RHP: Not until now. There would not have been as much publicity, because we were the middle class kids they wanted to use as examples of what could happen to nice, respectable families. If we had been black kids from Hamilton Hill, I think they would have put us away without so much fanfare. And probably with felonies on our records, not as youthful offenders.
JB: I think you're right on target with that. More about your jumping into the Gene McCarthy campaign. You were just a kid. What could you do? What did you do? Tell us more about that, please.
Campaign poster for McCarthy
(Image by poster belonging to a personal friend of Richard's) Details DMCA
RHP: I had the most important job in the campaign. I was the Youth Coordinator. It was my job to get all the kids who were under twenty-one, and too young to vote, to volunteer for the children's crusade. I think they picked me because I was politically astute and because I was a nice kid. We were trying to stop the Vietnam War, and we needed to show that we were respectful people, not crazy radicals. I got kids who were still in junior high school to devote long hours to the campaign -- writing letters, making phone calls, canvassing door to door. Nobody told me that mine was the most important job. I found that out later.
After I signed up with the McCarthy campaign, Robert Kennedy entered the race. I would not defect. I stayed with the man who had the courage to challenge Lyndon Johnson in the first place. But all the McCarthy kids would have supported Kennedy, and all the Kennedy kids would have supported McCarthy, whichever one got nominated. The importance of stopping the war was greater than any of us. But Martin Luther King was killed, and Robert Kennedy was killed, and during a tumultuous convention in Chicago, with blood in the streets and within the McCarthy headquarters, the party regulars nominated Hubert Humphrey who had not won a single primary. After watching on television the Chicago police in riot gear beating the heads of protestors with billy clubs, I landed in the hospital with a nervous breakdown.
McCarthy actually won the New York primary, winning a clear majority of the elected delegates. Kennedy, now deceased, came in second. Humphrey ran third. But many of the delegates were chosen by the party committee, and Humphrey ended up with three quarters of those, on the grounds that voter turnout in the primary was only 25%, and all the people who didn't vote in the primary must have been for Humphrey. That's the way it worked back then. Only fifteen states had presidential primaries. Most of the delegates to the national convention were chosen by the state committees. You could win all the primaries and still lose the nomination.
JB: What changed between 1968 and 1972?
RHP: The delegates at the 1968 convention knew that they needed to make the nominating process more democratic, so they established a commission for this purpose. George McGovern, then a little known Senator from South Dakota, was put in charge. The commission drafted new rules requiring that, henceforth, no more than 10% of the convention delegates could be chosen by the state committees, and this led directly to the nationwide system of primaries and caucuses that we have today.
George McGovern was a man who had been "right from the start". His very first speech on the floor of the Senate, way back in January 1963, had been in opposition to the Vietnam War. And he had an advantage that McCarthy did not. Understanding very well the new rules that his commission had written, McGovern competed in all the primaries and caucuses and won the presidential nomination in 1972. The insurgents had taken control of the Democratic Party.
But it didn't turn out well. Whereas Hubert Humphrey had lost narrowly to Richard Nixon in 1968, George McGovern lost 49 states to Richard Nixon in 1972. Baby boomers still have vivid memories of this devastating defeat, which explains their reluctance to nominate an insurgent candidate (such as Bernie Sanders). But the truth is that McGovern never had a chance. No Democrat could have defeated President Nixon. Humphrey had come close only because George Wallace, the segregationist Governor of Alabama, had run as a third party candidate in 1968, winning 13.5% of the vote nationwide and carrying five southern states. Wallace was expected to mount another third party campaign in 1972, but a would-be assassin shot him and left him in a wheelchair. Nixon was a sure bet to win over nearly all of the Wallace voters. Humphrey had won a majority of the vote in only five states, and had come close to a majority in only three others. In a two-person race, there was no path to victory for McGovern.
JB: Sanders-McGovern analogies have been popping up all over the place. And it is timely to ask, being in the middle of the Democratic primaries, how much the process has changed since then.
RHP: Some things have changed. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment, ratified in 1971, lowered the voting age to eighteen. The electorate has changed; everyone who was old enough to vote in 1972 is now 66 or older. The voters are more liberal; opinion polls show that Sanders could win both the popular vote and the electoral college in a two-person race, which was never true for McGovern. This is mainly due to younger voters. According to the initial exit polls for this year's Democratic primaries in 16 states (as first released, at the moment the polls closed), support for Sanders among voters aged 18-29 ranged from 46% in South Carolina to 82% in Michigan. In contrast, among voters aged 65 and older, support for Sanders ranged from 8% (in four states) to 23% in Michigan. (I have excluded the numbers from Vermont, his home state, so as not to skew the data).
Some things have not changed. Older voters turn out more reliably than younger voters. According to 2010 United States census data, 22% of the voting age population were 18-29, 26% were 30-44, 35% were 45-64, and 17% were 65 and older. According to the exit polls for this year's Democratic primaries in 17 states (as first released, at the moment the polls closed), voters aged 18-29 were far fewer than 22% of the electorate, ranging from 7% in Alabama to 18% in Minnesota. Voters aged 65 and older were far more than 17% of the electorate, ranging from 23% in Michigan to 38% in Oklahoma. I don't mean to be critical, but my message to young people is this: If you want to bring about change in this world, you have to show up.
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