It was déjà vu all over again for me on April 30, when the NYPD removed pro-Palestinian protesters sitting in at Columbia University’s Hamilton Hall. That brought back memories of April 30, 1968, when the NYPD forcibly broke up sit-ins at Hamilton Hall and other campus buildings by students protesting plans to build a de facto segregated gym on public parkland. The students were also protesting the Vietnam War by demanding that Columbia cut ties with the Institute for Defense Analysis, a consortium that provided strategy and weapons research for the Pentagon.
Then as now, I was living in an apartment just a block from the Columbia campus. But in 1968, the police intervention was far more brutal and undisciplined. The screams of students resonated in my ears while I watched from my window as club-wielding police officers chased young people down the block toward Riverside Park.
That night marked the start of a radicalization process that left me, like many others, alienated from the system. There was no way I could support the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey. Only years later did I realize that I was mistaken, and we missed an opportunity to have a president who might actually have made America great by championing racial justice, labor rights, and the war against poverty.
I hope that today’s campus protesters don’t repeat our mistakes by abandoning President Joe Biden, who already has a proven record of accomplishments in his first term. The anti-Vietnam War protests were much larger and more widespread than this year’s demonstrations on campuses. And the passions were possibly more intense back then because U.S. troops were directly involved, and the draft loomed over young American men.
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But it raises my hackles when I hear some demonstrators refer to Biden as “Genocide Joe.” Donald Trump is far worse than Richard M. Nixon ever was, and the Republican Party was reasonably sane back then. And as we’ve seen in recent presidential elections, the outcome can be decided by just a few thousand votes in key swing states.
Back in April 1968, I was a 17-year-old high school senior looking forward to graduation and starting my freshman year at the University of Chicago. Already the year had seen the North Vietnamese Tet Offensive in January, which countered the claims by President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration that the U.S. and its South Vietnamese allies were winning the war.
March saw an upheaval in U.S. politics as anti-war candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota received a stunning 42% of the vote in the New Hampshire Democratic primary; Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York entered the race for the Democratic presidential nomination; and Johnson announced that he would not seek reelection.
On April 4, Civil Rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, which led to riots in more than 100 cities nationwide.
Kennedy offered the last best hope of healing the divisions within the Democratic Party and adopting a peace platform to end the war in Vietnam. But his assassination on June 5 at a Los Angeles hotel right after the senator had won the California primary was a crushing blow. The assassin Sirhan Sirhan, who was born into a Palestinian family, has said he hated Kennedy for his support of Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. His assassination coincided with the first anniversary of the war in which Israel captured Arab territories, including the Gaza Strip.
I had come to Chicago ahead of freshman orientation week at the University of Chicago and worked as a volunteer for McCarthy’s campaign. We set up a McCarthy literature table in Chicago’s Old Town nightlife district on Sunday, Aug. 25, on the eve of the Democratic National Convention’s opening day. Then shortly after 11 PM, police violently drove anti-war protesters out of Lincoln Park to enforce a curfew, and the streets were full of police officers clubbing protesters and using tear gas. The Second City comedy club opened its doors to provide refuge until the situation quieted down.
On the convention’s final day, I joined a march led by McCarthy delegates down Michigan Avenue toward the International Amphitheater. When police blocked the march several miles from the convention site, the wife of a McCarthy delegate gave me her guest pass to attend the convention. I wanted to heckle Humphrey during his acceptance speech, but as soon as I held up my McCarthy sign I got rushed out of the visitors’ gallery by city workers that Mayor Richard J. Daley had sent to pack the house.
This year, Democrats will once again be holding their convention in Chicago. But the party is united behind Biden, and Chicago has a progressive Black mayor in Brandon Johnson. However, there still remains the possibility of disruptive protests during the convention if the Israel-Hamas war drags on until August.
In 1968, young radicals like myself vilified Humphrey, who as a senator was probably more liberal than Biden and played a lead role in the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. During the campaign, protesters would frequently chant “Dump the Hump” or hold placards bearing slogans like “Killer of Babies.”
While some on the left harbored fantasies of a revolution that would change the country, Republican nominee Richard M. Nixon was exploiting the backlash against the campus protests to campaign as the “law-and-order” candidate representing the “silent majority.” Trump is using the same playbook today, despite his four criminal indictments.
Nixon promised “an honorable end to the war in Vietnam” without disclosing any details about his peace plan. Only decades later did we learn that Nixon had sabotaged the October 1968 Paris Peace Talks for his political benefit, which delayed a U.S. pullout from South Vietnam until 1973. With Democrats divided, Nixon ended up winning a close election by a margin of 43.4% to 42.7% over Humphrey in the popular vote, with Alabama’s pro-segregation Gov. George Wallace getting 13.5%.
But Yale historian Michael Brenes, in a 2018 New York Times op-ed, said that during the 1968 campaign Humphrey was calling for a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam and looking for a U.S. exit strategy from the war. Despite his differences with Johnson over the war, Humphrey was a strong supporter of LBJ’s ambitious Great Society social reform plan aimed at ending poverty, abolishing inequality, and improving the environment. It’s the program that brought us Medicare, Medicaid, and the Head Start preschool initiative.
Brenes wrote about what might have happened had Humphrey won the election:
Humphrey would have immediately searched for a political solution to the war—for the conflict to end peacefully, and without further military commitment. Needless to say, he also would have continued to expand the Great Society, and not begin its long demolition, as Nixon did.
For these reasons, Humphrey represents the possibilities for a different history for the United States after 1968, particularly for Democrats looking today to rebuild their party and understand the mistakes of the past.
Just months after the presidential election, I was suspended from the University of Chicago for two semesters for taking part in a sit-in at the administration building. That was probably the best thing that happened to me because I ended up getting a job as a copy clerk at the Chicago Sun-Times that was the stepping stone to my career as a journalist. I also edited and wrote for underground newspaper CAMP News about the GI resistance movement. Some members of the University of Chicago’s Students for a Democratic Society chapter followed a destructive path as co-founders of the Weather Underground, a militant revolutionary Marxist group that carried out a bombing campaign.
As a correspondent in Poland, I did get to witness and write about a real revolution in the 1980s that helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet empire, namely the Solidarity free trade union movement.
Today, I consider myself a pragmatic progressive. This election’s stakes couldn’t be higher, because Trump represents a far greater threat to our democracy than Nixon ever did. And we can’t repeat the mistakes of the past.
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