Then Dr. King was killed in Memphis and it felt like I had been knocked flat. For a month afterward I couldn’t think about politics or a stupid fight over a Presidential nomination. That bastard Wallace could have gotten elected for all I cared; he was drawing big enough crowds to make it look like a possibility and the calendar was only April. Then in June, I was asked by friends in The Movement to come with them to Chicago at the end of August, they were planning a big mass demonstration at the Democratic Convention to demand they nominate Robert Kennedy instead of Johnson, and everyone was needed on deck. Taking it to the streets is how they put it. At first I though it was a stupid idea, LBJ was going to get his coronation and there was nothing we could do about it now. No one with any power was listening to us, I told them, and going to Chicago was a waste of time. But I was wrong; somebody was listening after all.
James Rice: My father was a delegate to the Republican Convention in ‘68; he was a Reagan man all the way and the absolute last thing he wanted to see was that rich welfare state Eastern liberal Nelson Rockefeller get the nomination; so you can imagine how royally ticked off he was when he got back from Miami Beach the second week of August. Reagan went into that convention with over 400 delegates and a real head of steam, so all the guys like my Dad who’d worked their asses off for Goldwater really and truly believed they were going to do it again. The strategy was to stop Rockefeller on the first ballot and then pick up enough delegates to put their man over on the second. But they had the rug pulled out from under them at the end of the first roll call when Governor Rhodes of Ohio stood up and threw all his favorite son votes to Rockefeller; Romney in Michigan did the same thing, clinching the game for Rocky before my father and the Reagan campaign knew what had hit them. All my father talked about when he got home was how the Eastern Establishment had the fix put in from the start and there was no damn way he was just going to just fall in line behind some millionaire who‘d never have to worry about seeing the value of his home decline because Negroes moved next door. He thought it was a personal spit in the eye to him and everyone else who’d worked for Goldwater and Reagan when Rockefeller honored Martin Luther King in his acceptance speech and affirmed his support for the Civil Rights Act. And it sure as hell was salt in the wound when Rockefeller picked a fellow liberal like Mark Hatfield for his Vice President.
It was so bad that my Dad and his buddies were actually talking about getting behind George Wallace, a cross burner; not just voting for the Alabama Governor, but raising money for him in California and forming a committee of the like minded in the Golden State. All those riots from Watts to Detroit, all those scenes of Negroes looting and burning left a lot of pissed off white people feeling like there was nowhere else to go. But then came the Democratic Convention in Chicago at the end of the month and the world got turned upside down.
Gen. Earl Halton: In the wake of the Moscow shakeup, Secretary Nixon postponed his plans to leave the Administration and decided to stay on until the end of President Johnson’s term, which meant that I stayed on as well. The best part of it was the extra star I got; the down part was-along with everyone else on the Secretary’s staff-getting pulled into the election of ‘68.
The events of that year have been well chronicled in more than a few books; I would point out the investigative works of Theodore White, William Manchester, Joe McGuiness, and David Halberstam as among the best and there is little I would say here that will add to their work. And I have nothing to say on the subject of whether I was a confidential source for any or all of those gentlemen.
What I can say is that it was Secretary Nixon who first informed President Johnson of the proposed “Kennedy Coup” at the Chicago Convention; this was confirmed to me by the Secretary himself who recounted the details of his conversation with the President to me the day after it happened, which would have been the second day of August. “Those sons of bitches really thought they were going to put one over on us,” were Mr. Nixon’s exact words. “They put the screws to me to me 1960, did the same thing to the President when he was running against Jack for the nomination. And Bobby is playing the same dirty game this year. Well, not this time.”
The Secretary explained the details to me this way: a cabal of old JFK hands-Sorenson, O’Brien, Powers, and O’Donnell, among others at Senator Robert Kennedy’s direction-had been in contact with Democratic Party bosses and big dogs. This cabal was intent making Senator Kennedy the Democratic Party’s nominee at the Chicago Convention instead of President Johnson. They would do this despite the President having more than enough pledged delegates to win the nomination by having the states of New York, California, Massachusetts, Minnesota, along with several hundred other delegates scattered among other state delegations simply abstain on the first ballot. That would be enough, combined with the 400 votes pledged to McGovern, to deny the President the nomination on the first roll call. It seemed that party rules only bound delegates to vote for a certain candidate on that first ballot, after that they were free to vote their conscience for whomever they wished and presumably would have flocked to the Kennedy banner and a chance to resurrect Camelot. Secretary Nixon assured me that this scheme not only could have worked, but was well on its way to success if he had not found out about it and alerted the President.
Now let me say this: I have no first hand knowledge of how the Secretary came by this information. Some-such as Mr. Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson-claim it was through the use of military intelligence agency assets, specifically Army and Naval Intelligence units deployed under Secretary Nixon’s orders. Let me say that such actions would have violated certain legal statutes and there is no credible evidence-now or then-that anything like that ever occurred.
But no matter how it is obtained, knowledge is power, and Secretary Nixon certainly used the power this knowledge gave him to his advantage. It is a damn shame that a decent man like Vice President Humphrey got put on the list of those found to be false in their loyalty to the President, but it is undeniable that members of his senior staff had been talking to Kennedy’s people. It seemed the Vice President’s men were playing a double game, angling to have their guy emerge as a compromise candidate if President Johnson and Senator Kennedy deadlocked themselves. The Vice President had no knowledge of what his men were up to; I know this because Mr. Nixon told me as much. It did not stop him from ordering Mr. Haldeman to leak this particular story to the press two days before the convention was to convene; I’ve always known politics was a tough and dirty business, but I had no idea just how much so until that last week of August of 1968.
Ruth Eleanor Green: Why did Robert Kennedy wait so late to challenge LBJ? His people would later say that it was the assassination of Dr. King and the accounts of Vietnamese suffering from horrible radiation sickness that appeared in the American press in the spring of ‘68 that finally motivated them to try and change the direction of the country. Maybe, but I think they were cowed too long by opinion polls that showed huge public approval for the President’s policy in Vietnam-immoral and criminal as that policy might have been.
In the end, they tried and thousands of us traveled to Chicago to stand witness and show our support; and for a few too short days it looked like we might actually succeed in toppling the warmongers. A group of us stayed with a school teacher on the South Side and watched a lot of what went down on her television set. That’s where we saw Senator Kennedy announce that his name would be put in nomination; I remember watching George McGovern’s speech on the opening day of the convention where he withdrew and threw his support to Bobby and thinking our momentum was unstoppable. We also watched as Hubert Humphrey, blinking back tears, stood before reporters and told them his name would not be put up for Vice President again. In that moment, I thought Lyndon Johnson’s house was falling apart and we would be the one to build something so much better once the rubble was cleared away.