Where Have all the Heroes Gone?

1968 - that was the year that was. The most combustible year in American politics since the war. Protestors took to the streets in their thousands to shout about Vietnam, women’s rights and the assassination of Martin Luther King. George McGovern, a senator and presidential candidate at the time, recalls. 'You almost had to be here. There was a supercharged electric current running through the air. There’s never been anything like it since'. By the time McGovern entered the race For the Democratic nomination, President Johnson had been forced to withdraw his bid for it and Robert Kennedy had been killed trying to get it.

Johnson's real trouble had started in the first primary in New Hampshire, where the unfancied senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, had almost beaten him. Basing his campaign solidly on an anti-war platform, McCarthy attracted young idealists from all over the country who stoically trudged around the state passionately arguing for a withdrawal of American troops from South-East Asia.