When the Whole World Was Watching
Forty years ago, during one of the most dramatic campaign seasons in U.S. history, two Minnesotans stood at the center of the storm
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Even so, because the party was then controlled by a small group of insiders, Humphrey’s entry into the race instantly made him the favorite. At the same time, McCarthy’s campaign faltered. His disengagement turned out to be a serious liability: No one knew who was in charge.
A number of his early supporters switched to Kennedy, and his willingness to fight seemed to wane just as he became a serious candidate. “He was the man who essentially forced the president to resign,” says Eisele, but “you were never entirely certain if he really wanted to do what was necessary to become president.” Never was that more apparent than during an appearance on The Tonight Show when McCarthy was asked directly how he felt about being elected president. “I never said I wanted it, really,” he told Johnny Carson. “I’ve gone so far as to say I’d be willing to take it. And I think really that’s as far as anyone should go.”
Kennedy beat McCarthy soundly in Indiana, though McCarthy rebounded in Oregon and was only narrowly defeated in the California primary. Still, these seemed like Pyrrhic victories in the early morning hours of June 5, when—just hours after Kennedy won the California contest—a mentally disturbed Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan fired three .22-caliber bullets into Kennedy’s chest as he walked through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Twenty-six hours later, Kennedy was dead.
After RFK’s assassination, McCarthy and Humphrey became the last two men in the race for Democratic nomination. Both had come a long way from their days as political novices, plotting the course of the nascent DFL. In just 20 years, they had risen from the small world of state politics to rarefied heights, yet the fact that each had risen to the pinnacle of his career during the same year was a historical irony that no one had much time to contemplate in 1968.
Spano suggests that their roots in the DFL aided their ascendancy. The party had basically invented itself in the 1940s, and that lack of baggage attracted a number of remarkable personalities: “It had the advantage of not being dragged down by old party traditions and associations,” says Spano. “It was open to new ideas and drew talent and leadership from a group of very smart people. Remember that Humphrey and McCarthy were both scholarly guys. They also had obvious political gifts. That’s a strong combination.”
“These were men of national stature and had been for many years before the campaign,” says Eisele. “They knew foreign policy; they knew domestic issues; they were impressive men.”
The fact that they were both Minnesotans never seemed particularly important to the candidates themselves. At the very least, it was much less interesting than the circumstances that brought them both into the race. “Gene McCarthy and 1968 were made for each other,” Humphrey would later write in his autobiography, The Education of a Public Man. “The students, almost two-and-a-half times more in colleges and universities than in 1948, radicalized by years of sit-ins and demonstrations, affluent and mobile, rose in a great crusade. The McCarthy movement was not just the exuberance of youth. It moved across many age groups in many places. Tired of the war, bored with political rhetoric, they found in the new face, quiet voice, and subtle enigmatic phrasing of Eugene McCarthy, a leader worth following.”
McCarthy was somewhat less gracious in his assessment of Humphrey, but he did respect him, says Eisele. “McCarthy’s respect for Humphrey might have been a little more grudging,” he says. “Gene probably felt a little superior to Hubert.” Regardless, they’d been together in Washington since 1948; they’d grown out of DFL politics in the Twin Cities. Says Eisle: “They were friends.”
In the last week of August 1968, Eugene McCarthy took rooms on the 23rd floor of the Conrad Hilton in Chicago to await the outcome of the Democratic National Convention. His volunteers set up camp on the 15th floor. Hubert Humphrey and his staff were in the same hotel, 10 floors above.
On the ground, in Grant Park, protesters were gathering by the thousands, ranging from genuine innocents to Yuppie provocateurs. Arrayed against them, by instruction of Chicago mayor Richard Daley, was a phalanx of Chicago policemen, National Guardsmen, army troops, and FBI and Secret Service agents.
Inside the Chicago Amphitheater, where the convention proceedings were taking place, McCarthy once again proved that he wasn’t up for a fight. The day before the actual nominating vote, he let it be known that he knew Humphrey had the nomination wrapped up. When word of his acquiescence leaked out to the convention floor, a sense of defeat swept through his supporters.
Meanwhile, the clashes between police and demonstrators in Grant Park escalated. The acrid smell of tear gas filled the convention center and floated up to the upper floors of the Hilton. As the nominating process began on Wednesday inside the amphitheater, the battle outside intensified, with demonstrators taunting police, and the cops responding with billy clubs. As the vote began, the chaos mounted. McCarthy headquarters at the Hilton set up a makeshift first-aid station, headed by McCarthy’s brother, Austin, a surgeon, to care for injured demonstrators able to make their way inside.
Ten floors above them, Humphrey’s attention was riveted to a television broadcast of the voting results. As the count proceeded and his lead over McCarthy mounted, Humphrey’s exuberance overflowed. When delegates from Pennsylvania put him over the top, he actually leapt into the air. After his wife, Muriel, appeared on the screen, he said to those assembled around him: “I wish Momma were really here. See how pretty she looks.” Then he bent over and kissed his wife’s image on the television screen.
He spent the next day deciding on a vice-presidential candidate and trying to encourage some semblance of unity within the party. Protesters and supporters of McCarthy spent the day licking their wounds, and wondering what had
happened to Humphrey’s sense of outrage.
“I never could understand how Hubert Humphrey could be looking out the window in the same hotel that we were staying in and be unmoved by what he saw was happening to the kids below,” says Connolly. McCarthy declined an invitation to appear with Humphrey on the podium that night, but that afternoon he went to Grant Park to speak to his supporters. “I am happy to be here to address the government of the people in exile,” he told the crowd.
In his victory speech, Humphrey tried to sound a note of conciliation, and even hinted that a break with the policies of the Johnson administration might be in the offing. But it would be weeks before Humphrey actually distanced himself from the president on the issue of Vietnam—well into his presidential race against the Republican nominee, Richard Nixon.
But there would be one final indignity for McCarthy’s campaign. After the final gavel fell at the convention, Chicago police charged into the rooms of several McCarthy supporters, and dragged them, kicking and screaming, to the elevators and down to the lobby. The police would later claim that they had seen offenders hurling ashtrays and other objects down on them from the 15th floor. The screams of McCarthy’s volunteers and staffers, many of whom were the same young idealists who’d gone “Clean for Gene” way back in the snows of New Hampshire, echoed through the hotel, rousing McCarthy on the 23rd floor. With senior members of his staff, McCarthy went down to the lobby. “Who is in charge here?” he asked the cops. “Who is in charge here?”
When some semblance of calm was finally restored, McCarthy told his beaten and bloodied campaign workers to head back to their rooms on the 15th floor. But the bitterness was slow to subside.
In late September, Humphrey finally announced his break with Lyndon Johnson over policies in Vietnam, and his campaign immediately started to close the large gap between him and Nixon. Through October, Humphrey’s campaign picked up momentum. But it was late in the day for a comeback.
After Chicago, Eugene McCarthy took a 10-day trip to the French Riviera. He returned to the States toward the end of September and agreed to cover the 1968 World Series as an essayist for Life magazine. It wasn’t until late October that he got around to announcing his support of his old colleague’s candidacy for the presidency. In lukewarm fashion, just a week before the election, he issued a statement to the press in which he said that, despite the fact that Humphrey’s stand on key issues “falls far short of what I think it should be,” McCarthy’s followers ought to support his candidacy. Needless to say, Humphrey supporters were underwhelmed by the endorsement.
On November 5, Richard Milhous Nixon was elected president of the United States, defeating Hubert Humphrey by a mere 500,000 votes, 43.4 percent to 42.7 percent. Many observers felt that given another week or two, Humphrey might have caught Nixon to become Minnesota’s first and only president.
In years to come, Humphrey supporters would recall McCarthy’s tepid, last-minute statement of support, suggesting that with any sense of unification during the fall of 1968, Humphrey might have won the election and spared the country Richard Nixon. McCarthy supporters, on the other hand, continue to suggest that Humphrey’s wounds were self-inflicted, administered long before he and McCarthy became foes. If he had stood on principle and denounced the war earlier, there would have been no need for McCarthy’s blessing.
“It was the convention,” says Spano about Humphrey’s defeat. There was “too much chaos, too much confrontation, too much acrimony.”
“It was Johnson,” says Eisele. “The ties and the fact that Johnson never really put the full force of the office behind Humphrey’s campaign.”
In may have been all those things and more. It was 1968, the wrong year for electing a Minnesotan to the presidency.
Tim Brady is a St. Paul writer and a frequent contributor to Minnesota Monthly.
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