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America’s Tumult of 1968


((PKG)) AMERICAN ODYSSEY EXHIBIT
((Banner: America’s Tumult of 1968))
((Reporter:
Julie Taboh))

((Camera: Mike Burke))
((Adapted by:
Martin Secrest))
((Map:
Washington, D.C.))
((Locator:
National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.))
((Banner: 50 years on, an exhibition highlights America’s tumult of 1968))
((Courtesy: National Portrait Gallery, The Irving Penn Foundation))
((Kim Sajet, Director, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery))
This exhibition is called, “One Year 1968: An American Odyssey,” and it was a very tumultuous time in American history, and I would say that many people across the world still also remember 1968. This is a year when we get two assassinations. We, of course, have the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and then later, Senator Bobby Kennedy. America is in Vietnam, and it is not going well. President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who, of course, had assumed the presidency because of the assassination of John Kennedy three years earlier, was having very bad approval ratings, (and) in fact had gone from 80 percent (approval) to 32 (percent). And he announces that he is not going to re-run for the presidency.
((NATS))
((Kim Sajet, Director, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery))
The photograph behind me is incredibly important. It’s very iconic. It’s actually taken by one of the astronauts on the Apollo 8 mission that actually circled the Earth. And this, of course, is a picture of the Earth taken from the window. This is a moment, I think, when suddenly not just America, but the world realizes how small we are. We’re all on this little marble, the little blue marble. So this orients the globe, the citizens of the world, in a way that almost no other picture has done since that time.
((NATS))
((Kim Sajet, Director, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery))
This small, but I think mighty exhibition, actually indeed provides a time capsule that, in some ways, may be a portent to some of the things that we need to be thinking about today. So, for example, there is a very dramatic cover that was put on Time magazine in June (1968) to describe a story that they were doing about the gun in America. And it’s very confrontational, because the gun is literally pointed at you, the reader, (the) viewer. This is, of course, a conversation that continues in America today. And really giving people a context, that we’ve been here before. We will be here again. We are having this context about what do we want this country to be.


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