In a previous HNN article, I dealt with 1962 starting as a year of trial for the Kennedy administration and, after the settlement of the Cuban Missile in late October, ending as one of hope. Conversely, 1968 began as a year of hope, but ended--both in the USA and abroad--on a much gloomier note.
As in 1962, my own path mirrored and reflected the larger trend. There was a saying in the mid and late 1960s: “Don't trust anyone over 30.” The countercultural movement of the decade was primarily a youth movement, one that flourished on many college campuses. I was teaching on such a campus, Wheeling College, later transformed into Wheeling Jesuit University. I turned 30 in the spring of 1968, but throughout that year--the most significant of the late 1960s--I and my wife Nancy remained sympathetic to the movement.
Most of the college’s students were from white, middle-class Catholic families--we had no Black students until a small faculty group of us in late 1968 established two scholarships for them (the president of the college was the Jesuit priest Frank Haig, brother of Al Haig, later White House chief of staff under Presidents Nixon and Ford and still later Secretary of State under President Reagan).
