Free Republic

The 60th quadrennial presidential election in the United States is in four weeks, less than a month away. As the campaign season is heating up, let’s take a look at the election of 1968, the last time the incumbent President decided not to run for re-election despite not being term-limited, just like President Joe Biden did this year. As the 2024 election is fast approaching, we need to make a big jump in American history, skipping from 1932 to 1968. Evidently, there are a lot of events we have to jump over, here’s a list of just the most significant...

...The Farmer-Labor Party carried more than a tinge of communism, an ideology which repelled Humphrey. This presented few problems during wartime when the U.S. was allied with the Soviet Union, but when the war ended and the Cold War began the communists threw their weight behind Moscow. Despite the Midwest’s long tradition of non-interventionism, Humphrey believed that the failure to confront Hitler earlier had encouraged eventual war and he was deeply committed to an anti-communist foreign policy, which the communist elements of the DFL opposed. “We’re not going to let the political philosophy of the DFL be dictated from the...

When Donald Trump declared himself “the president of law and order,” comparisons immediately ran to Richard Nixon and 1968. Nixon too had campaigned on law and order, against the backdrop of urban riots following Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and antiwar protesters who clashed with Chicago police right outside the Democratic convention. So the Nixon analogy is apt. But it is incomplete without its complement: Joe Biden as Hubert Humphrey. Like Mr. Biden, Humphrey was a garrulous establishment liberal and vice president who had spent decades in the Senate. Each man was nominated by a divided Democratic Party. Both were...

Foster Brooks Roast Hubert Humphrey

If reason ruled in politics, the Democratic party would urge its presidential candidates to eliminate the vitriolic posturing from their campaign, and would then begin to concentrate on the only question that matters: Who can beat Reagan? That is different from asking whether Walter Mondale would make a better chief executive than Gary Hart, or whether Hart’s “new ideas” are preferable to Mondale’s old-line liberal values. What troubles me is that, given the rising nastiness, this campaign begins more and more to resemble the terrible script written in 1972, when another new face, George McGovern, was buried by Richard Nixon’s...

Saturday, in Pittsburgh, a Sabbath celebration at the Tree of Life synagogue became the site of the largest mass murder of Jews in U.S. history. Eleven worshippers were killed by a racist gunman. Friday, we learned the identity of the crazed criminal who mailed pipe bombs to a dozen leaders of the Democratic Party, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. From restaurants to Capitol corridors, this campaign season we have seen ugly face-offs between leftist radicals and Republican senators. Are we more divided than we have ever been? Are our politics more poisoned? Are we living in what...

The Democratic warhorse Dianne Feinstein is warning that Bernie Sanders’ campaign against Hillary Clinton could turn the party’s convention in Philadelphia into the kind of disaster that erupted in Chicago in 1968. “It worries me a great deal,” she tells CNN. I can understand why. I was there. Covering the Democrats’ 1968 convention for one of America’s greatest newspapers, the Anniston (Ala.) Star, I saw a bitterly divided party, riven by the Vietnam War and Jim Crow, met with violence in the streets. The convention finally handed up, in Vice President Hubert Humphrey, one of the finest liberals in history....

"One can't believe impossible things," Alice objected. "I daresay you haven't had much practice," the Red Queen replied. "When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." You may be reading this sometime after breakfast, and six is a pretty large number of impossible things. But looking at developments in the 2016 campaign, I can see two impossible things -- impossible in the sense that almost every pundit (including me) ruled them out -- that might happen in the weeks and months...

On Saturday they would appear before the convention’s Credentials Committee and ask to be seated as the official Mississippi state delegation... Shortly after he signed the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson told his aide Joseph Califano, "I think we’ve delivered the South to the Republican party for your lifetime and mine." Maybe so, but he was determined to hold onto the region long enough to ensure his own re-election; the opinion polls might show him leading the Republican candidate, Barry Goldwater, by an enormous margin, but he was desperate not to stoke the fires of sectional conflict. Only one...

I’ve been dismissive of Jim Webb’s prospects for winning the Democratic presidential nomination. But Jacob Heilbrunn’s column on Webb, and Steve’s commentary on that column, made me take another look. On second look, I still don’t see Webb getting very far. Will female Democrats favor Webb — currently in his third marriage and the author of what some might consider a sexist novel — over Hillary Clinton? Not likely. Will African-Americans favor Webb — so proud of his Scotch-Irish heritage — over the wife of “our first black president”? Not likely. Will white southern Democrats favor Webb? Arguably. But he’s...

"Certainly one of the chief guarantees of freedom under any government, no matter how popular and respected, is the right of citizens to keep and bear arms. This is not to say that firearms should not be very carefully used, and that definite safety rules of precaution should not be taught and enforced. But the right of citizens to bear arms is just one more guarantee against arbitrary government, one more safeguard against tyranny which now appears remote in America, but which historically has proved to be always possible" Senator Hubert H. Humphrey (D) Minn. "Know Your Lawmakers" Guns (magazine),...

It seems that a decades-old battle for the soul of the Democratic Party has reemerged in the Obama administration.  The media likes to talk about splinters and fault lines among the Republicans, but these have a far shorter history than the intra-party war that seems to be fought ever few decades among Democrats because of that party's tendency to drift to the far left.   Ron Radosh notes the interesting background of a group Van Jones founded, The Ella Baker Freedom Center. Most people have referred to the late Baker as simply a civil rights activist.... in my book, Divided They Fell: The Demise of the Democratic...

People worldwide -- and indeed, most Americans -- are under the impression that whichever party candidate has the most delegates at the end of the primary elections is assured the party nomination for president. And who can blame them? In a typical year, one candidate will emerge from the primary campaign with a majority of the delegates, and he will have the nomination secured. But this year's race is unprecedented; a woman and black man, running neck to neck against each other to try and reach the magic number of 2025 delegates to lock the nomination. There are 4,049 total...

Why wasn't there more celebration of this milestone for racial equality? It seems that there will be far less commemoration of the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 40 years ago yesterday than there was of the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education in May. This is not as it should be. Brown was certainly a milestone in the nation's history, a declaration that separate could not be equal and that racial discrimination is wrong. But Brown was much less effective in ending segregation than the Civil Rights Act. This was...

…..In 1968, during the toughest campaign of his life, Senator Fred Harris (HHH’s campaign cochairman), a man whom he loved and considered espousing for the vice presidency, went on a disgruntled slowdown after the convention when he was denied that nomination. Humphrey was saddened, but harbored no hard feelings. But Harris soon returned and was ready for any assignment from Larry O’Brien, the newly appointed campaign manager. It was not so with Fritz Mondale, his political pride and joy, a disciple of twenty years (now vice president), whom Humphrey had created and nursed along politically from start to finish. Prior...

One of things I often do is flip idly through books at the library. Okay, call me a bookworm gathering bits of useless information. However, one of the bits of information that seems to stick out in my mind was something in a book written by a close personal friend of the Hubert Humphrey after his death. I remember that the author, who was also a doctor, had a whole chapter in the book in which he puts Walter Mondale over the coals for betraying Hubert Humphrey. I believe it had to do with either the 1992 or 1996 election...