1968

by Mark Kurlansky

  In 1968 there were still black Republicans. Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, the only black senator and the first since Reconstruction—a moderate social progressive who served with Lindsay on the Kerner Commission—was a Republican. The Democratic Party had not yet become the black party. It was the nomination of Agnew that changed that. Most of the 78 black delegates to the Miami convention, out of a total of 2,666, went home either unwilling or unable to back the ticket. One black delegate told The New York Times, “There is no way in hell I can justify Nixon and Agnew to Negroes.” A black Chicago delegate said, “They are telling us they want the white backlash and that they don’t give a damn about us.” The Republican Party lost its most famous black supporter when Jackie Robinson, the first black to break the color line in Major League baseball and one of the country’s most highly respected sports heroes, announced that he was quitting Rockefeller’s Republican staff and going to work for the Democrats to help defeat Nixon, calling the Nixon-Agnew ticket “racist.”

  Accurately defining the political party division of the future, Robinson said, “I think what the Republican Party has forgotten is that decent white people are going to take a real look at this election, and they’re going to join with black America, with Jewish America, with Puerto Ricans, and say that we can’t go backward, we can’t tolerate a ticket that is racist in nature and that is inclined to let the South have veto powers over what is happening.”

  One of the advantages of Agnew as a running mate was that he could run a little wildly to the right, while Nixon, statesmanlike, could strike a restrained pose. Agnew insisted that the antiwar movement was led by foreign communist conspirators, but when challenged on who these conspirators might be, he simply said that some SDS leaders had described themselves as Marxists and he would have more information on this later. “Civil disobedience,” he said in Cleveland, “cannot be condoned when it interferes with civil rights of others and most of the time it does.” Translation: The civil rights movement has impinged on the civil rights of white people. He called Hubert Humphrey “soft on communism” but retracted the statement with apologies after the Republican congressional leaders, Everett Dirksen and Gerald Ford, complained. Agnew said, “It is not evil conditions that cause riots but evil men.” Another famous Agnew declaration was, “When you have seen one slum you’ve seen them all.” And when criticized for using the words Jap and Polack, the vice presidential candidate countered that Americans were “losing their sense of humor.”

  Liberal Republicans struggled not to show their revulsion at the ticket. Lindsay, whose city had seen its share of rioting and demonstrating from blacks, students, and antiwar protesters, wrote:

  We have heard loud cries this year that we should insure our safety by placing bayoneted soldiers every five feet, and by running over nonviolent demonstrators who sit down in the streets.

  You can now see the kind of society that would be. Look to the streets of Prague, and you will find your bayoneted soldier every five feet. You will see the blood of young men—with long hair and strange clothes—who were killed by tanks which crushed their nonviolent protest against communist tyranny. If we abandon our tradition of justice and civil order, they will be our tanks and our children.

  As for the Humphrey campaign that came limping out of Chicago, it was clear to Humphrey that he had to challenge Nixon on the right. His running mate, Senator Edmund Muskie from Maine, was an eastern liberal who helped solidify their natural base. The Left might be unhappy with Humphrey, but they were not going to turn to Nixon. His position on the war was that it was not an issue because North Vietnam “has had it militarily” and a peace would be negotiated before he came to office in January. But in the last weeks before the election, Humphrey started to speak out against the campaign of fear and racism and began to gain ground against Nixon. “If the voices of bigotry and fear prevail, we can lose everything we labored so hard to build. I can offer you no easy solutions. There is none. I can offer you no hiding place. There is none.”

  Humphrey added a new chapter to the fast-developing television age by campaigning on local TV. Traditionally, a politician would come to a town, arrange a rally, as large as possible, at the airport, and arrange an event at which he made a speech. Humphrey often did this, too, but in many towns he skipped it. The one thing he did everywhere he went was appear on the local television show. As for Nixon, he was probably not the last nontelegenic presidential candidate, but he was the last one to accept that about himself. It was widely believed that his five o’clock shadow on television during the debates had cost him the 1960 election. Significantly, the majority of people who only listened to the debates on radio thought Nixon had won. In 1968 a makeup team had worked out a regimen of pancake foundation and lighteners so that when the lights went on he did not look like the villain in a silent movie. His television coordinator, Roger Ailes, who believed his young age of twenty-eight to be his advantage, said, “Nixon is not a child of TV, and he may be the last candidate who couldn’t make it on the Carson show who could make it in an election.” In 1968 appearing on television talk shows had become the newest form of campaigning. Ailes said of Nixon, “He’s a communicator and a personality on TV, but not at his best when they say on the show, ‘Now here he is . . . Dick!’”

  With the election only weeks away, the Humphrey-Muskie campaign started running peculiar but effective print ads. Never before had a front-runner been attacked in quite this way. “Eight years ago if anyone told you to consider Dick Nixon, you’d have laughed in his face.” It went on to say, “November 5 is Reality Day. If you know, deep down, you cannot vote for Dick Nixon to be President of the United States you’d better stand up now and be counted.” The ad included a campaign contribution coupon that read, “It’s worth to keep Dick Nixon from becoming President of the United States.”

  George Wallace was the wild card. Would he draw away enough southern voters to deny Nixon states, thus ruining his southern strategy? Or was he, like the old States’ Rights Party, going to draw away traditional southern Democrats still loyal to the old party? Wallace told southern crowds that both Nixon and Humphrey were unfit for office because they supported civil rights legislation, which to cheering crowds he termed “the destruction of the adage that a man’s home is his castle.” Nixon had called Wallace “unfit” for the presidency. Wallace responded by saying that Nixon “is one of those Eastern moneyed boys that looks down his nose at every Southerner and every Alabamian and calls us rednecks, woolhats, peapickers and peckerwoods.” Ironically, Nixon himself always thought he was up against “Eastern moneyed boys” himself.

  Out of despair came frivolity. Yetta Brownstein of the Bronx ran as an independent, saying, “I figure we need a Jewish mother in the White House who will take care of things.” There was a large bloc of people whose feelings about the election were best expressed by the candidacy of comedian Pat Paulsen, who said with his sad face and droning voice, “I think I’m a pretty good candidate because first I lied about my intention to run. I’ve been consistently vague on all the issues and I’m continuing to make promises that I’ll be unable to fulfill.” Paulsen deadpanned, “A good many people feel that our present draft laws are unjust. These people are called soldiers. . . .” His campaign began as a routine on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a popular television show. With Tom Smothers as his official campaign manager, Paulsen on the eve of the election was predicted by pollsters to attract millions of write-in votes.

  In the last two weeks of the campaign, polls started to show that Nixon was losing that mystical mandate known in political races and baseball series as “momentum.” The fact that Nixon’s numbers were stagnant and Humphrey’s continuing to grow implied a trend that could propel Humphrey.

  The campaigns for the House of Representatives were gaining attention, becoming better financed and more contentious than they had been in many years. The reason was that there was a possibility, if Humphrey and Nixon ended up very close in electoral vo
tes, with Wallace taking a few southern states, that no one would have a majority of state electoral votes, in which case the winner would be picked by the House. The voting public did not find this a very satisfying outcome. In fact, a Gallup poll showed that 81 percent of Americans favored dropping the electoral college and having the president elected by popular vote.

  But on election day, Wallace was not an important factor. He took five states, denying them to Nixon, and Nixon swept the rest of the South except Texas. While the popular vote was one of the closest in American history—Nixon’s margin of victory was about .7 percent—he had a comfortable margin in the electoral college. The Democrats kept control of both the House and Senate. Only 60 percent of eligible voters bothered to cast votes at all. Two hundred thousand voters wrote in for Pat Paulsen.

  The Czechs saw the victory of Nixon, the old-time cold warrior, as a confirmation of U.S. opposition to Soviet occupation. Most Western Europeans worried that the change in the White House would slow down Paris peace talks. Developing nations saw it as a reduction in U.S. aid. Arab states were indifferent because Nixon and Humphrey were equally friendly to Israel.

  Shirley Chisholm was elected the first black woman member of the House. Blacks gained seventy offices in the South, including the first black legislators in the twentieth century in Florida and North Carolina and three additional seats in Georgia. But Nixon won a clear majority of southern white votes. The strategy that undid Abe Fortas also elected Nixon, and it became the strategy of the Republican Party. The Republicans get the racist vote and the Democrats get the black vote, and it turns out in America there are more racist voters than black ones. No Democrat since John F. Kennedy has won a majority of white southern votes.

  This is not to say that all white southern voters are racist, but it is clear what votes the Republicans pursue in the South. Every Republican candidate now talks of states’ rights. In 1980 Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in an obscure, backwater rural Mississippi town. The only thing this town was known for in the outside world was the 1964 murder of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner. But the Republican candidate never mentioned the martyred SNCC workers. What did he talk about in Philadelphia, Mississippi, to launch his campaign? States’ rights.

  CHAPTER 21

  THE LAST HOPE

  I am more impervious to minor problems now; when two of my people come to me red-faced and huffing over some petty dispute, I feel like telling them, “Well, the earth continues to turn on its axis, undisturbed by your problem. Take your cue from it. . . .”

  —MICHAEL COLLINS, Carrying the Fire, 1974

  TOM HAYDEN later wrote about 1968, “I suppose it was fitting that such a bad year would end with the election of Richard Nixon to the presidency.” A Gallup poll showed that 51 percent of Americans expected him to be a good president. Six percent expected him to be “great,” and another 6 percent expected him to be “poor.” Nixon, looking exactly like the “Eastern moneyed boy” George Wallace accused the Californian of being, formed his cabinet from a thirty-nine-story-high luxury suite with a view of Central Park in New York’s Hotel Pierre, conveniently close to his ten-room Fifth Avenue apartment. A hardworking man, he rose at seven, ate a light breakfast, walked the block and a half to the Pierre, passed through the lobby, according to reports, “almost unnoticed,” and worked for the next ten hours. Among the visitors who seemed most to delight him was the University of Southern California star O. J. Simpson, the year’s Heisman Trophy winner who had run more yards than any other player in history. “Are you going to use that option pass, O.J.?” the president-elect wanted to know.

  For the two thousand high-level positions just below the cabinet, he told his staff he wanted as broad a search as possible. Taking his instructions to heart, they had a letter drafted personally from Nixon asking for ideas and sent it to the eighty thousand people in Who’s Who in America, which led to news stories that Nixon was consulting Elvis Presley, who happened to be listed in the book. Though traditionally presidents revealed their cabinet choices gradually, one by one, Nixon, trying to tame that new media that had been troubling his career for a decade, arranged to have his entire cabinet announced at once from a Washington hotel with prime-time coverage on all three television networks.

  1968 Yippie poster calling for a demonstration at the Nixon inauguration

  (Library of Congress)

  This was one of his rare television innovations. However, he did show a strange affinity for another piece of technology, which in time was his undoing—the tape recorder. The Johnson administration had been fairly restrictive in the use of wiretapping and eavesdropping devices, but in the spring of 1968 Congress had passed a crime bill that greatly liberalized the number of federal agencies that could use such devices and the circumstances under which they could be used. Johnson had signed the bill on June 19 but said he believed that Congress “has taken an unwise and potentially dangerous step by sanctioning eavesdropping and wiretapping by federal, state, and local officials in an almost unlimited variety of situations.” Even after the bill passed, he instructed Attorney General Ramsey Clark to continue restricting the use of listening devices. But President-elect Nixon criticized the Johnson administration for not using the powers given by the new crime bill. Nixon called wiretaps and eavesdropping devices “law enforcement’s most effective tool against crime.”

  He also had new ideas for listening devices. In December Nixon aides announced a plan to place listening posts in Birmingham, Alabama, and in Westchester County, New York, so that the president-elect could hear from “the forgotten American.” The plan was for volunteers to tape conversations in a variety of neighborhoods, town meetings, schools, and gatherings so the president-elect could hear Americans talking. “Mr. Nixon said that he would find a way for the forgotten man to talk to government,” a Westchester volunteer said.

  The Chicago convention remained at the heart of one of America’s increasingly hot debates, the so-called law and order issue. While revulsion at the comportment of Daley and the Chicago police was the first reaction to the riots, increasing numbers argued that Daley and his police were right to impose “law and order.” In early December a government commission headed by Daniel Walker, vice president and general counsel of Montgomery Ward, issued its report on the Chicago riots under the title Rights in Conflict. The report concluded that the incident was nothing short of a “police riot” but also that the police were greatly provoked by protesters using obscene language. Not only the Left but the establishment press pointed out that police are quite accustomed to obscene language and wondered if this could really have been the cause for what seemed to be a complete breakdown of discipline. Mayor Daley himself was known to use unpublishable and unbroadcastable language.

  The report described victims escaping from the police and the police responding by beating the next person they could find. It never did explore why McCarthy workers and supporters were targeted. Life magazine reported that the most corrupt police divisions were the most violent, implying that these were “bad cops” who did not take orders. But many of the demonstrators, including David Dellinger, remained convinced that far from a breakdown in discipline, “organized police violence was part of the plan,” as Dellinger testified to Congress.

  On the other side, there were still many people who believed the Chicago police were completely justified in their actions. So the Walker Report neither healed, resolved, nor clarified. The House Un-American Activities Committee conducted its own hearings, subpoenaing Tom Hayden and others from the New Left, though they did not hear from Jerry Rubin because he arrived in a rented Santa Claus costume and refused to change out of it. Abbie Hoffman was arrested for wearing a shirt patterned after an American flag. He was charged on a newly passed law making it a federal crime to show “contempt” for the flag. The committee’s acting chairman, Missouri Democrat Richard H. Ichord, said that the Walker Report “overreacted,” as did newsmen who covered the story. The keen ey
es of the House Un-American Activities Committee had, not surprisingly, uncovered that the whole thing was a communist plot. Their evidence: Dellinger and Hayden had met with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong officials in Paris. “Violence follows these gentlemen just as night follows day,” Ichord said, waxing nearly Shakespearean.

  The Government Printing Office refused to print the Walker Report because the commission refused to delete the obscenities that witnesses accused demonstrators and police of shouting at one another. Walker said that deleting the words would “destroy the important tone of the report.” Daley himself praised the report and criticized only the summary. As he walked out of the press conference, reporters shouted, “What about your police riot?” But the mayor had no comment.

  The law with which Abbie Hoffman was arrested for his shirt was one of several laws passed by Congress to harass the antiwar movement, as Republicans and Democrats competed for the “law-and-order” vote in an increasingly repressive United States. Another of these 1968 laws made it a crime to cross state lines with the intent to commit violence. Federal prosecutors in Chicago were considering charging the leaders of the Chicago demonstrations with this untested law. But Johnson’s attorney general Ramsey Clark had no enthusiasm for such a conspiracy trial. This changed when Nixon took office and appointed New York bonds lawyer John Mitchell attorney general. Mitchell once said that Clark’s “problem” was that “he was philosophically concerned with the rights of the individual.” He wanted a Chicago conspiracy trial and on March 20, 1969, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, John Froines, and Lee Weiner—who came to be known as the “Chicago Eight”—were indicted. Hayden, Davis, Dellinger, Hoffman, and Rubin openly admitted organizing the Chicago demonstrations but denied causing the violence that even the government’s Walker Report blamed on the police. But they barely knew Black Panther leader Bobby Seale. During the trial, Judge Julius Hoffman ordered Seale bound and gagged for repeatedly calling Hoffman a fascist. None of them understood how SDS activists Froines and Weiner had gotten on the list and in fact the two were the only ones acquitted. The others had their convictions reversed on appeal. But John Mitchell himself later went to prison for perjury in the Watergate investigation.