Why this year’s Harris-Walz DNC will be the opposite of 1968’s

1968 was one of the worst years in American history. The middle of that year was the worst Democratic National Convention in history. In Chicago. When Democrats gather in the same place this month, their convention will be the opposite of 1968 because of the lesson learned the hard way then: Never again.

1968 was a year of death. Death of soldiers. Death of leaders. The death of dreams.

1968 was the deadliest year of the Vietnam War for American soldiers and the families who lost them. 16,899 American soldiers were killed in Vietnam that year, more than double the number of Americans killed in all wars since then. I went to my first military funeral in 1968 and watched a general bury his son, my cousin Johnny, a recent West Point graduate who had led troops into battle for four months before earning the Silver Star in the day he was killed in action. Everyone knew someone who lost a loved one in Vietnam. Everyone knew someone who lost a loved one in Vietnam. We were living in a national darkness of death on a scale not known since, including the fear of death of millions of young men who were at or, in my case, approaching draft age – with no end to the war. in sight. Thousands of those young people with cards in their wallets, along with some of their girlfriends and sisters and peace advocates of all ages, marched on Chicago in 1968 to demand an end to the Vietnam War. For them, the stakes at the convention were nothing less than life and death.

By the time the anti-war protesters arrived at the convention, one of their candidates was dead. Heroes were hard to come by then, but the peace movement had a few. America’s most inspiring public speaker, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., broke with the president who signed the Civil Rights Act and eloquently opposed Lyndon Johnson’s war. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Senator Robert Kennedy ran against the war in the 1968 Democratic presidential primary five years after the assassination of his older brother, President John F. Kennedy. On June 5, 1968, just after delivering his California primary victory speech, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Thus ended the dream of another Kennedy presidency.

The peace candidate left standing at the convention was the first candidate with the audacity to challenge the incumbent in a primary, Senator Eugene McCarthy, who shocked American politics with a strong showing in the New Hampshire primary against Johnson. Only 12 states had primaries in 1968, so the nomination had to be won at the convention. McCarthy won the most states and the most no-show votes at the convention.

Each night of the convention was increasingly chaotic and violent outside the hall and inside the hall. Protesters were being beaten in the streets by what a commission of inquiry would later call a “police riot”. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley embarrass himself inside the room, using his army of conventioneers to try to silence, sometimes with fists, any dissent over handing over the nomination to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a LBJ war supporter , who did not run. in one primary. CBS’s Dan Rather was shoved to the floor as stunned viewers looked on. Walter Cronkite told the country, “I think we’ve got a bunch of thugs here, if I may say so.”

The next night, CBS reporter Mike Wallace took a punch to the jaw on the convention floor. When Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff, a fine orator and former member of the Kennedy cabinet, left his prepared remarks at the podium to condemn the Chicago police’s “Gestapo tactics,” we could all read Mayor Daley’s lips on television shouting, “F – — you, you, Jewish son of a t—-!” The networks turned to lip readers to confirm to us that the mayor said exactly what we thought he said. That night, the Chicago police used so much tear gas that Humphrey could smell it through the air vents of his hotel suite.The networks went from covering the riots live to the moment at the convention when Humphrey won the nomination at 11:47 p.m., in what which became the least important news of the night.Thus ended the dream of voters being able to stop the war on Election Day with an anti-war candidate.

Richard Nixon watched the Democratic convention on television knowing that no moment at the Republican convention would help him win the presidency more than every moment at the Democratic convention. Nixon, never a popular politician, won in November by less than one percent of the vote.

The Democrats changed their rules so that the nomination was given by voters in the presidential primaries and never again had a contested convention. This year, as concerns grew about President Joe Biden’s position at the top of the ticket, suggestions about how to find a new nominee if Biden stepped down were everywhere. Virtually every suggestion included an open convention where, after the candidates politely campaigned against each other on talk shows or some such, the nomination would be decided by a dramatic vote of the delegates, with the promise that be captivating TV. But every time I came across the word “exciting”, I saw the word “chaos” instead. It seemed naive to bet on reporters who had never seen an open convention to describe it as interesting instead of chaotic. What if it took as many ballots to get a candidate as it does now to get a Speaker of the House? How weakened would the eventual nominee be by all the angry speeches against them? There should be no violence inside or outside the room for today’s reporters to quickly reach the word mayhem.

Professional Democrats, including convention delegates, can still feel the scar tissue of the 1968 Chicago convention. And they delivered a different result this year when, once again, the president dropped out of the race and tried to hand over the nomination to his vice president: instant unity , no arguments, no punches. Lesson learned.