OREGON, 1968. A PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY THAT MATTERED
PRE-PRIMARY
In 1966 as Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Robert Kennedy of New York campaigned for Democratic congressional candidates on college campuses, Humphrey was greeted by hecklers and Kennedy by mobs of squealers and jumpers of all ages. Kennedy was an outspoken critic of President Johnson’s Vietnam policies and had a large base of support. Despite Harris and Gallup polls showing him the preferred candidate over President Lyndon Johnson in 1968, Kennedy repeatedly insisted he would not be a candidate “under any foreseeable circumstances” words he later had to eat.
In the 1966 senatorial race in Oregon, Howard Morgan, a critic of the Vietnam policy, challenged Congressman Robert Duncan who supported it, for the Democratic nomination. Morgan, a member of the Federal Power Commission under President John F. Kennedy and former Chairman of the Oregon Democratic Party, received 34.5 percent of the vote on his single issue campaign. It was the first important campaign involving Vietnam to present an anti administration choice on a state-wide basis. The Morgan vote was an indicator of the deepening anti administration feeling. Duncan won only to be defeated by dove Republican Governor Mark Hatfield. Morgan’s campaign manager, Blaine Whipple, was the Democratic nominee for Congress from Oregon’s First District in 1962 and was one of only 10 congressional candidates that year to be endorsed by the Council to Abolish War, a national organization that supported peace candidates.
Many individuals concerned about Vietnam began forming committees of doctors, lawyers, businessmen, clergy, laymen, and students in 1967 and developed a communication network across state lines. Their numbers grew significantly and mushroomed after they found a candidate.
On Aug. 15, 1967, at a convention of the National Student Association in Madison, Wis., Allard K. Lowenstein and Curtis Gans formally launched a Dump Johnson movement. On Aug. 31, the National Conference for a New Politics conducted a 5-day convention in Chicago attended by 3,000 delegates to discuss electoral strategy for 1968. On Oct. 8, the Democratic Party announced the National Convention would be held in Chicago and on Oct. 20, Lowenstein met with Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy who agreed to be the movement’s candidate.
On Oct. 21-22, the National Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE) drew 100,000 to a demonstration at the Pentagon. On Nov. 18, Republican Gov. George Romney of Michigan announced his candidacy for president saying “A Republican president can work for a just peace in Vietnam unshackled by the mistakes of the past.” On Nov. 30, McCarthy officially entered the race running on an antiwar platform.
On Jan. 21, 1968, North Vietnamese troops began a 77 day siege of the 6,000 U.S. Marines at the Khe Sanh combat base and on Jan. 30, the Tet offensive began in South Vietnam. Vietcong and North Vietnamese troops struck at targets across South Vietnam, including the U.S. Embassy in Saigon. This is often cited as the turning point in public support for the war. The number of American troops peaked at 542,000.
Richard Nixon entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination on Feb. 1 saying the war should be prosecuted “more effectively.” Alabama Gov. George Wallace entered the race as an Independent on Feb. 8. CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite concluded a special report on Vietnam Feb. 27 with an editorial predicting “that the bloody experience in Vietnam . . . will end in a stalemate.” President Johnson is said to have responded: “That’s it. If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”
THE NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY, FIRST IN THE NATION
On March 12, New Hampshire voters, in the nation’s first primary, gave Johnson a narrow victory – 42 to 49 percent – over McCarthy. When Republican write-in votes were included, McCarthy had come within 230 votes of defeating a president of his own party. On March 16, Kennedy reversed his decision and announced his candidacy. On March 31, in an evening speech to the nation, President Johnson withdrew, saying “I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.
Between March 12 and June 4, there were 13 presidential primaries. Johnson won New Hampshire; McCarthy Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin; Kennedy California, Indiana, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Favorite sons and U.S. Senators Stephen M. Young won Ohio and George Smathers, Florida. McCarthy’s popular vote was 2,914,933; Kennedy’s 2,304,148. Both campaigns drew millions of younger voters. The masses of young people flocking to Obama in 2008 recall the hordes of students who became “Clean for Gene” and canvassed door-to-door for him. Both drew thousands of supporters to public events. McCarthy, even though less inspiring as a speaker than Obama, spoke to 15,000 in Pittsburgh, 30,000 in Houston, and 50,000 in Boston.
In August 1967, Lowenstein recruited Whipple to join the Dump-Johnson movement and in October 1967, Gans, was in Oregon on a recruiting trip. He visited Morgan and Whipple seeking their help in tapping the anti-Johnson sentiment in the state. They invited the 80 persons who had been the most active in Morgan’s campaign. Seventy-five attended the Oct. 29 meeting at the Salem YMCA and became the core group who built the McCarthy Oregon organization. Whipple was named one of the leaders of the statewide organization.
Gans and Lowenstein attended the meeting and Lowenstein made a moving presentation which motivated the group to commit to support a campaign for an anti administration candidate in the May 28 primary. Gans and Lowenstein told them McCarthy, the only high ranking Democrat willing to make the challenge, would soon announce his candidacy. Other than Whipple, those in attendance knew little about the Minnesota Senator. Whipple met McCarthy, then a Congressman from St. Paul, in 1956 when he was working for the Minnesota Association of Dairies and engaged him to be the keynote speaker at its annual meeting. He later gained some notoriety for his speech nominating Adlai Stevenson for President at the 1960 Democratic National Convention attended by Whipple.
THE OREGON PRIMARY
U.S. Senators Wayne Morse, Eugene McCarthy, and Blaine Whipple
McCarthy’s showing in New Hampshire and his overwhelming victories in the April 2 Wisconsin and April 23 Pennsylvania primaries brought floods of recruits to the Oregon effort. Kennedy’s victory in the Nebraska primary May 14 motivated Whipple to send letters to 2,000 volunteers around the state urging them to work even harder because now the future success of the McCarthy campaign depended on a win in Oregon May 28. These letters went to individuals in every section of the state who had spent the winter meeting, organizing, planning, mailing, and campaigning, each local group in its own way, with only loose coordination from state headquarters in Portland. The campaign that followed brought McCarthy his greatest national attention.
The Oregon McCarthy organization included representatives of the state Democratic Party, the labor movement, some independents, a number of Republicans. It was the best organized and best financed of the national campaign and had enough money in advance to plan the spending effectively. For these reasons and because Senators Wayne Morse and Mark Hatfield had taken a firm stand against the Vietnam war, McCarthy looked forward to the race. Morse publicly urged Kennedy not to challenge McCarthy in the primary.
Whipple’s letter went to people like Harriet Civin in Eugene, Barbara Ryberg in Ashland, Philip Nikkel in Grants Pass, Bruce K. Alexander in Beaverton, Mary Davison in La Grande, Les AuCoin in Forest Grove, and Mr. And Mrs. Harry Shaich in Portland. A.C. Roll, a Roseburg lawyer and long-time Democratic party worker and a number of acquaintances developed their own literature and copied ads from eastern newspapers to run locally. This was the case in many other Oregon communities.
Ruth Stovall of The Dalles, a housewife and Democratic precinct committeewoman, held a meeting in her home, growing a new circle of support. In Bend, people who had worked for Senators Wayne Morse and Mark Hatfield, formally organized with Dr. J.E. Hyatt and Mary Katherine Swearingen as cochairs. Hildur Niskanen of this group probably wrote more letters to delegates and editors than any other McCarthy volunteer in the country.
In La Grande students at Eastern Oregon College began organizing with the help of history professor Mary Davison and Winston “Wink” Saunders, Union County’s Mr. Democrat. When Whipple arrived for an organizing meeting March 28 in the afterglow of New Hampshire, the organization grew by leaps and bounds. A Corvallis headquarters opened March 28 and an art auction raised $1,000 followed by a McParty which raised $200. The Corvallis group was not the stereotype of the national campaign – a crusade of mostly young and politically inexperienced people. The average age of the Benton Co. executive board was 40.75 years and its members had 146 years of political experience. The whole Oregon McCarthy effort was primarily an Adult Crusade.
A doctor in John Day set up a headquarters and bought his own billboard. A housewife in Baker opened a headquarters in a tent since no building was available. The Astoria group included boats of fishermen with signs, “Fishermen for McCarthy.” The Clatsop Co. door-to-door campaign included canvassers on horseback in the rural area. They made their own campaign buttons out of bottle caps, painted and fitted with a crude button.
A salesman who traveled up and down the coast left brochures with his customers. At least a thousand people in the Portland area volunteered and Republicans called the headquarters daily seeking instruction on changing their registration. In Eugene a single bake sale netted $600. In Oakridge a housewife opened the first campaign headquarters in the town’s history. Hundreds of students from Washington, Idaho, and Montana came to canvass and 800 Portland area residents volunteered to house and feed them. Doctors provided the out-of-state students medical attention when needed. The largest crowd ever to assemble at Eugene’s Mahlon Sweet Airport greeted the candidate on arrival.
There were few defections when Kennedy announced his candidacy and by the Indiana primary, 42 McCarthy groups were operating compared to 10 for Kennedy.
ISSUES
In the Oregon campaign, McCarthy delineated these important differences between himself and Kennedy: He competed in New Hampshire while Kennedy worried about his political future. He urged the resignation of Sec. of State Rusk, FBI Director Hoover, and Selective Service Director Hershey. Kennedy didn’t. He questioned the growth of military influence under the Pentagon leadership of Secretary McNamara while Kennedy bought TV time to air an endorsement by McNamara. He chided Kennedy for setting up 26 separate campaign committees to deal with 26 varieties of Americans: Irish, Polish, Negroes, Mexican, retired former public officials, etc. He said his campaign and candidacy was for the separate and personal choice of each of the 200 million Americans, not for special interest, ethnic, age related, etc. groups. He wanted a unity of the voters, not a combination of separate interests or separate groups who, “in order to get what they want will help someone else get what they want.” He did not make appeals to the special groups; he spoke the same to all “for all were Americans.”
McCarthy said 1968 was a year in which the country would make the most important decision it had in a long time. He spoke of the importance of people being political, not of political leadership or organized politics. He wanted a politics of participation and a politics of personal response by the citizens of the country using reason and knowledge to make important political decisions. He told his listeners that no matter what happened in the primary they should continue through the general election to “be intensely and deeply political, more fully citizens than you have ever been in the past.”
May 10, four days before the Nebraska primary, McCarthy flew into Pendleton where Whipple met him and drove him to La Grande where he made two speeches. Brian Doherty, a 16-year-old Pendleton high school student and the Umatilla Co. McCarthy chairman, had 100 people at the airport to greet him shouting “We Want Gene.” Representatives from all the newspapers, radio, and TV stations for miles around were there. This was the day that the Oregon campaign began to click.
The Bloomington, Indiana McCarthy Group had adopted the La Grande organization and sent it $1,461 and Clark Glymour, a graduate student from Indiana University at Bloomington with his wife and 3-year-old child had come to La Grande to help the local organization. He immediately noticed that people came to the headquarters with questions about McCarthy’s views, something that didn’t happen in Indiana and Nebraska. He was also surprised that they read position papers and remained to discuss the issues. One of McCarthy’s speeches was at Eastern Oregon College and later when Kennedy spoke at the college, the faculty was so pro-McCarthy the college president had to draft a faculty member to sit on the speaker’s platform with him.
The next day McCarthy made two stops in Portland where 250 persons were turned away from one meeting and the Chamber of Commerce had the biggest attendance of any meeting in its history. A group of ladies in Portland collected money to run want ads which said: “I am very concerned that we keep politics in the hands of the people. It is important that Senator McCarthy wins in Oregon. Please help in these few remaining days by telling your friends to vote for Senator McCarthy. The country needs McCarthy’s integrity, courage, and quiet good sense.” The ad was signed, “Mrs. Herbert Park, Portland,” and copies sent to weekly newspapers with money and a note saying if it wasn’t enough, write Mrs. Park and she will send the rest; if it was too much, send her the change. The week before the California vote, the cover of Life featured a picture of McCarthy in yellow weather gear paddling a canoe down the Willamette River with the caption “Voyage of the Loner.”
The state headquarters in Portland originally occupied part of a floor in the Dekum Building and was manned mostly by housewives. It grew to take over the sixth floor, then the seventh and eighth. When the lease expired May 1 it moved its army of volunteers to the vacant 5-story Elks Temple on SW 10th street which was soon filled with national staff people and student volunteers from around the country.
By now the smell of victory was in the air. The organization clicked. Norval Reece, a Philadelphia executive who was in charge of scheduling the national campaign, delegated scheduling to Whipple because of his knowledge of the state and its politics. In turn, Whipple relied on the intensive studies of Steve Cohen’s crowd and television potential. For the first time in the campaign, a crowd-gathering team was at work. The television campaign was the best of the primaries, outshining Kennedy’s. The Oregonians had overcome the failures of Indiana and Nebraska.
Arthur Herzog, a New York writer older than most of the national staff people, was the campaign’s main presence in Oregon. A quiet and thoughtful person, he took pains to learn about the state and the local McCarthy organization and acknowledged there should be as little interference from the national staff as possible. Consequently, the frictions were few.
The McCarthy campaign purchased a half hour of television time Saturday evening May 25, three days before the primary. Kennedy was invited to join McCarthy for a joint appearance. He declined. McCarthy spoke to the most enthusiastic audience of the entire campaign. Five thousand were in the Memorial Coliseum to hear him “sock it” to Humphrey and Kennedy. He said Kennedy hadn’t brought New Politics to the campaign, that he had no new issues or thrown any light on the old issues. He said New Politics was not identifying a composite of minorities with special problems and saying this is the New Politics; rather it’s as old as the history of politics in this century. He said the Kennedy rhetoric was old politics: “. . .we’re going to do better, we’re going to get the country moving, we’re going to do more” without specifying which way the country was going to move or what we’re going to do more of, or what or who we’re going do to better. He said he didn’t see how Kennedy clarified the issues when he suddenly stripped to his shorts and took a plunge into the cold Pacific. Old politics he said. Nothing new. Nothing surprising. Almost every phrase was greeted with shouts and applause.
On Sunday morning, both candidates spoke to Jewish congregations and visited the Zoo and the Rose Garden. McCarthy went to the liberal congregation, Kennedy to the conservative. McCarthy, accompanied by Whipple, toured the Rose Garden with Portland Mayor and Mrs. Terry Shrunk while Kennedy visited the Zoo. A zoo train transported visitors between the venues. When the Kennedy convertible and media bus appeared at the train stop, Whipple saw the opportunity for the photo op they had hoped for – the taller McCarthy with the shorter Kennedy. They paid their respects to Mayor and Mrs. Shrunk and started for the train. When an aide alerted Kennedy to the possible confrontation, he started for his car. McCarthy speech writer Jeremy Larner reached the convertible as its motor started and suggested Kennedy wait and have a talk with McCarthy. Kennedy’s response was “That’s too bad” and as his car moved away, the TV cameras caught McCarthy approaching as Kennedy fled. “Chicken! Coward!” came the shouts picked up by TV sound men and the words beautifully matched the footage. It was the most dramatic footage of the Oregon campaign when shown on TV that night. Bobby Kennedy running away from Gene McCarthy.
The McCarthy election night party was in the third-floor ballroom of the old Elks Temple. The final result: McCarthy 44.7 percent; Kennedy 38.8; Johnson 12.4; Humphrey 4.0; others .1 It was the first time in 27 elections a Kennedy had been defeated.
Gene and his wife Abigail arrived about 9:30. The cheering and screaming was deafening. McCarthy thanked them all and then gave his final Oregon speech: “I said in Nebraska election night the record of the westward movement shows that almost every wagon train got as far as the Missouri river. But the real test began once you crossed the Missouri and started up the Oregon Trail.
“We proved who had the best horses and the best wagons and the best men and women. We proved that, here today in Oregon. Here we had the right issues and the right candidate, and here it’s just a question of finding our constituency. . . The campaign here not only bridged the generation gap; there wasn’t any generation gap; it was solid all the way . . . It will be solid all the way to Chicago and on beyond Chicago. I said early if I were the candidate, we wouldn’t have riots, we’d have singing and dancing in the streets. We’ll have a short inauguration speech; take down the fence around the White House; and have picnics on the lawn.”
When he finished, the band played “California, Here I Come.” The jubilation continued long after he and Abigail left for this was the highest point of the campaign since New Hampshire.
In 1968, Oregon voters elected delegates and representatives to the National Committee of their political party in the primary. Democratic voters elected Blaine Whipple a delegate and Democratic National Committeeman. He was a McCarthy Floor Leader and campaign spokesman along with Blair Clark, McCarthy’s national campaign chairman, at the Chicago Convention. James Hennings, now Director of the Metropolitan Public Defenders Office in Portland, was his aide at the Chicago Convention.
