Wave Maker

The summer of 1968 was a very tumultuous time in America. All over America, people were rioting in the streets in opposition to the Vietnam War. Lyndon Johnson was under enormous pressure -- so much so that he announced that he would not run for re-election.

The Democratic Convention took place in Chicago that year. Party doves (Tip O'Neill among them) were desperate to insert a Vietnam War plank into the party platform calling for a halt in the bombing and a negotiated withdrawal, fearful that a failure to do so would doom the party's majorities in both the House and Senate. LBJ and the party stalwarts weren't budging.

Eugene McCarthy was the darling candidate of the anti-war movement. O'Neill sent his emissary, Robert Healy, to McCarthy's hotel suite to urge him to make an appearance on the convention floor and argue for the "peace plank."

The scene unfolded thus:

The insurgents vowed to take the issue to the convention floor. Johnson (for reasons of personal pride and foreign policy) and Humphrey (because he was firmly under Johnson's thumb) were not going to kow-tow to the peace forces in Chicago. The showdown began at Tuesday evening's session. Healy, still wearing two hats of activist and reporter, found McCarthy in the candidate's thwenty-third-floor suite with poet Robert Lowell and writer Shana Alexander.

"I said to him, 'It could really make a difference if you would go down to the convention and make the argument for the peace plank. I think it would only be fair for the kids who have busted their ass for you.' And Gene and Lowell look at each other and they start talking about early sounds of the morning," Healy recalled. "It was like a contest. Gene says, 'The drying out of a barn.' And Lowell says, 'The opening of a flower.' And Gene says, 'When a horse gets off the ground.' And they went on and on and on. Can you imagine that? Jeez, he was something else.***

(ed.: Healy does not report detecting any pungent aroma in the hotel suite.)


***Tip O'Neill and the Democratic Century, John Aloysius Farrell (2001).