WHAT A YEAR!

SOME historians, remarked Arnold Toynbee, hold the view that history "is just one damned thing after another." Himself a believer in orderly historical patterns, Toynbee disapproved of such an outlook. But 1968 seems bent on supporting what he called the "antinomian"* view.

One damned thing after another, indeed; also one tragic, surprising and perplexing thing after another. During the first eight months of 1968, events have moved at the pace of an avant-garde movie edited by a mad cutter. The alarms, the assassinations, the political reversals and the extremist cries have been so overwhelming that even last week's Czechoslovak tragedy may seem like only one more episode by Christmas. The common reaction is "What a year!", followed quickly by "What next?" Was there ever a year that could match this one for continued shocks, for a sense that "things fall apart, the center cannot hold"?

Murder and Malevolence

Of course. Some of the shock feeling is caused by a kind of historical provincialism: one often tends to feel that one's own time, one's particular moment, is the worst, the most significant ever. Historians are cooler about it. With cosmic detachment, they insist that the only crucial years are those providing great turning points in human affairs. For all its banner headlines, 1968 does not begin to compare with, say, 1848, when seismic revolutions cracked the old European order in the Austrian Empire, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark and The Netherlands. To date, the 20th century's most fateful year was 1914, when the West plunged into what Winston Churchill called "another Thirty Years' War." That semipermanent conflict spanned such events as the Russian Revolution (1917), the Wall Street crash (1929), the rise of Nazism and the New Deal (1933). Indeed, 1968 should hardly unnerve those who recall 1939 and its sickening slide into World War II--or the incredible kaleidoscope of 1945, which alone produced the defeat of Germany, Italy and Japan, the first atomic bombs and the United Nations, plus the deaths of Hitler, Mussolini and Roosevelt. And what subsequent year really compares with Cold-war 1948, when the Russians blockaded Berlin, took over Czechoslovakia (the first time), and bolted the Iron Curtain across Europe?

Even so, Americans have never before undergone so many sustained surprises both at home and abroad as they have in the past year. Last summer Israel smashed the Arabs, Red China exploded its first H-bomb, Johnson met Kosygin in New Jersey, the Bolivians killed Che Guevara, the Nigerian civil war began destroying Black Africa's most promising nation, and Negro rioters ran wild in Detroit and Newark.

Last fall Britain devalued the pound, the gold crisis agitated the world--and so did the first human-heart transplant.

All this merely prefaced a new year which put in question most of the assumptions on which the U.S. based its foreign power as well as its domestic politics and peace. In January came the first seizure of a U.S. warship on the high seas in more than 150 years--not by some great naval nation but by North Korea, which escaped unscathed. North Viet Nam launched the Tet offensive, stunning Saigon and temporarily capturing Hue. By February, George Romney was an ex-presidential candidate, while Nelson Rockefeller played Hamlet, thus opening the way for Richard Nixon, the perennial loser, whose chances had been so widely written off. Whoever expected a Senator with a professorial past, who sometimes bored his audiences, to defy the President and win the New Hampshire primary?

Not Robert Kennedy, who, as everyone had pointed out, would wait four more years--but then rushed into the race after McCarthy's victory. Not Lyndon Johnson, who, as practically everyone had" been betting, would run again--but who then announced his abdication and partial de-escalation in Viet Nam. (Everyone had learned to expect such sudden surprises from 1968, and from L.B.J., that till the last moment there was doubt if he really meant it.)

Suddenly, death began stalking the nation's most creative leaders. Sudden ly, faceless men sought fame by mag-nicide, the killing of someone big. In April the murder of Martin Luther King ignited Negro riots in 125 cities that killed 46 people, injured 2,600, and required 55,000 troops to restore order. In June came the second Kennedy assassination, an unbelievable replay of the first, including a blind-chance killer, a meaningless motive, and national grief for a dramatic young leader cut down at the threshold of his powers.

Meantime, assorted student protests roiled Belgium, Britain, Egypt, Indonesia, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Spain and West Germany. Out went the U.S. tradition of universities policing adolescents in loco parentis. At Columbia, student rebels captured the campus, destroyed a tottering adult empire (last week President Grayson Kirk resigned), and inspired more demonstrations in France, where once-passive students turned anarchist and incited a nationwide general strike that nearly toppled

Charles de Gaulle from power. Though a nervous majority later gave De Gaulie more power than ever, his government may soon soothe the students with widespread educational reforms.

The rush of action seemed headlong and haphazard, but there was a rationale behind it. Everywhere, a vast yearning for new freedoms and fulfillments is sweeping Communist, capitalist and ex-colonial nations alike. In spired by mass communications, tutored by the pioneering young, millions want more--and feel more frustrated when affluence, equality and education are too slowly achieved. In this heated situation, old institutions are too often archaic and unresponsive to change. Instead of plunging forward with history, the Kremlin fears the Czech disease of freedom. The Vatican is impelled to ban the pill. Congress rejects effective gun regulation. Whatever the issue or nation, something loosely called the "establishment" resists aspiration and innovation. The global result is growing impatience with old political processes; a desire for direct action is inflaming minds and causing almost daily clashes that defy law and logic.

Until recently, the U.S. had a boundless faith in steady progress, a growing sense of social justice, a belief that federal cash would solve the nation's re maining problems. Yet a decade that began with a quest for moral grandeur has bogged down in the effort to keep society from exploding. Gone is the idea that a big power can safely fight a limited war against a small power. Instead, North Viet Nam forced the U.S. to spend $85 billion and lose moral prestige in much of the world. At home, vast New Dealish programs have failed to cure poverty; civil rights legislation has left Negroes more frustrated than ever. For all the U.S.'s faith in uni versal higher education, many of the nation's brightest youths have rebelled against mass schooling that seems to ignore their burning questions: What is the good life, the nature of justice, the remedy for society's evils?

Big News and Little Solutions

As 1968 began, some of the most idealistic students set an example for their elders by avidly seeking reform through the political process. What they found instead was a seeming national swerve toward conservatism. The young, the poor, blacks and antiwar dissenters had profoundly affected government--something they once felt powerless to do. But then came a counterreaction of other Americans who feel threatened by change and civil disorders, to say nothing of youth's drug culture and new sexual freedom. As if to further dis illusion youth, the No. 1 domestic political issue may well be "law and order" rather than social justice.

Unfortunately, all this promises more crises and convulsions in 1968. The con fusion tends to confirm extremist notions that U.S. institutions are moribund, that the only solution is to uproot society and start afresh. Only the fatuous deny that too many courts, legislatures, federal agencies and universities have grown unmindful of their duty to liberate rather than constrict. Yet in advanced countries, institutions cannot be eliminated; the infinitely complex problems of crime or poverty require organized experts. There is no Gordian knot waiting to be slashed. To yearn for apocalypse and reject the real task--to reform failing institutions--is simply to sabotage one of the world's few self-governing societies.

The trouble is that most of what needs to get done in the U.S. is pretty boring stuff--things like modernizing taxes, zoning, building codes and local governments. Yet neglect of such matters is what promotes the wrong kind of change. Most of the historians' turning-point years involve wars and revolutions, not peaceful change. Clearly, 1968 is already a year for the history books; if it becomes a really major entry, the reason will be that Americans failed to solve too many of the minor problems that eventually cause major explosions. In that sense, today's blaring headlines convey a warning: the big news is what isn't being done in a thousand little ways.

Americans have really always known this. There are various ways of looking at history: as fate, as chance, as an opponent to be outwitted or a force from which to hide. Americans treat it, at least in part, as a problem to be mastered. Call it pride or pragmatism, on this fundamental belief the U.S. was founded and still stands--that men need not be victims.

* A word derived from the Greek anti and nomos, meaning "against law," and notably applied to the belief that Christians are saved by faith and not by works. The word now generally connotes freedom from law.

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