Beating Plowshares Into Swords: An Alternate History of the Vietnam War by F. C. Schaefer Page A

nomination. That bastard Wallace could have gotten elected for all I cared; he was drawing big enough crowds to make it look like a possibility and the calendar was only April. Then in June, I was asked by friends in The Movement to come with them to Chicago at the end of August, they were planning a big mass demonstration at the Democratic Convention to demand they nominate Robert Kennedy instead of Johnson, and everyone was needed on deck. Taking it to the streets is how they put it. At first I though it was a stupid idea, LBJ was going to get his coronation and there was nothing we could do about it now. No one with any power was listening to us, I told them, and going to Chicago was a waste of time. But I was wrong; somebody was listening after all.
     
    James Rice: My father was a delegate to the Republican Convention in ‘68; he was a Reagan man all the way and the absolute last thing he wanted to see was that rich welfare state Eastern liberal Nelson Rockefeller get the nomination; so you can imagine how royally ticked off he was when he got back from Miami Beach the second week of August. Reagan went into that convention with over 400 delegates and a real head of steam, so all the guys like my Dad who’d worked their asses off for Goldwater really and truly believed they were going to do it again. The strategy was to stop Rockefeller on the first ballot and then pick up enough delegates to put their man over on the second. But they had the rug pulled out from under them at the end of the first roll call when Governor Rhodes of Ohio stood up and threw all his favorite son votes to Rockefeller; Romney in Michigan did the same thing, clinching the game for Rocky before my father and the Reagan campaign knew what had hit them. All my father talked about when he got home was how the Eastern Establishment had the fix put in from the start and there was no damn way he was just going to just fall in line behind some millionaire who‘d never have to worry about seeing the value of his home decline because Negroes moved next door. He thought it was a personal spit in the eye to him and everyone else who’d worked for Goldwater and Reagan when Rockefeller honored Martin Luther King in his acceptance speech and affirmed his support for the Civil Rights Act. And it sure as hell was salt in the wound when Rockefeller picked a fellow liberal like Mark Hatfield for his Vice President.
    It was so bad that my Dad and his buddies were actually talking about getting behind George Wallace, a cross burner; not just voting for the Alabama Governor, but raising money for him in California and forming a committee of the like minded in the Golden State. All those riots from Watts to Detroit, all those scenes of Negroes looting and burning left a lot of pissed off white people feeling like there was nowhere else to go. But then came the Democratic Convention in Chicago at the end of the month and the world got turned upside down.
     
    Gen. Earl Halton: In the wake of the Moscow shakeup, Secretary Nixon postponed his plans to leave the Administration and decided to stay on until the end of President Johnson’s term, which meant that I stayed on as well. The best part of it was the extra star I got; the down part was-along with everyone else on the Secretary’s staff-getting pulled into the election of ‘68.
    The events of that year have been well chronicled in more than a few books; I would point out the investigative works of Theodore White, William Manchester, Joe McGuiness, and David Halberstam as among the best and there is little I would say here that will add to their work. And I have nothing to say on the subject of whether I was a confidential source for any or all of those gentlemen.
    What I can say is that it was Secretary Nixon who first informed President Johnson of the proposed “Kennedy Coup” at the Chicago Convention; this was confirmed to me by the Secretary himself who recounted the details of his conversation with the