A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

"I remember practically every hour of 1968," says Senior Writer Lance Morrow, who wrote this week's cover story. "I was 28 years old then, and writing in TIME's Nation section, doing pieces about Bobby Kennedy's coming into the race, and Johnson's withdrawing, and the assassinations. It was tragic history, but it also had a quality of hallucination."

Morrow traveled to Chicago to cover the Democratic Convention. Stepping out of the Hilton Hotel into the battle between police and demonstrators on Michigan Avenue, he was charged by a Chicago cop with billy club raised. "He was about to go for my skull," Morrow says. "I held up my press credentials, like a ridiculous little shield. He thought for a long second, then shouldered me back through the glass doors of the hotel."

Nation Editor Walter Isaacson, though only a high school student at the time, was also in Chicago for the convention. Much to his parents' consternation, he had traveled there from his hometown of New Orleans. Only later would he learn that his parents had asked friends in the Louisiana delegation to keep an eye on their 16-year-old son. "I had the feeling it was going to be a historic event and wanted to be there," says Isaacson. "My feelings about the world, like those of many people my age, were shaped considerably by the events of 1968."

Correspondent Don Winbush, who was also a teenager at the time, remembers most vividly the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. "For me, a young black man who had grown up in the South, it was a stunning blow," says Winbush. Reporter-Researcher Anne Hopkins finds June 5 to be the day that continues to haunt. Turning on the radio as she awoke that morning, she learned that Robert Kennedy had been shot. "As I began to absorb what was happening, the phone rang," she says. "It was my mother, calling to sing Happy Birthday to me."

For Correspondent Hays Gorey, who covered the Kennedy campaign, the details of that tragedy will never fade. Eerily, just days earlier in San Francisco, firecrackers had gone off, causing reporters to worry about the candidate's safety. Gorey remembers Kennedy's response: "If someone wants to get me, I guess he will." On the night of the California primary, Gorey was walking toward Kennedy when the candidate was cut down in the pantry of a Los Angeles hotel. "I heard these pop-pop-pop sounds like firecrackers," Gorey says. "But instinctively you knew this time it was the real thing."