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Forty Years Ago: Deja Vu Convention 1968
Now isn't it amazing we have gotten to this point again, already headed toward the convention and no nominee? I was 15 years old and ironing clothes for money as I watched the 1968 Democratic convention. (I was already working for the Eugene McCarthy campaign in South Dakota - "Be Clean for Gene" "The Children's Campaign" etc.) Now I'm reading "Boom: Personal Reflections of the '60s and Today" by Tom Brokaw (a fellow South Dakotan) and it's all coming back. I remember seeing Mayor Daley's police (his son is still Mayor of Chicago) bashing the heads of even delegates outside the convention center! This summer's Democratic Convention will be the 40 year anniversary of the infamous 1968 convention. The issues are not quite the same, yet similar enough to give some of us profound feelings of deja vu. So this is a refresher for those who remember, and a primer for those who have come after, in the hopes that we don't repeat the mistakes of yesterday!
History
John Kerry (who had returned from Vietnam and backed RFK) once said he'd wanted to write a book called "1968". He returned to a country divided, which was reflected in what happened in the election that year. In 1968, the press and polls were skeptical about McCarthy's antiwar platform, yet young people flocked to help him. Thousands left school and work to sleep on floors, phoning voters for primaries. RFK was his major opponent, but was assassinated in June before the convention, which followed the assassination of MLK in April. RFK had a similar platform and the primary competition had been intense! Had RFK lived and beat McCarthy in the primaries, could have been the nominee. McCarthy actually won 42% of the popular primary vote, and beat LBJ soundly enough in the New Hampshire primary to cause him to pull out of the race. (LBJ had favored reduction of force only after the Paris Peace Talks were completed.)
In 1968, winning primaries did not necessarily result in delegate votes at the national convention, as the delegate selection process was heavily controlled by state party honchos. McCarthy therefore received only 23% of the votes at the convention and Vice President Humphrey (who replaced LBJ as the candidate of the party establishment) got the nomination on the first ballot with 67%, to run against Nixon in the general election and lose by a razor-thin margin.
The convention itself was chaotic, with clashes between protesters and police. TIME magazine did a cover story on breakdown of police discipline. The whole thing was a media circus, followed by a flood of magazine and books about how and why it happened. Some historians contend that the party fragmentation has never been completely repaired, and return to war and economic strain tax it further. The Democrats did reform the nominating process (with a Commission headed by McGovern, another South Dakotan) after the 1968 fiasco, to increase the role of primaries and decrease the power of party delegates. Primary votes counted for more in terms of delegate selection, and African Americans, women and youth were better represented at the convention. More recent reforms since then have resulted somewhat in return of relative power to the party delegates (aka "superdelegates".)
Deja Vu
The Superdelegates are seated automatically, based on their status in the party. They are free to support any candidate they choose, so are also known as "unpledged delegates." They make up approximately 1/5 of the total delegates. If the race is close enough, they make act as kingmakers and "broker" the Democratic convention. Such a scenario is being talked up, given the closeness of the race between Hillary Clinton (who would need 86% of the remaining pledged delegates to win the nomination outright) and Barack Obama (who would need 80%). Approximately 300 superdelegates have not publicly announced who they will support. Former Vice President Al Gore and a number of other senior Democrats plan to remain neutral for now in the presidential race in part to keep open the option to broker a peaceful resolution to what they fear could be a bitterly divided convention. If it came to pass, it could be the first time since 1952 that there has not been a nominee on the first ballot.
Here is a List of 2008 United States Democratic Party Superdelegates (by endorsement, subject to change) The list is Clinton-leaning, as far as the House and DNC, but glancing through it, it is apparent that some on the list have shifted to Obama as he gains momentum. There also does not appear to be a distinct pattern of support by race or gender, with minorities and women both split, just as with the electorate. Delegate counts given by various media outlets do not match, nor on the candidates' websites. The Republicans have a projected nominee, but issues of their own in attaining party unity. As usual, the Democrats are a little harder to herd into the tent, which keeps things dynamic. Each superdelegate has to consider that they or their friends may be up for re-election and factor that in to their decision.
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In 1968 I was only 17 so I could not vote yet. But I was aware of Bobby Kennedy and had a poster on my wall with the quote "Some men see things as they are and ask "Why"? I see things as they should be and ask "Why not"?
I think that made a powerful impression on me, perhaps than I realized now looking back. I probably would have worked for him that summer, but instead we had the horror of his assassination, which was only two months after Martin Luther King's.
Instead, I did another show and watched what was happening in Chicago on tv.
Now, forty years later, what is happening feels historic, but maybe in the end is actually less so. I wonder how the world would have been different if MLK and Bobby had lived and I wonder also how different life would be if 2000 and 2004 had not gone the way they did.
It feels to me like we are wrestling back the country from all of the cynical and evil forces that seek both power and profit.
How I got involved with McCarthy though only 15 - I was against the war, all war, any war. I did a report for school on nonviolence and got information from the Quakers. I had a bunch of books and pamphlets.
One thing they included was the training of Navy SEALS - by calling them derogatory names including those reserved for the most reviled women and by calling them the most despicable slang words used by people who hate homosexuals. There was also information on fear of women and of being gay by men so trained.
I lived in Plankinton, South Dakota, which only had 500 people. I slept in a house next to my parents' that they owned, and one thing I had was a box that someone from my school came home in dead. It said "Head" at one end. I painted a peace sign on my floor. One reason I got it was because my dad was a garbageman and he brought it home, for the lumber. I don't think he could bear to take it apart though. & the reason my Dad was a garbageman was because he could no longer be a teacher, because his nerves were shot (post-traumatic stress, known in those days as "shell shock.")
My dad was a Democrat but we had many an argument because he made too many parallels with Vietnam and WW2. To me, he was brainwashed about Communism and also about the Japanese. I still believe to some extent he was. He believed the "domino theory" (every time we let a country fall to Communism there would be more, and eventually us), which was that era's version of the "flypaper theory" (we have to fight them over there or they'll follow as over here), as St. John McCain believes (or says).
About McCarthy - I saw a sign for an antiwar candidate next to a doorway on Main Street in Mitchell, South Dakota (home of George McGovern.) I walked up the steps to a second story building and got signed up to help Eugene McCarthy. The person who organized that office was from Minnesota (where he was from) and was 21 years old.
I enlisted a couple of friends and we got a guy to drive who was apolitical (we had no driver's licenses yet and the 21 year old was very attractive - talked him into it) - he had a van with a loudspeaker system. We rode through small Republican towns like Stickney and Corsica and read McCarthy platform ideas over the loudspeaker.
The campaign was poor so we made our own signs, with alot of cut and paste. We came into a new town once and tried to start a new headquarters in a small room. The RFK people had already started a big headquarters. We ate hamburgers, they ate steak. We were in fierce competition and I didn't know that in June RFK would die. I turned 16 that summer but my childhood was over.
Anyway, that's how I got involved and that's why Eugene McCarthy's campaign was also known as "The Children's Campaign."
The Dems need to be reminded about the 1968 convention from time to time, to remember what the domestic political cost of starting an illegal war can be. It’s entirely possible that the Dems will arrive in Denver this summer without anyone having a first ballot lock, in which case horse-trading will ensue. My best friend was covering the Chicago convention, so I was getting frequent reports about the comings and goings of the Chicago police on the streets outside the hotels and the convention center.
There were no superdelegates then, superdelegates being a much later invention intended to correct another problem, which in turn had appeared in an effort to correct a previous problem, etc. But even without official superdelegates, power was still concentrated in the hands of the various machines around the country.
In 1968, people were frightened and angry, especially young people, who had first flocked to Eugene McCarthy’s quixotic campaign, and then even more so to Bobby Kennedy’s. I do not see anything remotely resembling the level of anger that boiled up in Chicago—getting rid of the draft was one of the smartest things the leaders of the military-industrial complex ever did. I am dubious about whether even the raw politics of using superdelegates to supercede a close delegate count will rouse people to adopt the confrontational politics of the antiwar movement in Chicago in 1968. In a sense, we are already openly engaged in the preliminary rounds of that delegate fight. Power being the motivator of unprincipled behavior that it is, I put nothing past anyone at this point. I hope that the coming primaries will produce a candidate with enough palpable momentum to ride over the niceties of the superdelegates and the Florida and Michigan delegation problem. If not, things will not be pretty, but in a very different way than in Chicago, much harder for the voters to see or participate in. (I canvassed for McGovern in my blue-collar neighborhood in CT, where I found very few McGovern voters in a traditionally solid Democratic precinct.)
Yes, I canvassed for McGovern but four years later. He only won my state (South Dakota at the time). There were plenty of protests but also alot of Dem "hawks" (like my dad), maybe not as virulently supportive of the war as many but took far too long to give up on the quagmire.
On election night 1972, I STILL wasn't old enough to vote or old enough to drink either (they encouraged us to look happy and gave us free drinks, that discouraging night in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.)
nmp,
I thought McGovern only won Massachusetts and DC. I remember this because there were a lot of bumper stickers that said "Don't blame me, I'm from Massachusetts".
I also remember writing to the Canadian government that night in 1972 and asking about immigration policies.
We got a nice letter back, inviting us to consider it!
Karen
You are right - McGovern LOST his home state, & tk DC & Massachusetts.
Thanks for the diary Dianne....
I remember Bobbie coming to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, So. Dak. in '68. I was 11 Y.O., just 2 weeks(?) before he was killed.
This year is the first time in my life I feel like the dream has returned.
Nice to meet you. It feels like home.
Rick
I remember the 1968 convention well and will be in Denver for this one and 70-646 practice exam, 70-642 practice exam. The thought of PMI-001 practice exam and history repeating itself is actually giving me nightmares at least once a week. This is not hyperbole, I'm serious.