April 5...the day after

Haze is never far away in Washington, DC. It happens in both the weather and the government. Big fluctuations in temperature, especially in the spring time, bring that murky air down over the city like a blanket.

The weather was hazy at 3pm on Friday, April 5, 1968 as I was driving back into the city from NIH (DC-acronym-speak for the National Institutes of Health) in Bethesda, Maryland. My meetings there were mercifully over early so that I had time to get to my office on Capitol Hill, close up and be there to pick-up my fiancé Jane when she arrived at National Airport (now Reagan) on spring break.

We were all shocked the night before with the news of Martin Luther King’s assassination in Memphis. The world-changing series of events from 1968 that began with the Vietnam War’s Tet Offensive in January was continuing. Just 5 days before on March 31,President Johnson had announced that he would not seek reelection when he said, “There is division in the American house now. There is a divisiveness among us all tonight.” Civil Rights and the Vietnam War were putting unbelievable pressure on our democracy and everyone could feel it.

I was driving my parent's new Camaro convertible and listening to dialogues about the assassination on public radio when I noticed lots of kids on the street. School had just let out and it was the start of spring vacation so I really wasn’t paying much attention to the groups on the sidewalks. Then two young kids both picked up huge pieces of cement from a street repair project and hurled them through a business window. I knew something serious was going on and it would be best to move on quickly. I obeyed the traffic light and stopped a block or so down the street before I realized how vulnerable I was. A pack of kids came running at the car. I saw the brick coming at the windshield and just hoped it didn’t completely shatter. The safety glass worked and just as the angry gang reached the car, I sped off leaving them in my exhaust.

Working my way to the Hill, I saw pockets of unrest but I kept moving. Then, as I turned east on Florida Avenue towards the Capitol, I could see plumes of black smoke billowing up from Hecht & Company (DC’s Nordstrom) and several other tall buildings. The streets were beginning to be closed off. No cell phones, remember. I wanted to stop at a pay phone to call my office and my parents but I didn’t want to chance getting out of the car.

It took more than an hour but I reached the Rayburn Office Building and found my colleagues gathered in an office listening and watching the news. How could this be happening in America? In our nation’s Capitol, for that matter! In true government fashion, all the workers in the District were told to go home at the same time. Normally, work schedules were “time-released” beginning at about 2pm to prevent congestion. Everyone was now on the road at once and nothing could move an inch.

When officials realized what they had done, all the bridges out of town were closed and a curfew was imposed on the city. Geez, this sounded like Moscow, not Washington. I reached my father at the Pentagon and he told me he had been able to send a car to the airport to pick-up Jane and take her home. He suggested I stay put. Being a military man, he was already knee-deep in the operation in the District.

I went to a friend’s apartment nearby the office and we sat on his balcony feeling somewhat frightened and helplessly watching the city burn. The curfew was dropped at about 11pm and I got out of the city by midnight. Our suburban Virginia home felt really good that night. But it was another one of those life-changing days that occurred so frequently in 1968 and made me look on our government and our country in a very different way.

Several days later, I ventured into the city with Jane for a respite and a look at the spring flowers and cherry blossoms. I took a photo that shows Jane and flowers but in the background is a truck full of armed troops that was an ever-present sign of what martial law really feels like.

Martin Luther King Jr’s tragic death made our country take an even closer look at what we were doing to each other and at the perilous path we were headed down. I never miss a Martin Luther King Day celebration. His words, deeds and life had a profound effect on the person I have become. President Johnson went on in his March 31 speech to say, ”I cannot disregard the peril to the American people and the hope and prospect of peace for all people.” None of us can and may we never come that close to the edge of uncertainty again.