1968: Aristotle and the U.S.
You have to know some history, meaning years and dates and things, to realize that time is not a march of progress but a great wheel that turns eternally. What has happened before repeats, never exactly but with a regularity of echoes, resonances, and direct imitations, whether the imitators are aware of their mimicry or not. As a result, there are anniversaries that stand out even in our archaic counting conventions, because those conventions are not arbitrary but rooted in real contexts such as human life spans and the inevitability of fading memories as generations pass. What is lost to consciousness in the process is not total but it is substantial. Most importantly, the memory that remains is like a photograph of an old photograph of the front pages of newspapers. The vividness of personal recollection, of hard lessons learned, bleeds away and leaves but a husk behind. What remains is the yellowed headlines written by the anonymous, to us, individuals who wrote them and took the photographs inside the photographed newspaper our distant camera is recording.
As a people we make an official attempt to remember the important things that happened 100 years ago, 50 years ago, 20 years ago, and sometimes even 10 years ago. Every year is thus linked to its own anniversaries of the past. 2013 was the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination and 2013 seemed briefly more weighty for that connection. We usually interpret the connections, the resonances, in ways meaningful to our own individual perspectives. In 2013 America’s first black president was in office; we must have made progress. In 2013, high school graduates would be hard put to remember anything specific about JFK except that he was assassinated; this looks like regress. And so it goes. But that 50th anniversary, like many others, is important nevertheless. It invites comparisons on many levels, whether we accept the invitation or not.
We’re approaching the end of another important anniversary year right now. It was exactly 100 years ago that the United States rescued Europe from the costliest war in its history with a year of stunning victories in a conflict that had produced nothing but millions of dead on all sides. It was 75 years ago that America began to turn the tide against Nazi Germany in World War II with its first boots on the ground in Europe, the invasion of Italy. And it was 50 years ago that another war became the central and ultimately deciding issue in the costliest presidential campaign in American history. The year was 1968.
If you’re less than 50 years old right now, you were not born in 1968. You may not know to a certainty — and definitely have no personal recollection — that this was the year in which 1) the U.S. military victory in Vietnam against the communist Tet Offensive was transformed into a humiliating defeat by the coverage of the American press, turning a majority of the broader population permanently against that war, 2) Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis TN, 3) the New Left was officially born in presidential politics with the campaign of Eugene McCarthy, running very simply (and pacifically) “against the Vietnam War,” 4) Robert Kennedy, also running against a war his brother had started, was assassinated as he campaigned for the Democratic nomination, 5) student-led riots during the Democratic National Convention set the seal on the Marxist-inspired use of violence against “the fascist pigs” to achieve political ends in what SDS and other university-bred groups called The Revolution, 6) Richard Nixon defeated Lyndon Johnson’s sitting Vice President Hubert Humphrey to become the 37th President of the United States with his promise to end the war. Hear, see anything today that links 2018 to 1968 apart from the number 50?
The facts alone demonstrate that 1968 was an incredibly traumatic year in American history. But its events did not occur in a vacuum. We spoke of the great wheel of time, and of course there are wheels within wheels (and within them too). We also mentioned the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In fact, 1963 and 1968 are part of a larger story, one we might be able to understand in classical yet intensely human terms.
It was the great Greek philosopher Aristotle who laid out the formal rules for the dramatic form called tragedy. A great man must be destroyed by a fatal flaw, be it his own destiny or a single unchangeable character trait or both, since one can regard both as either. Aristotle defined two types of dramatic tragedy, both to transpire in five acts, with all the physical action taking place offstage, leaving us for the most part alone with the figure of “the tragic hero.” The complex tragedy is the one we’re most familiar with as a culture, since it’s one of Hollywood’s favorite forms, from Citizen Kane to Scarface. We watch the rise and then, after a turning point of some kind, “The Descent” of a man immensely talented for good or ill. Oedipus Rex by Sophocles was the example Aristotle uses as his archetype. Oedipus rises to the throne, marries his mother, and then is brought down to utter ruin by Fate. We’ve seen variations of this plot a hundred times on the silver screen and know its devices well. Portents, glimpses of the flaw working its way to the surface, then the fury of resistance against the inevitable. We’re used to these too.
But there is a second kind of tragedy Aristotle called the Simple Tragedy. Here, the turning point that sets the destruction in motion does not occur in the middle, but at the beginning. Aristotle’s archetype for this form was the play Antigone, also written by Sophocles. Creon, the King of Thebes, has defeated an attempt to overthrow Thebes by one of the brothers of Antigone, herself a royal personage, is the daughter of Oedipus, and becomes the instrument of Creon’s downfall. Creon is a great man, a hero who has defeated the army of Polynices, who died in the war he started. But at the beginning of the play, Creon has just ordered that the remains of Polynices be denied religious burial and scattered in the desert with not even a marker by which he might be found. Antigone rises against Creon, demanding he act on his conscience in obedience to Greek custom. Creon refuses her. His destruction is essentially a linear descent to his final end.
We’ve seen a presidential version of the Simple Tragedy before, though its creators may not have been aware that’s what they were making. In “simplest” terms, All the President’s Men was not the romantic triumph of Woodward and Bernstein but the tragedy of Richard Nixon, beginning with the turning point of an off-camera burglary and ending with his loss of the Presidency and his profound disgrace. Not 1968 to 1974, but 1972 to 1974. In Aristotelian terms, Redford and Hoffman may have had more lines, but they were mere devices, foils employed to destroy a man much greater and more significant than they.
Now, in more specifically historical terms, we can understand the period from the assassination of JFK through to the bitter end of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and its aftermath as the Simple Tragedy of LBJ. Despite all the twists and turns of fortune, the gyrations of a cast ranging from stars to bit players, the spectacular special FX, and the many intense subplots, this epochal period of our history is the story of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Why should we regard it in this way? Because it simplifies and illuminates and organizes innumerable events that are frequently blurred into a confusing chaos of mere broken shards of collective memory..
And so the dramatic action of the play begins on November 22, 1963…
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