CSotD: Did you say “Brokered” or “Broken” Convention?
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I'm on the road, but wanted to do a collection of what a pair of really good political cartoonists might come up with if there were ever a convention in which a popular, idealistic candidate was facing an establishment favorite and the party was determined to nominate the candidate they wanted, come hell or high water.
Let's let Phil set the stage:
This Mauldin cartoon ran April 15, and nobody who knew Mayor Daley had much doubt as to how HIzzoner planned to keep things peaceful. After all, it was less than two weeks earlier that he gave his police orders to "shoot to kill" looters in the riots following Martin Luther King's assassination.
But when Phil speaks of it suddenly getting scary, he's likely talking about a peace march April 27 which was disrupted first by revocation of the parade permit, which forced us to stay on the sidewalks and cross with the lights, and then, when the march continued, attacks by the police:
I think I saw the girl who was carted off in the ambulance: Her boyfriend ran out into the street just in front of us, and, when the police began beating him, she tried to pull him back onto the sidewalk and they used their nightsticks to make hamburger of her face. On the other hand, a friend of mine had his collarbone smashed by the cops and was rescued by some Kansas City businessmen who took him up to their hotel room and found him a private doctor, so who knows?
I do know that, after that, nothing that happened in August surprised me in the least, and anybody who came to Chicago thinking they were going to sing songs and march peacefully was seriously uninformed.
Though, as this August 20 cartoon suggests, there were people in Prague playing for higher stakes.
Mauldin followed that one up three days later, when the tanks rolled in.
Incidentally, a classmate of mine got caught up in all that: He was about to start his sophomore year abroad in Innsbruck and some friends decided to go see the Prague Spring, but got there after it started to fall apart. The Soviets wanted them to sign some forms, which they assured them were just receipts for their confiscated film.
But George could read neither Russian nor Czech and refused to sign, asking for the American consul. His buddies were annoyed with him, but later he defended his decision, saying that being delayed a few extra hours was better than signing something that might delay them considerably longer.
Strange times, but, indeed, never a dull moment, and Mauldin, bless his heart, wasn't letting anyone off the hook.
By the way, the Republicans had already held their Convention in Miami Beach. At that point, the joke was "Spiro Who?" but that's a topic for another day.
The relevant issue was that, while continued demonstrations and then primary losses to Bobby had persuaded LBJ that his time in the spotlight was over, he hadn't entirely abandoned his ambitions, especially with Bobby now dead and only Gene McCarthy to shove out of the way. Humphrey was the inevitable one in this race, but the Democrats were also the party in meltdown, as this editorial from the Bennington Banner suggests:
Bobby's pledged delegates from Vermont announced plans to support McCarthy, but there were significant rules fights over those sorts of issues yet to come.
Meanwhile, as Herblock noted, if the kids in Grant Park had no excuse for naivete, nobody who was paying any attention did. This convention promised to get ugly long before the Whole World Was Watching on prime time TV.
Not, by the way, that everyone was dismayed by the coming debacle.
I knew freaks who took delight in going into the local Wallace Campaign HQ and asking for literature and pins just to watch heads explode.
Not the same as going to provoke the faithful at Trump rallies, mind you: They played it strictly for laughs, joking among themselves that electing a redneck hatemonger would simply speed the revolution.
Well, it seemed funny at the time.
Anyway, the people who actually wanted to get their asses kicked were headed for Chicago, and not to be surprised a second time: Those who had been there for that pre-season scrimmage in April knew they were walking into a rematch in August.
And, boy jayzuz, they got it, as did Dan Rather and several other people who had the affrontery to bring cameras and notebooks into Hizzoner's kingdom.
In the aftermath, Daley famously defended his police with the delightful malapropism, "Gentlemen, let's get the thing straight, once and for all. The policeman isn't there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder."
If you want a quote like that widely circulated, start by having your police officers beat the crap out of some reporters to set the mood. Between his thuggish insistence on "law and order," and his ineptness in getting the press on his side, Daley might as well have been a Republican operative.
Not that he was working alone. As noted before, the country didn't want more of the same: They had supported Bobby, and McCarthy was also highly popular.
The 18-year-old vote was not yet a reality, but the kids weren't the only people who found it hard to swallow the idea that Hubert Humphrey was his own man.
By the time the dust had settled, it probably didn't matter: The Democrats were still divided between hawks and doves, and, as Herblock suggests, poor old Hubert didn't have a lot of maneuvering room on the only policy the American people really cared about at the moment.
Today, we know that Nixon was working behind the scenes to make sure the Peace Talks went nowhere, but that's for historians to mull over. At the time, what everyone knew was that they were tired of war, they were tired of LBJ and, when it was all over, the popular vote was close but the electoral wasn't.
Nixon didn't need to send Donald Segretti and the crew out to eliminate any threats in the 1968 election. The Democrats had done a masterful job of rat-f***ing themselves.
(Dixon, Illinois — Any Presidential trivia buffs?)
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