On this day in 1968

There is a truce in the Nigerian civil war, as General Ojukwu of Biafra sets off for the negotiations taking place in the neutral location of Addis Ababa.

An army coup has taken place in the Congo Republic- the smaller one.

[There were and still may be two states named after the Congo, one being the former Belgian Congo- "the large one"-, and the other being the former French Congo, north of the river.]

The leaders meeting in Bratislava have agreed to allow freedom in internal affairs to all members of the Warsaw Pact. [At least, that's how it was reported in the news at the time]
The last Russian troops involved in the military exercise in June have finally moved out of Czechoslovakia.

The first day of the Republican convention in Miami.
Richard Nixon had a minority of delegates from the primaries, but it was an open secret, even in English newspapers, that he probably had enough promises from other states to tip the balance in his favour.

The conventions of this year seem to have moved the American electorate into making two important decisions, which have an impact on American elections to this day.

Firstly, they would not be satisfied until all the states held primary elections, in the interests of transparency.
Secondly, although they were deliberately choosing the most expensive election process possible, obliging winning candidates to fight two national media elections in one year on the money they could raise by their own efforts, they would not forego their right to complain incessantly about how expensive elections had become.

In Miami, Richard Nixon was confirmed as the Republican candidate in the Presidential election.

On the day after being nominated as Republican candidate, Richard Nixon made his acceptance speech. The personal account of William Safire includes two incidents worth recalling.

There was a near-fiasco surrounding the physical copy of the speech, which had been entrusted to Frank Shakespeare, to be placed on the rostrum just before Nixon arrived there. Unfortunately the phalanx of security men escorting Nixon into the hall moved so fast that Shakespeare "missed the bus" and found himself at the crucial moment on the wrong side of a grim security cordon, where "guards with impassive faces were refusing to look at passes".

Shakespeare, a soft-spoken, mild-mannered man, transformed himself into a raging bully. Finally a Secret Service man recognised him and figured he would do him a favor by letting him in. By that action, Shakespeare made it to the rostrum just in time, and we were not treated to the first acceptance speech in history ad-libbed by a seething candidate.

Later that night, Safire received an urgent summons.

At one-thirty Dwight Chapin called; 'Did I wake you up?' I said no, the phone was ringing, and he said 'Can you come up here? The Boss wants to talk to somebody and nobody's around... He's too "up" to sleep- can you sit around with him until he runs out of gas?'

The conversation included Nixon's explanation of Spiro Agnew;

You know why we needed Agnew. I gave a lot of thought to Lindsay- surprised?- but what the hell, he'd cut you up. Big gains up North, but Lindsay would lose us Florida, Texas, Kentucky, the Carolinas, Tennessee. Hatfield?- light. Percy?- Boy Scout. Baker?- too new. Agnew's a tough shrewd Greek. We've got to figure out a way to sell him. He can't give a speech worth a damn, but he's not going to fall apart.
"Agnew wears well?"
That's it. He wears well. He wears well. Get him on press conferences, panel shows, talking about the cities, answering questions, but no set speeches. He's no speechmaker.

William Safire, "Before the Fall", pp53-56

a little history on Agnew

in the mid 1960s the democrat party was in the process of transitioning from old-school conservatives (many southern white males, rural / small town) to urban northeasterners.
in 1966 the Maryland democrats nominated old-school conservative George P. Mahoney for governor. the Baltimore / northeast liberals found him unacceptable and nominated Baltimore treasurer Hyman Pressman for governor as an independent candidate. the Republicans, then as now a minority party in the Free State, nominated the obscure Spiro Agnew, considered a progressive on race issues, who won based on the democrat vote being split. (no other Republican would win the Gubernatorial race in Md til 2002).

Nixon needed a running mate in 1968. all his pollsters indicated that any well-known candidate (Romney, Reagan, Rockefeller) would cost him votes, but Nixon and no running mate would have a better chance to win.
thus Nixon picked Agnew, as close to a nobody as he could find.
Spiro Agnew was a reliable moderate conservative with an impressive record in WWII (the veterans vote was still important then) and a decent reputation as a legislator and governor in Maryland. Agnew was ultimately accused of corruption and resigned, but most commentators felt that he was as honest as anyone in Maryland politics at the time. (his successor, Marvin Mandel, was also indicted on corruption charges).

Agnew's job in the campaign, as most VPs, was to rally the base. he might be best known today for the line 'nattering nabobs of negatism', written by Pat Buchanan.

a reply to: ElGoobero
Thank you for the useful background.
isn't it also the case that removing Agnew became a necessary preliminary to dealing with Nixon, because nobody fancied the possibility of a President Agnew? He was almost Nixon's anti-impeachment insurance.

This is the fiftieth anniversary of an odd event which I experienced during a family holiday in Scotland.

We were in the middle of our annual caravan tour through the Scottish highlands. We were in Perthshire at the time. To be exact, we were on a caravan site in the Carse of Gowrie (an excellent road atlas was providing these local details). We had visited Glamis Castle the previous day. Our next planned move was to drive up into the Pass of Drummochtar and spend the night in the lay-by which we christened “wild sheep country”.

I was sitting, reading in the caravan, while my father and my brother had gone off to the camp shop for the usual supplies (newspapers, certainly, and probably bread and milk). Being impatient for them to return so that we could get on with the day, I looked out of the window and saw them coming near. That was satisfactory, so I returned to my book.

Several minutes passed, and they had not arrived on the scene, so I looked out again. Nobody was in sight. “Funny, I thought” (in my best Dudley Moore voice), and I returned to the book.

After several more minutes, I looked out for a third time, and there they were again. A few moments later, they were clattering up the steps and into the van, which is what I had been expecting the first time.

The odd event was something which I noticed at once and recorded on the day
I had seen them approaching twice, and the two images were identical.
Not only did they have the same appearance, side by side, with what they were carrying, but they had also reached the same point on the ground.
It was as if the first picture was a “preview” of the second.

I believe there’s a German or Scandinavian word for this kind of experience. I discovered one, once, but haven’t been able to track it down again.

I may as well add that the event had no consequences. It wasn’t an omen of anyone’s death, and it wasn’t the first of many similar experiences.
It was just something mildly puzzling.

The [DISRAELI] family were staying at a caravan site just outside Inverness. Before going on a day-trip up Glen Affric, we did some shopping in Inverness.
A newspaper placard on the street carried the news;

RUSSIANS
INVADE
CZECHOSLOVAKIA

This was another of the major traumatic events of the year.

(It was also, incidentally, the only time in my life that I learned about a big news story in the classic way, by a newspaper placard.)

IIRC this was the year of the Prague Spring as true liberals tried to advance the cause of freedom in Czechoslovakia and got smacked down by the Evil Empire.

the whole cold war thing was very sad. a generation of East / Central Europeans living in poverty and near slavery. very glad that the system collapsed without real civil war (which I think was a possibility). hopefully Cuba and Venezuela and North Korea will be free before long.

Alexander Dubcek and the other former leaders of the government of Czechoslovakia were taken to Russia to experience some friendly persuasion.

William Safire, one of the Nixon speech-writers, was at the Democrat Convention.

Nixon thought it would be a good idea to send a small delegation to the Democratic Convention, to take up a public "listening post" in the Conrad Hilton Hotel and put out statements shooting down the most outrageous Democratic claims or allegations. We had a difficult time getting big-name "surrogates", as they later came to be called, to be our spokesmen in the lonely Republican outpost in the midst of the maelstrom of the Democrats' '68 Convention, but finally the Governor of Colorado John Love- who always seemed to be the chairman of some Governors' Conference- agreed to come. He was teamed up with Don Rumsfeld, a dynamic young Congressman, and given "support" by Buchanan, Bill Timmons, and me.

Pat and I wandered into the Conrad Hilton lobby and were smitten by the stink bombs deposited there by demonstrators who wanted to inflict a degree of discomfort on delegates. I went out to the airport that afternoon to meet our star surrogate and brought him back through a chanting, laughing, snarling mob scene in the lobby; there were signs there that said "Make Love Not War". Governor Love waved gaily at the sign holders and thanked me for being such a good advance man...

...the noise of the guests trooping though our suite. The local Republicans had provided a pair of long-legged twins as secretary-hostesses who were more of an attraction than Governor Love or Cngressman Rumsfeld...

"Before the Fall"- pp60-61

It may be necessary to explain that "gaily" is just a heightened version of "cheerfully". The hi-jacking of the word means that the original concept can no longer be expressed.

Alexander Dubcek and the rest of the government of Czechoslovakia were in Moscow, experiencing the persuasive powers of the Russian leadership.
They now signed an agreement permitting Russian troops to remain in Czechoslovakia until further notice.
So they were allowed to return to their country and were not killed in a plane crash.

a reply to: starviego
At the Democrat National Convention in Chicago, the nomination of Hubert Humphrey.

William Safire was one of the Republican team "observing" events on the spot.

After Humphrey was nominated, we of the GOP's Poker Flat put out a statement. "The spectacle of Mayor Daley shouting "go on home" at Senator Ribicoff is a sure illustration of the fact that a party which cannot unite itself cannot unite the nation." (That wasn't really what Daley had profanely shouted, but it would do) Pat and I went into Grant Park at twilight and had a good whiff of tear gas, our first such experience, and came back to the suite to find pandemonium- the idea of a band of Nixonites with a good view of the park being at the Democratic headquarters hotel intrigued a lot of reporters. Prizefighter Jose Torres and novelist Norman Mailer were hanging out the window looking at the skull-cracking below. Pat Buchanan looked out as well, saw a police charge and the beatings of young demonstrators and murmured "Jesus, we better watch what we say about law and order." As the horror of that convention was displayed on television, the word came to us from Key Biscayne to sit tight and do nothing- anything we could say would detract from the way the Democrat party was tearing itself apart.

Willima Safire, "Before the Fall", pp60-61


Thanks to starviego for providing this link earlier in the thread.

(Humphrey, not Humphreys)

that convention was one of the low points of democrat party history.

reflection of the power of TV as this was being broadcast live nationwide.

a reply to: ElGoobero
Thank you, I have edited.
At least i didn't call him "Hubert Horatio Hornblower".

Hubert Humphrey, nominated the Democrat candidate, made his acceptance speech.
William Safire was one of the Republican team "observing" events in Chicago on Nixon's behalf. After the speech, he was called to the phone to speak to Nixon, being obliged to drag the telephone into the bathroom of their suite to get away from the noise of their guests. (This is the context of the explanation about long-legged twins acting as secretary-hostesses, which I quoted a couple of posts back).

"Did you write that?" Nixon asked me about Humphrey's speech. "No, thanks, nothing I ever wrote ran fifty minutes." "He could have gone through that in forty minutes, you know," Nixon said. "He let it drag. Hubert doesn't know how to talk to that tube."

Both men thought they recognised "new day" as an unconscious steal from Nixon's own acceptance speech.

Later Safire and Buchanan went out into the park again, observing the green-helmeted troops and blue-helmeted police lined up, the tear-gas lingering among the flower-beds, the bayonets and the shattered glass. "It was surreal, sickening, frightening."
Then after rubbish was dumped from the windows of their own hotel, the police came charging in and up to the floor occupied by the "kids" of the McCarthy head-quarters. Safire passed through and saw the devastation and the bloodied heads, and could not get over the fact that a political "sanctuary" had been invaded.
"The rape of the McCarthy suite was covered in the papers, but television was already under criticism for showing too much violence, and somehow this worst political atrocity of all was not impressed on the national consciousness."

William Safire, "Before the Fall", pp 61-62

Reflections on the 1968 Democrat National Convention in Chicago



___



The wreck of the Democrats
MURRAY KEMPTON
Chicago—The Democrats are routed before they have begun.
The spectacle of the Chicago streets last week must have been seen by everyone in the civilised world, except the more attentive delegates to the Democratic convention itself. Since I happened, by the mystery of events, to be myself a delegate, and since the scenes outside my range are any- thing but perishable in everyone else's memory, it seems best to depend on Senator McCarthy's observation that, when you've seen things like that, there is very little to say.

The consequences could be much more than the election of Mr Nixon, which was the prob- able result in any case, and which, before last week, could have been judged as no more than another transient interruption in the Democratic party's traditional sovereignty over our politics. What perished in this horror was the national Democratic party as it has existed in our history for exactly a generation now—an alliance between the Negro and the Southern Negro-baiter, between organised labour and the organised corporations, between the ward- heeler and the intellectual.
Vice-President Humphrey is the last candidate of that peculiar alliance; he has the support of Henry Ford and of Walter Reuther, of Governor John Connally of Texas and of Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, of Mayor Richard Daley and of a host of American political scientists. This coalition is as hollow within as it is brazen without.

The Vice-President, it can be safely said, will lose every large state—including New York, which alone seemed safe for him; and he could lose every state. The survival of any imperilled Democrat in the House or Senate will depend on the swiftest possible flight from him.
He is plainly in that pitiable state where everything a man does must worsen his condition. Last Saturday Congressman Gerald Ford, the House Republican leader, demanded that Congress investigate the 'indiscriminate use of force' which had 'appalled' so many Americans. The Republicans, having hoped to win on the issue of law and order, had immediately under- stood that the Democrats would be beaten just because they had enforced the law so viciously. Yet Mr Humphrey seemed unaware that his would be the first national party to lose an election by upholding law and order. It was time, he announced, after a day's reflection, to 'quit pre- tending that Mayor Daley did anything that was wrong' in the conduct of his police.

It must be said, to be as kindly as possible, that the Vice-President has again underlined the separation between the reality of the Democratic party's deeds and its rhetoric. The United States of America is considerably better than its enemies think it is; but last week everything that is wrong with it was on naked and brutal display. Mayor Daley's performance was a summation of the worst that has been said about our cities; it was impossible, seeing it, for any American not to know how the law is enforced in the Negro districts of Chicago. Yet Vice- President Humphrey abjectly echoed the Mayor's charge that his troops were provoked by a conspiracy to disrupt their city. There was, of course, such a conspiracy—if a publicly proclaimed plan to disrupt can be called a conspiracy. The demonstrators might very well have tried disorder if they bad been given the chance; the very point of the affair was that they had been clubbed down while they were in a state of comparative order. Everyone who has ever been a politician—if I may invoke the authority of four days of low-slung eminence at that profession—learns very soon, if he is remotely attentive, that it is a game of tennis more often decided by errors than aces. Mayor Daley's enemies cast up to him a soft lob; he drove it into the net and then blamed them.

Mayor Daley is, of course, one of the last of those big-city despots who contributed so much to Roosevelt's immense majorities. Being himself an antique, Vice-President Humphrey must pay him the homage due him for so many years so obviously long gone now. But Mayor Daley has now become a sectional politician like Bull Connor of. Birmingham, Alabama, or Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi—impossible to run against on his own turf and impossible to run with anywhere else in the country. The old alliance is not just broken; by now any one surviving symbol can be a cause of embarrassment to another.

As to Mr Humphrey, he can stand for the decay of the liberal American of tradition. Senator Goldwater visited a disaster on the Republicans because his character was too stern to bend to real politics. Vice-President Humphrey now leads the Democrats to catastrophe because he has no character at all and will bend to anything. His very speeches sound like police court confessions; one thinks of him in the backroom, now belted by Mr Johnson, now cajoled by someone else, and then pushed before the cameras to babble whatever came out of the confrontation of the good cop with the bad cop. He looks like Titus Oates in 1689.

This is all said with some affection. By a coincidence too surprising possibly to be detailed here, I was under arrest the night the poor man accepted his nomination and on the radio heard him, presumably to Mayor Daley's satisfaction, recite a prayer of St Francis. By another coincidence there was a Catholic divine beside me and I said, 'Oh, well, Father. After what the Franciscans did to the memory of St Francis, we can't really blame Mr Humphrey, can we?' At the sight of him, you forgive everyone's sins of omission.

What will happen? Senator McCarthy now says he will not run as an independent, although Mr Humphrey did the only thing that could make that danger a reality to him when he took his loyalty oath to Mayor Daley. In any case, the Democrats will be almost wiped out, to return a different party, possibly within two and certainly within four years. They will be led, of course, by Edward Kennedy, who, without effort, has been presented by the enemies of his family with a crown for which he showed no signs of having the will to struggle.

archive.spectator.co.uk...

Richard Nixon, a candidate for the Presidency of the United States, appeared on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-in and said "Sock it to me." A bucket of water was poured over him.

Turning to more serious matters, in the world of cricket, there were new developments in the "Dolly" affair.
The South African-born cricketer Basil D'Oliveira, being classed as a "Cape Coloured", had escaped apartheid restrictions by being naturalised in England. Earlier in the year, the M.C.C. (Marylebone Cricket Club), which selects the England cricket team, had courted controversy by failing to select him for the expected tour in South Africa. It was announced today that he was now being included in the team, to fill a vacancy. South Africa responded by cancelling the tour invitation.
The controversy had repurcussions in 1970, when a South Aftican cricket team toured England and was met by demonstrations. An episode of the satirical radio show, "I'm sorry, I'll read that again", included a song in which "the lads of the M.C.C." described themselves as "marching along with our heads in the sand, backwards when England calls..."

a reply to: DISRAELI

a bucket of water? is that the reason they call it watergate?