Commentary: How 1968 tumbled communism

Fifty-year anniversaries of the shocks of 1968 pour down: the Tet Offensive and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, riots and demonstrations galore. All eminently deserve remembrance. But violent eruptions weren't the whole story of that fateful year. On a global scale, 1968 was also the beginning of the end of communism as a left-wing ideal.

During the preceding half-century, despite all of communism's recorded crimes, Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries had remained committed to the absolute rule of a single party as the only