Fifty years ago this month, America was in turmoil.

Martin Luther King had been assassinated on April 4. 

In response, Robert Kennedy, campaigning in Indiana for the Democratic nomination for president, pleaded for his audience “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”

Tragically, Kennedy’s own life would be taken two months later in Los Angeles following a victory in the California primary.

In this second part of a year-long series looking back at 1968, the year that changed America, CNHI newsrooms across the United States look back at the tumultuous months of April to June.

It was a period that also saw America’s continued involvement in Vietnam, riots iand student rebellions in major citis like New York and Paris, the Prague Spring and the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.

“This was a very dramatic time,” said NBC veteran newsman Tom Brokaw, who lived through it all, covered it as a news reporter snd anchor, and later documented the year in his 2007 best-selling book, “Boom: Voices of the Sixties.”

Brokaw was 28 and a rising star in Los Angeles in 1968 where he helped cover the Robert Kennedy assassination.

He spoke to CNHI about 1968 and the night Kennedy was killed by Sirhan Sirhan, moments after claiming victory in the crucial California primary.

“I was principally the anchorman of KNBC in Los Angeles,” Brokaw recalled, “but I spent my days covering the big stories around California.”

The big story in politics at the time, Brokaw recalled, was Kennedy versus Eugene McCarthy for the Democratic presidient nomination, especially after President Lyndon Johnson on March 31 announced he would not seek a second presidential term. The nomination would eventually go to Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

“The assassination itself was the god-awful climax of what had been a very intense campaign in California and on the west coast,” Brokaw said. “Senator Kennedy had lost Oregon, much to his surprise. And I have this vivid memory of the Kennedy campaign. They were coming into California … they had been in and out, but after they lost Oregon, they came down and they knew it was do or die at that point. If they lost California it was over.”

Kennedy had the full California political apparatus at his beck and call after the loss in Oregon, Brokaw said. Jess Unruh was the speaker of the California assembly and the most powerful Democrat in the state “and they went ‘balls out’ so to speak, for one week. It was culminated by a Meet the Press TV appearance by McCarthy and Kennedy on the Sunday before the election.

“McCarthy made a fatal error on Meet the Press and Bobby moved in on it,” Brokaw recalled.

“McCarthy said the solution of Watts was a redistribution of the population, so that they (African Americans) would have more opportunities culturally and economically. Bobby said, ‘You’re going to take people from Watts and distribute them across Orange County?’ A terrible idea. Well, it was a very callous attack, but by doing that he began to win white, middle-class working-class voters.”

Night of the RFK assassination

“I was on the air the night Bobby was shot,” said Brokaw, who was dividing time between the local and the network newscasts. He said he was just getting ready to go on the air with the local election returns when the word came that there would be a delay.

“Something had happened at the hotel,” Brokaw recalled of the shooting at the Ambassador Hotel. “Frank McGee (the NBC national anchor in New York) said there had been a shooting. Charles Quinn, who was covering Kennedy came on … the first report was that he had been shot in the hip and then it was ‘no, he was shot in the head.’ That’s when we knew this thing was not going to have a happy ending.

Everybody gathered at the hospital where Kennedy was taken. Brokaw was “out on the curb, until two or three in the morning,” he said, “when (Kennedy Press aide) Frank Mankiewicz came out and described the nature of the wound and you knew at this point it was fatal.”

Kennedy died the next day, 63 days after King was killed in Memphis.

Brokaw had also been working at KNBC at the time when Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4. Following the shooting, riots in more than 100 cities, including Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Kansas City, Newark and Washington, D.C., broke out. Across the country 46 deaths were blamed on the riots.

There was a riot in Los Angeles after MLK was shot, Brokaw recalled, “but not to the same degree that it happened in other places. It didn’t flare up as much as it did in other cities. I’m not entirely clear why. I think there was kind of an exhaustion there. Obviously, it played dramatically across south central Los Angeles, but not like it did in other northern cities.”

Watershed moment

1968 represented a watershed moment for the civil rights struggle in America, said Karlos K. Hill, Interim Director and Associate Professor, African and African American Studies, University of Oklahoma, Norman.

“Yes, it was the year Dr. King was assassinated, but it was also a year in which the black power movement eclipsed the civil rights struggle. And you saw the development of several black power groups. Probably the most prominent was the Black Panther Party in 1967. By 1968, they had become the most well-known black power organization.

“With King being assassinated,” Hill said, “it created a leadership vacuum at the top, which was filled by younger, more militant activist organizations.”

Malcolm X had been killed in 1965, but his legacy was kept alive by individuals in the Black Panther Party. “In many ways,” Hill said, “the Black Panther Party saw themselves as the children of Malcolm X.” Malcolm stood for many things, such as building autonomous black institutions, black Pan-Africanism and black nationalism.

“The interesting thing about King was, that when he died, he was at his most unpopular,” Hill said. “In April 1967, King had given a controversial speech on the Vietnam War. In that speech, he called the United States the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. You can imagine that this speech did not go over with his allies in the White House. Because of the negative attention it got in the media, many of his supporters in the civil rights movement fled from him. And he was really isolated afterwards, after that speech.”

It is not clear whether King would have been able to bounce back from that speech and the positions that he was beginning to take, Hill said. “If anything, King was becoming more radical as he matured as a leader, as an activist. There is no assurance that King would have become the King that we remember now, if he had lived to the present.

“King died at a moment where it was possible for us to still look back on the 1963 March on Washington and see it as his defining moment,” Hill said. “It happened that he was taken away from us at a time where that moment could still define him, even though … for people who were living in 1968, it would have been that Vietnam speech that was most remembered. Not the 1963 March on Washington and the speech that he gave there.”

Shifts in society

The months from April to May 1968 were pivotal because they started to showcase the consequences of the social movement that was developing at the time, particularly in the United States, said Chris Ellis, Bucknell University associate professor of political science

“Things didn’t magically change in April,” Ellis said  “But until this time, this movement felt like many other periods of social unrest in the past — full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing. After King’s death, and after the signing of the Civil Rights Act, we started to see what real social change actually looked like, and what real resistance to it actually looked like.”

In 1968, the baby boomers were setting the pace, so to speak, Brokaw said. “They were changing almost everything: the economy, the culture and they were certainly changing politics.”

Brokaw offered this scenario:

“Imagine what it was like in a working class household in Detroit, when a guy who was in the Marines in World War II and still wears a crew cut, comes home at the end of his shift, sits down and looks across the kitchen table and sees his daughter, who introduces him to Zeke, and they’ve decided to move in together. Zeke has sunglasses, a tattoo, and plays in a rock band. And it’s not entirely clear what kind. Long scraggly hair. The World War II veteran then turns to his son, who has hair down to his shoulders and is wearing a T-shirt with the American flag in tatters across his chest and he says, ‘Ain’t going to Vietnam, Dad. I’m going to Canada.’ I think some variation of that was going on in a lot of families at that time.”

It was an extraordinary cultural shift that was happening, in a way that we were not prepared for, Brokaw said, “because post World War II was a time of great boom in America, where people had money they never expected to have, and were able to buy their first homes, buy cars, send their kids to college and play by the old rules. Then, suddenly, the generation that was the beneficiary of all that turned on them.”

Now we have a different kind of rebellion against the establishment, he said. “It’s more from the right. And it is a kind of consolidation, as I see it, of traditional Anglo morays. They are not as determined to uproot the establishment in every conceivable way. They are kind of getting into the bunker and hanging on. Societies change from time to time and we’re going through a big change now.”

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