BOOK REVIEW: "PLAYING WITH FIRE"

Shortly after surviving the year 1968, I took to calling it “the year of the national mass nervous breakdown.” In the 56 years since, as I have studied the history of that year, I have run across nothing to change my mind about calling it that.

Lawrence O’Donnell understands that, too.

In my memory, 1968 went from watching Jean Claude Killy win the men’s downhill at the Olympics to the Tet Offensive a week later at the end of January; to Eugene McCarthy upsetting politics in the New Hampshire primary; to being so stoned on Owsley Blue when LBJ announced he “would not accept the nomination of my party to be your president” that we spent the next hour and a half arguing whether he’d actually said that, the question settled when some un-stoned friends showed up and confirmed that he had indeed said that; the entry of Robert F. Kennedy into the race and the argument of those who had gone “clean for Gene” that he was “robbing us of our victory;” sitting up on Grizzly Peak Boulevard smoking hashish with a lady friend while we looked out at the lights of Oakland, wondering when the fires would break out that night after Martin Luther King was assassinated (they didn’t, but they sure did elsewhere); watching the political phenomenon of Kennedy’s campaign - the only campaign I can compare to what has happened in the past three weeks of 2024 - standing entranced in San Francisco’s Union Square to hear him say “Some see things as they are and ask why - I see things that never were and say why not?”; later to be heartbroken when I stepped out of the bathroom at a celebration party the night of the California primary, at the moment when the TV set that was on in the darkened bedroom showed the assassination, walking out into the living room where a girl looked at me and said “Who died?” - she broke into tears at my answer.

And then my girlfriend and I ending up a month later in Killeen, Texas, outside Fort Hood, working at the Oleo Strut Coffeehouse. There were the GIs, recently back from their time in Vietnam, upset that they were going to get orders to crack heads of demonstrators they agreed with in Chicago; our little yellow sticker with a white hand in the “peace sign” backed by a black fist, that we handed out to them effectively scuttled the government’s ability to put them on the streets with the result being the Chicago Police riot at the Democratic convention, while we were arrested on drug charges in Texas - saved by the incompetence of the Killeen police, who didn’t plant enough marijuana on us to make the charge stick, but a few hours in a cell thinking about the SNCC organizer in Houston who’d just been sentenced to 20 years was pretty damn sobering. Driving to Austin and back with a loaded .45 under my seat in expectation of being stopped by the Klan. The bravery of the soldiers we worked with who risked the authorities wrecking their futures for their participation in a demonstration at UT before the election where they spoke of war crimes they had witnessed in Vietnam.

And then there was the election, and the victory of Richard Nixon - who I had really though we weren’t going to have to kick around anymore - the first time I really felt bad about an election outcome. Followed by the end of the year looking at the Earth, seen from the Moon, how strange was that?

You see what I mean? It really was crazy. Everyone I know who survived that year has a different story of their experience, and they’re all equally crazy.

Lawrence O’Donnell wasn’t old enough to experience 1968 as a full-on participant, but he was old enough to remember it as strange - and, yes - crazy. For those who want to know the ins and outs of those crazy events listed above, you cannot do better than to read his book, “Playing With Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics.” I got my copy when it first came out in hardbound seven years ago; you can get it now in trade paperback, since it has finally been re-released this past week.

O’Donnell says his political awakening came with the 1968 election, when he was 16.

The book is an account of a country coming apart at the seams, told 50 years later with the advantage of distance and hindsight about what was really important - much of which wasn’t immediately apparent at the time.

As the author observes and demonstrates in his account, the result of 1968 set the stage for Watergate and everything that has come since. It saw Nixon invite the Unreconstructed South into the Party of Lincoln - with the eventual result being the Party of Trump we deal with today.

1968 is still so alive for those of us who were there and know what was lost, that on election night in 2008, I told several people at the watch party we attended that “We’ve finally won the election of 1968!” Turned out I was wrong, but I have the same feeling this year.

Maybe.

This book is valuable if you can remember the events you were involved in, if you can remember being puzzled by what you saw on your parents’ TV that year, if you didn’t even exist then.

Understanding1968 is a necessary clarification for really understanding how and why we got to the 2024 we find ourselves in.

Read. This. Book.

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