17

THE SIEGE OF CHICAGO

In fall 1967, Johnson chose to hold the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley prevailed with an iron hand. The city’s major lakefront convention center had burned down, however, compelling the Democrats to meet at Chicago’s International Amphitheater, five miles west of downtown, while nearly all attendees would be housed at the Conrad Hilton Hotel on Michigan Avenue and nearby hotels. Telephone and transportation workers were on strike that summer, and numerous antiwar groups, such as the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam and Students for a Democratic Society, along with social protest movements such as the Youth International Party (“Yippies”) and “Hippies,” were threatening to send thousands of protesters to the convention.1

Humphrey, concerned about possible violence, proposed to Johnson that he move the meeting to the more insular Miami Beach, where the Republicans were to meet first in early August, a request strongly seconded by the media, which faced strike-related logistical problems and expensive new start-up costs in Chicago. Johnson insisted that Daley would be insulted, and Humphrey’s call in early August to the mayor to provide facilities for the protesters went unanswered. Daley built up a virtual army of 12,000 Chicago police on twelve-hour shifts, 6,000 National Guardsmen, 1,000 FBI and Secret Service agents, and 6,000 heavily armed US Army troops, although no more than 10,000 protesters—despite estimates running to 50,000—showed up, with the majority peacefully inclined. The Daley administration allowed a permit for only one demonstration and forbade sleeping in the city’s parks, although protesters could have been accommodated in large Lincoln Park, four miles from the convention center, which was surrounded by barbed wire fencing and looked like a prison or nuclear installation.²

Violence was so likely that Senator McCarthy urged his young followers to stay away, and many did. But confrontations began on Sunday, August 25—the day before the convention opened—when fifty baton-swinging police routed from Lincoln Park some one thousand demonstrators shouting, “Peace Now,” “Dump the Hump,” and “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” News reporters were driven off, and far worse scenes followed during the next two days.

Daley and John Criswell, Johnson’s chosen DNC treasurer and convention manager, installed extremely tight security inside the amphitheater, including electronic identification cards for entry and exit, and strict guards almost everywhere. Administration-friendly delegations were seated nearest the podium, and McCarthy or McGovern supporters were located in the building’s outer reaches. The mayor was determined to keep television cameras focused on the podium and away from protests on the floor.3

Before flying to Chicago on August 25, Humphrey appeared on Face the Nation. He insisted that he was his own man and that Johnson’s Vietnam policies were “basically sound,” supportive words that left a little “wiggle room” to raise the hopes of stronger peace advocates. But the convention proved disastrous for everyone: Humphrey was undermined by Daley, who kept rigid control of the meeting, and by Johnson, who dominated the platform committee regarding the Vietnam plank. Further, Humphrey’s excessive insecurity about his pending nomination led him to fail to take charge of events or grasp reasons for the protesters’ anger.⁴

The vice president was upset on arrival at the Chicago airport that neither the mayor nor a crowd greeted him; there was only a bagpipe band, whereas, he noted angrily, some ten thousand supporters had turned out for McCarthy. Humphrey hurried to meet with the Illinois delegation, but Daley withheld his expected endorsement. The vice president and many others speculated that this politically powerful Democrat intended to seek another candidate who he thought stood a better chance to win—Senator Ted Kennedy, despite his dovishness on the war. Kennedy had reentered politics on August 21 with a speech deploring the deep divisions in American society and calling for an unconditional bombing halt and mutual withdrawal of US and North Vietnamese troops.⁵

The morning after the speech, Humphrey quietly went to Kennedy’s home in McLean, Virginia, to ask him to be his running mate, insistent that Democratic polling showed that together they would readily win but that otherwise the race against Richard Nixon would be very close. By choosing Kennedy, who would bring his family name and charisma and the nation’s peace advocates, Humphrey would signal a break from Johnson, who would be angry but unable to halt a move that would appeal both to old-line Democrats like Daley and peace progressives.

Kennedy declined; despite having gotten on well with Humphrey in the Senate, he was responsible for his deceased brothers’ families and reluctant to join with a man his brother Robert had sought to defeat because of his Vietnam War position. Still, Humphrey found Ted Kennedy “very warm” and committed to working for his election, and was also convinced that he not only did not want the second slot on the ticket but “absolutely will not run for President.”6

Nonetheless, Daley called Kennedy on August 24, two days before the convention, to ask him to become a candidate for presidential nomination or agree to accept a draft. He declined both options but said that his brother-in-law Stephen Smith would be coming to Chicago as a New York delegate and would report on events. The next day Daley and Jesse Unruh, Speaker of the California State Assembly and fervent Robert Kennedy backer, met and tried to lure Kennedy into the presidential race. But he again cited family responsibilities, which he repeated when historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called to query him about running, and he remained at his family compound in Hyannis Port on Cape Cod.

Humphrey still feared a draft Kennedy movement despite having enough delegate support to gain the 1,312 votes needed for the nomination even without Illinois’s 118 votes, and he had assurance from Larry O’Brien, who had spoken to the senator, that Kennedy would not run. Humphrey grew worried when on the first day of the convention former Ohio governor Mike DiSalle said he was setting up a Kennedy for President office, and then the cochairmen of the Michigan delegation, Senator Philip Hart and state Democratic chairman Sander Levin, announced for him.⁷

Humphrey was also distressed on checking into his suite at the Conrad Hilton Hotel that Secret Service agents had to whisk him past a less than friendly crowd carrying McCarthy signs. Further, Johnson’s control over convention minutiae compelled the vice president to send his son-in-law, Bruce Solomonson, to one of the president’s functionaries’ rooms daily to secure extra tickets for his family and friends to enter the amphitheater. On hearing of McCarthy’s displeasure at the lack of space for his staff, Humphrey exclaimed, “What the hell’s he complaining for? I’m the Vice President of the United States and I’m being treated like a Yugoslavian peasant.”⁸

Humphrey began “waffling all over the place,” Berman noted, when Texas governor John Connally, who spoke for southern governors, said his peers in the region opposed the rules committee’s intention—spurred by the more liberal Democrats—to jettison the unit rule allowing governor-controlled majorities to cast all of their delegations’ votes for one candidate. The vice president, through his chief of staff, Bill Connell, had let Connally know he favored waiting until 1972 to abolish the unit rule. But as his preconvention delegate vote increased, Humphrey wrote the rules committee that he backed changing the rule for the current meeting, causing Connally to threaten to start a “draft Johnson” movement, soon disavowed by the president.

Fearing loss of support among the South’s 527 delegates, Humphrey again changed course with a letter to the rules committee proposing not to drop the unit rule until 1972. But on the second night of the convention the assemblage voted to end the unit rule at once, opening the delegate selection procedure to much greater—and more diverse—public participation.9

Humphrey sought to make amends with southerners in credentials fights. His supporters helped seat “as is” Connally’s delegation, defeating a challenge from a delegation led by his arch-opponent, liberal senator Ralph Yarborough, and consisting of many African Americans and Mexican Americans. The vice president also helped to gain a limited “compromise” over the Georgia delegation, with half the seats awarded to segregationist governor Lester Maddox’s choices and half to a group led by the young civil rights leader and state representative Julian Bond. North Carolina and Alabama delegations withstood their challenges, with only the old-line, lily-white Mississippi delegation pushed aside. Still, the changes in the unit rule and make-up of delegations proved monumental. McCarthy and his minions got most of the credit; Humphrey’s mixed responses diminished liberals’ respect for him.¹⁰

The vice president continued to worry about a Kennedy draft, even though no one had nominated him and the large southern bloc was opposed. McCarthy came to the convention convinced he could not get the nomination but on the first day rejected the idea of his campaign manager, Richard Goodwin, a former adviser to Robert Kennedy, to woo southerners by offering the vice presidential slot to Connally. The next morning McCarthy asked Goodwin about “this Teddy thing,” but Goodwin’s four calls to Smith got no clear response, although later that afternoon Smith met briefly with McCarthy, who offered to withdraw in favor of Kennedy (gratuitously adding that he could not have done that for Robert Kennedy). Smith said he thought McCarthy’s action would make the nomination fight “a real ballgame,” but he needed to check with Ted Kennedy.¹¹

The matter ended there. That afternoon Daley, upset that Kennedy would not declare, pulled back, and offered his support to Humphrey. With a nudge from the White House, every southern leader but one endorsed the vice president that evening. Kennedy, who had a “gut feeling that this is not the year”—informed his closest advisers that he would not run, and a draft was impossible without his prior commitment. He delayed a public announcement and a call to Humphrey, perhaps hoping to influence the Democrats to vote for the minority “peace” plank on Vietnam.12

This was the most difficult, and detrimental, issue for Humphrey. Although now certain of the nomination, he hoped to avert a divisive platform battle. McCarthy, McGovern, and others were calling for an unconditional bombing halt intended to have Hanoi agree to negotiations. The vice president’s advisers and supporters were urging him to separate from Johnson by proposing a bombing halt and perhaps resigning his office to run as a candidate separate from the administration. This latter strategy risked charges of Humphrey abandoning a sinking ship; further, he was too emotionally and politically tied to the president to do this and fearful he would “come down hard” on him if he broke ranks. After North Vietnam’s August 17 offensive and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia three days later, Johnson had halted further Vietnam peace efforts, excluded Humphrey from pictures with him and NSC officials, and challenged him in cabinet meetings to take a hard line on Vietnam. As Berman noted, Johnson was doing “nothing but harming the VP all the way.”¹³

The president also controlled key convention proceedings. He named a political ally, House majority leader Carl Albert of Oklahoma, as permanent chairman, and rejected Humphrey’s choice of Maine senator Edmund Muskie to chair the platform committee. Instead the president chose his staunch advocate Louisiana congressman Hale Boggs. The platform committee began hearings on August 19. Humphrey sent New York lawyer David Ginsburg and staffer William Welsh to work with the committee and its drafting group, hoping to strike a balance between Johnson hard-liners and dovish spokesmen. The doves comprised about one-third of the committee, thus ensuring a minority report, and included Goodwin; Kenneth O’Donnell, an aide to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson who managed Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign and then Humphrey’s before O’Brien took over; Ted Sorensen, counsel and speechwriter for President Kennedy; and Ohio congressman John Gilligan, a Humphrey admirer who sought a plank that would satisfy the administration and the Kennedy-McCarthy-McGovern forces and bolster the vice president’s presidential campaign in the way his 1948 victorious minority civil rights plank had helped President Truman.¹⁴

This “peace” faction’s plank included four points: an unconditional end to bombing of North Vietnam while continuing to aid US forces in the South; a phased mutual withdrawal of US and North Vietnamese forces from South Vietnam; encouragement of the Saigon government to negotiate a “broadly representative” government with the NLF; and reduced US military action leading to early, significant withdrawals of US troops. McCarthy approved the plank, and Ginsburg, preparing a Humphrey draft, said that there was “not ten cents worth of difference between this and the vice president’s policy.” He cleared the plank with the southern governors, who said they “could live with it.” The Vietnam conflict was not cited as a civil war, nor was “coalition government” mentioned; the only sticking point might have been setting terms for an “unconditional” bombing halt.15

Ginsburg called Humphrey in Washington, who, as per Johnson’s instruction, read the statement to Secretary of State Dean Rusk and National Security Adviser Walt Rostow. They proposed minor edits and said that they could “live with this.” Humphrey also got backing from AFL-CIO president George Meany, a Johnson supporter. The vice president flew to his Waverly home for a brief stay before going to Chicago, thinking he had a consensus position on a Vietnam platform plank in hand.¹⁶

Johnson soon destroyed the accord. Two days earlier he had summoned to Washington the convention and platform committee chairs, Albert and Boggs, and platform committee member West Virginia senator Jennings Randolph. The meeting was ostensibly called to brief them on the Czech crisis, but Johnson instead read them a riot act, buttressed by cables from the US commander in Vietnam, General Creighton Abrams Jr., asserting that a bombing halt would vastly increase North Vietnam’s military capabilities in the DMZ and facilitate the NLF’s third major offensive of the year. Boggs and his compatriots returned to Chicago determined to resist the peace plank.¹⁷

Humphrey heard “audible rumblings from the ranch in Texas” on his arrival in Chicago. Johnson’s representative, White House aide Charles Murphy, had secured a copy of the peace plank from the vice president’s aides, and that night he told Boggs, Ginsburg, and Welsh that the president held the peace plank’s proposed bombing halt unacceptable despite its proviso that its timing would “take into account the security of our troops and the likelihood of a response from Hanoi.”

Early on the morning of August 26, Murphy called Johnson to express Boggs’s concern that he would have to go to his colleagues with a disagreement between the vice president and president. Johnson was unmoved. He would not agree to a bombing halt: “I had rather vote for Nixon than to kill my boys” and would not allow “a bunch of draft dodgers and pacifists who had never seen a uniform” determine when the United States would stop bombing. Instead, he would allow a bombing halt only “when the action would not endanger the lives of our troops in the field,” and only the president and National Security Council would determine the crucial “when.” The president did not intend, as did the framers of the peace plank, a bombing halt to be a first step to induce Hanoi to negotiate seriously, and while the peace plank proposed to start a mutual troop withdrawal, Johnson insisted that there would be no withdrawal until hostilities were ended, or nearly so.18

Boggs immediately told the platform committee drafting group that Johnson’s Vietnam plank was not negotiable, while Ginsburg and Welsh talked with O’Brien about their drafting problems. Coming on their discussion, an agitated Humphrey said, “I don’t want to hear any more about it—they’re just haggling over words.” But he soon learned that far more was at stake when Marvin Watson, a close Johnson aide and now postmaster general, came from Washington to tell him the president refused to accept the peace plank. Taken aback, Humphrey called Johnson in Texas, who said he did not want it known that this was being cleared with him and insisted that the peace plank undercut government policy and him. When Humphrey replied that he had cleared the plank with Rusk and Rostow, Johnson said it had not been cleared with him.¹⁹

Humphrey and his advisers still inclined to stick with the peace plank until Boggs made it clear that he was as “immovable” on the issue as the president. The vice president backed down completely, although he later wrote, “I should have stood my ground.” He defended himself by saying, “The Vice President has very few guns in a battle with presidential artillery. He can be shot down before he takes off,” and that to fight Johnson would have been “suicidal.” But more revealing, as Humphrey confided to Berman at the time, he feared that fighting Johnson over the Vietnam plank would be “suicidal,” and he “would cut me up and out of the nomination.” Consequently, as columnist Tom Wicker wrote, this meant that if the vice president went into the campaign with the president’s Vietnam plank rather than his own, he would be viewed as presenting “his master’s voice.”²⁰

Humphrey undoubtedly would have faced trouble from the president had he rejected his plank, although the vice president believed that Johnson had not run himself because “he could not make it.” But the president, working through White House aide Watson, Criswell, and Connally, had been secretly planning to have Daley invite him to deliver an address to the convention that he hoped would spur a presidential draft. Yet the next day, August 27—with a plane at the ready in Texas—his aides and Daley “roundly” told him not to come, even for the gala birthday party the mayor had planned for him at Soldier Field stadium. Humphrey was greatly relieved; he now knew the presidential nomination was likely his since neither Johnson nor the big southern bloc would throw support to Kennedy, McCarthy, or McGovern, all of whom favored the peace plank.²¹

In dealing with Johnson, the vice president underestimated his own strength and high regard among longtime Democrats despite having become the president’s captive spokesman for the war. Thus Humphrey, who had defied a sitting president, party officials, and the South in daring to put his minority plank before a national convention in 1948, meekly yielded to Johnson. As he confessed at the time, “I had become the oldest son and could not make the break.”22

On Monday evening, August 26, the platform committee supported the president’s Vietnam plank by 65–35, opening the way to the bitter convention floor fight Humphrey dreaded. As McCarthy said, “Now the lines are clearly drawn between those who want more of the same and those who think it is necessary to change our course in Vietnam.” Most important, the vice president looked “weak and vacillating,” Orville Freeman noted, and the nomination he had seemingly secured “might not be worth taking.” Berman agreed; now Humphrey’s “Democratic support melted away,” he later wrote, with few of his faithful to return before Election Day.²³

Humphrey further alienated liberal and antiwar supporters the next morning while debating McCarthy and McGovern before the big California delegation. “I did not come to repudiate the president,” he said. No one on the American side of the war had sought to escalate it, he stated, and “the roadblock to peace is not in Washington, D.C. It is in Hanoi.” He drew shouts and boos, whereas McGovern got a standing ovation when he repudiated Humphrey’s defense of Johnson’s policies and said that the Democrats had pledged “no wider war” four years earlier. McCarthy, strangely diffident, said little, insisting the delegation already knew his views as expressed in their primary. He said he could not support a Democratic candidate “whose views did not come close” to his own but told reporters he would probably give Humphrey support in “a couple of weeks.”²⁴

Boggs delayed introducing the Democrats’ platform until 12:37 a.m. on August 28. Proponents of the minority Vietnam plank—calling for an unconditional bombing halt—suspected that the administration had waited until the television viewing audience was small, and they fought to gain adjournment. But when the delegates reassembled around noontime, they found “fact sheets” on their seats warning that the minority plank was an attack on the president and on “rational” US policy in Southeast Asia.

An unprecedented three-hour debate followed, with spokesmen for the majority, or so-called Humphrey-Johnson plank, such as Muskie, insisting that the two planks differed only over means, not ends, while Boggs repeated Johnson’s dire warnings about a bombing halt. Minority spokesmen such as Oregon senator Wayne Morse viewed the war as ill-conceived and destructive of the fabric of American society. The late afternoon 1,567¾–1,041¼ vote in favor of the Humphrey-Johnson plank was never in doubt, however. The New York and California delegations were joined by others that promptly donned black armbands and sang “We Shall Overcome.”²⁵

During Humphrey’s breakfast with Daley on that Wednesday morning, Kennedy called to inform the vice president he would absolutely not be a presidential candidate. Humphrey asked Kennedy again to be his running mate—“together we can win this, easily,” he said. But the senator again cited “family reasons” as making this impossible, and when Humphrey asked, “Is the door locked and the key thrown away,” Kennedy said, “Yes.” But he would come out strongly for Humphrey and work for him “with everything I have.” Not even word that Daley wanted Kennedy to join the ticket moved him. Humphrey’s best chance, short of his own strong action, to unify the party and to win the election had passed.26

The vice president spent the rest of the day reviewing San Francisco mayor Joseph Alioto’s speech nominating him for president, weighing vice-presidential choices, and having lunch with African American athletes Jackie Robinson and Elgin Baylor, to whom he insisted that he would not be silent, no matter the price, about his belief that Nixon’s emphasis on “law and order” was “subdued racism.” He complained to Time-Life interviewers that the press had unfairly charged him with hardening his line on Vietnam by insisting that Hanoi show “restraint” before a bombing halt; he was saying only that “you shouldn’t sell anybody out.”²⁷

The debate about the Vietnam plank spurred protest that turned violent. The National Mobilization, using its only demonstration permit, gathered a large crowd in Grant Park, across Michigan Avenue from the Hilton. When a demonstrator was arrested for lowering an American flag from its stand, forty or more police pushed rapidly in wedge formation through the crowd, swinging clubs and hurling tear gas canisters, with the fumes wafting through air conditioning ducts of nearby hotels, including into Humphrey’s Suite 2225A in the Hilton. Angry and with his eyes irritated, he complained about television coverage of “the kooks and rioters” and then went to take a shower, order dinner, and prepare for the night’s proceedings.²⁸

Protesters gathered again in the early evening in Grant Park, intent to march to the convention site with chants ranging from “Peace Now” to “Fuck LBJ” to “The Whole World Is Watching” coming through squawk boxes. But squads of police charged them—and National Guard troops cut off escape routes—swinging their clubs, using an overturned barricade as a battering ram, and hurling tear gas grenades. The brutal “battle of Michigan Avenue” lasted only about fifteen minutes, with dozens of protesters and bystanders badly beaten—and considerable blood spilled (including that of police)—while hotel plate-glass windows were smashed and hundreds arrested.

The police, or “Pigs,” as protesters yelled as they threw bricks, bottles, and other objects at them, were provoked. But their behavior constituted a “police riot”—as an investigative committee later judged—that the “whole world” would watch when filmed versions of the events were run on national television that evening. Humphrey, distressed that the day of his nomination was being disrupted, called in reporters to say that the protesters did not represent Chicago but had “been brought in from all over the country,” although half came from the city and the convention was a national one.29

Amid the street chaos and convention floor battles between zealous security forces, delegates, and news reporters, the nominations began. Governor Harold Hughes of Iowa spoke for McCarthy as the people’s candidate, and Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff, nominating McGovern, said that if McGovern was president there would be none of the Chicago police’s “Gestapo tactics,” causing Daley—with ninety million shocked Americans watching—to mouth a four-letter expletive and reference to Ribicoff’s Judaism, to which the senator retorted, “How hard it is to accept the truth. How hard it is.”³⁰

Humphrey found it equally hard to accept the way his nomination appeared on national television. Alioto formally nominated him as an “extraordinary man” who had become practitioner of the “art of the impossible” in achieving passage of the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and 1964 Civil Rights Act. But as Cleveland mayor Carl Stokes, the first African American to lead a major city and proof of Humphrey’s continuing civil rights commitment, rose to second his nomination, NBC News cut away from the speech to broadcast footage of the police action in Grant Park. Humphrey and his staff were furious. “I’m going to be President someday,” he blurted out, “and I’m going to appoint the FCC and we’re going to look into all of this.”³¹

There was little joy as Humphrey watched the roll call, although he grinned when Minnesota gave him 38½ votes to McCarthy’s 13½. As his tally mounted, however, he went into another room, where Berman found him, alone and crying, although why remains uncertain. He returned in time to see Pennsylvania (where McCarthy had won 70 percent of the primary votes) give him enough votes to put him over the 1,312 required for victory. His final tally reached 1,760¼, with McCarthy finishing at 601, and McGovern at 146.

As television cameras scanned the amphitheater to focus on Muriel Humphrey, her husband, who was watching on TV in his room, said, “See how pretty she looks,” and kissed her image on the screen, a moment photographers captured. But the picture played poorly in the press the next day as another unfortunate “joy of politics” moment.

Humphrey took congratulatory calls from Johnson (“Bless your heart, thank you,” the vice president said) and Nixon. The traditional motion to make the nomination unanimous was not voted, however, although the convention chair, Albert, declared it passed.³²

Humphrey’s nomination was not a stolen one, as McCarthy later claimed, although the senator had won nearly 40 percent of the primary votes, Robert Kennedy had 31 percent, and Humphrey got just 2 percent. Primaries selected only 900 of the 2,600 convention delegates, however, and 76 percent of the nonprimary delegates favored Humphrey, along with most party officials. But Humphrey, who had not broken from Johnson’s grip, may not have been his party’s strongest candidate. As Schlesinger had warned, the most liberal and activist core of the Democratic Party needed for election would be unforgiving about the overriding issue of the Vietnam War.33

Humphrey now had to choose a running mate. His clear first choice, Ted Kennedy, had declined. Strained Humphrey-McCarthy relations precluded their running together; the senator had told the vice president shortly before the convention that he would not accept the second slot. Humphrey had allowed feelers to go out earlier to New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who chose to remain a Republican, and McGovern, a spokesman for the minority Vietnam plank, who had no interest in the position.

The southern governors pressed the vice president to choose one of their own, but he did not want anyone from that region, including progressive governor Terry Sanford of North Carolina. Humphrey also passed over New Jersey governor Richard Hughes, a liberal and a friend, as not adding to the ticket, and objections from the extended Kennedy family ruled out Sargent Shriver, currently ambassador to France and a former head of the Peace Corps and Office of Economic Opportunity.³⁴

The choice narrowed to Humphrey’s campaign cochair, Senator Harris—young, liberal, civil rights–oriented, and dovish—who greatly wanted the role, and Muskie, a former two-term governor and twice-elected senator from usually Republican Maine. His state had only four electoral votes, but the son of Polish Catholic immigrants was seen as playing well with the Democrats’ constituency in the larger northern states. He had a liberal record and had been a Senate friend of McCarthy’s, though he stood with Humphrey on the Vietnam plank. The vice president judged Muskie to be the most reliable person to direct domestic policy and to move, in an emergency, from the vice presidency to the White House. Further, his calm demeanor and height led to his being perceived as “Lincolnesque,” and his reticence contrasted with Humphrey’s garrulousness. The vice president felt more comfortable with Muskie than with any other prospective candidate.³⁵

Humphrey nearly backed away from his choice when Muskie, after being told of his selection, revealed that his unwed daughter was pregnant. Distraught at this eleventh-hour bad news, the vice president delayed his announcement for over four hours while he consulted advisers, who were divided, but at last opted to stick with him and to ask the aspiring Harris to nominate him, which—ever the good soldier—he did.36

Humphrey had made a principled choice that brought no enthusiasm. Harris would have had greater appeal to younger people, minorities, and antiwar proponents; the liberal Hughes might have helped to avert a narrow loss of New Jersey to Nixon; and Sanford might have helped in the South’s Border States. Notably, Humphrey had failed to seek someone who would appeal to crucial disaffected constituencies: antiwar liberals, young people, and African Americans. Perhaps it was symbolic that just as Humphrey was introducing Muskie to the press on August 29, McCarthy was walking across Michigan Avenue, past lines of armed National Guardsmen, into Grant Park to address the protesters as the “government of the people in exile.”³⁷

Humphrey’s acceptance address also posed a major dilemma. Nearly everyone in his camp thought that he needed a “shocker” speech to rouse the country; otherwise, O’Brien said, “he may win the nomination with the president, but lose the election because of it.” The vice president’s closest advisers, except for chief of staff Bill Connell, had been urging him to separate from Johnson by declaring his own plank on Vietnam. Even the president’s former aide Jack Valenti told Berman that Johnson’s “hard line” on Vietnam with Humphrey was “ridiculous,” and no one could hold a candidate after his nomination: “any nominee would go the other way.”³⁸

A group of Humphrey’s closest longtime friends and advisers had devised a plan, approved by O’Brien, to have him “go the other way” from Johnson after being nominated by flying to Hyannis Port to persuade Teddy Kennedy to run with him and then to give his sealed acceptance speech to reporters with the proviso that it not be opened until he delivered it. He would fly to Washington to give a copy of the speech to Johnson, but too late for him to do anything about its distributed content. Humphrey would deliver his address, pay tribute to Johnson for standing aside on March 31 in order to seek peace, and announce that he was resigning as vice president so that his words on Vietnam and other issues would be taken as his own and not those of the administration. Thus he would separate himself from Johnson and be free to lay out his own position on Vietnam.

This unprecedented action was highly risky—especially without Kennedy as a unifier on the ticket—and subject to criticism as a cynical move to abandon a sinking ship. When O’Brien presented the proposal to Humphrey, he viewed it as a “gimmick” and, perhaps most important, feared that “it would enrage the President.”39

Humphrey held to a standard script but viewed as disappointing the acceptance speech his writers and friends had produced, and worked alone to the last minute to craft a revised address. He feared that “violence, disorder, and repudiation” might mark the day he had dreamed about, and he sought to offer inspiration and reconciliation through recalling the prayer of Francis of Assisi that proposed to sow love in place of hatred, hope over despair, and light rather than darkness. His staff excised this reference with each redraft, but the vice president discovered the omission en route to the amphitheater and wrote it back in.⁴⁰

Standing before the delegates, the nominee feared rejection until he received the first of several ovations during his speech, which was good, but far from his usual stem-winder. He began by disapproving of violence, “whatever the source,” and quickly summoned Francis’s prayer while calling on Americans to reaffirm their love of country and to continue their “revolution” marked by the traditions of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy—each name drew cheers—and Lyndon Johnson, whose mention produced as many loud boos as cheers. Still, Humphrey praised him for having accomplished more of the nation’s unfinished business than any modern predecessor, and “I say thank you, thank you, Mr. President,” drawing more boos.

Humphrey said that the party’s hard and “sometimes bitter” debate over issues had been decided by “majority rule,” with minority rights preserved. Three issues most needing to be addressed remained: the need for peace in Vietnam and in American cities and Democratic unity. Vietnam was foremost, but he offered only the pledge that “the policies of tomorrow need not be limited by the policies of yesterday.” He decried “mob violence and police brutality” and attacks on the courts as unacceptable and said that all Americans were entitled to a job, a decent home and neighborhood, and a good education. He called on his “two good friends” McCarthy and McGovern, who had given “new hope to a new generation,” to join with him in effecting Martin Luther King’s “dream” and Robert Kennedy’s “vision.” McGovern came to the platform to stand with Humphrey, but McCarthy did not.⁴¹

The presidential nominee and his entourage attended a celebratory party, and he returned to his suite at 2:00 a.m. for a good night’s sleep. But the “nightmare” or “catastrophe” of Chicago was recurring. Around 5:00 a.m. Friday, a swarm of Chicago police and some National Guardsmen, without warrant or writ but having been pelted by some hard objects thrown from the McCarthy campaign’s operational base on the fifteenth floor of the Hilton, burst in, brutally assaulted the young staff workers, and began to arrest them. The attack slowed to a halt only after Goodwin happened to stop by, intending to bid farewell to the senator’s campaigners. He had them sit quietly on the floor, ordered calls made to summon McCarthy and Humphrey, and warned the attackers that print and television reporters were coming.

McCarthy came quickly, called a halt to the police action, and, on advice of his Secret Service detail, delayed leaving the city in order to protect his departing staffers. But the “siege of Chicago,” as novelist Norman Mailer termed it, would haunt Humphrey throughout the campaign. More than 700 civilians were injured, along with 83 police, and 653 people were jailed, many for little or no reason. When McCarthy finally left the city aboard a chartered aircraft, the pilot announced over the intercom, “We are leaving Prague.”42

Norman Sherman, Humphrey’s press secretary, had refused to wake him when told of the police attack, although how he would have reacted is uncertain, given his view of protesters as “storm troopers” whose “new politics” consisted of “breaking up meetings.” When CBS television reporter Roger Mudd interviewed Humphrey the next day, he said he was “sick at heart” over the conflict between the police and young people, “but I think we ought to quit pretending that Mayor Daley did anything wrong. He didn’t.” The demonstrations “were planned, premeditated by certain people that feel all they have to do is riot and they’ll get their way,” he said. “They don’t want to work through the peaceful process.” The profanity they uttered “was an insult to every woman, every mother, every daughter, indeed, every human being,” he added. “You’d put anybody in jail for that kind of language. . . . Is it any wonder that the police had to take action?” His focus on traditional politics and lifestyle put him “on the far side of the generation gap,” as a sympathetic biographer has written.⁴³

Humphrey left Chicago for his Waverly home feeling as if “we’ve been pushed off the rim of Grand Canyon,” he told Muriel, “and now we have to claw our way up the sides.” Later in the campaign he would remark to news reporters that “we went out of there [Chicago] destroyed.” Only about three hundred people, including numerous protesters carrying signs, greeted him at the Minneapolis airport. Shortly, after returning to his Waverly home, he told a gathering of a couple of thousand friends and supporters that if Americans needed to protest against anything, it was the tendency of some people “to take to the streets to settle their problems.” A couple of days later, he backtracked slightly on his view of the Chicago protests and proposed a blue-ribbon commission investigation. He conceded that the police had “overreacted” and insisted that neither he nor Daley condoned “beating of those people with clubs.”

Nonetheless, three years later—well after an investigatory committee issued its report on the Chicago “police riot”—Humphrey again assailed as “just not decent people” those who had spit on his wife, “called her every filthy name in the book,” and “threw bags of urine and human excreta” on him. These were people who claimed to believe in peace and brotherly love, he said, “but I don’t consider that peace-making. . . . I think it was a terrible thing.” Notably, Humphrey did not mention the impact of Vietnam War violence on American society.44

Humphrey left the Democratic convention trailing Nixon in polls by sixteen or more points and subject to Johnson’s continued harassment. The vice president admitted to Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, “I don’t even know who Johnson would prefer as the next president, Nixon or me.” Similarly, Defense Secretary Clifford wondered on more than one occasion if in his “heart of hearts Lyndon Johnson really wants Humphrey to win,” and another prominent Democrat felt compelled to say to the press, “Johnson is not running against Humphrey.”⁴⁵

Nixon was a strong candidate who, despite earlier losses to John Kennedy in 1960 and Edmund “Pat” Brown for governor of California in 1962, won the Republican presidential nomination over George Romney, the moderate governor of Michigan; the more liberal New York governor Nelson Rockefeller; and Ronald Reagan, elected governor of California in 1966 and the new darling of extreme conservatives. At the Republican convention during August 5–8 in Miami, Nixon’s ranks held, especially in the South, with a key assist from South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, former Democratic segregationist turned Republican. Nixon gained a close first-ballot victory, and the party closed ranks behind him.⁴⁶

Nixon chose as his running mate the largely unknown governor of Maryland, Spiro Agnew. He had begun his term in 1966 as a relative moderate and a Rockefeller supporter, but after protest movements and riots in black neighborhoods, he became outspoken on “law and order,” blamed “misguided public compassion” for urban conflict, and said that police should shoot fleeing rioters. Nixon chose Agnew to please Thurmond and increasingly conservative southern voters who disliked federal government programs and Supreme Court rulings that promoted school desegregation, voting rights, open housing, and affirmative action. Agnew would also assail war protesters, newsmen, and political opponents, and presumably would also counter George Wallace, candidate of the American Independent Party, who was on the ballot in every state and would seek southern votes and eat into the Democrats’ traditional blue-collar, labor union base in the North.⁴⁷

The Republican platform blamed the “Johnson-Humphrey” administration for “lawlessness” in America and called for “liberating the poor” from welfare programs that allegedly stifled the work ethic. The GOP further charged that the administration’s Vietnam policy “has failed—militarily, politically, diplomatically, and with relation to our own people,” and proposed to settle the war based on self-determination and US interests while moving to civil and military “de-Americanization” of the conflict. In his acceptance speech, Nixon claimed to speak for “the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans, the non-shouters, the non-demonstrators,” said it was time to get tough on crime, and decried the United States being “tied down in a war for four years with no end in sight.”48

During the New Hampshire primary in March, Nixon said he would “end the war and win the peace in the Pacific,” a statement taken to mean that he had a “secret plan” to achieve this. He sought to appear to take the political high road by insisting that he would not say anything that might upset the Paris negotiations and shrewdly played to Johnson’s vanity by assuring him that he would never embarrass him over the conflict during his remaining time as president or afterward.⁴⁹

Secretly, Nixon sought to forestall a settlement, or announcement of an “October surprise” portending one, which he feared would turn the election to Humphrey. During the Republican’s vice presidential years and on a business trip to Taipei in 1967 he had come to know Anna Chennault, the wealthy Chinese-born widow of Lieutenant General Claire Chennault, World War II commander of the “Flying Tigers” that had defended China against Japan. In 1958, she moved to Washington, DC, where she became a prominent hostess and Republican Party contributor, and in 1968 she would cochair with Mamie Eisenhower the “Women for Nixon-Agnew” committee. Chennault was also connected to Asian political leaders, including South Vietnam’s president, Nguyen Van Thieu, and Saigon’s ambassador to the United States, Bui Diem, who transmitted her messages to and from his government.

Nixon arranged for Chennault and Diem to meet in Manhattan on July 12, 1968, with him and his campaign manager, John Mitchell. Then and later, Nixon made clear that he was “committed to winning the war,” that if he was elected president South Vietnam would “get a better deal” from him than from Humphrey, and that Chennault was to be the “sole representative” between him and South Vietnam’s government. William Bundy, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs at this time, later wrote that Nixon’s action “may have been unique. The opposition party’s candidate for president was setting up a private channel to the head of state of a government with whom the incumbent President was conducting critically important and secret negotiations!”⁵⁰

Humphrey decided to forego the Democrats’ usual kickoff of marching on Labor Day with UAW members and other labor people in Detroit’s Cadillac Square because so many union workers were sporting Wallace buttons or hats. Instead, he flew to New York City to take part in a union parade that drew far more marchers than observers and many antiwar protesters carrying “Dump the Hump” or other hostile signs. His Secret Service detail had to slip him into his hotel through a side door.

His bland statement to an educational television station interviewer that he favored a blue-ribbon commission investigation of the violent behavior of the Chicago police was unlikely to win endorsement from Senator McCarthy (who would spend most of September on the French Riviera) or his liberal supporters. By contrast, when Nixon opened his campaign in Chicago, Mayor Daley gave city workers the afternoon off, and his police orchestrated an orderly reception for some 400,000 people.51

Humphrey could not begin campaign planning until he returned home from New York. He persuaded O’Brien to stay on as manager by also naming him DNC chairman, although he regarded his new task as “hopeless” and said he stayed out of “sympathy” for the candidate. Humphrey’s DFL compatriot Freeman was made to feel part of the inner circle by being put in charge of issues, scheduling, and travel, which allowed him to keep his cabinet post and the status he craved.⁵²

O’Brien and his aides hastily drafted a “very basic . . . flying by the seat of your pants” plan, but lack of money was a constant problem despite the efforts of Humphrey’s campaign treasurer, wealthy Minneapolis businessman Bob Short, and agribusinessman Dwayne Andreas. Humphrey’s and O’Brien’s first phone calls to Johnson and Arthur Krim, movie producer mogul and head of the President’s Club, whose coffers the vice president had helped to fill, went unanswered. When Humphrey finally reached Krim, he was told that the lack of aid was due to Johnson’s ire over the naming of O’Brien to head the DNC; the president believed that O’Brien would turn the party over to the Kennedy family. Johnson also objected to Humphrey’s choice of Short as his treasurer rather than the president’s man, Criswell. Angry and frustrated, Humphrey—assuming the call was being recorded—yelled that if he had to raise the money himself he would, “and it will make the goddamnedest story you ever heard. I have the Communists, the Republicans, and now the White House against me. I’ll go it alone.”⁵³

The struggle with the White House had just begun. Humphrey flew back to Washington for a September 4 NSC meeting—the last one Johnson would let him attend—where the vice president, looking for a possible break in the war, asked JCS chairman General Earle Wheeler why he viewed a cease-fire as dangerous. Wheeler replied that it would allow the enemy to organize politically in the area he controlled in South Vietnam and keep it from the Saigon government’s rule. The vice president’s campaign was not going to get help on the military front, and the meeting ended without the talk he sought with Johnson.

Humphrey told White House aides that he would raise his own campaign funds even if he had to drive a car across the country himself. “I am not going to let the chance [to be president] go because the Administration [the president] doesn’t want it.” Humphrey did decline a subtle offer from Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin to have Moscow supply funds, asking only for Russia’s good wishes.54

Johnson did tell Humphrey he would help in any way asked and would also release the cabinet to do so. The vice president doubted this. In fact, Krim’s offer to help with funds was as a consultant only, and he soon began to dismantle the President’s Club, with none of the $600,000 in its accounts going to the vice president’s campaign. Nor would Johnson ask his wealthy Texas friends to contribute. Thus Short looked to have twenty friends pledge $100,000 each to start things, while he put up $2 million of his own money, and O’Brien borrowed another $3 million for national advertising. Still, the Republicans would outspend the Democrats by about $20 million to $10 million.⁵⁵

Humphrey and Johnson divided over more than money. The vice president hoped to make his candidacy a “referendum on human rights,” as he told a B’nai B’rith gathering in Washington on September 8, and he intended to assail Nixon and Wallace for exploiting the “fears and hates” that social justice issues brought to the fore. Humphrey’s remarks were well received, and the next morning he began a cross-country dash. At the first stop, at John F. Kennedy Plaza in Philadelphia, the crowd was thin, with “Dump the Hump” hecklers all around and repeated questions about Vietnam. During a meeting with students, Humphrey responded to a query that “negotiations or no negotiations,” he thought “we could start to remove some American forces early in 1969 or late 1968.” In Denver that day he said that the minority plank—with its proposed bombing halt—was so “mildly different” from the majority one on Vietnam that he could have run on the former one. Secretary of State Rusk immediately stated that a bombing halt was unlikely to improve things quickly and even denied having approved the dovish plank Humphrey had run by him before the convention.⁵⁶

Unnerved, Humphrey sought to recoup in Houston the next day by holding up the Houston Post, which headlined the return of a marine regiment to the United States. He repeated his claim that troops might soon be coming home, although, as aides soon pointed out, two paragraphs later the story revealed that the troops had been on temporary assignment and were already being replaced by others. Before he could issue a retraction, Johnson publicly rebuked him.57

The president, greatly on edge over lack of progress at the Paris talks, took out his anxiety on Humphrey. Johnson had told Clifford that he wanted a “new initiative” to move negotiations along and would “pay a premium” for this. He also knew his chief Paris negotiator, Averell Harriman, favored a bombing halt, as did many State and Defense officials, but the president thought that if the United States held firm, a “break” would come from North Vietnam. Johnson worried, however, that “some of Hanoi’s work” was being done by Americans, including the thousand delegates who backed the Democrats’ minority plank in Chicago—but “I am the only President until January 1969,” he insisted, and he did not want anyone telling him what to do.⁵⁸

Thus, immediately after Humphrey’s remarks about troop withdrawals and the minority plank, Johnson raced to make a surprise, unyielding speech at an American Legion Convention in New Orleans on September 10. He insisted that his policy derived from those of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, who had intervened in small conflicts to ward off larger wars. He likened Vietnam critics to 1930s isolationists and said that everyone yearned to bring home US troops, but “no man can predict when that day will come.”⁵⁹

The speech was “not an act of friendship,” an angry vice president told friends, while Johnson aide Harry McPherson said that everyone took it as “a real blast at Humphrey.” But his remark about troop withdrawals “wasn’t really very far off,” Freeman noted, since Rusk, Clifford, and even Johnson had spoken hopefully about bringing US troops home. They gave Humphrey “almost no leeway,” however, and could have gone “much easier” on him. Further, many analysts viewed the majority and minority planks as not far apart “semantically.”

Johnson was intransigent, as Freeman learned after talking with trusted aide Charles Murphy, who “was convinced that the President would rather see Nixon elected than to see any equivocation on this very key issue” of being “tough as can be” with Hanoi. Johnson “really went after Humphrey,” Freeman wrote. “He called him a coward,” accused him of “trying to back off his family [the administration],” and charged him with “ogling McCarthy. . . . On and on he went. A lot of the language was four letter words,” after which the president asked Freeman not to tell Humphrey about this—they needed to “help him.” The agriculture secretary left “with my ears still ringing.” They would have rung more had he heard Johnson tell Clifford twelve days later that he doubted Humphrey had the ability to be president and would have respected his vice president more if he “showed he had some balls.”⁶⁰

Nixon sought to maneuver Johnson by sending the popularly renowned Reverend Billy Graham to see him on September 15 with a message—read to him “point by point”—in which the Republican pledged never to embarrass him after the election, to seek his counsel, to send him on special assignments, to give him “a major share of the credit” when the Vietnam War was settled, and to seek to ensure his deserved place “in History.” Johnson said he would support Humphrey, but if Nixon won, he would cooperate fully with him. The president was “touched and appreciative” of Nixon’s “generous gesture,” Graham reported to him. In fact, when Clifford soon pressed at an NSC meeting for a bombing halt and Rusk, opposed, argued that if it brought no result many Democrats would vote for Nixon, Johnson sharply cut in to say Nixon should not be part of the discussion.61

Hecklers greeted Humphrey everywhere he went as though he were Johnson, who admitted that the press took out their hostility toward him and the Vietnam War on the vice president. On Humphrey’s arrival in Texas in mid-September, Democratic leaders—including the president and Governor Connally—were notably absent, as were California’s more liberal Democratic officials when the vice president spoke in San Francisco and Los Angeles. As the New York Times reported, most of Humphrey’s campaign stops consisted of airport to hotel to television studio, and he spoke only of the “Kennedy-Johnson,” not “Johnson,” administration. The vice president also inclined to shift voters’ attention to the choice between Muskie and Agnew, whom the Republicans had openly designated to take the “low road,” as Freeman noted, and who remarked after Humphrey’s troop withdrawal remarks that the vice president was “squishy soft” on Communism. Nixon made Agnew apologize, but he was branded “the Joe McCarthy of 1968.”⁶²

By mid-September, Humphrey appeared to be “coming apart at the seams,” Freeman wrote, and internal campaign analyses revealed severe defections “from the left, anti-war liberals, and leftists comprised of University Students, intellectuals, and better educated middle class once liberal Democrats.” So, too, were “Negro militants” gone, “but even more serious is the defection from the right. This is white workers both in the North and the South.” They “see a threat from inflation, from taxes, from Civil Rights, to wit, open housing and school desegregation and their physical safety,” Freeman noted. They also believed that their taxes were being spent on “lazy people,” meaning Negroes, who could get a job “if they really wanted to.” These voters would support Wallace and, if not, would go to Nixon because, as one analyst reported, “These people don’t think Humphrey is white—they really think he’s black.”

Humphrey knew of his difficulties but “ripped into everyone connected to the campaign,” especially about keeping him from the crowds that had always inspired him, although he seemed to ignore the anger directed toward him over the war. But in mid-September he gave “absolute authority” to Freeman to revamp his campaign staff and scheduling. Still, as his old DFL compatriot realized, “Poor Humphrey is swimming against the stream, but he’s sure battling,” and “He’s best when the tide runs against him.”63

That same day, O’Brien told Humphrey, “Let’s face it, as of now we’ve lost. It’s on every newsman’s lips. You’re not your own man. Unless you change direction on this Vietnam thing, and become your own man, you’re finished.” The vice president agreed, and estimated the odds were three-to-one against him. He blamed himself for his mistaken troop withdrawal comments and Johnson for “undercutting me” in New Orleans. He needed “some[thing] positive,” a compelling stroke to hammer home that “Nixon represents resistance and apathy” and Wallace “apartheid”; Humphrey offers an economy that will lead people to vote their pocketbooks, and he will tell the people that “we have to start pulling our ground forces out as soon as the Vietnamese are ready—de-Americanization.” O’Brien quickly pointed out this last proposal meant a break with Johnson: “a clean break this week or never. Do it now—even a white paper,” he urged. Humphrey balked: “I don’t know.”⁶⁴

“The press wants to divide us—me and the president. That makes their stories,” Humphrey said. Johnson told Humphrey that it was not “proper for the VP or an ex-VP [Nixon] or an ex-President [Eisenhower] to play commander-in-chief.” Humphrey agreed that neither he nor Nixon would do anything like that before January 20, 1969. Johnson added that “tactics, strategy, peace conferences, [and] troop withdrawals” were delicate matters to be left to the president. Humphrey noted only that when he became president, “I’ll spend every day finding peace. Re-examine everything.”⁶⁵

The vice president sought to reenergize his campaign on September 19 by flying to Boston, where Ted Kennedy surprised him by greeting him at Logan Airport. But even when this Democratic heartland’s favorite son addressed a large crowd on the Boston Common, boos rang out from more than five hundred protesters at mention of Humphrey. When he spoke, the loudspeakers had to be turned up to project his voice over cries of “Dump the Hump” and “Shame.” The vice president insisted that his hecklers’ behavior would “disgust” the American people, and he cut his speech short. Massachusetts’s Democratic leaders feared he might even lose in their state, despite its overwhelming orientation to their party.⁶⁶

Humphrey headed west, stopping in South Dakota to endorse McGovern’s reelection. But even in the state where the vice president was born and raised, he was running so far behind Nixon that there was concern he would drag his former protégé to defeat. In Independence, Missouri, he heard Truman urge him to “give ’em hell” and likened his own campaign to that of the former president’s 1948 stunning upset of a front-running Dewey. In Toledo Humphrey sought to start regaining voters from George Wallace by labeling his “law and order” slogan a “hoax,” and in Minneapolis, before an AFL-CIO convention, he pointed out that Wallace’s Alabama ranked at the nation’s bottom in wages, unemployment benefits, and workmen’s compensation but was near the top in sales tax and crime rate.67

Humphrey pressed Nixon to clarify his stance on key issues such as school integration (which the Republican said he favored though he questioned use of federal power to enforce this); law and order (with Nixon insisting that “black capitalism” was the answer to crime); and the pending Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (which Nixon said he favored though he wanted to delay ratification). Humphrey said that Nixon straddled issues so much, “he must be saddle sore.”

Humphrey also argued that a Republican victory portended a return to the Herbert Hoover era and economic depression. This view appealed to traditional Democrats, but as Time noted, it was unlikely to win back vital Robert Kennedy and McCarthy voters who wanted Humphrey to break with the president on the war and believed that he had become Johnson’s “bond servant.”⁶⁸

As Humphrey headed into the crucial electoral state of California in late September, Johnson and the war remained the critical issue. Numerous leading Democrats shied from contact with Humphrey, including Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty; Speaker of the California Assembly Jesse Unruh, who was urging a write-in vote for McCarthy, which the highly liberal California Democratic Council (CDC) was promoting; and Alan Cranston, a CDC founder running for the US Senate.

Further, while in Los Angeles, Humphrey spent four hours at the small, conservative, Christian-affiliated Pepperdine College rather than at the large and diverse UCLA campus, where, an aide conceded, he would have been subject to “uncontrollable rudeness or total indifference.” Only in San Francisco, where the United Nations was founded, did he offer even a nod to peace-oriented advocates by proposing that organization might send peacekeeping forces to administer free elections in Vietnam and monitor withdrawal of all foreign troops.⁶⁹

Humphrey’s challenges to “Richard the Silent” and “Richard the Chicken-Hearted” to debate him went unanswered, and when McCarthy returned from France on September 27, he declined to endorse the vice president, insistent that he had not changed his basic views on Vietnam. Humphrey’s campaign, which had lost many big Democratic contributors who had once feared Robert Kennedy’s nomination, was almost broke and unable to run television ads, while Nixon’s smooth commercials flooded screens.

Johnson remained totally aloof from Humphrey, even hostile, and adamant that senior officials keep Nixon’s name out of policy discussions. Time reported that “the President might even prefer a Nixon victory,” which he could explain as a repudiation of the Democratic Party, given that he viewed the Republican candidate as more steadfast on the war than Humphrey, whose triumph would suggest “a repudiation of Johnson personally.” There was also a “Bourbon sense of ‘après moi, le déluge’” in the White House.70

In late September, the Gallup poll showed Nixon leading Humphrey by 43 percent to 28 percent, with the vice president leading Wallace by only 7 percent and in danger of coming in behind him in the Electoral College vote. Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was amazed at how many “New York intellectuals”—journalists and writers—had gone “soft” on Nixon out of anger toward Humphrey over Chicago and his failure to separate from Johnson on Vietnam. Even the eminent Walter Lippmann endorsed Nixon, finding him to be “maturer and mellower” than before, and left-oriented columnist Murray Kempton said that the Democratic Party needed to lose in order to be reorganized with new leadership.⁷¹

Humphrey’s downward spiral continued as he moved from California to Oregon, where at Portland’s Civic Arena several hundred college students rose as one to shout at the vice president “End the war” and “Murderer,” and walked out en masse. In Seattle fewer than six hundred supporters greeted him at Boeing Field, and on September 28, before an overflow crowd at Seattle Center Arena, several hundred militant protesters booed or shouted down his introducers, including the popular and powerful senator Warren Magnuson.

Several times Humphrey bellowed “shut up” at his opponents, only to have them respond, with a bullhorn, that “Vietnam is a scream [of death] that does not end” and that they had come to arrest and try him for “crimes against humanity.” He insisted that he would not be driven from the platform by people who “believe in nothing” but was unable to speak uninterrupted until federal agents and local police removed about thirty protesters. His speech emphasized his usual “underdog” status in his fights for progressive legislation from the Peace Corps and Food for Peace to Medicare, and he won sympathy and an ovation, but there were pickets at his hotel.⁷²

The vice president seemed “bewildered by his youthful enemies,” and “a desperate and angry figure,” New York Times columnist Robert Semple reported, and “an air of sadness hangs over his campaign.” Later, Humphrey would write that although Seattle was his campaign’s low point, public “outrage” over his mistreatment began to turn things his way. But it was not public outrage that turned his campaign; it was his willingness at last to distance himself, if only in a small way, from Johnson on the war and to demonstrate, as O’Brien had pleaded, that he was his own man.73