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| Martin Luther King, Jr. |
I was living with my parents and younger brothers and sister near Baltimore, MD, when news came that he had been murdered while leaning on the balcony of his motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
The hard part for me was the following evening when my family was watching Walter Cronkite report the assassination on the CBS Evening News.
My father was raging at the television: "He deserved it! He was a Communist!"
I hovered in silence, looking into the darkened TV room from the kitchen. I knew this man was a saint. He had given his life for civil rights and justice.
"He didn't support our boys in Viet Nam. He was out there demonstrating with those people who are tearing down everything we died for in World War II," my father continued.
I knew that bombing villages in Viet Nam was terrible. My country was killing civilians for what we knew as "the domino theory." I also knew that arguing with my alcoholic father, 54 years old, was pointless.
There were a lot of things I didn't know:
1) President Lyndon Johnson was continuing the war mostly to save face.
2) The Pentagon Papers had already documented the flimsy reasons for the US entering and continuing this war... but they were not released until 1971 when RAND employee Daniel Ellsberg gave them to the New York Times. Wikipedia: "The Pentagon Papers, officially titled United States – Vietnam Relations, 1945–1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense, is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States' political and military involvement in Vietnam from 1945 to 1967."
3) Martin Luther King Jr. had come out against the Viet Nam war exactly a year earlier, when most of the country still believed the lies that President Johnson and his Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara, were repeating.
King risked his life to connect racism and the deaths of black, brown, and poor boys in Viet Nam. He was one of the first national figures to oppose the war.
My father was among the patriotic majority who believed the president, the Congress, and the country could do no wrong. Any opposition was treason, probably motivated by Communist sympathies. Viet Nam was the domino that, if it fell, would trigger the fall of other nearby nations to Communist China.
And I? Most of all, I just wanted to go back to Stanford University in the fall for my junior year. I was taking the spring quarter off in order to earn money, after having spent most of my sophomore year in an overseas program. Every day I rode in my father's car to work as a clerk-secretary in the Social Security Administration headquarters, where he was a computer programmer.
During that terrible spring and summer, with the assassination of King followed by that of Bobby Kennedy followed by violent police actions against demonstrators at the Democratic convention in Chicago, my father was ranting against students and all those who opposed the Viet Nam war.
"That Communist college!" he raved. "You can't go back there. You students are demonstrating against everything my generation fought for."
"Now, Kermit," my mother would say. "Of course Anne can go back to Stanford."
He was right that my understanding of who King really was had come from being at college, hearing sermons by B. Davie Napier and William Sloane Coffin there, and witnessing--but not participating in--demonstrations against the war.
Fifty years later, my mother and father are dead and buried. I am 69 years old, a graduate of those schools my father abhorred: Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley.
The nation honors Martin Luther King Jr. and his courage.
We try to forget Lyndon Johnson and his mistakes. Hollywood produces films like The Post to explain to the young ones what the Pentagon Papers were and why they matter.
The feckless majority has morphed from "the Greatest Generation" to "the Moral Majority" to the "Trump base..." And the beat goes on.
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