Liberalism's Last Hurrah by Robert H Donaldson

Liberalism's Last Hurrah by Robert H Donaldson

Author:Robert H Donaldson [Donaldson, Robert H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Political Science
ISBN: 9781317466109
Google: PGTxBwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-04-08T16:12:30+00:00


The King Is Dead. Long Live the King

The Democratic National Convention was to be the coronation of Lyndon Johnson, the beginning of his administration. “He orchestrated the whole [thing],” Ken O’Donnell recalled, “and that was his total consumption.”1 The last four Democratic party conventions had revealed gaping party splits and resulted in agonizing floor fights. Johnson would make certain that at his convention there would be no floor fights, no walkouts, no last-minute scrambling for votes, nothing that would embarrass him or put a damper on the happy event. And just to make sure there were no surprises, that the convention ran smoothly, that no rival or group of rivals was planning a coup or even a disruption, he dispatched a platoon of undercover FBI agents to infiltrate organizations and groups with questionable motives and to tap the phones of potential spoilers. All indicators pointed up. Polls said that the president could not lose in November, and that he was even cutting deeply into the Republican electorate.2 Then, to add to the excitement, August 27, the last day of the convention, was his birthday. He would be fifty-six.

The convention did not go quite as smoothly as the president wanted. The first problem was that Atlantic City was simply not up to hosting a national convention. “Of Atlantic City it may be written,” Theodore White complained, “better it shouldn’t have happened.”3 White arrived in Atlantic City to research the sequel to his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Making of the President—1960, and he hated the place. To him, the town was little more than “a strung-out Angkor Wat entwined in salt-water taffy … [a city] trying to recapture some of its lost glamour.” The event, he added, “was to be a marker on the road back.” White went on to recount the experiences of various newsmen who had to endure everything from broken showers to door knobs coming off in their hands.4 Why Atlantic City? It had, of course, been John Kennedy’s choice. He had wanted a West Coast convention, possibly San Francisco, but when the dates did not fit well with the schedule at the Cow Palace, the president began looking at Chicago. The city fathers there, however, could not raise the necessary $625,000 to host the event. The decision then slipped to Miami, the next choice on the short list. Miami wanted the convention and the city raised the money necessary to host it, but Kennedy aides feared protests by Cuban nationals who had flocked to the city. With few places to turn, New Jersey Democrats promised to raise the money and the decision went to Atlantic City by default. It was not the best choice. Atlantic City in 1964 had passed its heyday.5

Larry O’Brien described the convention as “about as placid as a Democratic convention could be.” However, the appearance of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), a racially integrated organization claiming the seats of the all-white Mississippi delegation, not only brought some drama to the convention, it became a watershed event in the civil rights movement.



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