: MTV (October 31, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067103961X
• ISBN-13: 978-0671039615
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,378,502 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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