Myths of '68 pierced

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This 40th anniversary of the turbulent year 1968 is already starting to spawn nostalgic accounts of that year. We can look for more during this year in articles, books, and TV specials, featuring aging 1960s radicals seeking to relive their youth.

The events of 1968 have continuing implications for our times but not the implications drawn by those with romantic myths about 1968 and about themselves.

The first of the shocks of 1968 was the sudden eruption of violent attacks by communist guerrillas in the cities of South Vietnam, known as the "Tet offensive," after a local holiday.

That this sort of widespread urban guerrilla warfare was still possible after the rosy claims made by American officials in Washington and Vietnam sent shock waves through the United States.

The conclusion might have been drawn that politicians and military commanders should not make rosy predictions. The conclusion that was in fact drawn was that the Vietnam War was unwinnable.

In reality, the Tet offensive was one in which the communist guerrilla movement was not only defeated in battle but was virtually annihilated as a major military force. From there on, the job of attacking South Vietnam was a job for the North Vietnamese army.

Politically, however, the Tet offensive was an enormous victory for the communists — not in Vietnam, but in the United States. The U.S. media, led by Walter Cronkite, pictured the Tet offensive as a defeat for the United States and a sign the Vietnam War was unwinnable.

That in turn led to the second shock of 1968, President Lyndon Johnson's announcement that he would not run for re-election. He knew public support for the war was completely undermined — and that is what in fact made the war politically unwinnable.

Think about it: More than 50,000 Americans gave their lives to win victories on the battlefields of Vietnam that were thrown away back in the United States by the media, by politicians and by rioters in the streets and on campuses. Years later, communist leaders in Vietnam admitted they had not defeated the United States militarily in Vietnam but politically in the United States.

The next great shock of 1968 was the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The aftershocks included riots that swept black ghettos across the country. These orgies of mass destruction, vandalism, looting and deaths have likewise been seen nostalgically as mass "uprisings" against "the system."

But "the system" did not kill Martin Luther King. An assassin did. And the biggest losers from the 1968 riots were the black communities where they occurred. And many have never recovered to this day from the massive loss of businesses and jobs.

Then came the next great shock of 1968: The assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. Deep thinkers tried to claim that somehow America was in some way responsible for these assassinations. But the assassin of Robert Kennedy was not an American, but a Palestinian Arab.

Dispersed among these national shocks were various local and regional shocks, as colleges and universities across the country were hit by student disruptions and violence of one sort or another over one issue or another.

Like the ghetto riots, campus riots flourished where the authorities failed to use their authority to preserve order. Instead, academics sought to cleverly finesse the issues with negotiations, concessions and mealy-mouthed expressions of "understanding" of the concerns raised by campus rioters.

Many academics congratulated themselves on the eventual restoration of calm to campuses in the 1970s. But it was the calm of surrender. The terms of surrender included creation of whole departments devoted to ideological indoctrination.

Members of such departments spearheaded the campus lynch mob atmosphere during the Duke University "rape" case, as they have poisoned other campuses in other ways, all across the country.

A legacy was indeed left by the year 1968.

Thomas Sowell is a nationally syndicated columnist.