Nixon's Secret (47 page)

“A party that cannot unite itself, cannot unite America,” Nixon would say at a hundred campaign rallies.

The counterculture, Kennedy-loving Democrat idealists who despised Johnson and his war got their candidate on November 30, 1967, with Minnesota Senator Eugene McCarthy. He vowed to run his campaign solely against Johnson’s Vietnam policies and built up a campaign largely made up of anti-war youths. Two months later, as the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive rocked Vietnam and dealt the Americans a severe blow, McCarthy’s anti-war position grew into a credible threat.

Sure enough, when McCarthy poured most of his resources into the first Democrat primary on March 12 in New Hampshire and nearly beat Johnson with 42 percent of the vote, it became quite obvious that the incumbent president was beatable. This attracted former Attorney General and now-Senator of New York, Robert F. Kennedy, who had been reportedly mulling a presidential run for months. He wanted to challenge Johnson, but did not wish to disunite the Democrats, especially since his brother had so carefully pieced the party together only eight years earlier. But McCarthy’s near victory convinced Kennedy that LBJ could and should be defeated.

While many hailed RFK’s entrance into the race at first, others saw him as being ruthless and opportunistic—only using McCarthy’s win to build his own support. The anti-war left was bitterly divided.

Meanwhile, as anti-war fervor continued to grow, everything changed on March 31, 1968. Johnson appeared on live television to address the nation about halting the bombing in North Vietnam in favor of peace talks. LBJ then shocked the nation by announcing that “with America’s sons in the fields far away, with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hopes for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office—the presidency of your country. Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

In 1967, counterculture organizations began focusing their plans on protesting the war during the 1968 Democratic Convention. Countless anti-Vietnam War protests had already broken out across the country.

In 1968, President Lyndon Johnson’s favorability ratings were only around 30 percent and polls showed a meager 23 percent favorability for his policies on the Vietnam War. In the months preceding the convention, more than a hundred cities were ravaged by riots; and political turbulence erupted on college and university campuses. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, after which riots broke out across the country, including Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley reportedly issued a “shoot to kill” arsonists order to the police. On June 5, Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated after he won the California primary.

On March 23, 1968, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE), an umbrella organization for anti-war groups, met at a camp at Lake Villa, Illinois, to plan a youth festival that would coincide with the Democratic National Convention. Their common cause was to end the Vietnam War and to challenge the Democratic Party leadership. The Youth International Party (Yippies) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) joined in the planning. The city of Chicago denied them a permit to converge in the city. The Yippies came to the convention anyway.

Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy both entered the campaign in March to challenge Johnson for the party’s presidential nomination. Party dissension caused Johnson to drop out of the race. On March 31, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson addressed the nation calling for a halt of the bombing in North Vietnam. In the same televised speech, he made the surprising announcement that he would not run for reelection.

After Johnson’s announcement, the purpose of the convention became the selection of a new presidential nominee to run as the Democratic Party’s candidate for the president. Organizers of protests were thrown off by Johnson’s announcement; it created uncertainty among the anti-war organizers’ convention plans. Humphrey officially entered the race on April 27. Because Humphrey was closely identified with Johnson’s policies on the Vietnam War, the activists chose to go through with their plans to demonstrate at the convention.

A number of anti-war activists had joined the presidential campaigns of anti-war candidates Kennedy and Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota. Kennedy and McCarthy had been running against Vice President Hubert Humphrey. Senator McCarthy was seen as the peace candidate because of his markedly anti-war stance. Humphrey represented Johnson’s stand on the war. Even though 80 percent of the primary voters were for anti-war candidates, the delegates defeated the peace plank 1,567 ¾ to 1,041 ¼.

Humphrey compiled his delegates in caucus sates that were controlled by the Democratic Party establishment. At the time of Robert Kennedy’s assassination on June 5, the delegate count was: Humphrey 561.5, Kennedy 393.5, and McCarthy 258. After his death, Kennedy’s delegates remained uncommitted. Although Humphrey had not entered a single primary, he won the Democratic nomination. It is speculated that Chicago Mayor Daley and President Johnson pulled strings behind the scenes.
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The anti-war delegates felt betrayed.

The heat and humidity in Chicago portended the violence that was to erupt. Mayor Daley repeatedly boasted to reporters, “Now thousands will come to our city and take over our streets, our city, our convention.” Added to that, the city taxi drivers had called a strike prior to the start of the convention.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention was held at the International Amphitheatre in Chicago from August 26 to August 29, 1968. Inside the Ampitheatre the elevators were working erratically, and the phone service wasn’t reliable. The air conditioning failed to cool the hot air on the convention floor. The internal fighting among the delegates was telecast nationwide. The frustration over anti-war resolutions erupted in bitter floor fights. Daily shouting matches between frustrated delegates and party bosses lasted until early morning hours. The internal fighting among the delegates was televised across the nation. With the nomination of Hubert Humphrey, the delegates who opposed the war felt betrayed. The party bosses, not the people, 80 percent of whom voted for anti-war candidates in the primaries, had won.

The only common interest shared among the party regulars, anti-war delegates, and pro-Humphrey delegates was their doubt about winning an election over the Republican Party that had a unified front behind the nomination of Richard M. Nixon. The opposition groups, a mixed bag of hippies, Yippies, radicals, and moderates, that gathered to protest the convention represented a wide range of philosophies. But they were unified in the cause of ending the Vietnam war and challenging the Democratic Party to adopt a platform that would ensure that result.

The street violence began Sunday August 25. Anti-war leaders had tried to get permits from the city to sleep in Lincoln Park and to demonstrate outside of the convention site. Those permit requests were denied, although the city did offer them permits to protest in Grant Park. But in Lincoln Park, the protesters refused to leave when the park was officially closed. Chicago police bombarded them with tear gas and moved in, beating the protesters with billy clubs to force them out of the park. Seventeen reporters were attacked along with the demonstrators. Throughout the convention, police targeted reporters along with the protesters in Lincoln Park and Grant Park.

On August 27, from the convention floor, CBS’s Dan Rather, wearing a headset, attempted to get a statement from a Georgia delegate who was leaving the convention hall. Security shoved Rather and then allegedly punched him in the abdomen and knocked down. Rather said the guards told him to “get the hell out.”
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August 28, 1968, is known today for a “police riot.” According to eyewitness accounts of the event, at approximately 3:30 p.m., a young boy lowered the American flag at Grant Park, a site which had been approved by a city permit. Ten thousand demonstrators gathered there were were met by twenty-three thousand police and National Guardsmen. The police broke into the crowd and assaulted the boy, while the crowd threw food, rocks, and chunks of concrete at the police.

Tom Hayden, one of the leaders of Students for a Democratic Society, encouraged protesters to move the demonstrations into the streets so that if they were to be teargassed, the entire city would be teargassed; and if blood were spilled, it would happen throughout the city. It is said that there was so much tear gas used on the protesters that it made its way to the Hilton Hotel, where it affected Hubert Humphrey while in his shower.
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Live under TV lights, the police were taunted with chants of “kill, kill, kill.” The police were indiscriminate in spraying demonstrators and bystanders alike with Mace. The coverage of the police assault in front of the Hilton Hotel on the evening of August 28 is the most famous image of the 1968 Chicago demonstrations.

In the convention hall, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff used his nominating speech for George McGovern to criticize the violence going on outside the convention hall. Upon hearing Ribicoff’s remark, “with George McGovern we wouldn’t have Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago,”
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Mayor Daley responded with a remark that wasn’t picked up by the microphones but was later revealed by lip-readers: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch! You lousy motherfucker! Go home!”
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That night, NBC televised both the demonstrators being beaten by the police and the festivities over Humphrey’s victory in the convention hall. America clearly saw that the Democratic Party was bitterly divided.

After the calamity of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Nixon gained a broad lead over hapless Hubert Humphrey, who struggled mightily to forge his own identity. He was also vexed by a conundrum: he had cast off the image of his subservience to Lyndon Johnson, while at the same time keeping Johnson’s support. Only a break with Johnson’s Vietnam policy would make that possible. Humphrey struggled to put distance between himself and LBJ to bring party doves back into the fold without alienating the still powerful sitting president.

Nixon’s final lead in the polls dwindled as the vote share for independent candidate George Wallace slipped and Wallace’s Democratic supporters shifted back to the party of their ancestors. A Humphrey surge began, aided by the scrappy underdog nature of his campaign in the closing weeks, while Nixon’s carefully staged effort seemed canned and boring. It was: the Republican candidate stuck to his broad campaign themes and scrupulously avoided making any actual news at all.

Humphrey made substantial gains in September by distancing himself from Johnson. He was now identified in ads as “Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey,” and he focused on Southern voters who found Wallace too radical. He gained back the labor vote with major help from union leaders, and he was further aided by the fact that Wallace—who peaked in polling at 21 percent in September—selected infamous general Curtis LeMay as his running mate. After LeMay suggested that tactical nuclear weapons be used in Vietnam, the anti-war conservative vote that supported Goldwater in 1964 was promptly back in play.

By October, Humphrey grew increasingly anti-Vietnam and called for an all-out halt to bombing. Johnson’s infamous “October Surprise” occurred the weekend before the election: Johnson announced a bombing halt, and even a possible peace deal. The “Halloween Peace” gave Humphrey a boost. Coupled with the late endorsement of the anti-war Senator McCarthy, Nixon and Humphrey were in a dead heat.
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Apparently, Nixon and his team were expecting the October Surprise. Nixon saw it as a political maneuver that Johnson would try to use to box him in on his “peace talks” proposal. To counter, Nixon and campaign manager John Mitchell had opened back channels of communication with the president of South Vietnam, Nguyen Van Thieu. They worked through Anna Chennault, the notorious dragon lady whose husband, Claire Chennault, had founded the Flying Tigers airline. Chennault was in touch with the South Vietnamese ambassador and passed a discreet message to President Thieu that the South should refuse the three-party talks and hold out for a better deal after Nixon won reelection.

Thieu, sensing a double-cross from LBJ, was happy to comply. His announcement deflated the last-minute swing to Humphrey, and Nixon had the final successful chess move in his rivalry with Johnson.

Unfortunately, J. Edgar Hoover learned of Chennault’s back channel, then wiretapped him through the FBI, and advised Johnson, who was furious. He said on White House tapes that Nixon had “blood on his hands” and labeled the action “treason.” An angry Johnson called Nixon to confront him, but Nixon denied any knowledge of the maneuver. Nixon aide Haldeman later remembered that Nixon, he, and traveling aide Dwight Chapin dissolved in hilarious laughter after Nixon hung up.

As I outlined in my book
The Man Who Killed Kennedy
, the fact that Johnson even dragged out his “October Surprise” in hopes of securing Humphrey the election was questionable and pure power politics cloaked as foreign policy. LBJ had no concessions from the North Vietnamese and no breakthough in the Paris peacetalks. When the move failed, Johnson ordered the NSA to maintain surveillance and even wiretap certain members of the South Vietnamese embassy and Nixon campaign. He never revealed what Nixon’s team had done. Neither did Humphrey, who was convinced of his own victory. As the ultimate joke, Humphrey said that they didn’t make Nixon’s campaign’s actions public as an “uncommon act of political decency.”
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Quiet manipulations were commonplace in the 1968 race. Texas Governor John Connally played a central role in another backroom drama, according to author Jules Whitcover:

“One of the pieces not being picked up by Humphrey, incidentally, was John Connally, courted ardently by Nixon agents in Texas upon his return from the Democratic convention. Connally, disgruntled, agreed privately to help Nixon win support from conservative Texas oilmen and politicians, with an unspoken prospect that he would be taken into the Nixon cabinet—if Nixon carried Texas.”
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