History may remember it as a year like no other, with a surprising string of headlines reporting the president dropping plans to run for reelection, an assassin targeting a frontrunner, protesters demanding a ceasefire in a U.S.-aided conflict, and the vice president ultimately topping the ticket at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Sound like this summer? Vermonters here in 1968 know it as the even more startling story of that year’s campaign exit of President Lyndon Johnson, killing of candidate Robert Kennedy and convention vote for second-in-command Hubert Humphrey, all amid dissent from such Vietnam War critics as the state’s then governor, Philip Hoff.
“This country stands on the threshold of a new era,” Hoff said in a speech at the 1968 convention. “We have the weapons to destroy poverty, disease and ignorance. The only thing that separates us from this accomplishment is the will to do it.”
After Hoff spoke, Vermont delegates wandered outside into a crowd of some 10,000 peace demonstrators surrounded by twice as many police and National Guard troopers armed with clubs, rifles and tear gas.
It was just the start of the drama.
“It was a time of change and protest and revolt against conventions of many kinds,” Stephen Terry, Anthony Marro and the late Samuel Hand went on to write in their book “Philip Hoff: How Red Turned Blue in the Green Mountain State.” “Not since the Civil War had the nation been so divided, and while the result was far less bloody, the anger nonetheless was intense.”
A half-century ago, Terry headed the statehouse office (formally called the Vermont Press Bureau) of the Rutland Herald and its sister newspaper, the Barre-Montpelier Times Argus. Now retired and living in Middlebury, the 81-year-old is one of the few Vermonters still alive with a firsthand connection to the convention.
“That was an interesting time,” Terry recently recalled by way of understatement.
‘Irreconcilably split’
Before the Interstate and internet brought Ben & Jerry’s and berniesanders.com, Vermont had voted for every Republican presidential candidate from the Grand Old Party’s founding in 1854 until snapping the streak by favoring Johnson in 1964.
The Texas Democrat won in a landslide that November — a year after John Kennedy’s assassination. But Johnson’s popularity had plummeted by the start of 1968, when North Vietnamese attacks on U.S.-backed South Vietnam eroded the American electorate’s support for the war.
Without cellphones and personal computers, Vermonters relied on such daily papers as the state’s then largest, the Burlington Free Press, and its fiercest competitors, the Herald and Times Argus. Flip through their front pages in 1968 and you’d see antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy win 42% of the New Hampshire Democratic primary vote on March 12, challenger Robert Kennedy enter the race on March 16 and Johnson withdraw on March 31.
The turbulence soon escalated into trauma. Assassins killed civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4 and Robert Kennedy on June 5. (“Now it’s on to Chicago!” the latter told a cheering crowd minutes before his death.) By the time the Free Press, Herald and Times Argus decided to send reporters to cover the nation’s major-party conventions in August, the country was a powder keg ready to explode.
“I drew the straw to cover the Republicans in Miami,” recalled Terry, who figured he had scored the first and more exotic destination.
That left the Democrats (who would follow at Chicago’s International Amphitheatre) to Herald and Times Argus colleague John Mahoney and Free Press counterpart Mavis Doyle — the latter an “admired, feared and occasionally detested” reporter who wasn’t above listening to closed-door meetings through keyholes.
“Hoff is expected to play a prominent role in the convention,” the Free Press reported of the first Democratic governor to drop his support of Johnson because of the war.
The Green Mountain State’s 21 other delegates, the Herald added, were “irreconcilably split” between peace-advocate McCarthy and war-supporter Humphrey, who had entered the race on April 27. Arriving in the Windy City on Aug. 25, they caucused well past midnight.
“Vermont’s delegation is well guarded,” Mahoney capped his story. “Across the street from the Pearson Hotel, which is where the entire state delegation is housed, is one of the five armories in which the more than 5,000 National Guardsmen are on standby alert with tanks, bayonets, guns and tear gas.”
Reporters didn’t foresee what that could spark. Instead, their initial coverage focused on Hoff. Once considered in line for a post in a Robert Kennedy White House, the Vermont leader would mourn the candidate’s death, then become the first Democratic governor to support McCarthy.
“Hoff’s break with the Johnson administration,” the Free Press reported, “has cost him some prestige and privileges at the national convention. Not only is the Vermont delegation seated in the very rear of the amphitheater, but the Hoff people have been unable to get any accreditation for his staff members.”
It was clear that Humphrey was set to win the nomination. But Hoff nevertheless stepped to the podium to speak in favor of buttressing the party platform with a peace plank.
“Join those of us in the minority,” the governor told the crowd of some 2,500 delegates, “and destroy the only thing which stands between us and the American dream — the war in Vietnam.”
‘Different kind of convention’
Herald and Times Argus reporter Mahoney was a 32-year-old husband with four children when he arrived in Chicago.
“When I stepped from the air-conditioned cab,” he recalled in a 2008 blog post, “I walked into a wall of humidity. The air was hot and thick. It had substance, volume, presence. It took my breath away.”
Then came the tear gas.
Mahoney had strolled out of the convention hall and stumbled into a peace protest Aug. 28 when he began “coughing and choking” as authorities moved in with weapons and trucks “fronted by tangles of barbed wire.”
“I’ll never forget the bandaged heads and the blood, the vomit, the other body fluids,” he recalled. “I was only shoved, not struck.”
But Mahoney was shaken enough to join the demonstration, then try to convince a fellow journalist — specifically, renowned writer Norman Mailer — to do the same.
“I’m on assignment,” Mahoney recalled Mailer saying.
“Me too, Mailer,” the Vermonter remembered thinking, “but I had abandoned the pretense of objectivity and arms-length professional voyeurism, for this was war. For me, it was to be participatory journalism from there on out.”
That created a challenge for Terry who, in Montpelier, suddenly had to cover what was happening inside the convention hall nearly 1,000 miles away. Turning to a television and landline telephone, he soon was investigating the fact Hoff was being floated as a protest candidate for vice president.
Photographers on the floor captured Vermont delegates passing out “Hoff for V.P.” signs and stickers.
“Oh, that,” the governor himself told an inquiring reporter. “It’s nothing.”
But it was enough for then CBS News reporter Dan Rather to seek out the state’s contingent.
“Is that true?” the broadcaster was said to have asked. “Will he?”
Spotting Hoff, Rather put the Vermont governor on the air.
“For two minutes he lashed out at police brutality,” the Herald and Times Argus reported. Then Hoff said he wouldn’t be a candidate and instead would support Humphrey’s choice, fellow New Englander Edmund Muskie of Maine.
“I made my point,” Hoff told the press after.
The convention would end with Humphrey and Muskie winning the nomination and hundreds of protesters arrested or injured, leaving crews to clean up the balloons and the blood.
“Vermont’s delegates to the Democratic National Convention cleared the dust of Chicago from their feet,” the Herald and Times Argus reported Aug. 31, “so weary, dispirited, angry and frustrated.”
Hoff sent a telegram to then Chicago Mayor Richard Daley saying “we are pleased to be liberated from your streets” before telling reporters that the week was “the most traumatic experience of my life.”
The Herald and Times Argus quoted their own “participatory” reporter for confirmation.
“When you walked across the grass, the sod was so impregnated with tear gas that it would come up and choke the man walking behind you,” said Mahoney, who returned home to quit his job and move to Quebec. (VTDigger attempts to contact him were unsuccessful.)
Terry was left to report the rest of the story.
“I certainly did wish I was on the scene in Chicago,” he recalled this month, “because it had to be, from a journalistic perspective, one of the most amazing historic events.”
Vermont would go on to not only support GOP winner Richard Nixon (who lost only Chittenden and Franklin counties) but also see Republicans sweep every state office on the November ballot.
As 2024 delegates settle in for this week’s Democratic National Convention, Terry doesn’t anticipate presidential nominee Kamala Harris will face a replay of 1968.
“You will see protests, but there certainly won’t be the heavy-handedness,” the retired reporter said. “I imagine this will be a very different kind of convention.”
Read the story on VTDigger here: Think 2024 is a presidential potboiler? Revisiting Vermont’s politically volcanic summer of 1968..