My '68

There was no year like 1968. Draft calls summoned young men to fight in Vietnam alongside 500,000 troops already there. President Johnson opted not to seek re-election rather than face anti-war candidates Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April, cities exploded. Bill Armstrong, a reporter for The Daily Kent Stater, covered the primary campaigns of Sen. Kennedy and Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, worked at the Republican National Convention, and then traveled throughout Ohio with the presidential campaigns of Hubert H. Humphrey, George C. Wallace and Richard M. Nixon. Ohio was a battleground state where candidates argued over the issues of law-and-order, civil rights and peace. Meanwhile, a youthful band of New Left revolutionaries were creating demonstrations that alarmed the country. After disrupting Nixon's Inauguration, they turned their attention to fomenting campus upheaval, especially at Kent State University. Congress held hearings to learn who was behind all this. The author observed these activities first-hand. My '68 is his personal reflection on an extraordinary year, told with keen insight and self-deprecating humor in a way that puts the times in context. Everyone who lived through 1968 and its aftermaths will identify with this narrative.