A Note To Angry/Sad Bernieites
Through the spring of 1968, it seemed as if our insurgency had a chance. But instead, history and the machine intervened: history in the form of an assassin’s bullets which killed Bobby Kennedy in California, just after he’d won the state’s Democratic primary and was poised to overtake McCarthy and snatch the Democratic nomination.
The machine was that mostly faceless gaggle of party regulars and bosses like Mayor Richard J. Daley of Chicago, who seemed to revel in the head-busting that his cops were giving the punks like me outside.
By the time it was all over, Eugene McCarthy had faded, Humphrey had the nomination, and I was sick in my heart and soul.
I was, I vowed, not going to vote for Humphrey, who had not yet found the cojones to speak out about ending the Vietnam War. Even if that meant turning over the White House to the likes of Richard Nixon. (I didn’t really hate Nixon then, mostly just disdained him; but he soon enough earned as much hate as I could manage, notwithstanding he, like me, was a Quaker.)
Andrew Young, who brought us a mantra we didn’t want to hear.