Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (103 page)

On Wednesday, August 28, the angriest struggles ravaged the city. That was the day on which allies of Johnson secured a strongly pro-war plank (by a vote of 1,567 to 1,041) and on which Humphrey, having accepted the plank, was later nominated on the first ballot. Although much of the oratory in the hall was boring, tempers heated up by the evening, especially after televised accounts of violence outside reached the delegates. At one point Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff stood on the podium to nominate Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, a candidate who represented many former supporters of Kennedy. Ribicoff stared down at Daley, twenty feet away in the audience, and exclaimed, "With George McGovern we wouldn't have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago." Infuriated delegates from Illinois jumped up shouting and waving their fists. Daley was purple with rage and shouted back with words that, while drowned out in the bedlam, were lip-read by many in the national television audience: "Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch you lousy motherfucker go home."
⁴⁰

The violence against demonstrators outside the Hilton and near the hall at the time was indeed shocking. When protestors tried to march to the hall, thousands of police, acting on orders from Daley, determined to stop them. Taking off their badges, they charged, tossed tear gas, cracked people with clubs, and shouted, "Kill, kill, kill!" All who strayed into their path—demonstrators, bystanders, medics, reporters and photographers—became targets. Hundreds were bloodied, though no one—miraculously enough—was killed. It was dark, but television lights illuminated some of the scenes, and a national audience, listening to protestors shouting, "The whole world is watching," looked at outbursts of graphic violence. Later, police staged a pre-dawn raid on McCarthy's fifteenth-floor headquarters at the Hilton, clubbing young volunteers whom they accused of lobbing urine-filled beer cans at police lines below.
⁴¹

During these stunning confrontations the Johnson-Humphrey forces remained unrepentant. Humphrey, winning at last the presidential nomination that he desired so much, the next day chose Edmund Muskie, a senator from Maine, as his running mate and defended the actions of Daley and his police force. The mayor, he said, had done nothing wrong: "The obscenity [of the demonstrators], the profanity, the filth that was uttered night after night in front of the hotels was an insult to every woman, every daughter, indeed every human being. . . . You'd put anybody in jail for that kind of talk. . . . Is it any wonder that the police had to take action?"
⁴²

Many Americans did wonder. They argued that Daley need not have worried much about the demonstrators, whose numbers were modest. He could have let out-of-towners sleep in the park and have been more generous in setting guidelines for marches and demonstrations. He could surely have restrained his police. Instead, he encouraged them to run amok. In so doing he played into the hands of Hoffman, Rubin, and other demonstrators—seven of whom ("the Chicago Seven") federal authorities then proceeded to prosecute for conspiring to riot. Rubin later commented, "We wanted exactly what happened. . . . We wanted to create a situation in which the . . . Daley administration and the federal government . . . would self-destruct."
⁴³

It was no wonder, however, that Humphrey reacted as he did. An earnest, well-meaning man, he was appalled by the often juvenile behavior of some of the demonstrators. Millions of Americans agreed with him: polls suggested that a majority of the American people defended the riotous behavior of the Chicago police under the circumstances. Still, the disorder at Chicago hurt Humphrey and the Democratic party, which limped out of Chicago more badly wounded than ever. McCarthy refused to appear with Humphrey or to endorse him. The nominee, reconsidering his defense of Daley and the police, soon admitted that disaster had occurred. "Chicago," he conceded two days later, "was a catastrophe. My wife and I went home heartbroken, battered, and beaten."
⁴⁴
He recognized, as did the vast majority of political pundits when the convention finally ended, that it would take some sort of miracle to resuscitate the Humphrey-Muskie ticket and the Democratic party. How far the mighty—the liberal Democrats who had swept to victory in 1964—had fallen!

As H
UMPHREY RALLIED
to begin his campaign he understood that he had to deal with two formidable foes, George Wallace of Alabama, who had announced in February as presidential candidate under the banner of the American Independent party, and Richard Nixon, whom the Republicans had nominated for President three weeks before the Democratic debacle at Chicago.

Wallace was indeed a frightening force in 1968. Although he knew he could not win the election, he hoped to capture enough southern and border states so as to throw a close race into the House of Representatives. Surprising many political observers, he managed to get on the ballot in all fifty states, and his popularity climbed steadily, to 21 percent in the immediate aftermath of the Democratic convention.
⁴⁵
As in the past, Wallace commanded enthusiastic support among southern segregationists. Most far-right organizations, including the KKK, Citizens' Councils, and the John Birch Society, openly aided his operations.
⁴⁶
Much of the power driving his campaign came from the South, exposing more sharply than ever the regional rifts that had widened during the Goldwater-Johnson contest in 1964.

The appeal of Wallace in 1968, however, transcended regional lines, important though those were. It rested also on his evocation of backlash in many working-class areas of the North. Wallace was an energetic, aggressive, caustic, sneering, often snarling campaigner. Eschewing openly racist oratory, he called for "law and order" in the streets and denounced welfare mothers who he said were "breeding children as a cash crop." He gleefully assailed hippies, leftists, and radical feminists, some of whom picketed the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City just after the Democratic convention, dumped what they called objects of female "enslavement"—girdles, bras, high-heeled shoes, false lashes, and hair curlers—into a "freedom trash can," and earned the label forever after of "bra-burners."
⁴⁷
Wallace took special pleasure in attacking anti-war demonstrators, often with thinly veiled references to violent retribution that excited many of his followers. "If any demonstrator ever lays down in front of my car," he proclaimed, "it'll be the
last
car he'll ever lay down in front of." He also set forth an economic program designed to appeal to blue-collar working folk. It included support for a federal job-training program, safeguards for collective bargaining, a higher minimum wage, and better protection for people who lost their jobs or could not afford adequate medical care.
⁴⁸

Wallace seemed most passionate in attacking know-it-all federal bureaucrats and self-styled experts who tried to tell honest working-class folk what to do. "Liberals, intellectuals, and long-hairs," he cried, "have run the country for too long." His audiences cheered when he denounced "over-educated, ivory-tower folks with pointed heads looking down their noses at us." These were "intellectual morons" who "don't know how to park a bicycle straight." He added, "When I get to Washington I'll throw all these phonies and their briefcases into the Potomac."
⁴⁹

In driving for the presidency in 1968 Wallace made some mistakes, among them his selection in early October of General Curtis LeMay as his running mate. LeMay, who had directed fire-bomb raids on Japan in World War II, remained a fierce, plain-spoken advocate of air power, including nuclear weapons. He was widely believed to have been the model for the mad general in Stanley Kubrick's
Dr. Strangelove
(1964), a devastating satire of Cold War military zeal. In a disastrous early press conference following his selection as running mate LeMay told reporters, "I don't believe the world would end if we exploded a nuclear weapon." Despite all the tests in the Pacific, "the fish are back in the lagoons, the coconut trees are growing coconuts, the guava bushes have fruit on them, the birds are back."
⁵⁰
Humphrey soon started calling Wallace and LeMay the "bombsy twins."

When Wallace heard comments like this, he was dismayed. Like LeMay, he had supported the war, but by 1968 he knew that it was a divisive issue, and he had no clear ideas about resolving the stalemate. Like many Americans in 1968, he was not so much pro-war as anti-anti-war. This remained a key theme of his campaign: stimulating popular anger at privileged and "unpatriotic" young folk who went about ridiculing the military while dodging the draft.

For all his appeal, however, Wallace remained a third-party candidate. Political pundits did not expect him to win any states outside of the Deep South. The biggest worry of Humphrey and his advisers was the candidacy of Nixon, who held what appeared to be an insurmountable edge over the Democrats following the Chicago convention. The former Vice-President, fifty-five-years old in 1968, had seemed politically doomed following his defeat in a race for governor of California at the hands of Pat Brown in 1962. A very poor loser, he had lashed out at the press at the time, "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more." In 1968, however, he managed to win the GOP nomination on the first ballot, in part because he was a centrist in the party and in part because he had doggedly supported Republican candidates throughout the 1960s while lining up backing for himself. He then surrounded himself with a coterie of advertising, public relations, and television experts and ran a carefully scripted campaign that stressed his experience, especially in the field of foreign policy. Some contemporary observers, hoping for the best, speculated that there was once again a "new Nixon."
⁵¹

Nixon still nursed bitterly the many slights and injustices that he imagined had been his lot. Life, he thought with enduring self-pity, consisted of a series of "risks" and "crises."
⁵²
He retained the same passion to succeed in politics that had driven him in the past to excesses, sometimes vicious, of partisanship and personal invective. Uncomfortable before crowds, he remained an uninspiring campaigner. His speeches, as in the past, bordered at times on the mawkish. His movements, notably a hands-over-the head gesture of triumph, seemed studied and phony. John Lindsay, a liberal Republican from New York City, observed that Nixon looked like a "walking box of circuits."
⁵³

Nixon's running mate, Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland, was of doubtful help to him. Agnew had won his governorship in 1966, one of a number of Republicans who swept into office in the reaction against Johnson and the Democratic party that year. He had then seemed to be a moderate, backing Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, a Republican liberal, for the presidency in 1968. But Agnew, a Greek-American whose father had been a poor immigrant, was yet another political leader stung into backlash, especially by riots in Baltimore following the murder of King. At that time Agnew gained notice by damning the "circuit-riding, Hanoi-visiting, caterwauling, riot-inciting, burn-America-down type of [black] leader."
⁵⁴
Nixon, seeking a running mate who would be strong for "law and order," chose Agnew without looking too carefully into his background. He had reason to doubt his choice during the campaign when Agnew dropped ethnic slurs, speaking of "Polacks" and calling a reporter a "fat Jap." Resurrecting the tactics of Joe McCarthy, Agnew called Humphrey "squishy soft on communism." He observed, "If you've seen one slum, you've seen them all." The
Washington Post
concluded that Agnew was "perhaps the most eccentric political appointment since the Roman Emperor Caligula named his horse a consul."
⁵⁵

These problems aside, Nixon ran a well-calculated, very well financed campaign. The GOP spent enormous sums on radio and television—estimated at $12.6 million as opposed to $6.1 million for the Democrats—and pioneered the practice of what became known as "demographic marketing." This involved hiring "media specialists," who assumed unprecedented influence in the campaign. They undertook market research to determine the concerns of special groups and then directed particular ads, most of them "spots," at blocs of voters. They also did much with new TV technology—videotape, zoom shots, split screens—to make their spots lively. It was the first truly high-tech television campaign in American history.
⁵⁶

On the issues Nixon tried not to rock the boat; after all, he began the fall campaign with a huge lead over Humphrey. Concerning Vietnam, the driving political issue of the era, he said only that he had a "secret plan" to end the war. On domestic matters Nixon echoed Wallace, but in a more genteel fashion, by catering to the contemporary backlash. (Humphrey mocked Nixon as a "perfumed, deodorized" version of Wallace.) This meant celebrating "law and order," denouncing Great Society programs, rapping the liberal decisions of the Supreme Court, and deriding hippies and protestors. He lambasted the "busing" of children, then being applied in places as a means of desegregating the schools. Much of his campaign, like his choice of Agnew, reflected what pundits later called a Southern Strategy, which aimed to corral the backlash white vote in the South (and elsewhere). "Working Americans," he declared, "have become the forgotten Americans. In a time when the national rostrums and forums are given over to shouters and protestors and demonstrators, they have become the silent Americans. Yet they have a legitimate grievance that should be rectified and a just cause that should prevail."
⁵⁷