I have never regretted a vote that I have cast. Almost 50 years later, I bitterly regret the one vote I did not cast.
The election of 1968 occurred in a country riven by the Vietnam War. Ultimately, almost 60,000 Americans died, more than 150,000 were wounded, more than two million Vietnamese, Cambodians, Laotians and others died.
Both parties shared responsibility for this bloodbath, beginning with Republican Dwight Eisenhower’s “Domino theory,” graduating to Democrat John F. Kennedy’s “Advisors,” and to Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson’s stunning escalation of the war, driven by the hysteria of lies and half-truths.
Summer 1968 saw Chicago’s Democratic Convention, its streets and parks clogged with war protesters, with draft-aged men and young women, but older folks as well. Television showed unarmed demonstrators, Democrat Mayor Richard Daley‘s police clubbing and gassing them, the bystanders and reporters caught up and injured and the chaos in the convention hall as well.
I was sickened by the brutality of the war and the police. Sickened by politicians—by President Johnson, by Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey, credentialed liberal reformer, but now evidently Johnson’s man. I suspected he would be too weak to turn the war.
With Bobby Kennedy assassinated, with Eugene McCarthy out of the race, utterly contemptuous of Richard Nixon, I refused to vote.
Republican Nixon won. He continued, intensified and expanded the war in Vietnam, and into Cambodia and Laos. Many thousands more suffered and died. Everyone knows how his Watergate further dishonored the presidency.
I do not know whether Humphrey could have ended the war sooner and with less suffering. Perhaps. But he was certainly a more honorable man than Nixon.
I will vote this Nov. 8, and I will vote early in the morning.
Bruce Curtis is a professor emeritus of MSU.
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