Here it is:
I didn’t vote for Hubert Humphrey for president in 1968. Humphrey lost to Richard Nixon, by less than one percent. And as Andy Young had warned me, it’s been (almost) all downhill from there.
Not that I voted for Nixon instead. Or for George Wallace, the fiery segregationist Alabama governor, who carried five deep southern states that year.
Instead, I didn’t vote at all.
I’m not proud of it; but my feelings and regrets are not the point here.
After all, my shunning of the polls didn’t matter locally: I was in Massachusetts then, which Humphrey won by a landslide 63%.
But it wasn’t me personally who Andy Young came to talk to, on a chilly autumn day. And it was still hard, or even impossible for many of us to hear his message.
I don’t remember a lot of my generation’s statistics — but I lived them. In 1968, in my age group, many, maybe most of us felt the same way: offended, alienated, outraged, desperately against an evil war.
And not least, in danger from it. In 1967 and ’68, as the presidential campaign took shape, nearly 28,000 America troops had been killed in Vietnam, at the rate of 400 per week. A rough but plausible estimate is that twice as many, around 60,000 more, were seriously wounded in those months.
But more than half a million Americans had been drafted into the military in those two years, with millions more on the draft rolls, awaiting their fate.
Personally, I was recently out of the draft’s clutches, having done alternative service that ended in early 1968. But being done with the draft didn’t mean the war was over for me. I was surrounded by peers, just a few years younger, who were immediately at risk.
And beyond those circles, there were hundreds of thousands of veterans returning from combat, not physically “wounded,” but soon to bear the ravages of what was only later called PTSD.
Antiwar protests were widespread, and continuing on campus and off. Besides U.S. casualties, the war was killing Vietnamese, especially civilians, at an astonishing, horrifying rate, several millions in all, though estimates very widely.
In the face of all this, president Lyndon Johnson stuck by the war even as it ruined his previously spectacular record of domestic social progress, in civil rights, antipoverty efforts, the start of Medicare and much more.
Looking back, Johnson’s fall from grace was breathtakingly fast: he was driven to end his bid for re-election by early March that year.
But he didn’t let go easily. His vice president, Minnesota’s eternally optimistic Hubert Humphrey, had been loyal and subservient (the word “Pence” whispers in my inward ear sometimes, provoking a shudder). It seemed clear that Hubert wanted out from under the Vietnam incubus, but Johnson was still the boss, even after Humphrey got the nomination that summer at the Chicago convention.
Speaking of Chicago: convention antiwar protests there were met by what sane observers called a police riot, which burned a series of nightly images of mayhem and disorder into the public memory.

Humphrey left the convention with the nomination, but dogged by an aura of weakness in the face of disorder, and still waffling on the war.
This went on through the fall, and its ugly campaign. I warmly despised Nixon and his dog-whistle racist “Law and Order” slogan; but In my specimen capacity, revulsion against Humphrey’s indecisiveness was likewise undimmed the day I learned that Andrew Young, one of Dr. Martin Luther King’s top coworkers, was speaking on the campus at Harvard, trying to entice some of us back in to the fold. Out of respect for him and our mutual martyred leader, I went to hear what he had to say.
Many threw angry questions at Andy, mainly about the war, and condemning Humphrey’s perceived unwillingness to break with it. He didn’t try to defend either Hubert, or the war. But he delivered a message from our own future, with a dose of plain wisdom that now seems so obvious, and utterly contemporary.
It was, in sum: elections are about imperfect but binary choices, and all that Andy and Dr. King had worked for in the South was at stake here. Andy boiled it down into a four-word mantra:
“Remember the Supreme Court.”
But I didn’t remember that November; nor did too many others of my generation. Humphrey came very close, but lost.
I have remembered all that many times since then, with deepening regret. Andy Young’s mantra, or prophecy, soon began to come true: in September1971, now president Nixon nominated William Rehnquist to the Supreme Court.
Looking back, it seems clear that Rehnquist’s elevation marked the beginning of the (now massive) reversal (at all governmental levels) of civil (and other) rights that Andy Young predicted. Top reporters have established that Rehnquist had a long segregationist record and had been very active in major voter suppression efforts directed at Hispanic and nonwhite voters in Arizona.
He had also been a close advisor to segregation-supporting Senator Barry Goldwater in the senator’s 1964 anti-civil rights presidential campaign. Rehnquist’s record was deeply sleazy, but was successfully obscured during his confirmation by the Senate.
Rehnquist’s subsequent labor of rolling back progress is long; my pick for its nadir and deepest blow to our Republic was the fifth vote he provided in December 2000, which gave the presidency to George W. Bush.
Others can pick different decisions; there are many. But Bush v. Gore was a direct and key link in the steadily lengthening chain of reaction and corruption that has delivered us into the venal hands the present Supreme Court majority. Its calamitous record for all men (and women) is far from finished, and the prospect of more vacancies to come within a few years should be unnerving.
There’s plenty of anger and turmoil in the younger sectors of the generation that now face the presidential choice of 2024.
I wonder if they will draw back from the folly of vengeful indifference that too many in my cohort fell into in 1968.
I don’t know the future.
But I think I know that it will be worse if another generation ignores Andy Young’s profoundly simple plea that I disregarded:
Remember the Supreme Court.
In Fall of ’68 I had just moved to Nashville, from Mass., for grad school. I hadn’t transferred my voter registration (figured it was possibly too late, and beside my vote wasn’t needed in the Prez race, and the Dems were going to win the rest of the positions that mattered in any case.
So, I volunteered with the Nashville Dems to be a poll watcher. They assigned me to a poor white “transitional” neighborhood. I saw a number of folks coming in who looked to be on hard times: each came in with a small square of paper. I knew what that was (“here’s $5 and here’s who to vote for” — big money for a street alcoholic).
Breaking all the rules that were never told to me, I went up to one of these paid voters, and saw:
Gore
Nixon
Gore was Al’s father and was running for Senator. He won.
My heart sank: at that moment I knew there was a division in our country that was stronger and deeper that anyone (except LBJ) suspected.
The lessons we needed then, and still need now, start with Arlie Hochschild’s “Strangers In Their Own Land”.
What a relevant story for the high-stakes drama we are unfortunately mired in at this time. Thanks.
Thanks for reminding us of that worst-best of times. You wrote, also, “I was recently… done alternative service that ended in early 1968. ”
I had recently started (fall 1967) my alternative service–working in a mental hospital near Philadelphia, rooming with 3 other conscientious objectors (Mennonites), my bed behind the couch since there was only one bedroom.
But in 1968 after the other 3 finished, I was evicted from the apartment for having anti-war signs on my Chevy van (the Mystical Hippoptomas:-). And lived in my van on an island near Newtown, fording the stream every day to go to work. Back then I first attended a Quaker meeting of young adults in Philly.
The night of the Democratic Convention, of course, I was hoping for Eugene McCarthy, but got so devastated when he lost that I forgot I was listening on my car radio. When I needed to leave for work the next morning–dead battery:-( A bad warning of the future… It seems like you are correct–it’s been mostly down the abyss ever since in American politics.
Great memory, Dan! “They also serve, who overcome a dead battery to get to work!” I listened to most of the ‘68 Chicago Dem convention on radio myself (plugged in, tho), and for much of it almost felt like I was there in Grant Park. I hope we come thru this re-run of that in better shape . . .