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By Root 868 0

Nixon, the party predicted, would narrowly lose, as Nixon tended to do. Michigan governor George Romney had become the object of too many jokes when he reversed his support for the Vietnam War, claiming he had been “brainwashed.” The dry-witted Democratic Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy commented, “I would have thought a light rinse would have done it.” California governor Ronald Reagan hoped he could step into the vacuum created by Romney. But he had been an elected official for less than a year. Besides, Reagan was considered too reactionary and would likely be completely routed, as would Romney. The Republican Party knew about routs. It was a sensitive topic. In the last election their candidate, Barry Goldwater, running against Johnson, had sustained the worst defeat in American history. He also had been too reactionary. A liberal like Rockefeller might have a chance.

In 1967 some Democrats had talked about replacing Johnson in 1968, but incumbents are hard to remove in American political parties, and “Dump Johnson” movements such as ACT, the Alternative Candidate Task Force, were not expected to have much impact. The only Democrat who was given any hope of unseating Johnson was the fallen President Kennedy’s younger brother Robert. But Robert, the junior senator from New York, did not want to step in. On January 4 Kennedy once again reiterated his position that despite differences of opinion with the president over Vietnam, he expected to support him for reelection. Years later, Eugene McCarthy speculated that Kennedy did not think he could beat Johnson. So in November 1967, McCarthy decided that he would be the antiwar alternative to Johnson, announcing his candidacy at a Washington, D.C., press conference that was said to be the most low-key and unexciting campaign kickoff in the history of presidential politics. “I don’t know if it will be political suicide,” journalist Andrew Kopkind reported the senator saying at the conference. “It will probably be more like an execution.”

Now, on the first day of the new year, McCarthy said that he was not at all disheartened by the lack of public response to his candidacy. He insisted that he would not “demagogue the issue” of the war to gain supporters and argued in his unheated prose that the Vietnam War was “draining off our material resources and our manpower resources, but I think [it is] also creating great anxiety in the minds of many Americans and really also weakening and debilitating our moral energy to deal with the problems at home and also some other potential problems around the world.”

In November 1967 McCarthy had said that he hoped his candidacy would cause dissidents to turn to the political process rather than the “illegal” protest to which they had been driven by “discontent and frustration.” But a month later, SDS leaders Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis and other antiwar figures had started planning for 1968. High on the agenda was a series of street demonstrations in Chicago during the Democratic convention the following summer.

The Yippie! movement—only later in the year was the exclamation turned to acronym by inventing the name Youth International Party—was founded that New Year’s Eve, according to the official though not entirely factual story, at a Greenwich Village party, the product—so said its founders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin—of an evening of marijuana. “There we were, all stoned, rolling around on the floor,” Hoffman later explained to federal investigators. Even the name Yippie!—as in both the cheer and the counterculture label hippie—showed a kind of goofy brilliance much appreciated by young militants and very little appreciated by anyone else.

On the first day of the year, the United Nations announced that 1968 was to be the “International Year for Human Rights.” The General Assembly inaugurated the yearlong observations with a worldwide appeal for peace. But even the pope, in his January 1 peace message, admitted that there were “new terrible obstacles to the achievement of peace in Vietnam.”

The Vietnam War was not the only threat