1968 -- Remember The Election?

Not long after starting at UCLA, in the fall of 1967, I came to see the best hope for ending the war in Vietnam in the upcoming presidential election. The election, in fact, loomed over everything as the promising vehicle for change. The vote at that time, of course, had not been extended to 18 year olds, but there were still plenty of chances for involvement.

During the early primaries, I just followed the news and thought about who might have the best chance to effect an end to the War. Gene McCarthy was the choice of the purists, because he was the first to openly challenge Johnson for the Democratic nomination. I came to favor Robert Kennedy, though, because I thought he had the best prospects for actually getting elected. Throughout the 1968 election, I held to a pragmatic line like this.

The very first day I volunteered for the Kennedy campaign, through the UCLA Kennedy support organization, we were driven to the Crenshaw district to canvass, house-to-house. Enthusiasm was high in this mostly Black neighborhood; some people asked if I was related to Kennedy (must have been my hair), and the feeling at the end of the afternoon was optimistic. When I got home that evening, President Johnson was announcing that he had decided not to run for reelection. Not a bad day's work!

I continued to campaign for Kennedy, for Alan Cranston, and for Henry Waxman and, on the day of the primary helped to bring out the vote. Since we lived only seven or eight blocks away from the Ambassador Hotel, I walked up to take part in what we expected would be a victory celebration. After I had been there for a couple of hours, I guess, packed in a ballroom, waiting for the candidate to come down to talk to us, I heard what sounded like firecrackers going off way down the hall. Minutes later, the announcement came to us that Kennedy had been shot.

Within a week of Robert Kennedy's death, and after my finals, I wrote a series of letters to some of the leading members of the California delegation to the Democratic convention, who were mandated to support Kennedy for President. The gist of my letters was that they should throw their support to McCarthy, and from then until the convention I campaigned for "Clean Gene." I helped man the McCarthy table at UCLA during the summer quarter and did more canvassing. All the time, I had a feeling of futility, since it was said that Humphrey already had the nomination sewn up. My previous optimism was being replaced with a grimmer disillusionment.

I experienced the Chicago Democratic Convention through television. The day of the police riot, I had pleaded too much homework to get out of going with my parents and sisters to visit relatives in San Diego. In this I was lucky; I didn't have to listen to my father cheer on the police (as I am sure he probably would have) and I was left to experience my anger and disgust by myself.

My "political pragmatism" did not end with the conventions, though. Given the actual choice between Nixon and Humphrey, I felt I had to choose Humphrey. In this I have to admit feeling cheapened and cynical. But I was unwilling to give up on electoral politics. I worked for Humphrey headquarters in Los Angeles, as a go-fer and a canvasser...whatever was needed. The day before the general election, Humphrey came to Los Angeles and he wanted a parade in Downtown that would gridlock the center of the city. A few of us walked along the route hours before, delivering large boxes of confetti and excelsior to those office workers who would agree to throw them out of the window on the candidate. We ourselves were stationed on top of a building with an enormous box of excelsior. We all had orange painted styrofoam hats on--the signal to sharp-shooters that we were with the campaign and were not to be shot (!) and, it being a windy day, we held the hats on with one hand and threw shredded paper down on the parade with the other.

None of this, of course, got us any closer to ending the War. For myself, it did destroy my faith in electoral politics as practiced in the USA for many years; I am not sure when that faith will ever return.

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