Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has given us another gift, entitled “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s.” Engrossing as always, beautifully written as always, it is several stories simultaneously, but at its core that of her late husband, presidential counselor, renowned speechwriter and activist Richard Goodwin.
Goodwin began the 1960s as a junior aide to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy and ended it as an influential strategist in the movement to end American involvement in Vietnam. “The story of his public life,” Kearns Goodwin writes, “is the story of a young man’s love affair with America — not the geographic bounds of the country, but the constellation of democratic values that lay behind its founding.”
The book is also timely, as we are increasingly called to remember 1968, spurred by questions about whether the fractures within the Democratic Party will hand the White House back to a GOP able to portray Democrats as the party of chaos, crazy and Columbia University. At a minimum, there are superficial similarities between recent college demonstrations over Israel’s war with Hamas and the anti-war protests of 1968.
There are also differences. The Vietnam protests were against American troops dying in an offensive war against a defenseless Vietnamese population that was not waging war on anyone. By 1968 they constituted a mass movement whose size befit its moral high ground.
Presently, the anti-Israel protests on certain American campuses are much smaller, confined in numbers from a few dozen to a few hundred, organized in some measure by off-campus operators. Polling suggests that Americans are unsympathetic to the demonstrators, who chant slogans supportive of a genocidal jihadist group that gleefully slaughtered 1,200 innocents dancing at a peace festival or sleeping in their beds, and which pledges to repeat the slaughter endlessly until their goal of ethnic cleansing is complete. This is not exactly the cause that Dick Goodwin and millions more were drawn to in 1968.
The demonstrators themselves have repulsed most Americans, if not certain faculty members who seek their approbation. “Death to America!” “Go Back to Poland!” and “We Don’t Want No Zionists Here!” aren’t slogans very much like those that inspired mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War. Whether the anti-Israel encampments will have more lasting impact than the now forgotten 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement is unclear.
But there’s plenty about 1968 to reflect upon as we approach an election that will determine whether the America we know crashes and burns, or survives. Donald Trump makes Richard Nixon look like Abe Lincoln, but the hard left seems perfectly willing to torch the country in service of its demands. There’s little doubt that the violence during the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago and the left’s refusal to support Democratic presidential nominee Hubert Humphrey enabled Nixon to cast Democrats as the party of the untethered and thereby narrowly win the election. President Joe Biden faces comparable jeopardy, already trailing in the polls behind a presumptive Republican nominee who is patently unstable if not fundamentally impaired, four times criminally indicted and certifiably fraudulent — and that’s just for starters.
Nevertheless, Hamas’ remarkable constituency in the Democrats’ far left can be counted upon to torch America’s future, just as Hamas has torched Palestinians’ future. After all, it was the Bernie Bros who made Trump president in 2016. This summer’s Democratic convention, again in Chicago, threatens to be a political bloodbath, generated by those who either don’t seem to grasp that they are lining up behind an ISIS-equivalent or don’t care.
There will be chants that border on the lunatic and scenes of chaos, and this may well turn the Oval Office over to a one-man wrecking ball.
Biden, a good man and a successful president, finds himself battered by extremists on either side of him: MAGA on the right and “From the River to the Sea” on the left.
Navigating between the crazies will be a tall task. And the country’s future hinges on his ability to pull it off.
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