Todd Brewster & Peter Jennings Read Online Free PDF

with hatred and a desire for revenge,” he said. “We can move in that direction as a country…. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did …to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed …with an effort to understand, with compassion and love.” While the rest of the country burned, there were no riots in Indianapolis. There people tooktheir grief home quietly. Two months later Bobby Kennedy, too, became the victim of an assassin’s bullet.
    College and university campuses were in an uproar, and not only in the United States. Students took to the streets in Paris and London. Czechoslovakia, a Communist country, had begun some modest but daring democratic reforms, nicknamed the “Prague Spring.” But on August 20, 1968, some 650,000 Soviet troops marched into Czechoslovakia to force the country back into the Soviet camp. Mobs of Czech youths climbed onto Russian tanks and chanted, “USSR go home.” But the Prague Spring was over.
    The most notable American uprising came at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Ten thousand demonstrators traveled there to make their voices heard. Twenty-three thousand police officers and National Guard forces were waiting for them. An army of students faced off against an army of police in riot gear outside the convention center. Inside, party leaders nominated Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, as the Democratic candidate for president. The demonstrators outside claimed that the party leaders had ignored them and betrayed their hopes. It felt as if a civil war between America and its own young people had begun.
    Jane Adams, born in 1943, was a member of Students for a Democratic Society who was in Chicago for the convention.
    I had been active in the student Left throughout the sixties, but by 1968 I was so alienated from the political system that I was not following the processes of the Democratic candidates very closely. I remember many people saw Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy as hopeful forces for change, but after Martin Luther King’s assassination, I began to feel that there was a rottenness at the core of the political system of this country.
    I was a marshal out in the streets during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. My most vivid memory of the convention was at the demonstration down at the McCarthy campaign headquarters. A crowd of thousands of people gathered outside, and the police were pushing us closer and closer together. Those of us who had experience protesting kept saying, “Stand up, stand up, stand up,” because we knew the police were gonna charge and were gonna go in and slaughter them. After the police charged in, I saw this young man in a suit and tie and a woman who looked like she was a sorority girl, very well dressed, and she had blood pouring out of her hair. Thisyoung man had picked her up and was trying to push her in the door, and he was hysterical. I was so furious, because these kids were doing nothing.
    When Humphrey was nominated, I was in the YMCA watching it on TV. I ran out in the streets, and armored personnel carriers with barbed wire on the front of them moved into position. The young people chanted, “The whole world is watching,” which really meant that the whole world is watching this massive injustice that’s going on here, the ripping off of our democracy from us.
    On the night of July 20, 1969, Americans put away their anger. Along with billions of television viewers around the world, they watched as American astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar module and became the first man to walk on the moon.
    The American space program had also been caught up in the Cold War struggle between democracy and Communism. After the Soviets had launched the
Sputnik
satellite in 1957, beating America into space, the United States had thrown its support behind NASA, the national space agency. JFK had pledged to put a man on the moon