#381: The Week That Killed the ‘60s

Last week saw three remarkable events within 24 hours: the second inauguration of Barack Obama, the nation’s observance of Martin Luther King Day, and the 40-year anniversary of Roe v Wade.  That made for quite a week, but for me it recalled an even more remarkable week at the very beginning of those 40 years.

For in this very same week in January 1973, we witnessed four even more remarkable events that marked the end of “The 60s” and ushered in the difficult era we still live in today.  In hindsight, that single week—exactly 40 years ago--was the great turning point of the last 60 years.

On Saturday, January 20, 1973, Richard Nixon was inaugurated for his second term--a term that ended in disgrace and resignation.  I was living and working (my first year in parish work) in Washington, DC, and joined thousands of protesters on the Washington Mall during the inauguration itself.  

Leonard Bernstein conducts a “Concert of Peace” at the Washington National Cathedral

The night before, my wife-to-be and I attended an “Anti-Inaugural” concert at the National Cathedral: Leonard Bernstein conducting Haydn’s “Mass in Time of War” following Senator Eugene McCarthy’s remarks that our protests had reached the point of going beyond words to the kind of anguished cry that only music could provide.

Two days later, on Monday, January 22, I was in the shower preparing for an evening parish meeting when the radio news announced the Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade.  The decision shocked me, for I had long believed the Court would uphold the rights of the unborn, and I believe to this day the decision was not only wrong but badly crafted and badly reasoned—bad law in every way. But nonetheless, it became the law of the land, which every elected federal official must vow to uphold.

That same day, the news also announced that former President Lyndon B. Johnson had died.

Five days later, January 27, the movie I was watching (in a cinema less than a mile from the White House) suddenly stopped, and the house lights went up.  The manager appeared at the front to announce that, after five years of the Paris Peace Talks, a ceasefire had finally been signed, officially ending the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam.  He asked for a moment of silence before the movie resumed.

This all happened mere months after the Watergate break-in, only several weeks after the famous “Saturday Night Massacre” that was the beginning of the end for the Nixon administration, and only weeks before the Congressional Watergate hearings that eventually led to Nixon’s resignation. 

This was less than five years since the infamous 1968 election that followed the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the “police riot” at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Soviet invasion of Prague, and the U.S. bombing of Hanoi--events that made 1968 the peak of that turbulent era we call “the 60s.”

It had been quite a period, the years leading to 1968. By 1973, it was still only 7 years since the end of Vatican II, 7 years since the beginning of the Vietnam War, 7 years since the Voting Rights Act, 8 years since the Civil Rights Act, 9 years since the “I Have a Dream” March on Washington, and 10 years since the assassination of John Kennedy.

Yet despite all these events, that week in January ‘73 stands out in my memory. In many ways, the hope and idealism that permeated the ’60s was replaced, in that short week, by the things that define American Life still today.

LBJ signs voting rights bill as MLK looks on

Lyndon Johnson was the southerner who finally cemented the political triumph of the civil rights movement by signing the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965).  But in the process, he turned the South “red.”  Prior to 1965, the southern states were solidly Democratic: conservative “Dixiecrats” dominated the region, and were a key component of FDR’s “New Deal” coalition that had allowed Democrats to control the White House for all but 8 of the 36 years between 1932 and 1968.  When LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, he supposedly whispered: “There goes the South!”--and he was right.  The southern states, burnt by this southerner’s “betrayal,” abandoned the Democratic Party and guaranteed that Republicans would control the White House (with the exception of Jimmy Carter’s four years) from 1968 to 1992.  LBJ’s death marked the death of “New Deal” liberalism as the dominant political movement in America.

Roe v Wade, meanwhile, did more than make abortion legal.  It divided American culture and the American people deeply and permanently, tearing the fabric of American national unity and leaving us, even today, a nation less united and more conflicted than at any time since the Civil War itself.

The official end of Vietnam brought great relief but also a troubled legacy.  Americans reacted in two opposite ways.  Many Americans believed we should not have been in Vietnam in the first place; for them, Vietnam’s lesson was to avoid such military ventures in the future.  These Americans saw the invasion of Iraq, for example, as a clear failure to learn that lesson.

But many other Americans felt we should have won in Vietnam, and believed we could do better in future wars.  Getting rid of the draft, for example, reduced the political resistance caused by parents upset about children forced into military service.  Embedding correspondents in combat units biased their reports toward more war-friendly interpretations of events.  And blocking media coverage of returning dead soldiers prevented the popular rage that the visible body counts from Vietnam had triggered.

In short, Vietnam split Americans between those convinced we should move away from a foreign policy rooted in and dependent upon perennial war, and those convinced that Vietnam taught nothing other than the necessity of prosecuting future wars with more politically correct methods.

The reelection of Richard Nixon eventually led to impeachment, to resignation, and to widespread popular cynicism about government in general, fueled by the advent of investigative reporting that exposed the underbelly of Washington politics; this led to disastrously low approval ratings (especially for Congress), shattered the ‘60s-era belief in the value of public service, and ultimately led to the gridlock we witness today.

In a word, that one week in January 1973--exactly 40 years ago last week--was a kind of seismic moment, splitting open the faults that have caused every major fissure in American politics and culture today.

For American Catholics, that seismic moment has proven equally momentous.

Roe v Wade had the effect of interrupting the momentum of the renewal movement from Vatican Council II (1962-1965) by focusing the Church’s energy on the legal prohibition of abortion.  This in turn linked the Catholic Church to the conservatives in the Republican Party, so that Catholicism abandoned its traditional working class alliance with the Democrats and spawned the “Reagan Democrats” who, along with the evangelical Moral Majority, were precursors of today’s Tea Party.

This in turn shifted the public profile of the Roman Catholic Church in general.  Since 1973, the Catholic Church has become widely perceived as a conservative, even reactionary organization--in spite of the progressive thrust of most of its social doctrine.  Thus many children of Baby Boomers grew up thinking that, if they believed in “progressive” causes (peace, environmentalism, labor, serving the poor, racial justice), then there was no place for them in the Roman Catholic Church.  By 2000, as the next generation of Millennials arrived, the Catholic Church had become irrelevant to millions of young Catholics.  This was the unintended but real side effect of Roe v Wade.

More than 10% of Americans today call themselves “former Catholics”—and thus even our parishes, struggling with falling numbers in aging congregations, suffered deep losses triggered in that awful week in January 1973.

The week that killed the ‘60s left us with a war we wanted to forget (thus guaranteeing we would repeat its mistakes in Iraq), a political rift so strong it led to gridlock, and a cultural divide that has infected the Catholic Church, weakened its social-justice impact, and even sapped the vitality of its daily parish life.

The 40 years since that week in January 1973 have not been kind to America or to American Catholics.  We can all only hope we will reach a new seismic moment soon that will set us on a better course.

 © Bernard F. Swain PhD 2013