• Public

  • Public
  • Network
  • Groups
  • Featured
  • Popular
  • People

For Democrats, of course, Chicago in August could be déjà vu all over again. Their 1968 gathering is the limiting case of a contested and bitter convention, one where the withdrawal of the incumbent Johnson, spurred by a challenge from Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy, led to a struggle between Robert F. Kennedy and Vice President Hubert Humphrey that was upended by Kennedy’s assassination that June. Most of Kennedy’s delegates went to Humphrey, who won the nomination handily on the first ballot. But anti-Vietnam War demonstrations outside the convention hall were met with tear gas and violence from Chicago police, and after Connecticut Sen. Abe Ribicoff used the podium to decry Mayor Richard J. Daley’s “Gestapo tactics,” the vivid image inside the hall was Daley shaking his fist and shouting an antisemitic epithet at Ribicoff. All of it left Humphrey with the opposite of a “convention bump.” He fell just short in November, a defeat easily attributable to mayhem at the convention.