The Year 1968: Where Did the Time Go?

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

What a different world it was in that spring and summer of 1968. I had begun a masters degree in political science at McGill University; my thesis topic was the Cuban Revolution and the Cuban-American relationship.

Castro was a young firebrand then, had only been in power nine years, and we all admired him.

The university was a hothouse of student activism and the student union was always crowded, full of people arguing passionately about politics.

Martin Luther King, Jr. had been killed in Memphis on April 4, and riots had broken out almost immediately in more than 110 cities across the United States. I recall watching the TV coverage of the Liberal party's leadership convention - won by Pierre Trudeau - being interspersed with footage of the mayhem in American streets.

Thanks to the unpopular Vietnam War, President Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not be running for re-election. The two Democratic challengers on the left were Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the slain president, and Eugene McCarthy, the idealistic Minnesotan senator.

But Kennedy was murdered on June 5, following his victory in the California Democratic Party primary. I have memories of hitchhiking down from Montreal to New York with a friend as Kennedy's body was being brought back from California to New York, to lie in state at St. Patrick's Cathedral, before burial at Arlington National Cemetery.

At the acrimonious Chicago convention that August, marred by street riots and mass arrests, the ineffectual Hubert Humphrey would win the Democratic nomination. Six years of Republican rule under Richard Nixon would follow.

In Canada, Trudeaumania broke out that spring. In the federal election that had been called for June 25, I worked for Professor Charles Taylor.

Then a young academic at McGill, Taylor was running for the NDP in a Montreal riding.

On the evening before the vote, I was at Parc Lafontaine in Montreal, when radical Quebec separatists clashed with police following the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade. Trudeau was there, and stood his ground on a balcony of the city's library across the street as he was pelted with bottles and rocks.

Many of the rioters were arrested - one of my friends was forced to run the gauntlet at a police station. Beaten with truncheons, he had a fat lip for months afterwards.

The next day, people flocked to the polls to vote Liberal, and Taylor lost. Maybe it was for the best, as he would go on to become a world-famous philosopher.

Right after the election, I was again hitchhiking down to the U.S. from Montreal with another friend who, in the sartorial style of the time, had unkempt long hair and a wild untrimmed beard. Despite that, we got rides all the way to Washington.

We went into a black neighbourhood to drop in, unannounced, at the offices (if such they could be called) of the radical Black Panthers.

There had been major urban violence in the city three months earlier, following King's assassination, and the area looked like a war zone.

Somehow, I managed to spend some time at the Library of Congress, researching my MA.

Later that summer, I became part of a cabal of McGill students - we called it a vanguard! - plotting a student strike against our political science department. We were all part of that amorphous entity known as the New Left.

We did indeed get our strike that fall, and shut down classes for about two weeks, until we won our demands for greater "student power." Most of us are today on the other side of the barricades.

In 1968, the entire social system seemed in flux, and we felt we were on the verge of creating a new and better world. As Peter, Paul and Mary sang, "Wasn't that a time!"