United States Presidential Candidates 1968

"Watching George Romney run for the presidency was like watching a duck try to make love to a football."

"For example, the papers today are filled with stories about businesses dropping health coverage for employees. We provided a substantial package for our staff at the Stratford Inn. However, were we operating today, those costs would exceed $150,000 a year for health care on top of salaries and other benefits. There would have been no reasonably way for us to absorb or pass on these costs."

"The problem we face as legislators is: Where do we set the bar so that it is not too high to clear? I don't have the answer. I do know that we need to start raising these questions more often."

"The South Dakota senator’s message was a necessary and appropriate one for that moment, when the United States was mired in what seemed to be a war without end in Southeast Asia—a war that emptied the US treasury into the coffers of a military-industrial complex that demanded resources that could have been spent on job creation, education and healthcare."

"I don’t think the American people had a clear picture of either Nixon or me...I think they thought that Nixon was a strong, decisive, tough-minded guy, and that I was an idealist and antiwar guy who might not attach enough significance to the security of the country. The truth is, I was the guy with the war record, and my opposition to Vietnam was because I was interested in the nation’s well-being."

"In short, ‘one-size-fits-all’ rules for business ignore the reality of the market place. And setting thresholds for regulatory guidelines at artificial levels--e.g., 50 employees or more, $500,000 in sales--takes no account of other realities, such as profit margins, labor intensive vs. capital intensive businesses, and local market economics."

"I had a strange, brief flirtation with the right. I voted for Richard Nixon...Nixon was even running against a South Dakota boy, George McGovern. But McGovern had no understanding of treaty rights..."

"The wisdom and hope that was inherent in McGovern’s call that year was not sufficient to defeat Richard Nixon. In a matter of months, however, polls would reveal that Americans regretted their decision, as they came to recognize the extent of Nixon’s corruption. Forty years on, McGovern’s vision that America might come home to the ideals that had nourished it from the beginning is less a matter of hope than necessity."

"But my business associates and I also lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never doubted the worthiness of any of these goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: `Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for the increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape.' It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators."

"Today we are much closer to a general acknowledgment that government must encourage business to expand and grow. Bill Clinton, Paul Tsongas, Bob Kerrey and others have, I believe, changed the debate of our party. We intuitively know that to create job opportunities we need entrepreneurs who will risk their capital against an expected payoff. Too often, however, public policy does not consider whether we are choking off those opportunities."

"I opened the doors of the Democratic Party and 20 million people walked out. -ibid"

"We are the party that believes we can’t let the strong kick aside the weak... Our party believes that poor children should be as well educated as those from wealthy families. We believe that everyone should pay their fair share of taxes and that everyone should have access to health care... With the country burdened economically... there has never been a more critical time in our nation’s history” to rely on those principles."

"A slender, soft-spoken minister’s son newly elected to Congress — his father was a Republican — Mr. McGovern went to Washington as a 34-year-old former college history teacher and decorated bomber pilot in World War II... with ... a brand of politics traceable to the Midwestern progressivism of the late 19th century."

"I never did care that much for George McGovern. I thought that George McGovern was just an opportunist, at that time."

"The vision McGovern, who died Sunday at age 90, articulated as his party’s nominee for the presidency, and as one of its ablest and most honorable senators, is as correct as ever... the need to make deep cuts in Pentagon spending and the attendant policing of the world... George McGovern’s vision makes even more sense now than it did in 1972. When McGovern ran for president in 1972, his slogan was “Come Home, America.”"

"Bill Clinton, who started his political career with McGovern, expressed interest in cutting defense to invest in transportation infrastructure, including “a high-speed rail network.” Yet again, however, liberals and conservatives proved no different in government, voting to keep the military-industrial complex going, even though the United States had become the world’s first truly uncontested superpower."

"Elected to the Senate in 1962, Mr. McGovern voted consistently in favor of civil rights and antipoverty bills, was instrumental in developing and expanding food stamp and nutrition programs, and helped lead opposition to the Vietnam War in the Senate."

"...“soft” on defense. For forty years now, Democrats have sought to avoid the label that was attached to George McGovern, the World War II hero who recognized the folly of squandering America’s human, moral and fiscal prospects on war-making in Vietnam. It is true that McGovern lost his 1972 presidential race. But he did not lose because he was wrong. He lost because of the wrong politics of a moment when his own party was divided and his opposition was ruthless."

"From secrecy and deception in high places, come home, America."

"Come home to the affirmation that we have a dream. Come home to the conviction that we can move our country forward."

"Chairman (Larry) O'Brien, Chairwoman (Yvonne) Burke, Senator (Ted) Kennedy, Senator (Thomas) Eagleton and my fellow citizens, I'm happy to join us (sic) for this benediction of our Friday sunrise service. I assume that everyone here is impressed with my control of this Convention in that my choice for Vice President was challenged by only 39 other nominees. And I can tell you that Eleanor (McGovern) is very grateful that the Oregon delegation at least kept her in the race with (wife of Attorney General John N Mitchell) Martha Mitchell. -McGovern's acceptance speech at the 1972 Democratic National Convention, America's Political Parties: Power and Privelige Part 1: The Democrats hosted by Ben Wattenberg"

"In 1988, I invested most of the earnings from this lecture circuit acquiring the leasehold on Connecticut's Stratford Inn… In retrospect, I wish I had known more about the hazards and difficulties of such a business, especially during a recession of the kind that hit New England just as I was acquiring the inn's 43-year leasehold. I also wish that during the years I was in public office, I had had this firsthand experience about the difficulties business people face every day. That knowledge would have made me a better U.S. senator and a more understanding presidential contender."

"I'm fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in."

"I think the Vietnamese are better off in Vietnam."

"From the entrenchment of special privileges in tax favoritism; from the waste of idle lands to the joy of useful labor; from the prejudice based on race and sex; from the loneliness of the aging poor and the despair of the neglected sick: come home, America."

"From military spending so wasteful that it weakens our nation, come home, America."

"Unlike some of his peers, Mr. McGovern did not become wealthy in office, and he said he had no interest in lobbying afterward. Instead, he earned a living teaching, lecturing and writing. He briefly owned a motor inn in Stratford, Conn., and a bookstore in Montana, where he owned a summer home. But neither investment proved profitable."

"To the liberal Democratic faithful, Mr. McGovern remained a standard-bearer well into his old age, writing and lecturing... insisting on a strong, “progressive” federal government to protect the vulnerable and expand economic opportunity, while asserting that history would prove him correct in his opposing not only what he called “the tragically mistaken American war in Vietnam” but also the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan."

"Four years later, another antiwar Democrat managed to win the nomination. Senator George McGovern had flown thirty-five bombing missions against the Nazis in a B-24. He couldn’t be dismissed as a weakling afraid to draw blood. At the 1972 Democratic convention that summer, McGovern promised to withdraw the United States from Vietnam immediately: “[W]ithin ninety days of my inauguration, every American soldier and every American prisoner will be out of the jungle and out of their cells and then home in America where they belong.” The message failed. The McGovern campaign lost all but a single state in the general election to Richard Nixon. McGovern didn’t reassess. If anything he hardened his position. Before leaving the race, McGovern made the case for what might now be described as an America First foreign policy: “This is also the time to turn away from excessive preoccupation overseas to the rebuilding of our own nation.” It would be forty-four years before another presidential candidate made that point as forcefully, and he was a Republican."

"Defense conversion is most closely associated with South Dakota Democrat and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, who made it his signature issue in Congress. A recession in the mid-1950s and the military cuts following the Cuban missile crisis gave him the opportunity to push the idea through the Senate, and in 1964 he called for a National Economic Conversion Commission (NECC) that would oversee the work. McGovern wanted to get the defense industry out of job creation, recognizing, as many liberal and conservative elites did privately, that the military-industrial complex was essentially a “gigantic WPA.” McGovern also wanted to free up hundreds of millions of federal monies for domestic welfare, to shore up the welfare state. But the Vietnam War killed the project, as his fellow Democrats denounced him as a “radical” in the middle of a war."

"Five years ago, even the most audacious visionary would not have dared predict the slashing do-or-die desperation and the sizzling up-tempo beat which has exploded into our politics, into our daily conversation, and into our nightmares and dreams."

"It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jet liner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot’s seat."

"The question of the Negro's place in America, which for a long time could actually be kicked around as a serious question, has been decisively resolved: he is here to stay. But the Negro revolution is the real bedrock of the battleground on which the new right and the new left are contending. In a sense, both the new left and the new right are the spawn of the Negro revolution. A broad national consensus was developed over the civil rights struggle, and it had the sophistication and morality to repudiate the right wing. This consensus, which stands between a violent nation and chaos, is America's most precious possession. But there are those who despise it."

"A convict's paranoia is as thick as the prison wall - and just as necessary."

"Americans think of themselves collectively as a huge rescue squad on twenty-four-hour call to any spot on the globe where dispute and conflict may erupt."

"If a man is free - not in prison, the Army, a monastery, hospital, spaceship, submarine - and living a normal life with the usual multiplicity of social relations with individuals of both sexes, it may be that he is incapable of experiencing the total impact of another individual upon himself. The competing influences and conflicting forces of other personalities may dilute one's psychic and emotional perception, to the extent that one does not and cannot receive all that the other person is capable of sending."

"Americans are becoming increasingly polarized right and left, with the great body of the people in the middle confused and, sometimes to mask their confusion, feigning indifference."

"All the gods are dead except the god of war."

"The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less."

"If a man like Malcolm X could change and repudiate racism, if I myself and other former Muslims can change, if young whites can change, then there is hope for America."

"Somehow I arrived at the conclusion that, as a matter of principle, it was of paramount importance for me to have an antagonistic, ruthless attitude toward white women. The term outlaw appealed to me and at the time my parole date was drawing near, I considered myself to be mentally free - I was an "outlaw." I had stepped outside of the white man's law, which I repudiated with scorn and self-satisfaction. I became a law unto myself- my own legislature, my own supreme court, my own executive."

"I had come to believe that there is no God; if there is, men do not know anything about him. Therefore, all religions were phony - which made all preachers and priests, in our eyes, fakers, including the ones scurrying around the prison who, curiously, could put in a good word for you with the Almighty Creator of the universe but could not get anything down with the warden or parole board - they could usher you through the Pearly Gates after you were dead, but not through the prison gate while you were still alive and kicking."

"Rape was an insurrectionary act. It delighted me that I was defying and trampling upon the white man's law, upon his system of values, and that I was defiling his women - and this point, I believe was the most satisfying to me because I was very resentful over the historical fact of how the white man has used the black woman. I felt I was getting revenge. From the site of the act of rape, consternation spreads outwardly in concentric circles. I wanted to send waves of consternation throughout the white race."

"Malcolm X had a special meaning for black convicts. A former prisoner himself, he had risen from the lowest depths to great heights. For this reason he was a symbol of hope, a model for thousands of black convicts who found themselves trapped in the vicious PPP cycle: prison-parole-prison."

"The massive upsurge of the Negro people and the support and sympathy aroused in the white community beat the dinosaur back from their first line of defense."

"Shortly before the publication of his book, Cleaver had brokered an important black-white alliance in California. The New Left there had formed a political party, the Peace and Freedom Party, which had gathered one hundred thousand signatures to put its candidates on the California ballot. Through Cleaver, the party was able to establish a coalition with the Black Panthers, by agreeing to the Panther platform of exempting blacks from the military, freeing all blacks from prison, and demanding that all future trials of blacks be held with an all-black jury. Cleaver was to be nominated as the party’s presidential candidate, with Jerry Rubin as his running mate. Cleaver’s new wife, Kathleen, a SNCC worker, was to be a state assembly candidate, as was Black Panther Bobby Seale. It was during Cleaver’s campaign that he called for “pussy power” at an event he labeled “Pre-erection Day” and an alliance with “Machine Gun Kellys”—that is, anyone with firearms who was willing to use them. In October he received loud applause from a packed theater with an overflowing crowd at Stanford University, when he said of the governor of California, “Ronald Reagan is a punk, a sissy, and a coward, and I challenge him to a duel to the death or until he says Uncle Eldridge. I give him a choice of weapons—a gun, a knife, a baseball bat, or marshmallows.” 1968 was the best year Eldridge Cleaver had. The following year, accused of involvement in a Black Panther shoot-out in Oakland, he fled to Cuba and then to Algeria. By the time he finally returned to the United States in 1975, he had no following left."

"Prior to 1954, we lived in an atmosphere of novocain. Negroes found it necessary, in order to maintain whatever sanity they could, to remain somewhat aloof and detached from "the problem." We accepted indignities and the mechanics of the apparatus of oppression without reacting by sitting-in or holding mass demonstrations. Nurtured by the fires of the controversy over segregation, I was soon aflame with indignation over my newly discovered social status, and inwardly I turned away from America with horror, disgust and outrage."

"I had gotten caught with a shopping bag full of Marijuana, a shopping bag full of love - I was in love with the weed and I did not for one minute think that anything was wrong with getting high. I had been getting high for four or five years and was convinced, with the zeal of a crusader, that marijuana was superior to lush - yet the rulers of the land seemed all to be lushes. I could not see how they were more justified in drinking than I was in blowing the gage. I was a grasshopper, and it was natural that I felt myself to be unjustly prosecuted."

"In economics, because everybody seemed to find it necessary to attack and condemn Karl Marx in their writings, I sought out his book, and although he kept me with a headache, I took him my authority. I was not prepared to understand him, but I was able to see in him a thoroughgoing critique of and condemnation of capitalism. It was like taking medicine for me to find that, indeed, American capitalism deserved all th hatred and contempt that I felt for it in my heart."

"I cannot help to say that Huey P. Newton is the baddest motherfucker ever to set foot inside of history. Huey has a very special meaning to black people, because for four hundred years black people have been wanting to do exactly what Huey Newton did, that is, to stand up in front of the most deadly tentacle of the white racist power structure, and to defy that deadly tentacle, and to tell that tentacle that he will not accept the aggression and the brutality, and that if he is moved against, he will retaliate in kind. Huey Newton is a classical revolutionary figure."