If you notice that news commentators are mentioning 1968 a whole lot as they cover the U.S. presidential race, I want to point out that wasn't happening (as far I can tell) back in March when I first mentioned the way that history doesn't quite repeat itself.
What changed? Historic headline events in this year's race could not be ignored the way nuances could.
Why 1968? Well, that was the year when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated on the campaign trail, mirroring the shooting in Butler, Pa., this year. That was also the year that the last sitting president eligible for re-election - Lyndon Johnson - chose not to run. As you don't need me to tell you, events in the past couple of weeks have brought these two parallels front and center.
There's another parallel coming and that is that the Democratic Pary's national convention will be held in Chicago, just like the one in 1968, which was attended by street protests and violence. The anger underlying the protests was against the Johnson administration's war policy in Vietnam, a war that was never declared by Congress, which according to the Constitution has the sole power to declare war.
The division at that time mirrors the hostile political environment today. In my mind, what symbolizes that is the way that the ABC TV network chose to cover the conventions. There were only three major broadcast networks back then, and ABC was the smallest with the least resources. So rather than do the gavel-to-gavel coverage of the conventions that CBS (think Walter Cronkite) and NBC (think Chet Huntley and David Brinkley) did, ABC waited until after prime time with a TV digest of the day's events and a political-analysis segment between conservative combatant William F. Buckley in one corner and liberal combatant Gore Vidal in the other.
Part of the appeal that ABC was making to viewers at the time was to a public that wanted to be checked out of all the partisan bickering and just escape with primetime entertainment programming, which the other networks were not providing. Whether you were apathetic, tired of all the back and forth, an independent or a partisan of the other party whose convention was getting covered that night, you didn't have to watch all the partisan stuff.
I know it's hard to believe in the age of streaming, but there wasn't much TV beyond the three networks.
Anyway, I watched the Buckley-Vidal segments in real time in 1968. During the next-to-last night of the Democratic convention, Vidal called Buckley a "crypto-fascist" and Buckley then threatened to punch him. The only documentation I found on Buckley's response was a quote in The Nation's online site that says, Buckley threated to punch Vidal "in the goddamn face." (The Nation's report also says that Buckley called Vidal "a queer.") I don't remember those words. My memory was that Buckley threatened to punch him in the nose. (The copy editor in me wanted to confirm whether I had misremembered, but I didn't do an extensive search on YouTube for video. After spending about 10 minutes watching one segment that I thought was going to bear fruit, the video was incomplete, and there's not enough time left in my life to be spent trying to confirm such insignificant details.) The fact is that a heated exchange happened live on TV because people were divided over this issue to the point of coming to blows. To me, this was a perfect microcosm of that macro fact.
Who knows what will happen in Chicago? Who knows what will happen in November? All I can say is, I don't want to see this movie ever again.
