That was the year that was

When I first stepped into "The 1968 Exhibit" at the National Constitution Center, I felt the same sense of dread I experienced the first time I visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. "This is gonna hurt," I thought. And it did.

In both cases, the feeling was triggered by a sound. In Washington it was the "chi-chi-chi" of the automatic sprinklers that reminded me of the helicopters we heard every night on the evening news coverage of the war in Vietnam.

This exhibit greets you with a recording of the low-throated chop of a Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopter. Not only do you hear it, but the helicopter is there as big as life, with a big Red Cross on its nose. The Huey medevac is parked like an unwelcome houseguest in front of an easy chair and a TV with video of Walter Cronkite reporting.

We have grown accustomed to watching our foreign wars from the comforts of home, but in 1968 that experience was as strange as seeing a full-size helicopter in your living room. The Huey display captures the unrelentingly surreal nature of 1968.

The era of the late '60s began in January 1968, with the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, and overlapped into the new decade to 1972, the year of President Richard M. Nixon's landslide reelection and, a month later, the Apollo 17 mission, the last time an American stood on the surface of the moon.

Back in 1968, we all expected that America was going to land on the moon soon. Any day now. Our astronauts had already flown around the moon and back. Now it was simply a matter of footprints to seal the deal. That historic moment finally happened on July 20, 1969. Three years later, Apollo 17 astronauts slipped the surly bonds of lunar gravity, never to return.

The year 1968 unfolded in a fog of war and tear gas and bong smoke. I look back in amazement at the apparently acceptable arithmetic of American losses sustained in Vietnam in the considered and sober judgment of the best and brightest political and military minds serving the U.S. government.

In 1968 alone, more than twice as many Americans died in Vietnam - 16,592 - as have died during the 12 years of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. And all the hawk-fed Cold War fears about communist domination if America "lost" Vietnam proved to be vapor. The only domino effect I've noticed since the fall of Saigon in 1975 was the "Made in Vietnam" tag on the FDNY baseball cap I bought in 2001.

The late '60s were all about moral and ethical values and, as often as not, pretentious posturing about such values. It was fashionable to care deeply about justice and to lecture complete strangers about it. It was a time of peace and love and elaborate phonies with long hair. The pop singer Donovan called it the "Season of the Witch": "You've got to pick up every stitch. Beatniks are out to make it rich."

As vivid and important as the events of 1968 were, historically and personally, I realize they are as relatable to an 18-year-old today as 1923 would have been to me when I was 18. But 1968 was more than once upon a time; it was a time once upon a life.

When I said I knew "The 1968 Exhibit" was going to hurt, it's because I know how the dream ended. It hurt then and, after all these years, it still hurts. Especially Robert F. Kennedy.

I watched a chilling video of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s last speech the night before his assassination April 4, 1968. "I may not make it there with you," he said of the Promised Land he had seen. He didn't even survive the next day.

Later that night, at a presidential campaign stop in Indianapolis, Kennedy broke the news of King's murder by a white man to a largely black crowd:

"For those of you who are black and are tempted to . . . be filled with hatred and mistrust of the injustice of such an act, against all white people, I would only say that I can also feel in my own heart the same kind of feeling. I had a member of my family killed, but he was killed by a white man."

Then he quoted his "favorite poet," Aeschylus of ancient Greece:

Even in our sleep,

pain which cannot forget

Falls drop by drop upon the heart,

until, in our despair,

against our will,

comes wisdom

through the awful grace of God.

The pain of Bobby's assassination June 4, 1968, has fallen drop by drop on millions of hearts for 45 years.

How many things would have been different had he turned another way in that hotel kitchen after winning the California primary? Does anyone believe Nixon would have defeated RFK in the general election that year?

Of the more than 17,000 visitors to "The 1968 Exhibit" since its opening June 14, thousands have voted for one of the 1968-era presidential candidates: Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver and Alabama Gov. George Wallace, Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy, Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon.

In the lead, though, as the voters of 2013 rewrite history, are Democrat Robert F. Kennedy, with 39.4 percent, and Republican Ronald Reagan, at 21.5 percent.

The polls close Sept. 2, the final day of the exhibit.