Election prompts 1968 memories

It was 1968, a year as rough and raucous as any in American history.

War, riots, generational divides, racial division and — before the year was over — assassinations that would leave a permanent stain on our political landscape.

It was an election year, a year when the presidential incumbent was a polarizing figure. In other words, a year not that much different from 2020.



I was a college student, and with the luxury of a 2-S student deferment from the draft I was opposed to U.S. conduct of the war in Vietnam. That’s not to say I was an activist; I was not. But I’d believed the war to be a huge mistake, and I’d felt that way since high school.

So it was probably inevitable that March that I would gravitate toward the longshot campaign of Sen. Eugene McCarthy. A Democrat from Minnesota, McCarthy had challenged President Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. And he had given the president a real scare, taking 42% of the vote to Johnson’s 49%.

At some point — I have long ago forgotten the details of the moment — I signed up to volunteer.

Specifically, I volunteered for a weekend bus trip to Wisconsin with a bunch of other college students to go door-to-door for McCarthy before the primary there.

That meant getting “clean for Gene.” In other words, I got a haircut.

And then I got on the bus for a long ride north.

None of my buddies had volunteered. There weren’t even a whole bunch from my dorm, but a guy named Will who lived one floor down was a familiar face, and we ended up working the weekend together.

Our destination was Racine, a politically conservative city in a very Republican corner of the state.

Wisconsin has a history of electing either very liberal or very conservative politicians. It’s as if the pendulum swings back and forth and never stops in the middle.

Campaigning for McCarthy in those circumstances was a little bit crazy. But we knew that Wisconsin Republicans were solidly behind Richard Nixon, we knew that they hated LBJ, and we knew they could cross over to vote in the Democratic primary for McCarthy as a way of thumbing their nose at the incumbent president.

So that was to be our sales pitch.

First stop was a union hall where some party activists did their best to fire us up and get us ready to go.

Two memories stand out: One is the actor Paul Newman standing on a chair, Budweiser in hand, giving us a pep talk about the importance of the McCarthy candidacy and the need to stop the war. The second is the cold, hard floor of the union hall; that’s where we slept that night.

Will and I went door-to-door in a couple of Racine neighborhoods with little effect, then we were trucked out to a rural area near Burlington and set loose to find our way from farmhouse to farmhouse. We did, though I don’t think we changed a single mind or a single vote that day.

Anyone who has ever gone door-to-door for any candidate knows that feeling. You feel exhausted and virtuous and foolish all at the same time.

But you also know that you’ve been a part of an important process — the same process that’s going on this spring. And you know that doing something is always better than doing nothing.

My recollection is that our bus trip home came at the end of that long, long day, with uncomfortable seats replacing the cold floor of the union hall.

And it was on the way back to campus that I learned how quickly, how suddenly, the political calculus can change.

Someone on the bus had a transistor radio and picked up a news channel.

The news caught us all by surprise: LBJ had announced that he would not seek re-election but would work toward a negotiated end to the war.

In a way, McCarthy had won. But instantly, that victory evaporated.

So did the coalition on the bus. Some abandoned McCarthy immediately and said they’d work for Bobby Kennedy, who hadn’t even announced a candidacy. Others said their involvement in politics was going to pause for awhile to sort things out; I was in that camp.

Within a week, none of that seemed to matter at all. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated.

Within a couple of months more, Bobby Kennedy himself would be the target of an assassin’s bullets.

And American politics was stained with blood once more.