Tag: Democratic Convention

1968-2008 FORTY YEARS SINCE THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION IN CHICAGO AND I WAS THERE

68chicago There they are.  While this was happening in front of the Chicago Hilton  I was first in the streets and then, as I’ve written before, upstairs helping to convert our McCarthy Campaign floor of rooms into a hospital.   The entire hotel reeked of the tear gas outside; everyone was scared, and angry, and sad.  I’ve told this story before, but it’s one day before the 2008 Democratic Convention — people are streaming into Denver, picking up their credentials, getting ready for welcome parties and scamming invitations… all forty years after this landmark in my life  and so many others.  Just take a look so you understand why these memories refuse to die.  And consider that the belief in Barack Obama today, which so many equate with the impact of John Kennedy, is also much like the hope engendered in us in those days.  I suspect it’s where a lot of the boomer support for Obama began. 

I wonder if you can imagine what it felt like to be 22 years old, totally idealistic and what they call “a true believer” and to see policemen behave like that.  To see Chicago Mayor Richard Daley call the first Jewish Senator, Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, a “kike” (you had to read his lips – there was no audio but it was pretty clear) and to see your friends, and colleagues, and some-time beloveds with black eyes and bleeding scalps.  To be dragged by a Secret Service agent from your place next to Senator McCarthy by the collar of your dress as he addressed the demonstrators, battered, bruised and angry. To see everything you’d worked for and believed in decimated in the class, generational and political warfare.

That’s how it was.  I’ve been thinking about it a lot, of course, on this momentous anniversary – when hopefully another, happier landmark will emerge in the extraordinary nomination of Senator Obama. I’ve been to every Convention from 1968 until this year.  It’s kind of sad to break the chain after 40 years but I think I’m ready.  I did a workshop on convention coverage at the BlogHer conference to pass the torch; I’m so excited for all the women who are going.  Just as Senator Obama is a generation behind me – in his 40s to my 60s – a little kid when we faced billy clubs and tear gas in his home town, so are many of the bloggers credentialed to cover the week.  I know it will be great for them and that they’ll make certain we know – in twitteriffic detail, what’s going on.

I know too that, 40 years from now, it will still be a milestone
memory in their lives.    I started to write “hopefully, a happier one”
but despite all the agony of those terrible days in 1968, I’m embarrassed to tell you that I wouldn’t trade the memory.  It’s so deep in my soul and so much a part of my understanding of myself and who I’ve become that despite the horrors within it, I cherish its presence.  So, what I wish my sisters in Denver (and Minnesota) is to have conventions — happy or not — as important to their lives, sense of history and purpose and political values as Chicago was to mine.  Along with, of course, the fervent hope that this time, there will be something closer to a happy ending.

FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

Rfk_bw_2By the time Robert Kennedy decided to run for President, in March of 1968, just days after Eugene McCarthy’s great New Hampshire primary showing  demonstrated President Lyndon Johnson’s weakness and the real unpopularity of the Vietnam war, I was already neck-deep in McCarthy’s campaign.  I’d been involved since the summer before, in what, before McCarthy agreed to run, we called Dump Johnson.  When Allard Lowenstein (himself assassinated in 2000), recruited us for it at the 1967 National Student Association (NSA) meeting, he’d  say "You can’t beat somebody (LBJ) with nobody."  So he had worked very hard to get Bobby to run, but he refused. 

It was Gene McCarthy who agreed to stand for all of us against the Johnson administration and the war.  After NSA I organized the Smith campus.  We were among the first students to go each weekend to New Hampshire to work for McCarthy and against the war.  So when Kennedy announced, just days after our great New Hampshire triumph, that he would also run, we were devastated, and angry. 

Over the months of campaigning though, I came to have enormous respect for Senator Kennedy and his campaign.  There was no way to watch him without feeling the power of his connection with all kinds of Americans and his compassion, poetry and sense of justice.  This moment, just as an inner city Indianapolis neighborhood learned of the death of Martin Luther King, is typical of him at his best:
 

By June the campaign was tense; such an important issue and the two Senators were running against one another as well as (and sometimes, it seemed, instead of) the war.  Kennedy won Indiana.  McCarthy won Oregon.  We moved south to Los Angeles(one of many places I saw for the first time from a campaign bus) criss-crossing the state from Chico to San Francisco and back to LA.  Just before the midnight after the primary, as June 4, 1968, election day, became June 5, we knew we’d lost, so we went to Senator’s concession in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton and then back upstairs to mourn.  We weren’t even watching the rest of coverage.  Suddenly, running through the halls of the staff floor of the hotel, one of McCarthy’s closest advisors shouted "Turn on the TV!  They’ve done it again!" 

Continue reading FORTY YEARS AGO IN 1968: BOBBY KENNEDY AND WHAT CAME AFTER

SO LONG GOVERNOR RICHARDS

When I worked at the TODAY SHOW as political producer I had a deal with both parties that they would call and give me a heads up when they named their keynote speakers.  That way I could call and book them to be on the show the morning of their speech — and get them before the other shows.  In 1988 I got a call on a Saturday morning to let me know that the Democrats had chosen Texas Governor Ann Richards.  I was frantic.  It was a weekend.  How would I find her?  How would I get her phone number?  I called the NBC affiliate in Austin.  They had no home number.  I called the AP.  Ditto.  I called a couple of political friends – no luck.  So then, on a lark (you can guess the end of this story I bet) I called information.  Yup.  She was listed in the phone book!  I called, she answered, and we got her first.  She was a riot on the phone, too.  I asked her about listing her number and she seemed genuinely amused- why shouldn’t she list her number like everyone else?  Governor Richards died yesterday, September 13, 2006 at 73.

Probably that speech was one of the high points of her career.  Funny and a bit mischievous, it pushed class angles to differentiate between the parties, and it’s remembered far beyond Michael Dukakis, the candidate who eventually lost to the first President Bush. Bush himself often seemed awkward.  Said Richards, “Poor George, he can’t help it — he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”  She brought down the house.

But President Bush’s opponent, Michael Dukakis, lost resoundingly. Richards was elected governor in 1991 (12th of the only 28 women ever to serve at governors) and served one term – losing her bid for re-election, ironically – to the son of the man she had so mocked –  George W. Bush.    In her later years she worked for a lobbying firm that included several tobacco accounts, to the dismay of many of her fans.

But this self-made country girl, recovering alcoholic ( and biker – see this photo) led her state with imagination and humor, wrote a wonderful autobiography that made the Depression come alive and set a great example for the emerging crew of women politicians.  Those who followed her gained much from her pioneering leadership – and we’ll miss her.