Vietnam Tet Offensive, 1968

In 1968, as the war in Vietnam raged on, I chanted with others, “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many kids did you kill today?” I supported Gene McCarthy, and later Robert Kennedy, both running against Johnson for the Democratic Presidential nomination as anti-war candidates. I was hopeful for a bit, especially on March 31 when LBJ announced he would not seek re-election.

The violence exacerbated by Mayor Daley’s draconian crackdown on protestors at the 1968 Democratic convention helped to elect Nixon, a far worse alternative than Humphrey.

I was getting married that August 18, so I was also a bit distracted. But 1968 was a year that didn’t permit very much time for celebration. On April 4, Martin Luther King was assassinated. Riots broke out, cities burned, and I tried to process that tremendous loss. Robert Kennedy’s words helped. He was in Indianapolis when he announced the assassination to a predominantly black audience, saying in part,

“What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country…”

By June 5, Robert Kennedy was gone, felled by an assassin’s bullet. And in the midst of wedding planning and joy, I worried. The war in Vietnam raged on. August 8, Richard Nixon, a man I both feared and loathed, won the Republican nomination. Would my husband-to-be or my brothers be drafted?

Still, life went on. Ten days later, I got married, went on a honeymoon, and returned to Chicago as the riots erupted during the Democratic convention. The “whole world was watching” in horror and disbelief as protestors were beaten by police and Hubert Humphrey, not Gene McCarthy, was nominated. 1968 was a pretty bad year. I fought with members my parents’ generation about the war, lived in fear of the draft, thought about moving to Canada, and never doubted that Nixon was a crook.

As I approach my 55^th wedding anniversary this weekend, I want to reach out to those who are planning to stage protests at the convention in support of the Palestinians. This coming election is likely to be very close. As the Democratic convention is set to meet once again in Chicago, I want to share some memories from 1968.

In November, Nixon defeated the Democratic candidate, Hubert Humphrey, by a narrow margin of the popular vote. Nixon garnered support by promising to restore law and order and to “end the war and win the peace.” We all know now that these were hollow promises, At the time, I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about voting for Humphrey, but that’s what I did. Many of my peers chose to “Dump the Hump” and forgo voting, giving Nixon a slim majority, and ushering an ill-fated second term, which ended in his resignation after much domestic chaos and many more deaths as he escalated the war.

When Nixon became President in January 1969, the number of drafted US troops neared its peak of 536,100. There was no “peace with honor.” Nixon introduced a draft lottery system in an effort to address criticism of inequity within the draft, and people I knew chanted “Hell no, we won’t go,” and very few of them did. There were educational and other deferments for people of privilege as well as the possibility of moving to Canada.

In March of 1969, the fourteen-month Cambodian bombing campaign to cut off supplies to the North Vietnamese resulted in horrifying statistics. America dropped more tonnage in bombs during this time than the total tonnage dropped on Japan during WWII. Still, the North Vietnamese government refused to negotiate. On April 30, 1970, Nixon ordered our ground troops into Cambodia in an effort to “root-out” any communist forces concentrated there. Nixon knew this would stir up the anti-war protestors but believed it was necessary to win the war.

College campuses erupted to protest this escalation of the endless war in Vietnam. At Kent State, students set fire to the school’s ROTC building, resulting in the Ohio National Guard being called in on May 4,1970, to restore order. Students threw rocks and the guardsmen opened fire, killing four students. Less than two weeks later, Mississippi State Police shot into a Jackson State College dormitory after supposedly being shot at by anti-war demonstrators, killing two innocent young bystanders. Nixon’s narrow defeat of Humphrey, enabled by the clash between anti-war protestors and police at the 1968 Democratic convention, had prolonged a futile and painful war that resulted in the death of 5,820 American soldiers and two million Vietnamese civilians.

The protestors against the war in Gaza have a just cause. Protesting how Israel is responding to the October 7 Hamas-led massacre of over 1200 innocent Israelis and the taking of over 250 civilian hostages by killing more then 38,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, in an effort to destroy Hamas is understandable. But other than trying to influence our government’s policy toward Israel, it is not analogous to the Vietnam protests of 1968. American protests can’t effect a change in Netanyahu’s government. In 1968, we had a personal stake in the war, as young men we knew were subject to being drafted into an unjust war being conducted by our government. And because ours was government dropping the bombs, killing two million civilians in Vietnam and Cambodia, we believed our protests could effect change by electing new leaders. How would the current protests bring about a change in the leadership of Hamas and Israel?

In the end, the violence exacerbated by Mayor Daley’s draconian crackdown on protestors at the 1968 Democratic convention helped to elect Nixon, a far worse alternative than Humphrey. He escalated the Vietnam war rather than ending it as he had promised. As we are about to enter the 2024 Democratic convention, once again in Chicago,  I am hopeful the protestors will stay in their lane and not be confronted by counter-protestors. How would the election of Donald Trump over Kamala Harris be the outcome that will best serve the cause of the Palestinian people?

Laurie Levy
Boomer. Educator. Advocate. Eclectic topics: grandkids, special needs, values, aging, loss, & whatever. Author: Terribly Strange and Wonderfully Real.

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