1968 - Mark Kurlansky [212]
Liberal Republicans struggled not to show their revulsion at the ticket. Lindsay, whose city had seen its share of rioting and demonstrating from blacks, students, and antiwar protesters, wrote:
We have heard loud cries this year that we should insure our safety by placing bayoneted soldiers every five feet, and by running over nonviolent demonstrators who sit down in the streets.
You can now see the kind of society that would be. Look to the streets of Prague, and you will find your bayoneted soldier every five feet. You will see the blood of young men—with long hair and strange clothes—who were killed by tanks which crushed their nonviolent protest against communist tyranny. If we abandon our tradition of justice and civil order, they will be our tanks and our children.
As for the Humphrey campaign that came limping out of Chicago, it was clear to Humphrey that he had to challenge Nixon on the right. His running mate, Senator Edmund Muskie from Maine, was an eastern liberal who helped solidify their natural base. The Left might be unhappy with Humphrey, but they were not going to turn to Nixon. His position on the war was that it was not an issue because North Vietnam “has had it militarily” and a peace would be negotiated before he came to office in January. But in the last weeks before the election, Humphrey started to speak out against the campaign of fear and racism and began to gain ground against Nixon. “If the voices of bigotry and fear prevail, we can lose everything we labored so hard to build. I can offer you no easy solutions. There is none. I can offer you no hiding place. There is none.”
Humphrey added a new chapter to the fast-developing television age by campaigning on local TV. Traditionally, a politician would come to a town, arrange a rally, as large as possible, at the airport, and arrange an event at which he made a speech. Humphrey often did this, too, but in many towns he skipped it. The one thing he did everywhere he went was appear on the local television show. As for Nixon, he was probably not the last nontelegenic presidential candidate, but he was the last one to accept that about himself. It was widely believed that his five o’clock shadow on television during the debates had cost him the 1960 election. Significantly, the majority of people who only listened to the debates on radio thought Nixon had won. In 1968 a makeup team had worked out a regimen of pancake foundation and lighteners so that when the lights went on he did not look like the villain in a silent movie. His television coordinator, Roger Ailes, who believed his young age of twenty-eight to be his advantage, said, “Nixon is not a child of TV, and he may be the last candidate who couldn’t make it on the Carson show who could make it in an election.” In 1968 appearing on television talk shows had become the newest form of campaigning. Ailes said of Nixon, “He’s a communicator and a personality on TV, but not at his best when they say on the show, ‘Now here he is . . . Dick!’”
With the election only weeks away, the Humphrey-Muskie campaign started running peculiar but effective print ads. Never before had a front-runner been attacked in quite this way. “Eight years ago if anyone told you to consider