JANUARY 22, 2021 – Yesterday my book club met via Zoom to discuss our latest “assignment”—The Contest – The 1968 Election and the War for American’s Soul by Michael Schumacher (See Monday’s post). Geezers now, we readers were 12 to 14 (me) in that watershed year.
By 1967, I’d become a certifiable news nerd. I read cover-to-cover, every issue of U.S. News and World Report (“U.S. Snooze and World Retort,” as my oldest sister’s smart alec boyfriend called it). With chin on my palms and elbows planted on the living room carpet, I devoured the daily (floor-spread) edition of the Minneapolis Star. We didn’t own a television, but our parents rented one on four occasions in 1968: (a) The Olympics—summer and winter; (b) Our New Jersey grandmother’s four-day visit (so she could watch Hollywood Squares) while our grandfather attended a trucking industry convention in Chicago; and (c) the Democratic and Republican conventions—and bonus territory: the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which coincided with the Republican invasion of Miami. I watched every minute of the conventions—and invasions.
At that stage of life, I viewed the world through the bias prism of my family—Republican parents, Uber-Republican grandfather, Young Republican oldest sister. They had inoculated me against liberal infiltration: when I was shipped off to boarding school in Vermont that September, I successfully resisted the affected political chique of other students—even to the point of hanging an obnoxious “NIXON’S THE ONE” sign in my dorm window. If I ignored the ridicule of my misguided schoolmates, I welcomed the favor bestowed upon me—and the other “bright” kid who wore a Nixon button on his lapel—by the headmaster, a Nixon enthusiast who, in moral outrage, abhorred denim and long hair.
The dogged family bias stuck throughout my youth and continued well into my adulthood, though my close-up encounters in Miami during the Republican convention of 1972 and the Watergate Hearings (which I followed closely) threatened to derail my rigid adherence to the family political brand. A year of global travel in 1981 revealed cracks in the premises of my inherited bias.
Fast forward to early 2001. A set of coincidences landed me in an office occupied by unusual, brainiac, iconoclastic lawyers with “extra-curricular” degrees in history, journalism, and religion (one lawyer was an ordained Lutheran (ELCA) pastor). Several of these characters had records of liberal activism; one had been a campus radical—and jailbird—during Viet Nam. Little by little, these people—and the books they loaned, the articles they referenced, the life stories they told—expanded my perspective and left lasting impressions.
As I relive 1968 through the lens of The Contest, my viewpoint alternates between the eye of my youth, influenced by family biases, and the eye of my geezerhood, shaped by a half century of personal experience blended with world events on a planet spinning on its constant axis—the human condition.
Where lies truth and accuracy? Within a kaleidoscope of reference points upon an open-ended line of time.
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© 2021 by Eric Nilsson
