ECHOES OF RIOTS, ECHOES OF AUGUST (1968)

The essay that follows is a sort of companion piece to one I wrote in March, 'Hey, Hey LBJ, What Did You Do 50 Years Ago Today', to which you can link here. There is, I think, much more to be said about those tumultuous years in the late Sixties, not only about how and why they succeeded or failed, or how they have been misinterpreted, but also about what they have to say to us who lived through them, and what they might say to young people today. I'm sure more essays will follow, but for now, here's a memory of that summer...

At no point in my life did it ever occur to me to congratulate myself for living through August 1968, but somehow I have now I managed to 'survive', to use the more self-sensitive 21^st century term, its fiftieth anniversary. Anniversary remembrance is symbolic, triggered by nothing more than mathematical convenience (years ending in zeroes) which appeals to our senses of order. But August 1968 was not about order, but chaos. As Chicago Mayor Richard Daley explained, on 29 August, after his cops had run riot through protestors at the Democratic Party's Presidential Convention, “the policeman isn't there to create disorder, (he) is there to preserve disorder”.

The Chicago convention riots may have been the high-water mark of political counter-culture in an America (the cultural high would come a year later), which was built around by two great political issues: civil rights at home and the war in Vietnam abroad. The latter was driving a new spike through the liberal political establishment which had already begun to re-order itself in the wake of President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 and '65. Disaffected racist Southern 'Dixiecrats' still rallied to LBJ's waging of the war. But at the start of 1968 the Viet Cong's Tet Offensive suggested to America that LBJ wasn't 'winning' the war, and in February trusted news-anchor Walter Cronkite returned from Vietnam confirming that was the case. “If I've lost Cronkite, I've lost America,” Johnson said. 

In March, on my seventeenth birthday, anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy came close to defeating incumbent President Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. On the last day of the month, Johnson realised his candidacy would divide his party, and announced he would not stand for re-election. My teenaged self, thinking I was now part of a triumphant revolution, celebrated. But the celebrations were premature, and short-lived.

Four days later, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, and riots in cities across the country left 46 people dead. Protest increased. Columbia University students occupied campus buildings; but that paled in the face of French students sparking a general strike joined by some 22 million workers. Meanwhile, Robert F. Kennedy was trying to unify the opposition to LBJ's designated successor, Hubert H. Humphrey, whom many McCarthy supporters treated as an opportunist carpet-bagger. Yet in the same way King had, just before his murder, specifically linked the issue of civil rights to American conduct in Vietnam, so RFK seemed to be rallying King's constituency to anti-war coalition. Then, on 4 June, as he celebrated winning the California primary, he too was assassinated. Riots didn't follow immediately, but it's not unfair to see those in Chicago as a delayed by-product of that assassination, bringing white kids out on the streets the same way Rev. King's killing had brought out the black population in the cities.

August began with Nixon winning the Republican nomination, and new Defense Secretary Clark Clifford raising the number of US soldiers in Vietnam to its peak, 541,000. We watched again as European dissent got more real than ours; Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia to put an end to the Prague Spring. Surely there was something more we could do.

Thousands flocked to disrupt the Democratic convention, to stem the Humphrey tide that would ensure Johnson's war continued. But this was America; concrete action and coalition-building was subsumed into political theatre which played better on television news. Inside the convention, the winning of primaries proved to be less important than the wishes of the party bosses who ran the smoky rooms; the big party chief was John Bailey, from Connecticut, who'd given my grandad his marching orders for one term in the state legislature. Frustration overwhelmed those outside the convention hall, and then Daley unleashed the police. The cops, taking out their own frustration against what they saw as spoiled long-hairs untrue to their country, made the fatal mistake of including the reporters covering their attack among its targets.

Inside the hall, Senator Abraham Ribicoff, a Bailey protege from Connecticut, stood up and excoriated a lack of democratic process which led to “Gestapo tactics being used in the streets of Chicago”. Ribicoff was also Jewish, like my mother, so we watched him with a special pride. He had responded with great grace to a letter I'd written him when I was 12, asking about appointments to the Naval Academy. That was a much different me, I remember thinking, just as Mayor Daley was caught on camera cupping his hand round his mouth and shouted at Ribicoff. We lip-read what he screamed, which wasn't difficult. At least the 'you Jew bastard' part.

Protest had failed. August was over. Immediately after the Chicago riots, I was off to university to play football. My music was changing, with LP records and FM radio. I went off to college with the Buffalo Spingfield's final album, with The Band's first, with Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield's Super Session. Those old compilations of two hits and filler which kept pop music profitable were yesterday's news, though Otis Redding's History, James Brown Live At The Apollo and Aretha Now had made my cut. John Coltrane's Impressions had somehow cracked my consciousness, which was ripe for being expanded. My hair, under the football helmet, grew. Eventually I even managed to jump onto the running board of the sexual revolution. But before that happened, it was now September 1968. Surely whoever won the Presidency would hear the collective cries of so many of us seeking an end to racial discrimination, an end to the folly of the Vietnam war.

History can tell you how that turned out. The trial of the Chicago Eight protest leaders would become America's greatest example of political theatre of the absurd. Nixon narrowly defeated Humphrey, helped by his 'October Surprise' which sabotaged LBJ's peace talks with North Vietnam in Paris. The Democrats would make new rules, increasing the importance of their presidential primaries, which would result in George McGovern, who had led the Kennedy delegates after Bobby's killing, wiinning the nomination in 1972. Nixon would defeat him in a landslide, despite the clues provided by the early Watergate reports. The Vietnam war would continue until it was lost; Nixon would continue until he was lost, and resign. The Dixiecrats would defect full scale to the Republicans, and a few years later Ronald Reagan would begin the shift of America's political paradigm to the right, as prophesied from jail by Nixon's campaign manager and Attorney General, John Mitchell.

It was still a great time to protest, especially within the protective walls of a small liberal arts college. Especially because even there you found chaos, division between black and white, left and right, straight and hip. It was obvious this would not be a French-style movement for change. It was also a safe time to lose oneself to the cultural revolution, but after Woodstock the following August, that too began to crumble into what became known as the 'me' generation. By 1970 even students, at Jackson State and Kent State, were being killed. Lives were there to be got on with. Some of us would be lucky enough to try to continue to protest. Eventually I would even vote for a presidential candidate who won. But that took decades. Back in August 1968 (was it really 50 years ago?) I would have told you change was in the air. Almost everything still seemed possible, especially if you were 17.

ROBERT F KENNEDY, THE LAST CAMPAIGN: MY LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS ESSAY

My essay on the 50th anniversary of the RFK assassination is on the LRB Blog, you can link to it here. It's a little different from the one I originally wrote. Partly in layout: I led with the John Stewart quote, then explained who Stewart was. But mostly in detail: I went in to a little more description of the three assassinations I mention, to draw out their similarities, but I can understand why LRB wanted to keep
the focus tighter on the story of that campaign as well as the what ifs had Bobby not been murdered.

The RFK assassination is in many ways the most perplexing of those three. On the face of it, the evidence of conspiracy is the most obvious, but in most ways it remains the hardest to prove. I had started to write a separate essay recapping where we stand, and another drawing the parallels in the modus operandi in all three murders, recurring themes of conspiracy and cover up, as it were. But each time I got bogged down in the minutiae of what remains a conundrum for most people.

My suspicion of Bobby was real at the time. My lack of enthusiasm for Humphrey was just as real. By 1970, and in the wake of the student strike, the futility of protest began to tempered by what seemed democratic political progress; eventually George McGovern would use changes in the primary and convention process (spearheaded by his campaign manager, Gary Hart) to capture the Democratic nomination. McGovern was the man who had stepped forward to lead the 1968 delegates already won by Bobby; that he and Eugene McCarthy could never reach an accommodation that would raise a viable challenge to Humphrey is, in a nutshell, the most lasting legacy of Bobby's death.

McGovern's nomination in 1972 was probably the high point, or the last high point, of Sixties protest. McGovern, of course, would be trounced by Nixon in the '72 election; no October Surprise was necessary, though the Watergate break-in, like Russian interference in 2016, was swept under the carpet until well after the election results were known. When Nixon was finally toppled, there was no danger a McGovern would replace him.

I probably should also have added a line about the idea that Bobby was convinced his brother's killing had been the result of conspiracy. He would have known who the likely suspects were, and where to look for them and their accomplices. That in itself may have put the target on his back.

HEY HEY LBJ, WHAT DID YOU DO 50 YEARS AGO TODAY?

It was a Sunday, the 31^st of March fifty years ago, 1968. I was in my last year of high school, already halfway out the door to college. The Vietnam war was a concern, but knowing I'd been offered scholarships, and would spend the next four years deferred from the draft, it was not an immediate worry. On that quiet spring evening President Lyndon B. Johnson was about to address the nation on television. I was watching it alone, but I began to shout to my family once the import of his now-famous words sank in. “...accordingly, I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

'We' had toppled a president! Eugene McCarthy's strong second place finish in the New Hampshire primary, backed by Vietnam protesters dubbed 'the Children's Crusade', had shown LBJ he would have to endure a battle to get what should have been, as a sitting president, an automatic nomination. Though he spoke of unity and his concentrating on finding a solution for the Vietnam War, those words rang hollow. I was celebrating. LBJ was a favourite of my grandfather, who was a long-time Democratic party hack. Ten years earlier Grandpa had come back from a 'Jefferson-Jackson' fund-raiser at which then-Senator Johnson spoke, and given me an LBJ-autographed programme. 'This man will be president some day,' he told me. LBJ fulfilled my grandad's prophecy, but now change was coming. Johnson would be gone. A war would be over.

Of course, that did not happen. Change came, but in none of the ways I'd anticipated. Johnson's crowning achievements in his brief presidency were the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Even as he stood down to 'unite' America, just four days later, Martin Luther King was assassinated, and the ensuing riots harkened a new era in the fight for racial equality. Robert Kennedy would enter the presidential campaign, running like McCarthy on an anti-war platform, but also as a potential civil rights healer. At the time I saw RFK as the cynical opportunist he had always been. Over time, I've come to re-assess my opinion, believing his conversion was real, spurred by King's move toward wider social activism. What we lost to two assassinations was no less than an opportunity for a racially unified anti-war movement for social justice. After RFK's murder, Johnson's vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, won the Democratic nomination at Chicago's bloody convention, then he lost narrowly to Richard Nixon in November 1968. 

The convention brought changes in the Democratic party that enabled George McGovern to win the party's nomination in 1972. By then I was 21, and he was the first of many losing candidates for whom I would cast my vote; he's still the one I believed in most whole-heartedly. Despite the Vietnam War, now four years deeper in to tragedy, despite the Watergate scandal, which was still years from being taken seriously by the mainstream media, Nixon trounced McGovern.

Immediately after Johnson's speech I wrote an anti-war poem, which was published in our very conservative local paper, the New Haven Register; my first published poem. I went away to college, marched against the war, went on strike in 1970 following the invasion of Cambodia and the killings at Kent State and Jackson State. I protested against the war and for Black Panther leader Bobby Seale in New Haven, when Yale President Kingman Brewster proclaimed the impossibility of a black man receiving a fair trial in America. I became a conscientious objector, and the draft missed me. I moved to Montreal anyway. Watergate came and went, as did, eventually, the war, and finally Nixon himself. All triggered by Johnson's withdrawal from the Presidential campaign.

Today, with America mired in perpetual war for perpetual peace, needing a Black Lives Matter movement to combat an epidemic of killings by the police, and with a president as shifty as Nixon but with none of his wisdom or integrity, I went back and through the miracle of the internet watched Johnson's full speech for the first time in fifty years. He seemed a more sympathetic figure now, trapped in the quagmire of Vietnam after sacrificing his Democratic party in his quest to achieve racial justice. A few years ago, when I wrote a review of the film Selma, I questioned whether it was fair to make Johnson the villain of the piece, especially when so many less ambiguous villains were available, starting with J. Edgar Hoover. Johnson's relationship with King was an uneasy one, but as another movie,All The Way, showed, he had to burn bridges of his own to get his Civil Rights legislation passed. He played a big-stakes political game, knowing what was at risk if he won, probably more than if he lost, and he did what he thought was right anyway.

LBJ may not actually have said 'there goes the South' in 1964 as he signed the Civil Rights Act into law, but that is exactly what happened: by 1968 the drift of the racist, fundamentalist, conservative Dixiecrats to Nixon's Republican party had begun. By 1980, when Ronald Reagan took the White House from Jimmy Carter, the transformation was complete: allied with the far-right oil men, military contractors, and western tycoons, the southerners could squeeze the traditional Yankee moderates within the Republicans: compromise with the hated 'liberals' soon became impossible.

Watching anew, I realised LBJ's speech was primarily about the divisions he saw growing in America. He began by speaking of divisive partisanship. Later he said “I will not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing”. I paid no attention to those words at the time, but five decades later, they sound more prophetic than “there goes the South”. Johnson had been a consummate arm-twister in his time as Senate majority leader, a master of bending those on both sides to achieve some sort of compromise. Today, Mitch McConnell is as ruthless as any Menshevik; the threat of Tea-Party purists backed by Koch and Mercer money being enough to keep all but the bravest or most foolhardy Republicans in partisan line. America enters new, undeclared, open-ended wars, with a bi-partisan monotony of rubber-stamped support behind them. Bernie Sanders' 2016 version of the “Children's Crusade”, like McCarthy's in 1968, merely confirmed the weaknesses of the Democrat's chosen candidate, who nevertheless nearly won.

We know now that Nixon was conspiring with the likes of Henry Kissinger to sabotage the Paris Peace Talks to end the Vietnam War, on which Johnson was staking his withdrawal from partisan politics. We know Johnson knew about it, and thought it treasonous, but was afraid to take action against Nixon for fear he would be accused of doing just what he had sworn he would not do: play party politics with the war. The conflict in Vietnam would persist until 1975, when the ignominious abandonment of Saigon put paid to the whole false notion of 'peace with honour'.

By then, Lyndon Johnson was more than two years dead. It is hard not to conclude the failure of his sacrifice to achieve either peace or justice left him empty. What he would have made of America's electing a black president, then following by electing one who's facing accusations of presidential treason with Russia is beyond speculation. But thinking back to 1968, and watching Johnson's speech, so remarkably un-televisual, so devoid of spin in today's terms, is to see it in a different light. It rings true, with a sense of battered honesty about it. We don't get many politicians acting at all honourably these days. Thus history adds nuance my young self could not, makes LBJ a more sympathetic figure. I still have that autographed programme. I find it means more to me today. It holds up better than my poem.

THE CALIFORNIA PRIMARY: BACK TO THE FUTURE

It's the California primary! The Democratic party's nominee for President seems all but decided, with the votes of party insiders making the crucial difference. The insurgent faction of the party is being told to stand-down, to allow a candidate they see as part of the very problems they are protesting get down to battling a Republican candidate seen by many as a figure of revulsion. Yet the insurgents battle on, hoping that a big win in California might open up the party's convention, and their candidate might win were it contested. Ah, you think, Bernie Sanders' position is hopeless and he ought to quit before Tuesday's vote? But it's not Bernie Sanders I'm talking about, it's Bobby Kennedy. And today, of course, is the anniversary of his assassination in Los Angeles.

The analogy is not perfect, because it was not only Kennedy competing against the party's anointed candidate, he was competing also against fellow insurgent Senator Gene McCarthy. In those days primaries were few in number and not crucially important; even in some states that held them, the primary vote did not even bind the convention delegates who were chosen in the traditional manner, by each state's party 'machine'. Party delegates got to travel to the convention, carry signs, wear red and white and blue clothing, sing and cheer, and do what they were told by their state party chairmen. It was democracy in action.

Hillary Clinton, the party's presumptive choice now, is a good match for Vice-President Hubert H. Humphrey, the eventual Democratic candidate, while Richard Nixon was many things, but not many of them resembled the snake-oil hucksterism of Donald Trump. And it's highly unlikely that the eventual choice of a Democratic candidate this year will involve assassination or riot.

The 1968 Presidential race, like everything else in America then, was chaotic. Protests against the Vietnam war were reaching massive scale; the black inner cities were erupting in a series of riots, and the progress of de-segregation in the South, despite President Lyndon B. Johnson's steering the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act through Congress, was desperately slow. American politics itself was in a period of profound change, which Johnson recognised as he signed the Voting Rights Act into law: 'there goes the South.' he said. The Democratic Party had been maintained by an uneasy alliance of big city Northern machines and labor unions with so-called Dixiecrats, Southern segregationists whose states had, for a century, continued to fight the Civil War and ignored the Republicans, the party of Abraham Lincoln.

Johnson's landslide win over Barry Goldwater in 1964 had been based on his continuation of the legacy of John Kennedy, and the portrayal of Goldwater as a right-wing fanatic whose finger was not to be trusted on the nuclear button. The famous TV ad of the little girl picking flowers before a nuclear explosion ran only once, and didn't mention Goldwater by name, but it didn't have to. But Johnson's refusal to 'lose' the war in Vietnam saw him escalate the conflict and the American presence in it. In February 1968, Johnson watched TV news anchor Walter Cronkite report on Vietnam, highly critical of our involvement. 'If I've lost Cronkite I've lost Middle America,' Johnson told his aides. On March 12, in the New Hampshire primary, McCarthy's army of college students and anti-war activists emerged with 42 per cent of the vote. Johnson 'won' the state with 49 per cent, but the McCarthy faction had also lured 20 of the 24 delegates available. For a sitting President, this was a disaster.

Sensing LBJ's vulnerability, four days later Bobby Kennedy entered the race. Many McCarthy supporters never forgave RFK his opportunism; they pointed to Kennedy's similar behaviour in appropriating a Senate seat in New York, when everyone knew the Kennedys came from Massachusetts. Years later, Hilary Clinton faced similar accusations when she traded in her Chicago Cubs baseball cap for a New York Yankees one while winning a Senate seat in her newly-adopted state.

On 31 March in a speech suspending American bombing in Vietnam, LBJ shocked the country by announcing 'I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party to run for President.' I was in my last year of high school; just turned 17. I leaped from my seat in excitement: it was as if we had driven Johnson from office.

Vice President Hubert H Humphrey now became the presumptive nominee, with the backing of party bosses. Known as 'the Happy Warrior,' Humphrey, a textbook 'liberal' and party loyalist, was trapped in his support of the Vietnam war. He did not contest any primaries: in some states 'favourite son' candidates stood on behalf of delegations controlled by the party machines. And the battle between the insurgents became fierce. Kennedy's civil rights record helped him with minority voters, especially after the assassination of Martin Luther King on 4 April; he had the charisma and the Kennedy name to give black voters hope. Plus McCarthy was no tireless Bernie Sanders; lacking the drive to take his campaign on the road, his appeal was more to reason. Even so, going into the California vote McCarthy had won four primaries (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Oregon) while Kennedy had taken two (Indiana and Nebraska), though McCarthy would take New Jersey and Kennedy South Dakota on the same day as California. Only in Oregon, Indiana and Nebraska had the two gone head to head.

But California on 5 June was the big prize and when the vote was counted Kennedy won with 46%, to McCarthy's 42. Despite having taken far fewer popular votes around the country, he now led McCarthy in committed delegates (393-258) though Humphrey and his surrogates still had a comfortable lead. Then in the early hours of 6 June, after a victory speech and a cry of 'on to Illinois' Kennedy was shot dead at the Ambassador hotel.

McCarthy would win Illinois, but the Democrats were now split into four pieces, and the insurgents' delegates won in primaries would never have been enough to out-vote Humphrey's, even had they been united. Perhaps Kennedy, riding a wave of primary support, might have convinced the convention that he had a better chance of defeating Nixon. But by the time the convention opened in Chicago on 26 August, Kennedy's support was split, only some of it sticking after Senator George McGovern picked up his standard. The Dixiecrats, who could back LBJ but were more suspicious of HHH, were facing challenges on the floor to their own delegations, many of which were still segregated. Meanwhile, outside the convention, the Youth International Party (Yippies) and Mobilization Against The War were organising a festival which soon turned into a riot, triggered when Chicago police beat a man who'd lowered the American flag in Grant Park.

The ensuing scenes of violence shocked America, as Chicago police seemed to run amok, even assaulting press on the convention floor. When Abraham Ribicoff, Senator from my state, Connecticut, rose to nominate McGovern, he said that with a man like him as president 'we wouldn't need Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago'. The television cameras caught Chicago mayor Richard Daley, hand cupped like a megaphone around his mouth, shouting at Ribicoff, and lip readers claimed he yelled 'sit down you Jew bastard'. In the end, Humphrey won the nomination by a wide margin, and went on to lose the election to Nixon, by a narrow margin in the popular vote but a wide one in the electoral college. This was thanks to Alabama governor George Wallace, running as an Independent, winning five states in the South away from Humphrey. Nixon's 'southern strategy' had been born, and soon the so-called 'solid south' would switch from being solidly Democrat to solidly Republican. Humphrey's only chance would have been a success in the Paris peace talks being held with the Vietnamese. But in what became known as the first 'October surprise,' Nixon's team, with help from Henry Kissinger, sabotaged the negotiations, promising the South Vietnamese they would get a better deal once Nixon was President. The Vietnamese were surprised when it turned out they were lying.

I still recall some former McCarthy supporters refusing to support Humphrey, arguing a Nixon win would bring the country to its senses. Instead, four years later, McGovern won the nomination as a result of a more democratic primary-driven process which he had been chosen by the party to develop. Even so, despite the deepening of the Vietnam quagmire, and the Watergate burglary, Nixon beat McGovern in a landslide even bigger than Johnson's over Goldwater just 8 years earlier. The country had turned full circle, but many would say the worst was yet to come.

Almost 50 years later, the process has been democratized even further, to the point where independent voters who don't identify as Democrats have a say in the choice of candidate. This may be unfair to the party faithful, or it may be a better gauge of how a candidate will fare in November with the independent voters who decide national elections. This is why the party bosses still hold the so-called 'super delegates' in the hole, to ensure an insurgent like a McGovern, whom they believe will lose, or worse, believe might win without their support, cannot get the nomination. The system, deeply entrenched, is designed to work, and after California Hillary Clinton seems likely to be declared the nominee. A Sanders shock in California, however, might persuade some super-delegates to question Hillary's electability, and consider whether the Democratic convention should actually be an open affair.

There has not been a seriously contested party convention since the Republicans in 1976, when Ronald Reagan narrowly lost a challenge to incumbent (but unelected) President Gerald Ford. Ford would go on to lose the election to Jimmy Carter, but much as I searched for parallels between them and Clinton/Sanders, I defy anyone else to find them either.