Letters

If “now” were the date above, I should be writing this from Buffalo, New York, on a partly sunny Sunday mild for that area in that season, when Lake Erie is still frozen and the winter’s heaviest snowfall yet ahead. On the 61st day of the 70th year of the 20th century of the Christian calendar, the human world and its American neighborhood, having survived, in the main, the shocks of “1968” and its predecessors, stood such-a-way: Clay Shaw was acquitted on a charge of involvement in the assassination of President John Kennedy, Sirhan Sirhan was pleading in vain to be executed for assassinating Senator Robert Kennedy, and James Earl Ray was about to be convicted of assassinating the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Ex-President Dwight Eisenhower was weakening toward death after abdominal surgery in February; ex-President Lyndon Johnson, brought down by the Viet Nam War, had retired to Texas; his newly inaugurated successor, Richard M. Nixon, was in Paris conferring with French President de Gaulle and considering the Pentagon’s new antiballistic missile program. The North Vietnamese were pressing a successful offensive toward Saigon while the Paris peace conference — finally begun in January after the long dispute over seating arrangements — entered Week Six of its four-year history. Everywhere university students were rioting: the Red Guard was winding up Mao’s Cultural Revolution in China; the University of Rome was closed; martial law had been imposed here and there in Spain, tear gas and bayonets in Berkeley and Madison; in Prague students were burning themselves alive to protest Soviet occupation of their country. Hostility between the Russians and the Chinese was on the verge of open warfare at the border of Sinkiang Province; along Israel’s borders with Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, things once again had crossed that verge. The U.S.S. Pueblo inquiry, souvenir of one war ago, was still in progress. The Apollo-9 spacecraft was counting down for launch toward its moon-orbiting mission, the French-British Concorde for the first supersonic transport flight, both to be accomplished on the following day. Ribonuclease, the “key to life,” had just been synthesized for the first time in a chemical laboratory; in another, also for the first time, a human egg was successfully fertilized outside the human body. The economy of the United States was inflating at a slightly higher annual rate than the 4.7 % of 1968, which had been the highest in seventeen years; the divorce rate was the highest since 1945. Having affirmed the legality of student protest “within limits,” our Supreme Court was deciding on the other hand to permit much broader use of electronic surveillance devices by law-enforcement agencies. Every fourth day of the year, on the average, an airliner had been hijacked: fifteen so far. Before the month expired, so would Mr. Eisenhower; and before the year, Senator Everett Dirksen, Levi Eshkol, Ho Chi Minh, and Mary Jo Kopechne, with difficult consequences for Senator Edward Kennedy. Tom Mboya would be assassinated in Nairobi, Sharon Tate and her friends massacred in California, large numbers of Southeast Asians in Southeast Asia. Sirhan Sirhan would be sentenced to death, James Earl Ray to 99 years’ imprisonment; Charles Manson and Family would be arrested and charged with the Tate killings, but the Green Beret murder trials would be dropped when the C.I.A. forbade its implicated agents to testify. Abe Fortas would resign from the U.S. Supreme Court and be replaced by Warren Burger, whose court (in opposition to President Nixon) would order immediate desegregation of Southern schools and soften the penalties for possession of marijuana; the U.S. Court of Appeals would reverse the 1968 conviction of Dr. Benjamin Spock and his alleged coconspirators; and Judge Julius Hoffman would begin the trial of the Chicago Seven for inciting riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. The Russian-Chinese border fighting would be “resolved” by talks between Aleksei Kosygin and Chou En-lai, and Chairman Mao would declare the Cultural Revolution accomplished. While the Paris peace talks reached an impasse, the cost to the United States of the Viet Nam War would reach 100 billion dollars, fresh U.S. atrocities would be reported, the draft lottery would begin, the first contingent of American troops would be withdrawn from South Viet Nam, the Defense Department would deny, untruthfully, the presence and activity of U.S. forces in Laos, the student riots, strikes, and building seizures would spread to every major campus in the nation, and a quarter-million demonstrators, the largest such crowd in the 193 years of the Republic, would march in Washington on the occasion of the “Moratorium.” U.S. forces in Spain would practice putting down a hypothetical anti-Franco uprising; U Thant would declare the Mideast to be in a state of war; the British Army would take over the policing of Northern Ireland after a resurgence of warfare between Catholics and Protestants; China would explode thermonuclear test weapons in the atmosphere; the U.S. and Russia would reply with underground thermonuclear explosions of their own, in the Aleutians and Siberia, and begin arms-limitation conferences in Helsinki. President Ayub would resign in Pakistan, Georges Pompidou would succeed Charles de Gaulle in France, Golda Meir the late Levi Eshkol in Israel, and a military junta the deposed president of Bolivia. Nixon would lift the ban on arms sales to Peru (and meet with President Thieu on Midway, and exercise his broader “bugging” rights against political dissenters, and postpone the fall desegregation deadline for Southern schools, and close the Job Corps camps, and visit South Viet Nam, and greet the returning Apollo-11 astronauts aboard the U.S.S. Hornet). Those latter, and their successors in Apollo-12, would have left the first human footprints on the moon and fetched home a number of its rocks to prove it, despite which evidence a great many Americans would half-believe the whole exploit to have been faked by their government and the television networks; the Mariner spacecrafts 6 and 7 would photograph canalless, lifeless Mars; Russia’s Venus 5 and 6 would reach their namesake planet and reveal it also to be devoid of life. The New York State legislature would defeat a liberalized abortion bill. Complete eyes would join hearts and kidneys on the growing list of successfully transplanted human parts. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare would recommend an absolute ban on the use of DDT. Unemployment, inflation, prime-interest, and first-class-postage rates would rise in the United States, the stock market plunge; 900 heroin deaths, mostly of young people, would be reported in New York City; the Netherlands would temporarily shut off public water when U.S. nerve gas accidentally poisoned the Rhine. Dorchester County, Maryland, would celebrate its Tercentenary; fire would melt a wax museum at Niagara Falls, and the American Falls itself would be turned off for engineering surveys. At least six more airliners would be hijacked; Thor Heyerdahl in Ra I would embark upon the Atlantic, along with tropical storms Anna, Blanche, Carol, Debbie, Eve, Francelia, Gerda, et al.; in East Pakistan a child would be swallowed by a python; the National Committee on Violence would describe the 1960’s as one of the most violent decades in United States history, but the French wine-growers association would declare ’69 a vintage year.