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January 17 - January 23, 2018
Reagan was the Donald Trump of the 1960s—his connection to voters and political skills were always underestimated before he made a serious run for the White House.
The speeches GE wrote for him became his belief system. There was a timbre and a rhythm to Reagan’s speech voice that made him instantly recognizable and easy to follow.
In 1962, Reagan began citing the Tennessee Valley Authority as a prime example of government spending run amok.
The Reagan glow seemed to come naturally. He was, all Republicans agreed, a great communicator. Never close to being the best actor in Hollywood, Ronald Reagan was the best actor in politics.
Eugene McCarthy was the last American presidential candidate who thought flattering an audience’s intelligence was the way to win their hearts and their votes.
Most of that day, like all days now, the president could hear protest chants outside the White House. “Hey, hey, LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?”
“Accordingly,” Johnson said calmly, smoothly, eyes level with the camera, “I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
Bobby saw nothing to celebrate in the collapse of a presidency. He tried to watch the news on TV. He was pensive. Finally, Ethel said, “He didn’t deserve to be president anyway.”
The day after the King assassination, Washington was a war zone. Smoke from burning buildings hid the dome of the U.S. Capitol. Vehicles packed with soldiers and marines patrolled debris-strewn streets. Row after row of stores were looted and burned. Broken glass was everywhere.
Four thousand National Guardsmen enforced a curfew in Memphis. Newark had nearly two hundred fires.
Once again in the 1960s, the country was transfixed watching the funeral of another assassinated leader.
Bobby Kennedy anticipated it, too. On the night Dr. King was killed, Bobby told an aide, “That could have been me.”
When seventy-eight-year-old Rose Kennedy campaigned in Indiana for Bobby and was asked about the cost of the campaign, she said, “It’s part of this campaign business. If you have money, you spend it to win. And the more you can afford, the more you’ll spend.
Rose Kennedy’s campaign handlers were horrified at the elitist sound of that, but everyone in Indiana already knew the Kennedys were rich, and for many voters Bobby’s mother might have sounded refreshingly honest.
Bobby became the first Kennedy in history to lose an election.
The establishment is always the last to know it is wrong.
Johnson dropping out exploded everything the party establishment thought they knew about nominating a presidential candidate.
Whenever you saw Grier using his body to provide a safe space for Bobby in a crowd, you knew he was doing it for love. He wasn’t going to let us lose this man. We had lost too many in the 1960s to assassins’ bullets—Jack Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. With the country still reeling from the loss of Dr. King, Grier wasn’t going to let that happen to his country again. He wasn’t going to let that happen to Bobby. There was no doubt that Rosey Grier would take a bullet for Bobby.
Teddy Kennedy delivered the eulogy: “My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it. . . . As he said many times, in many parts of this nation, to those he touched and who sought to touch him: Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.”
This was the summer of 1968—the summer of riots and assassinations.
In the Nixon penthouse, the tone was muted panic.
In 2016, when Donald Trump’s campaign manager was fired and then hired by CNN the same week to argue with and interrupt Democrats already on the CNN payroll, he had William Buckley and Gore Vidal to thank for his new paycheck.
John Lindsay was the last liberal standing at the Republican convention of 1968. He was literally the last liberal to stand at a Republican convention podium. When John Lindsay finished speaking that night, liberalism in the Republican Party died.
Decades later, McCarthy said that after Bobby’s assassination, he felt like he was “just going through the motions.”
In early July, Davis assigned an assistant to call constantly until he got someone on the phone. The assistant kept calling steadily for two weeks. He never got through.
Channing Phillips was the first African American name placed in nomination at a Democratic convention.
Allard Lowenstein was recognized. He called for adjourning the convention. “People’s rights are being abused on the streets, maced and beaten unconscious.”
Daley shouted directly to Ribicoff words the microphone couldn’t pick up: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker, go home!”
Ribicoff was close enough to hear what Daley was saying. Ribicoff looked down at him, showing no fear, and said, “How hard it is . . . How hard it is to accept the truth, when we know the problems facing our nation.”
He quoted Chicago’s most famous columnist, Mike Royko, saying, “The biggest threat to law and order in the last week has been the Chicago Police Department.”
It was inconceivable that Rock Hudson was gay until he died of AIDS in 1985. Flamboyant celebrities like Liberace were not even suspected of being gay by most of their fans.
occurred to some reporters that conventions were supposed to bring in people from all over the country.
America knew that the mayor they saw the night before calling Senator Abe Ribicoff a “Jew son of a bitch” was not sharing the sorrow and distress that the antiwar delegates felt.
protester standing on the edge of the Cicero rally held up a McCarthy sign and a poster saying “Don’t Let Wallace Make This a Police State.” A middle-aged woman yelled, “Shoot ’em, kill ’em!” at the protester and slapped him to the cheers of the crowd. Another yelled, “You nigger-loving homosexual!”
Wallace voters who agreed to be interviewed sounded like Trump voters in 2016.
They said they supported Wallace because he told it like it was and wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.
The West looked strong for Nixon. An Arizona Republican said Nixon couldn’t lose there unless he “committed rape in public on the statehouse stairs in Phoenix.”
Nixon avoided specific policy positions to the point where he was reported to have a “secret plan to end the war.” Many voters and much of the press believed Nixon actually said those words: “secret plan to end the war.” It was actually a UPI reporter who summarized Nixon’s Vietnam policy with those words after covering Nixon speeches.
That false quote became the most memorable quote of the Nixon campaign.
“Well, we seem to have a phobia about nuclear weapons,” said LeMay. “I don’t believe the world will end if we explode a nuclear weapon.”
LeMay said, “It doesn’t make much difference to me if I have to go to war and get killed in the jungle of Vietnam with a rusty knife or get killed with a nuclear weapon. Matter of fact, if I had the choice, I’d lean toward the nuclear weapon.”
LeMay said, “If I found it necessary, I would use anything we could dream up, anything that we could dream up, including nuclear weapons if it was necessary.” And that was the end of the Wallace for president campaign.
In Denver, Humphrey told students that the peace plank was so close to his own position that he “could have” run on it. Then, reminded by reporters that the peace plank called for an unconditional end to the bombing, Humphrey disagreed with the peace plank.
Humphrey worked hard to regain the traditional Democratic constituency of union voters who had switched to Wallace.
“If you’ve seen one slum you’ve seen them all,” Agnew said. He called a Japanese reporter a “fat Jap.” He called Hubert Humphrey “squishy soft on Communism,” which was so absurdly untrue that it refreshed memories of “Tricky Dick” that the New Nixon had worked so hard to erase.
A. Philip Randolph’s cause came first, long before the antiwar protesters took to the streets. He grew up in a home in the South where his mother and father each had guns in case they had to fight off lynch mobs. Gene McCarthy knew there was only one answer to A. Philip Randolph’s letter. On October 29, exactly one week before election day, Gene McCarthy finally endorsed Hubert Humphrey.
And so, eleven months after announcing his campaign for president, Eugene McCarthy announced the end of his political career.
His inauguration was the first one in history to attract protesters. Eight thousand antiwar protesters came to Washington on Inauguration Day in 1969. Four years later, Nixon won a landslide reelection victory over Senator George McGovern, who ran as an antiwar Democratic nominee with the Vietnam War still raging. Nixon’s second inauguration drew a hundred thousand protesters to Washington. The next inauguration protest was in 2017, when Donald Trump’s inauguration was followed by at least half a million protesters in Washington and millions more in all fifty states and around the world.
was raw Nixon, the Nixon America saw in what appeared to be his last press conference in 1962, when he said, “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore.”
Exactly one month later, President Ford signed a pardon granting “a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.”
