🔒 High noon in Chicago: Dems aim to block second Trump term

The Democratic Party’s upcoming nominating convention in Chicago will be a pivotal moment in modern history, determining whether the US—and the world—can avoid the threats posed by a second Trump presidency. Reflecting on the turmoil of the 1968 convention, Max Hastings underscores the enduring resilience of American democracy, emphasising the importance of wise candidate choices for a hopeful political resurgence.

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By Max Hastings

And so there is again to be a high noon in Chicago. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___ Less than a month hence, the Democratic Party will hold one of the most momentous presidential nominating conventions in modern history. Its outcome will ordain whether not just the US, but the world, may be spared the collision with ignorance, caprice, recklessness and even possible dictatorship that is threatened by a second Trump presidency.

A fellow British journalist messaged me this week: “Are you coming to Chicago?” No, I responded — too old. And I’ve been there before. I was in the Windy City at its darkest hour in August 1968, another tumultuous political moment, at least as dramatic and important as next month’s.

I remember the tear gas; Mayor Richard Daley’s baton-wielding cops in Grant Park; interviewing beat poet Alan Ginsberg in the Hilton coffee shop; Hubert Humphrey sounding in his acceptance speech decent yet doomed.

Let’s go back a bit. In March 1968, I was among a group of 15 foreign reporters who visited the White House. We spent 40 minutes being harangued by President Lyndon Johnson about why he remained committed to sustaining the US war in Vietnam.

When Johnson finished his impassioned monologue, he stood up and left the room. We were preparing to leave when the president suddenly reappeared, looking almost sheepish. “Before y’all go.” he said in his Texan twang, “I’d like to ask one question: Since coming here, have any of you changed your minds about anything you’d heard or read about me before?”

We were shocked into embarrassed silence that the most powerful man on earth should seek the opinions of a clutch of youthful foreign journalists. Less than two weeks later, on March 31, he announced to the world that “I shall not seek, and I will not accept” the Democratic nomination for re-election.

In the months that followed, I reported from Memphis after the killing of Martin Luther King; witnessed race riots in Chicago; the funeral at Arlington National Cemetery of RFK, and much else that caused Theodore White, author of the Making of the President books, to say that he was minded to call his 1968 narrative The Making of a Tragedy.

I inflict on you now an old man’s memories to argue that the rage of US politics in 2024 doesn’t seem unprecedented. Suffusing events 56 years ago was comparable hatred, matching anger, toward Johnson, the candidates Richard Nixon and Humphrey, outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. I met hippies in Haight-Ashbury, befriended some rich kids who had dropped out there, several of whom got so turned on that they never dropped back in again.

And I encountered a host of middle Americans – Nixon’s so-called Silent Majority — who couldn’t understand what the whole protest, killing, race-riot thing — all of which got conflated — was about. They just wished desperately that everybody get back to work or war behind the flag. They would have loved Donald Trump and JD Vance.

On Aug. 4, we went to Florida for Nixon’s Republican coronation. Curious as it sounds, earlier in the year nobody had troubled to think or talk much about them, as America obsessed about the Democrats. In the Miami convention hall, the hawks’ favorite ex-candidate Barry Goldwater received a thunderous ovation.

As for the 1968 nominee, I recalled how we all laughed back in February in New Hampshire when a political scientist said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Dick Nixon emerges as the peace candidate in this election.” And, by golly, so he did. “I have a plan to end the war,” he said, as often as Trump today says “We must fight!”

We now know that there was no plan, just as Trump can’t explain exactly whom he wishes his followers to fight, beyond immigrants as well as the elites and billionaires who choose not to support him.

Nixon and the Republicans came out of the GOP convention looking as if they knew where they were going. It was pretty much the same show as the party mounted earlier this month in Milwaukee, except that Nixon had far more brains than Trump.

Two weeks after Miami came the Democratic convention in Chicago. Everybody today knows what happened on the streets, where Daley’s army of cops beat the hell out of thousands of antiwar protesters, providing TV cameras with images of America that shocked the world.

There is less awareness of the shambles in the convention hall behind the barbed wire. This started with a bitter conflict about race: Several Southern delegations were charged with fixing their white memberships. All the Mississippians and half the Georgians were unseated.

Security was mocked when reporters discovered that the revolutionary electronic-admission swipes worked just as well if one substituted an American Express card. By Thursday, 5,600 National Guardsmen with machine guns, armored personnel carriers and fixed bayonets were deployed outside the Hilton Hotel and every word of reasoned debate in the hall was drowned out by the chants of protesters and the screams of victims of Daley’s enforcers.

Norman Mailer stood before the armored ranks and addressed them through a bullhorn, saying, among other stuff, “So far as I can see, you people are not much different from the army that I was in: Not. Much. Damn. Good!”

God, what a week that was, and what a year for America. Over Chicago hovered the ghost of RFK, the man who might have beaten Humphrey, probably also later Nixon, but whom some of us resented as the usurper of the mantle of heroic antiwar pioneer Senator Eugene McCarthy.

Those events still appear to me – and you should believe this – worse than what is happening in 2024.

I came home to Britain that fall of ’68 convinced the US was on the skids, collapsing under the strains of Vietnam, race, youth alienation, pot and political bitterness. The ascent of Nixon seemed to liberals as ghastly an outcome as now does the prospective return of Trump.

Today I esteem Johnson and his Great Society achievements far more than I had the maturity to do, aged 22, in 1968. America came through that ordeal, Watergate, defeat in Indochina and much else to become incomparably richer in the 21st Century; it’s still globally dominant technologically and indeed financially, even if its relative military superiority has declined.

Despite all the horrors and looming perils of 2024, after my experience as a very green young eyewitness in 1968, I would never again make the mistake of shorting the US; of writing off the most resilient as well as dynamic society on earth, as some of its friends as well as enemies, confronted with the specter of Trump, are today tempted to do.

If the Democrats can contrive a less grisly Chicago convention than that of ‘68 and make wise choices of candidates, we could yet witness the national political resurgence that the whole Western world yearns for.

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