Joe Biden and Donald Trump have agreed to go toe-to-toe in the first of two just-scheduled televised debates in late June. While Trump hopes to change the subject from his conviction in New York, Biden has yet to mollify young voters who remain dissatisfied by U.S. efforts to end the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
And that is essential for the president to do to assure him of reelection in November.
To attract impassioned youthful dissenters to his column in an airtight race, the Chicago convention this August will be a key juncture, at least judging by how Hubert Humphrey mishandled the unruly left wing of his party back in the 1968 presidential race.
The tumult on the streets and in the convention in Chicago that year left the Democratic Party hopelessly divided between Vietnam War doves and hawks. Then-Vice President Hubert Humphrey lost to Republican Richard Nixon in November by a much narrower popular vote than anticipated. Humphrey made it close after calling for a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam in a nationally televised speech in Salt Lake City on Sept. 30 of that year.
Biden is hoping to avoid a similar party rupture this year over a different war — the right-wing Israeli government’s bombardment of Gaza after the brutal Hamas attack of last Oct. 7. Though for nearly 50 years a supporter of Israel, the president has announced that he will hold back offensive weapons he acknowledges have been used to kill civilians if Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders a major invasion of Rafah. The U.S., too, has built a Mediterranean pier for moving humanitarian aid into Gaza.
If Biden is unable to apply decisive pressure on a traditional U.S. ally to halt the war, he’ll likely contribute to significant voter unease with him that may be difficult to overcome as the convention, and election, nears. A Gallup Poll in late March showed a majority of Americans disapprove of Israeli actions in Gaza.
New York’s Paul O’Dwyer, the late civil rights lawyer and left-leaning politician — and the subject of a just-published biography we’ve written — emerged as a national leader of the Democratic left at the raucous Chicago convention. He was the insurgent Democratic candidate for a seat in the U.S. Senate from New York. His ally: Minnesota senator and presidential candidate Gene McCarthy. The fellow doves were defiant against the Vietnam war’s escalation under President Lyndon Johnson.
Delegates for O’Dwyer and McCarthy tried to hammer home a “peace plank” for the party platform, only to be rebuffed by LBJ’s regulars. The reformers did not disguise their displeasure when Humphrey, who had not appeared on even one state primary ballot, was nominated to face off against Nixon. The snowy-maned O’Dwyer led dozens of delegates on a candlelight march through the streets to show solidarity with antiwar protesters engaged in pitched battles with cops in riot gear under Mayor Richard Daley and the National Guard.
O’Dwyer’s ultimately unsuccessful campaign against Republican-Liberal Jacob Javits back in New York State attracted large flocks of students and other activists as on Sept. 24, 1968, when he addressed a large and appreciative audience at Vassar College.
“When I hear people damning the young, I always ask them if they are still capable of listening,” he told the cheering crowd. “Some of them are willing to risk even their bodies, to brave the ire of Mayor Daley. Others are in the streets of America, raising voices against the inhumanity and destructiveness that the leaders of my generation have given them.”
Despite Humphrey’s Sept. 30 broadcast promise to halt the war, O’Dwyer, a principled politician who could be stubborn, refused to endorse him until Oct. 29, the day after McCarthy did so. But “Tricky Dick,” backed by a much more unified party, urged a step-by-step approach to ending the war, while secretly sabotaging the Paris Peace talks.
One can certainly fault both O’Dwyer and McCarthy for waiting until the 11th hour to endorse the centrist Humphrey. But Humphrey’s choice to toe the line for LBJ was far more consequential. Had the vice president heeded the impassioned young people and antiwar movement at the convention, and worked out a compromise then, he might have eked out a victory. The war would have ended sooner, saving American and Vietnamese lives and foreclosing its bitter legacy.
There are major differences between then and now. But in our era, when digital communications can amplify and distort any political conflict, rally or protest, Biden would be wise to keep Humphrey’s tactical mistake at the 1968 convention uppermost in mind.
Polner and Tubridy are the authors of “An Irish Passion for Justice: The Life of Rebel New York Attorney Paul O’Dwyer” published by Cornell University Press this month.
