As this year’s Democratic Convention in Chicago approached, comparisons with the last Chicago Convention, in 1968, were both widespread and understandable. Like 2024, with wars raging abroad and unrest growing at home, with shots fired at political figures, with an incumbent president withdrawing from the race, and with, as a young reporter (my father) put it in 1968, “a mounting sense of powerlessness in the face of events,” 1968 was a tumultuous year in American history.
Almost by osmosis, the disruptions of that year resonated in my family. My father, who was 38, had gone in a few short years from covering Jersey City politics in the John V. Kenny era to covering national politics and the White House for the Newark Evening News. Next to the police beat, he viewed covering Hudson County politics as the best training ground for a young reporter. (“The issues become more important, and the job titles more elevated” he liked to say, “but the people don’t improve.”) Journalism – educating the public about the issues of the day — was more than a job; it was a calling. His bag was always packed.
Beginning in late 1967, with the March on the Pentagon in opposition to the war in Vietnam, he used that packed bag a lot. Even when he was in Washington, he was simply not home much. He called my mother from under a desk in the Pentagon as it was stormed by angry war protesters. Increasingly, Mom held the family of four young kids together while Dad was off reporting on a world that seemed to be falling apart.
As the country dissolved into chaos, he was around less and less. When the presidential campaign began, he was on the road covering the candidates, first Gene McCarthy and then Robert Kennedy. He filed story after story from around the country; he was in Wisconsin with Eugene McCarthy when President Johnson announced he would not seek reelection.
Two days later he was back in Washington at a Democratic fundraiser at the Washington Hilton when the word came that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated. He reported on the “mounting sense of powerlessness in the face of events” that gripped the well-heeled Democratic supporters.
He confided later in life that 1968 challenged his hard-won journalistic objectivity. His experience in combat in Korea – he was a corporal in Army intelligence on the front lines, interrogating captured Chinese officers, being nearly overrun by thousands of Chinese soldiers, watching an entire hillside of enemy soldiers incinerated by napalm — led him to despise so-called “chicken hawk” politicians who didn’t serve and to lean toward sympathy with the demonstrators against the war in Vietnam. When he watched Robrt Kennedy announce the King assassination extemporaneously in Indianapolis and single-handedly move the crowd past the anger stage to grief, he thought that speech exhibited an unrehearsed greatness worthy of a president.
He returned home to cover the March on Washington and Resurrection City after King’s assassination, then followed RFK to Oregon and then to Los Angeles. He was walking with the crowd behind Kennedy through the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel when Sirhan Sirhan assassinated Kennedy. He dictated the story of the shooting from a payphone at the hospital and was hospitalized himself briefly when hot television lights burned his back. The article was straight news interlaced with restrained grief. “Pierre Salinger, press secretary to the late President Kennedy who was assisting in Robert Kennedy’s campaign here, revived painful memories when he stood before cameras in the hospital gymnasium to announce arrangements for Robert Kennedy’s funeral. … In [Frank Mankiewicz’s] grief, he forgot to mention that Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, the late Senator’s younger brother, and Joseph, his oldest son .. were in the fifth-floor room when Robert Kennedy died. Edward is now the last survivor of the four sons of former Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy.”
The Newark News would mail the papers to our address in Northern Virginia; I turned 11 years old that summer, and would await the arrival of the manila envelopes, devouring the stories as they came in a day or two after they were published. Sometimes I got to them even before my mother, who at 94 remembers that year as the time “the whole country had a nervous breakdown.” Those articles were, in essence, how I stayed connected with my Dad that year. Reading them became an obsession; because of that intense focus, they imprinted in my mind. I read them as though he were writing them to me.
As the Democrats met once again this year in Chicago, and the obvious parallels of 2024 to 1968 were drawn, I remembered that summer’s strife. Thanks to a superb digitization project of the Newark Public Library, I was able to retrieve many of those articles, some of which are linked in this essay.
All of the nation’s contradictions and conflicts converged on Chicago that year as the Democrats convened. The pages of the Newark News that week were filled with stories of the conflicts that were tearing the city and country apart. My father covered the machinations of the New Jersey delegation as various proposals challenging the seating of delegates were debated and rejected; he was tear gassed covering the antiwar demonstrations outside the convention hall that turned into a violent confrontation between the protesters and police; and, most tellingly, he wrote an analysis piece after the prevailing candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, defeated a motion to include a “peace plank” provision in the party’s platform. The provision, widely considered a repudiation of the administration’s policy, was defeated narrowly after bitter debate.
“[T]he vote here,” he wrote, “the tumultuous demonstrations and denunciations it produced on the floor, and the ugly violence it generated on downtown streets, have set Democrat against Democrat. It was a portrait of a party unraveling.”
Congressman John Conyers, future head of the Congressional Black Caucus, expressed the growing belief among civil rights activists that future progress domestically was linked to ending the Vietnam War. “I cannot continue to tell those in the ghettos and the slums across America that this administration cannot produce new programs for the cities because every time I submit one my party leaders tell me that the war in Vietnam prevents it.” When the so-called peace plank was defeated, delegates on the convention floor began spontaneously to sing “We Shall Overcome.” A group of peace activists adjourned to a private meeting at the Drake Hotel to discuss whether they could support the nominee, and to consider forming running an independent candidate who favored peace. Daniel Gaby, chair of the Eugene McCarthy caucus in the New Jersey delegation, said that if Humphrey ran on the Vietnam plank as adopted, he would stay home and “mow my lawn” on election day.
Nor was Vietnam the only legacy issue Humphrey carried into the presidential campaign. The southern states were essential to Humphrey’s effort to defeat the Vietnam peace plank, but their bitterness over the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts and the adoption of federal “great society” programs also reached a boiling point. As the convention proceeded, Governor Lester Maddox of Georgia abandoned the Democratic party and endorsed populist George Wallace of Alabama, who would go on to win 13% of the popular vote and five southern states. The southern states, for decades “the solid south” of the Democratic party, have never really returned.
What was clear, the piece concluded, was that Vice President Humphrey’s campaign would be run in the deep shadows cast by controversial administration policies, the war in Vietnam, and the alienation of southern Democrats.
One might make a similar argument about Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign. The administration’s “all in” support for the way Israel is conducting the war in Gaza, and its seeming lack of influence over Israeli decisions despite that support, have divided the party. And its handling of the border issue, which Vice President Harris was supposed to lead, has been widely viewed, at least until recently, as a failure. The nation, moreover, is more deeply polarized than at any time since the Vietnam War. For better or worse, Vice President Harris, like Humphrey before her, owns the record of the Biden administration as she campaigns.
Given those similarities to 1968, however, it is remarkable how differently this year’s Democratic Convention played out in both style and substance. There were thousands protesting outside the arena over the war in Gaza, climate change, and other issues, but no large-scale violence, and little stomach to repudiate Biden administration policies. Instead of widespread rancor in the convention hall, the mood appeared consistently joyous. In contrast to President Johnson, who didn’t appear at the convention in 1968, President Biden keynoted the first night and was celebrated for his statesmanship in stepping down in favor of Harris. The Obamas brought down the house on day two, the roll call of the states was a dance party, Bill Clinton showed flashes of his disarming wit, and Governor Tim Walz was folksy and fiery at the same time.
Vice President Harris, it must be said, was magnificent. Her life story embodies the possibilities of the American experiment. Her belief in that vision of America harmonizes with President Obama’s and with every president since Lincoln who has asked us to summon the “better angels of our nature” to move America closer to the nation of our ideals. At the same time, she has prosecuted hard cases, she has navigated difficult issues, she has shattered some glass ceilings. She is a rare confection of pragmatism and idealism, and she has tapped, I think, a deep need in the country to look for the best in each other. She is unabashedly patriotic. Perhaps most important, she managed to position herself as the challenger, the agent of necessary change, despite her incumbency.
Are there fault lines to straddle? No question. Her rhetoric about the war in Gaza – emphatically supporting Israel’s right to defend itself and condemning Hamas as a terrorist organization, while acknowledging the suffering of the Palestinians and validating their rights – will be difficult to sustain, especially if the conflict escalates. And it isn’t clear that former President Trump’s signature issue – border security – will recede because of Trump’s cynical opposition to a bipartisan border security bill.
But Chicago 2024, in contrast to 1968, was a triumph. I know one former reporter who would have loved to be there to cover it, living out of his suitcase, and, over drinks at the Drake Hotel, arguing long into the night about the wonders and promise of American politics, ending the night with a raised glass and a smile: Slainte, America!
John J. Farmer, Jr. served as Attorney General of New Jersey, Acting Governor, Counsel to the Governor, Director of the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University, Dean of the Rutgers Law School, and Chairman of the Congressional Redistricting Commission.