Reminders of the 1960's as Nebraska Matters Again
Feb 03, 08:43 PM CST
Nebraska important in Democrats’ race for the nomination
By Jim Dean
The Columbus Telegram
The summer of love – 1967 – had given way to a winter of discontent about the continuing morass in Vietnam.
A somber, disheartened President Lyndon Baines Johnson told the nation in a March 31, 1968, television address that he would not seek re-election to the office he first came to when President John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. He was a victim of the war he had so vigorously prosecuted in Vietnam.
This then-young Nebraska boy watched Johnson’s speech while putting a cement hearth in front of a recently exposed fireplace and brick wall of a Lower East Side New York City apartment. The ensuing few weeks were tumultuous to say the least.
On April 4, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in Memphis unsettling a nation that was just beginning to grasp the concept of moving toward an integrated America.
In that same month, the lame duck president signed expanded civil rights legislation into law. More troops were called to battle in Vietnam while draft resisters and protesters made their cry heard across America.
The widespread opposition to the war fueled the hopes of Eugene McCarthy and Robert F. Kennedy.
Students at Columbia University, led by Mark Rudd, took over campus buildings on April 23 in protest of the war. Police violently removed them a week later.
Shortly after the Columbia incident, I opened my apartment door to a clamor created by Rudd’s visit to a crash pad in the tenement where I lived on Ninth Street between Avenues B and C. (Lest anyone think I was some sort of bomb-thrower, you should know I was a volunteer for a Lutheran church and a paraprofessional kindergarten aide at P.S. 64.)
On May 14, 1968. Robert “Bobby” Kennedy won the Nebraska primary with 51 percent of the vote built in large part on the charisma of a personal visit.
On June 4, 1968, Kennedy won the California primary.
Early on the morning of June 5, I descended a flight of stairs to buy some fresh bread at the small grocery next door. The otherwise empty early morning sidewalk was littered with flyers announcing Kennedy’s assassination in California.
The Kennedy-era seemed dead.
Fast forward 40 years and Nebraska may again play a role in presidential politics on the Democrat side. Since 1968 when Bobby Kennedy took the Democratic primary, Nebraska has been but a small red blur on the national Democratic radar. And once again, the Kennedy name is in the air.
The Kennedy clan, reduced nationally to John’s daughter Caroline and Senator Edward “Teddy” Kennedy, D-Mass., has appointed its heir to Camelot ��” Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill.
Obama has landed an advance staff in Huskerland seeking our 24 available “committed” delegates and the allegiance of the six “super” delegates who will go to the national convention in Denver this summer.
Between now and the Saturday night caucuses, we may be visited by Obama or a Clinton or both. Much will depend on the outcome of “Super Tuesday” when more than 20 states will select their candidates.
Nebraskan Vince Powers, a Democratic national committeeman and John Edwards supporter, reportedly received a call from former President Bill Clinton after Edwards dropped out of the race last week.
“I said, ‘Look, I’m going to support whoever shows up,”’ Powers told the Associated Press. “Nebraskans deserve a candidate coming and asking for their vote.”
No Democratic presidential candidate has won Nebraska in November since 1964. Given the Republican nature of the state, it’s hardly surprising we’re not a frequent stopping point.
Indeed, President Bill Clinton did not see Nebraska at ground level until the 12th month of the eighth year of his presidency when he visited Kearney.
The full impact of this reincarnation of Nebraska Democrats hit me full on Monday night during President Bush’s State of the Union address.
Right there on our not-flat-screen, analog TV, for all the world to see, sitting side by side like three peas in an odd pod, were Obama and Kennedy and … Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., a recent endorser of the new Camelot crusader.
Politics do indeed make strange bedfellows.
Jim Dean is managing editor of The Columbus Telegram.
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