Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

  To top all this off, Chicago’s bus drivers and telephone workers went on strike. Stalled mass transit was an inconvenience to the convention-goers, but the inability to get many telephone calls through was a disaster. Instead of being able to build elaborate communication networks to beam live video, television networks were stuck with having to hand-carry videotape to central broadcast facilities. The only place they could broadcast live was in the convention hall itself. Everything else had to be broadcast with a couple of hours’ delay, changing what audiences saw and when they saw it.

  It was a tinderbox waiting to explode, and it did. As student activist and historian Todd Gitlin later put it, “the movement’s irresistible force collided with Mayor Daley’s immovable object, while the television cameras floodlit the clash into national theater.”25 A later congressional investigation called the events “a police riot” and blamed the mayor for “unrestrained and indiscriminate police violence.”26 Given the awful scenes beamed into American homes, it was hard for Congress to come to any other conclusion.

  The first battles were innocuous, and even a little humorous. The Friday before the Convention’s start, the Yippies gathered in a park to nominate a 150-pound pig named Pigasus for president. The cops arrested six protesters and took Pigasus to the Chicago Humane Society. By Sunday night, however, “the mood had … turned nasty” and dangerous. Five hundred protestors defied a police curfew and remained camped in Lincoln Park. Batons started to swing. The slow burn began, exploding into violent chaos on Wednesday, the last evening of the Convention.27

  In the early evening hours, a column of protestors marched down Michigan Avenue, to be met by a wall of blue-helmeted police officers at the front steps of the two convention hotels. The crowd pushed forward, the police pushed back. The police threw tear gas; the fumes wafted up to the hotel rooms above. On the 25th floor, Hubert Humphrey rubbed his eyes and had to take a shower. On the 23rd floor, Gene McCarthy looked down in horror as police batons began to hammer down on the college kids who had followed him since New Hampshire.

  Things got ugly very quickly, and the reporters swarming over the convention hotels grabbed their notebooks and cameras, recording as protesters’ chants of “Fuck you, LBJ!” turned to screams for help as the police clubbed through the crowd and dragged people across the asphalt. Paper and other objects rained down from the hotel rooms below, launched by convention-goers trying to stop the police. Blood was on the sidewalks as the crowed yelled, “The Whole World is Watching, The Whole World is Watching.”

  And the world was watching. What made it so powerful and politically consequential, however, was that the world saw this happen on television a couple of hours after it happened because the telephone workers’ strike meant the television footage could not beam live. Instead, tape of what had happened at 8:00 P.M. got woven into the live coverage of the Convention proceedings at 10:00, giving the impression the two things were happening simultaneously. Both presented grim scenes. For the primary season bloodbath had left deep divisions and resentments in the Democratic Party.

  Kennedy’s assassination had taken the wind out of the Left’s sails, and paved the way for Hubert Humphrey—the man who had not been on a single primary ballot—to secure the nomination. The rules governing the Democratic Convention had changed little since 1912 or 1932. Delegates were not obliged to go with their state’s primary winner, and “favorite son” candidates stood for election in many states as a way to gain votes that were merely placeholders for candidates aiming to work their way to the top at the convention. By late June, the Wall Street Journal sighed resignedly that the likely nominees of both parties would be “favorites of the party professionals” after all. “The pundits contend that the public wants a choice, but the political system gives it an echo.”28

  McCarthy was still in, but diminished. His singular identification with the antiwar cause had left him scrambling for support among key Democratic constituencies. “It is almost as if McCarthy has identified himself so completely with one facet of national concern—policy in Vietnam—that no one, including the black man, thinks he stands for anything else,” commented the Chicago Daily Defender.29 McCarthy still had his ardent followers, but by this point they seemed more committed to his being president than McCarthy was himself. Another prominent antiwar senator from the Midwest, George McGovern, entered the race a few weeks before the convention in a last-ditch effort to provide the Democrats an antiwar standard-bearer. The aching gap created by Robert Kennedy’s death prompted a boomlet of support in the Convention’s first days for his brother Teddy, but by late Tuesday night it was clear Humphrey had a lock on the nomination.

  On that deadly Wednesday evening, reporters roamed the convention floor and interviewed antiwar delegates whose words undercut every attempt the party made to show unity. Delegates burst into tears on national television. They denounced their party’s leaders and its position on the war. They stood on chairs and sang “We Shall Overcome.” Meanwhile, Mayor Daley appeared on the convention floor, turning purple with rage and spouting expletives as he was denounced for his “Gestapo tactics” by one speaker at the podium. All the while, the networks interspersed the video of what had happened on the street earlier that evening.

  Humphrey was furious, and he turned his fury on the television reporters. Far above the melee on the street, and not fully understanding the extent of the violence, he could not believe that the night of his political coronation was playing out so badly. Sitting in his hotel room watching NBC, he reportedly shook his fist at the reporter on the screen, saying: “Don’t forget … I’m going to be president someday. I’m going to appoint the FCC—we’re going to look into all this.” Genial, liberal, kind, intelligent Humphrey came out of Chicago as the Democrats’ nominee, but forever tarnished by the violence and infighting that played out on network television. “The average voter may resign himself, uneasily, to Vietnam,” commented Life magazine. “But he is not likely to forget Democratic delegates crying shame at their own leaders or the paroxysms of brutality by which Daley’s blue-helmeted police bloodied brigades of ragged hippies and earnest McCarthyites in full view of the American living room.”30

  Mad Men

  While the Democrats’ televised campaign spun out of control, the Republicans’ narrative became even more tightly crafted and polished as Richard Nixon took his message to a national audience.

  In addition to playing smart politics during the primaries, Nixon had started in early 1968 to tap into the cultural zeitgeist in ways few politicians had grasped. Always suspicious of the Eastern Establishment and attuned to the concerns of Middle America, Nixon and his team saw that grassroots activism was not only a product of the left, but an emerging force on the right. For the 1960s saw the birth of other kinds of youth movements, where hair wasn’t long but stayed short. Where no one was dropping out of college or taking drugs. Where students marched in favor of the war, not against it. These young people listened to and participated in Up with People, the clean-cut singing troupe. They joined Young Americans for Freedom, the campus conservative organization.

  Nixon’s team also saw how the changes of the decade created potential to mobilize the New Deal generation, who watched in bewilderment as old certainties dissolved. Their children were growing their hair long and rebelling; people with black and brown skin were moving into their neighborhoods. Taxes were going up to pay for the war, yet ordinary people weren’t seeing visible benefits. Jobs once done by people were now done with hightech computers and automated machinery. They were anxious about lots of things, and feeling powerless to stop them. Some were Southerners who felt abandoned by the Democrats’ embrace of civil rights. Yet a good many lived beyond the South, in electoral vote-rich states like Nixon’s native California, or Michigan, or Illinois.

  Richard Nixon took note of all this, and played it to win. In early 1968, a memo started circulating around the Nixon campaign written by a young campaign worker named Kevin Phillips. Titled
“Middle America and the Emerging Republican Majority,” it explained how the great social upheavals of the 1960s had created a new enemy. Phillips pointed out that the New Deal was successful by focusing people’s anger on the economic elites who had so much when the rest had so little.31

  Franklin Roosevelt, despite being an elite himself, artfully appealed to those fears in the 1930s and created an alternative vision. Now, people were angry at cultural elites: the “experts” in Washington who were telling ordinary people to put their kids on buses and ride to integrated schools across town, who were tolerating drug use and bad behavior from insolent college students, who weren’t cracking down on crime on city streets. Phillips’s “Middle America” listened to Lawrence Welk, not to Motown or the Doors. They went to church, not to antiwar demonstrations.

  In May, Nixon gave a national radio address in which he gave these people a name. He called them the “silent center.” He told them: “A great many quiet Americans have become committed to answers to social problems that preserve personal freedom.” Later, as president, he would label this group the “great silent majority.” Liberals in Washington had trampled on individual freedoms and ignored these silent Americans. Nixon, poor boy from Whittier, the anti-Communist crusader, would give them a voice.32

  Yet as Nixon approached the fall campaign, he needed to find ways to deliver this message without reinforcing his old reputation as a conservative hatchet man. The conventional wisdom among the mainstream political press and in moderate-Republican circles—and Democratic ones as well—was that politics that pitted different groups against one another would not work at the national level. America had fragmented in 1968; it was the job of the next president to put it back together. Sage Washington commentator Scotty Reston reflected in April, “neither Nixon nor [Robert] Kennedy, despite their advantage in the popularity polls, has a good chance of uniting the country. They are at the radical extremes of foreign and domestic policy, and the mood of the country seems to be for moderation and compromise.”

  The new media-driven politics also demanded approaches that brought people together rather than splitting them apart, the political establishment reasoned. In the age of network television and mass culture, where millions of people watched the same newscasts and sitcoms, personality-driven politics had trumped the old partisan machines. It stood to reason that a successful candidate would be one who could knit people together through the force of charisma and compelling ideas. Success would come from a healer, not a divider. Nixon’s use of television in 1968 played off of this conventional wisdom, but also proved a good chunk of it wrong.

  The debacle of Nixon’s televised debates against John F. Kennedy in 1960 has become a staple of history textbooks. But another critical part of the television story of 1960 was how well Kennedy employed the tools of corporate advertising in his television commercials. He used snappy jingles and slogans that sold the candidate the same way Kellogg’s might sell a box of cereal. He had celebrities like Harry Belafonte and Henry Fonda attesting to his patriotism, his intelligence, and his support of civil rights. He had his beautiful wife Jacqueline speaking in Spanish to woo Latino voters.

  In contrast, 1960-era Nixon played by the rules. His TV spots were similar to those by most candidates who had come before him: one minute or more of the candidate awkwardly leaning against a desk, talking directly to the camera. In the increasingly snazzy and hyperkinetic world of television advertising, they were dull. They were made even more problematic by the fact that their star, Richard Nixon, lacked the geniality of Dwight Eisenhower or the charisma of the Kennedys. He was Nixon: serious, substantive, stern, scolding.

  Nixon wanted 1968 to be different, and turned to Madison Avenue to help him transform his public image. Nixon was not the first to do so—both Democrats and Republicans had done it for years—but the effort was extraordinary for the meticulousness with which the admen took on a complete image turnaround for their client. At the head of the team was a former J. Walter Thompson pro named Harry Treleaven, who set himself to the task of how to play down Nixon’s disadvantages and play up his strengths. Treleavan was bullish, writing of Nixon: “Not always loved, he is universally respected. He does have a certain star quality going for him.” The candidate didn’t have a great sense of humor, Treleaven acknowledged, which “could be corrected to a degree, but let’s not be too obvious about it.” Media aide Roger Ailes was more dismissive: “He’s a funny-looking guy. He looks like somebody hung him in a closet overnight and he jumps out in the morning with his suit all bunched up and starts running around saying, ‘I want to be president.’”33

  The answer to this image problem was to carefully manage any and all times Nixon appeared on television. They held televised forums in which the audience was hand-picked, the questions were scripted, and the questioners pre-selected. They placed him in informal settings. They heeded Treleaven’s call to “avoid closeups.” In September, the new, television-friendly Nixon made a surprise cameo appearance on the hugely popular NBC comedic variety show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, cleverly making fun of his stiff image and making his rival Humphrey seem unhip by comparison.

  Yet encased in this polish, the messages of the Nixon campaign were hard-hitting and tough, playing on the fears of the “silent majority.” This came through clearly in the fall campaign, when Nixon launched a series of slickly produced ads that were unlike nearly any other political commercial in history.

  Nixon never appeared in these ads; they featured only his disembodied voice, which provided simple and sonorous narration to a series of fast-paced, jarring, gripping images. They hit all the key issues: Vietnam, law and order, youth culture. They said little of substance, but featured images that were impossible to ignore—of bloody battles in Vietnam, of violence on the streets, of Democrats at war with each other in Chicago. In one ad, images of campus protesters and urban rioters flashed back and forth in rapid succession, while Nixon’s voice read:

  It is time for an honest look at the problem of order in the United States. Dissent is a necessary ingredient of change, but in a system of government that provides for peaceful change, there is no cause that justifies resort to violence. Let us recognize that the first civil right of every American is to be free from domestic violence. So I pledge to you, we shall have order in the United States.

  “This time,” flashed the words on the screen, “vote like your whole world depended on it.”34

  Even though Nixon was speaking to a very different set of concerns and constituencies, his campaign was one that played off the same interest group and identity politics emerging on the Left. Just like activists on campus and in the inner cities, middle-America conservatives no longer believed what the leaders in Washington, or Wall Street, or corporate boardrooms were selling them. They no longer believed we were “all in it together.” Just like the young people protesting the war and fighting for equal rights, Nixon raged against the consensus liberal Establishment. He packaged this rage in phrases and images derived after intensive research and attuned to the finer points of demographic change. Television had helped give Richard Nixon the charisma he lacked and allowed him to widen his appeal far beyond what the pundits ever expected. And it worked.

  Figure 23. Esquire, May 1968. George Lois, designer. After stumbling in televised appearances in his 1960 presidential run against John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon hired advertising industry professionals to help craft a fresh public image. National publications noticed and satirized his media makeover, but the results proved highly effective. Courtesy of George Lois.

  The Sound and the Fury

  In the middle of all this, there still were a great many Americans who felt that no major party candidate—from Rockefeller and Nixon to McCarthy and Humphrey—spoke to their wants and needs. Only one person did: George Wallace. While liberal and moderate Democrats fought, Wallace had split from the Democrats and set out as the standard-bearer of the American Independent Party, bringing a legion of disillusio
ned working-class whites along with him. “Our middle class,” Wallace later wrote, “ignored and neglected by the Democratic and Republican Parties, would now be represented.”35

  Wallace’s platform was a harsher and more undiluted version of Nixon’s message to the “silent majority.” He positioned himself as the candidate of the “little man,” and he was careful to steer away from the stridently racist rhetoric he had employed as governor of Alabama. “Both national parties … have kowtowed to every anarchist that has roamed the streets,” he thundered to a campaign crowd in Madison Square Garden. “I’m not talking about race. The overwhelming majority of all races in this country are against the breakdown of law and order.” Wallace talked about how elitist Ph.D. types were stomping on the rights of the ordinary folks. He talked about crime, school busing, and unemployment. He spoke of all the things working-class Americans—in the South and in the North—were worrying about. He wasn’t talking about race, he assured his audiences. But, really, he was.36

  The Wallace third-party insurgency was damaging to both Nixon and Humphrey. It pulled away some disaffected Southerners and disgruntled members of the “silent majority” who might have otherwise voted for the Republican, as well as presenting an alternative for the Democrats who felt their party had given in on civil rights. More important, it demonstrated the power of a particular kind of message on a particular kind of voter. The white ethnics from New York City’s outer boroughs and Chicago’s South and West sides, the small farmers from rural Alabama and North Carolina and Texas and Indiana, the churchgoing folk from small towns and the proud homeowners from working-class suburbs: these were the voters who had gone for FDR in the 1930s, but who were anxious and angry about all the changes the 1960s had wrought. They saw a Democratic Party that had allowed chaos to be unleashed, and they weren’t yet convinced the Republicans had an answer. George Wallace spoke to them. It wasn’t just about Southern “states’ rights” anymore. It was about freedom, opportunity, and individual rights.