January 1968

1968—the year than changed everything

 

In January of 1968 America had an increasingly unpopular president presiding over an increasingly unpopular war. I was in my fifth year of college. Vietnam seemed to have no end and the body count of soldiers accumulated daily on the news I watched on the TV set at the hospital where I worked. The big news in the first half of the month was at President Lyndon Johnson’s conference on crime singer Eartha Kitt denounced the Vietnam war to the president’s face. Mother Teresa denounced abortion to Bill Clinton’s face decades later, but in 1968 showing such disrespect to the President’s face divided the generations. Some of my professors at the Bible school I was attending had other ideas: “The Secret service should have taken her out on the White House lawn and shot her.” However, my generation (at le