It was not just the week nor was it just the US. 1968 itself was one of the worst years of the latter half of the 20th century around the world. The year began with the Tet Offensive which contributed in large part to the terrible year in the US, it completely polarized the American public making not only the anti-war faction much larger and more radical but the pro-war "patriotic" faction much more radical as well, ending up with the worst presidential selection in recent American history between a corrupt Democratic political hack (Hubert Humphrey) and the corrupt Republican hack Richard Nixon, (Nixon was so unpopular that with a tired and disliked Democratic administration in office, a very unpopular war and a political hack as an opponent, he still just barely squeaked out a narrow win.). That year also saw the invasion by the Soviet Union of the Republic of Checoslovakia and the vicious crushing of its hopes and dreams of a more democratic form of goverment. It effectively guaranteed another 30 years of slavery for the people of Eastern Europe. It was also the year that the corrupt PRI dictatorship in Mexico used undercover agents to provoke Mexicos's students into widespread protests in the streets in order to use the Army to gun down thousands so as to supress all dissent prior to the 1968 Olympics there. This is still a huge trauma in the country and considered one of Mexico's blackest moments in history, not only by its citizens in general but by its own Army as well. 1968 was the year of the Isreali Six Day War when the victorious Isrealis conquered Jerusalem, Gaza, the Golan Heights as well as the West Bank, an action which after 40 years of occupation, still reverberates throughout the Middle East. Of course the murders of King and Kennedy were terrible and traumatic incidents which wounded a whole generation of Americans (and even non-Americans like myself) but in truth, the whole year was an unmitigated disaster from start to finish and in fact laid a terrible trauma upon the whole world...........
The Worst Week
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Kennedy was scheduled to give a speech in a poor, black area in the inner city. The chief of police warned the Kennedy entourage to stay out of the ghetto; he refused to be responsible for their safety. Ethel begged her husband not to go, but he sent her back to the hotel and went ahead. The police escort peeled off as they entered an area of run-down buildings.
The night was cold and gray, but the crowd was in an almost-festive mood. Kennedy, clad in a dark overcoat with the collar turned up, climbed onto a flatbed truck. He pushed away a speech draft offered by his aide Adam Walinsky, and pulled out of his pocket some crumpled notes he had written himself.
In this pre-instant-news era, the crowd was ignorant of King's death. It fell to Kennedy to tell them. As the wind whipped at his hair (recently cut short, to signal he was no wild-eyed radical), he looked slightly hunched over and frail. "I have bad news for you," he began.
In the crowd, a Kennedy adviser named John Lewis anxiously watched the strange scene. Lewis was a hero and a martyr of the civil-rights movement. Practicing King's creed of nonviolent resistance, he had been beaten bloody as he knelt and prayed at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in March 1965. In March 1968, he had joined RFK's campaign because of Kennedy's concern for the "invisible poor" and his commitment to civil rights. "The America Bobby Kennedy envisioned sounded much like the Beloved Community I believed in," Lewis later wrote in his memoirs. Lewis had come to Indiana to help get out the black vote, and now, still reeling from the news of King's death, he watched transfixed as Kennedy's soft, weary voice rose over the crowd, which was still talking and laughing as Kennedy plunged ahead.
"I have bad news for you, for all our fellow citizens, and people who love peace all over the world," said Kennedy. Lewis noticed that a few faces had gone somber in the front rows of the thousand or so people gathered there. "… [A]nd that is that Martin Luther King was shot and killed tonight."
"No!" gasped voices in the crowd. People began to weep and drop to their knees. Farther back, people were still talking and laughing, oblivious.
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