On the third night of the convention we gathered in Grant Park with the intention of marching to the convention center in a show of mass support for Kennedy; there were thousands of us and we thought our time had come. I truly believed it in that moment despite all the setbacks and death, despite all my despair after Dr. King’s murder and the beatings of those wanting nothing more than peace.
But that moment was gone in a flash. We never got near the convention, Mayor Daley’s cops made sure of it; Johnson’s flunkies put the hammer down inside the hall and made sure everyone toed the line and those who didn’t could just get their collective asses the hell out of there. Hundreds did and marched up to Grant Park to join us; we cheered them, but it was the cheers of the defeated and everyone knew it.
What we didn’t know was that the worst was yet to come.
That would be when Richard Nixon was chosen to be Vice President on the ticket with Johnson. They called it a “national unity“ ticket, but the only thing that united those two men was the mountain of Vietnamese corpses they were both standing on.
James Rice: The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago was the best drama ever. Watching little Bobby Kennedy try to crash Lyndon Johnson’s convention and have his ass handed to him was a sight to behold. Their whole plot to dump Johnson got exposed days before the opening gavel and all those party hacks that were secretly in the Kennedy camp lost their nerve; that along with the jettisoning of Hubert Humphrey and the battle over the rules and the platform made for great TV. But nothing topped the scene when Republican Richard Nixon walked out on the stage to accept the Vice Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.
It was real political genius on Lyndon Johnson’s part to replace Humphrey with Nixon; he was in a dead heat at best with Rockefeller and both of them were barely ahead of Wallace, who was pulling down a whopping third of the vote if the polls were to be believed. But there were all those conservative Goldwater Republicans out there who just could not get over the fact that Rocky had given the cold shoulder to their man back in ’64. So old Johnson goes to Chicago and gives an acceptance speech where he says, “We were not afraid to go into South Vietnam and tell the bloodthirsty Communist hordes bent on conquest that they would go no further. We drew a line in the dirt and made them back down.” That was music to the ears of all those tough anti-Communists who suddenly forgot about LBJ signing all those Civil Rights Acts benefiting lazy Negroes whose only ambition was to get welfare checks paid for with hard working white people’s tax dollars. And the President didn’t say or do anything at Chicago that might have reminded them. It would have been a mighty different race if the Republicans had nominated Reagan, but it wasn’t in the cards.
My Dad started getting calls right after Labor Day, the first was from an old friend who’d raised big money for Goldwater in ’64 and who’d been a fellow Reagan delegate in ’68. The second was from John Connolly, the Texas Governor who’d run the convention for Johnson and made sure the so called “Kennedy Coup” got nowhere; the final one was from Tricky Dick himself. All of them were part of an orchestrated outreach to men like my father; men who had no use for Nelson Rockefeller and weren’t comfortable with the redneck rabble that was the Wallace campaign. Suddenly Dad was seeing virtues in LBJ heretofore hidden: yeah he was a big spending liberal and certainly a crook, but he’d sure kicked Commie ass over there in Southeast Asia. And he was smart enough to let Dick Nixon run the Pentagon and then promote him to Vice President. I think the clincher came when William F. Buckley wrote an essay saying how conservatives should follow their consciences on Election Day and vote for the man they thought was the toughest on the Communists.
So by the end of September, my father and many of his friends were sporting bumper stickers that simply said “Nixon for Vice President.” It was the perfect example of having your cake and eating it too. Their support was enough to tip California to Johnson on Election Day by the narrowest of margins; it off set Rockefeller carrying New York and New Jersey. They say Nixon was also responsible for the Democrats carrying Tennessee, Virginia and Florida and those states were enough for LBJ to pull it out in the Electoral College. It was nearly a year and a half after the official signing of the cease fire, but I think the Vietnam War really ended on the morning after Election Day 1968 when Johnson and Nixon stood together in the White House and claimed victory.
Ruth Eleanor Green: I put on a stoic face during the election that fall, it seemed the best way to cope with our defeat in Chicago. There was talk of mounting a fourth party challenge, a Peace Party, but it was really too late by then to get a candidate on the ballot in all fifty states. So I went back to my teaching job and watched the campaign on TV. It was not an edifying sight: Rockefeller, the great “liberal Republican” spent most of the fall talking about how he would put criminals and drug dealers in jail if he were elected; if anyone brought up Vietnam, he just intimated he’d have gone nuclear sooner than Johnson if it had been his call. Wallace just stoked the rage of morons who thought the Confederacy should have won the Civil War and made it clear he’d jump at the opportunity to drop even bigger nukes on the Communists if by some miracle he was elevated to the oval office. Both Lyndon Johnson and his new best friend, Richard Nixon, went across the country making speeches that might well have been written for Senator Joe McCarthy in his heyday.
Yet I’ll hand it to Johnson, he had the guts to name Thurgood Marshall Chief Justice of the Supreme Court right in the middle of that campaign. It showed that despite the crimes he had committed overseas, he still had not forgotten there were wrongs back here in the USA he could still put right in some small way. I took that into account when I cast my vote on election day, all my friends in the Peace Movement said there was no choice, that all of them-LBJ, Rockefeller, Wallace-were part and parcel of the same corrupt system, but I went to my polling place and pulled the lever beside a name just the same. You can’t complain if you don’t vote, that’s all there is to it.
But after the Armageddon that was the ‘68 election-because it took Dr. King’s life and left the forces of reaction more firmly in control than ever-I just tuned politics out for most of the next ten years; seeing Bobby Kennedy shake hands and make peace with the man who was his family‘s worst enemy only made it worse. They call the 70’s the decade of Nixon, the man who is second only to FDR for time in the White House. Some even try to portray him as the most progressive President since the second Roosevelt; tell that to all the dead Vietnamese, to all the dead Nicaraguans, to all the dead Angolans, to all the dead Chileans, not to mention Daniel Ellsberg, who has rotted in prison all these years on a phony treason conviction because he blew the whistle on Nixon’s covert operations.
Instead I devoted myself to more personal causes: I was a founding member of Our Responsibility, an organization dedicated to raising money and providing proper medical treatment for the thousands of surviving Vietnamese victims of the Neutron attacks who were suffering from horrible cancers caused by the radiation to which they were exposed. In the late ‘60’s this was not a popular cause. My fundraising work, plus the fact that I was also a prominent activist on behalf of repealing Maryland’s restrictive abortion laws earned me a visit from one of Director Gordon Liddy’s FBI agents in 1976.