What happened while I was sitting in Mrs. Curry’s 2nd grade classroom...

Excerpts From City Journal:

Christopher Hitchens:

Cuba was an unusually good vantage point for the 1968 phenomenon since it advertised itself as a new beginning for socialism that would avoid the drabness and conformity of the Eastern bloc. I was able to test this proposition in practice and in two ways. At a "cultural seminar," I heard the distinguished Cuban film director Santiago Álvarez say that any form of criticism was allowed in Cuba, except direct criticism of Fidel Castro. This seemed a rather large exception, but when I tried to be funny about it (so often a mistake in revolutionary circles), I had my first experience of being denounced, in unsmiling tones, for "counterrevolutionary" tendencies. It was a slight surprise to find that people really talked like that.

The second moment of truth came when the Warsaw Pact invaded what was then still Czechoslovakia. As a Trotsky-Luxemburg partisan, I had long bet that this invasion would happen and that it would bring the hoped-for split in the Left that would discredit what we called "Stalinism" for good. Many, if not most, of the comrades in our summer camp felt the same way. It was actually possible in Havana to dish out leaflets giving our views and to talk to Cubans who had demonstrated outside the Russian embassy. But Castro’s eventual verdict—in effect, a strong endorsement of the repression in Prague—was to install a gray regime in Cuba itself and to help dispel the Third-World-as-revolutionary-vanguard illusions of at least one section of the Left. When I last revisited Cuba, it was hard to buy a cup of coffee, so my efforts at planting the stuff, and in such hospitable soil, seemed a double waste of time.

Kay S. Hymowitz

But for most female mortals, the rules of the new regime were elusive at best. You kind of liked a guy you had just met, so what next? What did you do when he pressed, "Are you hung up or something?" The old order was built on guilt, shame, and inhibition; you sure didn’t want to go there. Susan Sherman, a self-professed radical poet I came to know years later when we both taught at the New School, wrote in America’s Child, her recent memoir, that though she didn’t have much interest in sex with the many men she befriended—she would soon come out as a lesbian—she "slept with all of them, finding that easier finally than saying no." Only a miscarriage changed her strategy. A friend who was at Berkeley at the time remembers that at political demonstrations men would yell, "Chicks up front!" They knew that the police would shrink from bashing female demonstrators’ skulls, while they themselves could march on, free of all chivalrous demands. That’s what women wanted, too, wasn’t it?

Stefan Kanfer

The student protests began in April 1968. They took aim at several targets: a gymnasium that Columbia proposed to build in Harlem—a project that had been approved by community leaders seven years earlier, but that was now characterized as "Gym Crow" by the undergraduates; an affiliation between the university and the Institute for Defense Analyses, a weapons-research think tank; and, above all, the Selective Service System, which was drafting college-age men for Vietnam duty.

Guy Sorman

Yet the profound impact of May ’68 went beyond local circumstances: it radically changed customs, values, and social relations in the West. In short, an individualistic society replaced the hierarchical one. Individualism pervaded the private domain. May ’68 was the moment when sexual liberation coincided with the availability of the birth-control pill. One of the sparks that set off the "events," in fact, was an altercation between the student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the French minister of education over banning male university students from women’s dormitories at night. The new sexual freedom also reduced the importance of marriage, and divorce eventually became commonplace.

Authoritarianism in business, too, began to founder, and a more participatory management structure came to replace employers’ old hierarchies. Many ’68 leaders became entrepreneurs and contributed to the new managerial style. Churches followed the antiauthoritarian trend, carrying forward the liberalization articulated at the Second Vatican Council. Universities around the world, in varying degrees, broke away from the mandarin system: students now had to be consulted and teaching made more participatory. The aftershocks affected political life, too. Governance became more relaxed, more focused on citizens’ daily concerns. Gaullism, the legacy of the French monarchic tradition, was unable to withstand the impact of May ’68. De Gaulle resigned a year later.

Harry Stein

In the summer of 1972, while Woodward and Bernstein were still alone among the national media in doggedly pursuing the Nixon gang, a dozen or so of us were 100 miles away in Richmond, Virginia, launching an alternative weekly called the Richmond Mercury. The Mercury actually featured some decent local reporting, but many column inches were also devoted to such matters of community interest as Watergate and feminism. Naturally, we went after Republicans with particular relish. My own contribution was a hit piece on William Scott, the GOP congressman running that fall for the Virginia Senate seat held by a moderate Democrat. Scott was a fat target: an unwavering Nixon ally, undistinguished, and widely disliked by his colleagues. In fact, Washington Monthly had already savaged him a few years earlier. All I had to do to portray him as a mean-spirited, irredeemably incompetent nincompoop was reinterview those sources and add a few of my own. My Scott piece received ardent praise from colleagues and readers, proving, in case there was any doubt, that this kind of journalism had very little downside.

By early 1974, I was at a magazine in New York called New Times, brought there by my closest friend from the Richmond paper, Frank Rich. Featuring highly regarded journalists like Jimmy Breslin and Murray Kempton as contributing editors, New Times aimed to be hip and forward-thinking, and young editors like Frank and me had plenty of freedom. Thus it was that we hit upon the idea of resurrecting Bill Scott, now Senator Scott, as the subject of a cover story. We would call it "The Ten Dumbest Congressmen" and crown Scott "The King of Dumb." Since I obviously couldn’t do essentially the same piece again, the assignment went to the magazine’s newly minted Washington correspondent, Nina Totenberg, and I gave her all my notes. She did a masterly job, not only hunting down new material on the hapless Scott but also including among her nine other victims a few Democrats, for "balance."

We could scarcely believe what came next. Scanning the masthead of this obscure little magazine and finding his old nemeses from the Mercury, the infuriated Scott called a press conference, thundering that this was all the doing of some left-wing kids from Richmond with an agenda—thereby turning it into a national story and confirming the thesis of the piece.
Scott never lived it down—even his obituaries mentioned the controversy. But what was never noted—there or anywhere else—was that he was right.

Sol Stern

Sometime later, after the events of 1968, I would look back at Hayden’s Bratislava speech as a turning point not only in the short history of the New Left but also in the history of American radicalism. Protesting against America’s wars has an honorable tradition, running from Thoreau to Eugene V. Debs and Norman Thomas. But starting with Hayden and continuing in the turbulent outbursts of 1968, that tradition of legitimate democratic opposition morphed into outright collaboration with the enemy. It wasn’t just that Hayden was rooting for the other side—abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison had done the same during the Mexican War—but that he was proposing to sabotage the American war effort by all means necessary. Soon enough, as members of the once-idealistic New Left and SDS crossed the line from dissent to treason, it became clear that those means included deadly violence. Within 18 months, some of Hayden’s followers were bombing military installations and public buildings in solidarity with their Vietnamese allies.