What made 1968 a pivotal year in American history and politics?

Question:

What made 1968 a pivotal year in American history and politics?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: The year 1968 is often remembered as the year America came apart. This pivotal year witnessed a confluence of independent yet related phenomena:

(i) the culmination of years of racial unrest,
(ii) the peak of student protests against what they deemed to be an unjust society at home and an unjust war abroad, and
(iii) the reaction of many white Americans against what they saw as a sweeping challenge to cherished values and social stability.

In the critical year 1968, as the atmosphere of threats, distrust, and violence poisoned the nation's politics and public life, the two leaders who might have been able to make a difference died at the hands of assassins. On 4 April 1968, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was slain in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to lend his support to striking garbage-workers. Two months later, Senator Robert F. Kennedy was murdered just as he won the California primary for the Democratic presidential nomination. Controversial and polarizing in life, both men, as martyrs, became the focus of nearly universal mourning. The blows their murders dealt to the national psyche were catastrophic, and were only exacerbated by the urban violence that accompanied both major parties' political conventions that August.