by Carl P. Leubsdorf
As the Democrats prepare to meet next week in Chicago, I thought back to their tumultuous 1968 convention, the third of the 27 I covered.
That’s where I cost the Democrats the presidency. At least that’s what the press secretary for that year’s defeated Democratic nominee told me.
Let me explain.
As a junior member of the AP’s convention staff, I was assigned to wait outside the suite of the presidential nominee, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, as he finalized his choice of a running mate. At one point, press secretary Norman Sherman emerged to advise that Humphrey was still consulting Democratic leaders about his choice.
Did those leaders include Lyndon Johnson? I asked, quite innocently. The unpopular president was sulking at his Texas ranch, unwelcome in Chicago after splitting the party and withdrawing from the race.
“Lyndon who?” replied Sherman, always a man with a quick wit, sometimes too quick. Quickly realizing his faux pas, he added, “That’s off the record.”
I looked at the roughly three dozen reporters in the crowded corridor and quickly realized there was no way I could comply with Sherman’s too-late request, especially after being burned two weeks earlier on another off-the-record situation involving Humphrey.
When I reached a phone, I dictated the exchange, then resumed my wait. Eventually, Humphrey picked Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie, providing a flurry of hope for a convention marked by bitterness inside the hall and clashes between police and antiwar protesters outside.
But that was just the beginning. Unknown to me, my AP colleague, Harry Kelly, advised Sherman I was going to file his snarky comment. That meant wide dissemination since, in those days, the AP wire was the closest thing to the modern internet.
At the Johnson ranch, all hell broke loose, as I learned years later when Sherman related the incident to Todd Purdum, who was writing a book about the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
“A Secret Service agent came up to me and said there was a call from ‘THE RANCH’ in their command center,” Sherman related. Both Johnson’s press secretary, George Christian, and his deputy, Loyd (CQ) Hackler, were on the phone, and “when I said hello, they shouted ‘Norman, who.’ We laughed and soon hung up.”
Humphrey’s reaction was less friendly. The vice president, Sherman said, looked at him and “snarled, ‘Did some son of a bitch on our staff say, ‘Who’s Lyndon?’ ”
“You’ve got the right son of a bitch, but the wrong line,” Sherman said he replied. “I said, ‘Lyndon who?’ ”
Sherman later discovered that Arthur Krim, a movie executive and Humphrey’s main fundraiser, called him from the Johnson ranch and said he would not raise a penny more “if he had people like me on the staff.”
For years after, Sherman regularly but jocularly blamed me for costing Humphrey the election, claiming that was why Johnson sat on his hands for weeks. Actually, his complaint was Humphrey’s break from his Vietnam policy, and Humphrey lost because of internal party divisions.
The “Lyndon who?” incident was just one of several memorable events I recall from Chicago where, fortunately, I covered the politics, not the daily clashes in the streets.
One was the year’s only presidential candidate debate, as Humphrey, Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy and South Dakota Sen. George McGovern clashed before the California delegation.
Another was turmoil in the convention’s Rules Committee, which had a long-lasting impact. A floor fight that insurgents won led to creation of the McGovern Commission, which overhauled the party’s nominating procedures in a way that prompted most states to adopt primaries and scrap insider-controlled caucuses.
The Rules Committee met on an upper floor of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, and I soon noticed there were only two pay phones nearby. This was long before cell phones and a local phone company strike meant the usual extra phones at convention sites could not be installed.
I was determined to ensure no one beat me on my piece of the story. I recalled that an AP colleague, Austin Scott, later of The Washington Post, had shown me how to make a pay phone inoperative by unscrewing the mouthpiece and turning over a part called a diaphragm.
So that’s what I did, so I would have a phone whenever I needed one. Many tried unsuccessfully to use the doctored phone, including Illinois Gov. Sam Shapiro, the committee chair. “I don’t think it works,” I helpfully told him.
But it always worked for me. At one point, I called my desk and was told The New York Times questioned my last update, since it heard nothing similar from its correspondent.
“Maybe he is having trouble finding a phone,” I said.
Democrats were so snakebit by that convention they avoided Chicago for the next 28 years. The 1996 convention that renominated President Bill Clinton ran smoothly, remembered mostly for the frequency delegates broke into “Macarena,” a popular song that summer.
Now, they are returning to Chicago, hoping for a convention more like 1996 than 1968. Though I won’t be there, I’ll be watching, as I bet will be an Iowa nonagenarian named Norman Sherman.
