Episode 104 - A Voice Is Raised

We ended the last episode with a quick look at the groundbreaking Beatles album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the powerful effect it had on popular music and on Western Culture in general. For many reasons, the album, which was released on May 26, 1967, seemed to elevate the mass consciousness of a significant segment of society to a new and higher level. And then a month later, on June 25, 1967, the old Fab Four took things up another notch.  

On the first internationally broadcast television program to be beamed simultaneously around the world by satellite, the Beatles introduced their classic masterpiece, “All You Need is Love,” which became an instant anthem for those amazing days.

They had invited a bunch of guests to be on stage with them as they performed the song, including the Rolling Stones, the Who and many others. It turned out to be an incredible celebration and along with the music and the expanding tenor of the times, a new form of appearance had come into the world as well. It was the hippy look and it quickly became known as the uniform of the counter culture. It’s hard to describe because of its individualized, free and unencumbered, styleless style. But one popular phrase of the times sums it up - you just “let it all hang out.”

And the Beatles, along with everyone else who joined them on the stage, all wore it well. Now, there was nothing subtle about what was going on. They were clearly making a statement and the entire Western world reacted.

Shortly thereafter, the remarkable summer of love got under way, with its happenings, be-ins and other mass gatherings, boldly celebrating the emergence of this newly liberated way of being. The concept of Flower Power had been born and spread like wildfire, verifying the old adage that, “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”

          Now, I haven’t mentioned anything about what I was doing personally back then, but it was a pretty incredible year for me as well.  As a senior, I was elected president of our high school, (which was a relatively big deal for its time and place), I had also met and fallen in love with my high school sweetheart, Sally, and we had our own magnificent, teenaged summer of love. And to top it off, the basketball team that my father had founded only a few years earlier, the Philadelphia 76ers, won the NBA Championship.

By the way, that high school romance of ours is still in full swing. We went on to get married, had a wonderful daughter, and as Sonny and Cher sang long ago, “the beat goes on.”  However, for the purposes of this podcast narrative, what’s important here is that from my little perspective, everything seemed right with the world.

Finally, the endless summer came to an end and I soon departed to Washington, DC and entered American University. One of the very first things that happened to me there presents an accurate picture of both the nature of the times and of my personal state of mind. I was living in a dorm and on one of the first nights, we had a meeting of the residents of our floor. There were about sixty of us and it went on for over an hour.

Towards the end, the floor supervisor summed up the dorm rules and then added, “So when it comes to alcohol, as long as you’re not too drunk, you’re going to be okay. If you are too drunk though, you’re going have to go before the disciplinary committee. Okay, so I guess you’re asking – “What is the definition of being too drunk?” he asked with a smirk.

“Well, if you get on the elevator and you’re too drunk to remember what floor you live on, or if you’re too drunk to remember what your room number is, or if you’re so drunk that you pass out in the hall before you even make it to your room - then you’re too drunk. If you’re less drunk than that, you’ll be fine.”

Everyone had a good laugh, like hey, we didn’t know college was going to be this much fun. But then, his entire demeanor changed and, sounding like a tough cop on the beat, in a curt, strict tone, he said, “Of course, if you’re caught smoking marijuana, you’re immediately expelled. We have no tolerance for that here.”

There was dead silence in the room and I thought to myself, “Who the hell is going to come to college and smoke marijuana?” It seemed like the most absurd idea in the world. “Why would anybody do that?” The mixture of college and marijuana seemed completely incongruous.

As you might deduct, at eighteen and a half years old, to coin an old phrase, I was as straight as they came. I had never smoked anything at all and had never had an alcoholic drink of any kind in my entire life. And that was fine with me. I had other plans. I was enrolled in the School of Government and Public Administration and following graduation; I would go to law school and then join my brother in the law firm my father had founded.

Anyway, it turned out to be a terrific opening semester for me. I went home for winter break to enjoy some sorely missed, extended time with Sally, and as the year came to an end, the only bad thing that I have to say about 1967 is that it turned into 1968.

So, here we go. But this takes us into some rather dark territory and intestinal fortitude becomes an absolute must. By now, you probably know that the first place to start talking about this year is with the ever-deepening quagmire of Vietnam.  Although I hadn’t been particularly aware of it, besides everything else that had happened in 1967, it was also the year that a small, but significant portion of the American public had begun to question our involvement in that war.

Through it all, Lyndon Johnson kept reassuring the country that even though the financial and human costs had been high, our effort in Vietnam was proving to be more than justified and things continued to go quite well for us over there. However, his rosy picture darkened considerably when something called the Tet Offensive broke out at the end of January of 1968. Without warning, the North Vietnamese launched a massive, well-coordinated attack throughout the entire country, including the South’s capital city of Saigon.   

As the brutal fight continued to rage on, it became an enormous blow to US public opinion in two significant ways. First, it showed that the optimistic spin that had been put on the war was deeply flawed. And secondly, it prompted something revolutionary in TV news. Due to enhanced technology, all of the networks began to cover the war in graphic detail, and kept it in the lead position of their major broadcasts.   

This constant exposure brought the bloodshed home in a way that had never been seen before. Horrible images, filled with violent battle scenes brought the war into the living rooms of the American public on a nightly basis, which was deeply disturbing to the entire country. Suddenly, Lydon Johnson began to seem like a major liar and his approval ratings, which had always been robust, began to tank.

At its peak, his approval rating had been 74% with only a 15% disapproval. By the end of February 1968, primarily due to his mishandling of Vietnam, his approval rating had sunk to a dismal 41% with a seriously significant disapproval of 48%.

On a personal side note, I used to take the train to Philadelphia on a fairly regular basis to visit Sally, who was still in high school. I would travel to and from Union Station in Washington DC and I began noticing something eerie. On every trip. I would walk by a restricted area where there would be about 20 – 30 rather small, flag draped metal boxes with a military official standing nearby.

Soon, I became aware that these were coffins carrying the bodies of US soldiers coming back from Vietnam, and the human toll of it all began to dawn on me. I soon realized that these weren’t just some metal boxes in the hallway of a train station. No. In a very short time, each one of them would become the sad focus of deep mourning, as the family and friends of the fallen would try to make sense of their dear young ones taken far before their time. All of this death! And what was it that what we were we fighting for again? 

At this point, to set the stage for what was about to come, it’s important to look back to 1967 once again, at three events that were to have an impact on the anti-war movement. The first one took place on April 4, 1967, when something truly extraordinary happened. After months of agonizing deliberations, and in a move that was incredibly controversial for the time, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. firmly and unequivocally announced his staunch opposition to the war.

In order to understand the significance of this, let’s remember that there have been very few people in American history who can match his moral and ethical standing. Of course, he is mainly remembered for his groundbreaking actions in the realm of Civil Rights, but as lofty as those accomplishments were, they are only a small part of who he really was.

For in essence, he had always considered himself to be primarily a preacher who had dedicated himself to doing God’s work. And as such, he stood for peace, equality, and dignity for all people, everywhere, not just for those aligned with the American point of view.  

In a major address before a packed house at the Riverside Church in New York City, Dr. King meticulously outlined his reasons for taking his anti-war stance.

He then began to address the issue of non-violence. Throughout his life, King had been deeply influenced by the work of Mahatma Gandhi and had espoused the path of non-violence in everything he did, especially in the inner cities of America. And because of that, he now couldn’t justify the hypocrisy of not opposing this massive war effort.  “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government,” he said.

With those deeply striking and incredibly powerful words, let’s let this be the end of this episode. We’re just beginning this part of the story, so as always, keep your eyes, mind and heart open, and let’s get together in the next one.