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    ‘The world is watching’: 1968 protests set stage for Democratic convention

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    Sean Wilentz was in the convention hall when someone handed out copies of a news wire report. “I remember the first line,” he says. “It said, ‘The lid blew off of this convention city tonight.’” The article went on to describe chaos and bloodshed in Chicago as police clashed with protesters against the Vietnam war.Just 17 at the time, Wilentz and a couple of friends raced to the scene in downtown Chicago. “It was horrible. The cops were angry and didn’t like the kids and the kids were angry and didn’t like the cops. I saw a motorcycle cop go on a sidewalk and pin a kid against the wall. I was very scared.”View image in fullscreenMore than half a century has passed since a police riot scarred the Democratic national convention of 1968. On Monday Democrats return to Chicago with a spring in their step as they prepare to anoint Kamala Harris their presidential candidate. Yet some comparisons with the events of 56 years ago are irresistible.Just as in 1968, a would-be assassin has sought to change the course of political history. Just as in 1968, an incumbent president has stepped aside and a vice-president will gain the Democratic nomination without winning a single primary vote. And just as in 1968, protesters will gather to demonstrate their anger over US involvement in an unpopular war.Democrats are praying that the similarities end there. When the teargas cleared in Chicago, Hubert Humphrey, a self-styled “happy warrior”, emerged as the standard-bearer of a bitterly divided party. He went on to lose the election to Richard Nixon who, like fellow Republican Donald Trump, pushed a “law and order” message to exploit white voters’ fears and prejudices.View image in fullscreenMuch has changed since Trump secured the Republican nomination at the party’s own convention in Milwaukee last month. With 81-year-old Joe Biden fading in opinion polls, the Democratic campaign had come to resemble a death march. But his decision to quit the race and throw his weight behind Harris triggered an explosion of relief, self-belief and surging enthusiasm.Next week’s Democratic convention will put the capstone on the dramatic turnaround. Harris and running mate Tim Walz, who have been drawing huge crowds at rallies and millions of dollars in donations, will be formally nominated and deliver the most important speeches of their careers – probably resulting in a further polling bump.But the carefully stage-managed event – also featuring Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and A-list celebrities – could yet go off script. Thousands of pro-Palestinian protesters are expected to gather outside to demand that the US end military aid to Israel amid the ongoing war in Gaza, where the death toll has surpassed 40,000, according to the healthy ministry there.The March on the DNC, a coalition of more than 200 organisations from all over the US, plans to hold demonstrations on Monday and Thursday, the days when Biden and Harris are due to speak. Its website brands the president “Genocide Joe Biden” and warns: “Democratic party leadership switching out their presidential nominee does not wash the blood of over 50,000 Palestinians off their hands.”Although a sprawling security plan has been drawn up by federal, state and city governments, some activists have vowed a replay of 1968, when years of unrest over the American misadventure in Vietnam came to a head in Chicago. Then, as now, students took up the anti-war cause with campus protests, including at Columbia University in New York, where Hamilton Hall was occupied in both 1968 and 2024.View image in fullscreenThere was already political uncertainty after President Lyndon B Johnson closed a speech about the Vietnam war with the stunning announcement that he would not seek another term. Biden has similarly dropped out of the election race, albeit later in the cycle and for very different reasons.America was further shaken by the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy, who was running for the Democratic nomination, and by cities burning in protest at racial injustice. Last month Trump narrowly survived an attempt on his life at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania but one of his supporters was killed.Wilentz, now 73 and a history professor at Princeton University, recalled: “The thing about Chicago: this is the culmination of a crisis that had been building in American politics for five or six years and it was also feeding off the civil rights movement. There was a real feeling of desperation, that this disaster is going to continue. The politics were very fraught and furious and one was not necessarily thinking strategically.”In late August more than 10,000 protesters opposing the Vietnam war and assorted other causes held huge demonstrations near the convention site. Some threw red paint to simulate blood and occupied major roads to block traffic. The official response was brutal with widespread use of teargas, beatings and arrests by the police and national guard. The carnage was broadcast live on television and demonstrators chanted: “The whole world is watching.”View image in fullscreenEyewitness Taylor Pensoneau, 83, who was reporting for the St Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper, recalled: “The protesters were doing a lot to taunt the Chicago police. They were throwing bottles and stones at the police and they were calling them pigs and confronting them. It was a very incendiary situation.“It seemed inevitable that at some point the Chicago police were going to respond and eventually they did in a very forceful manner, swinging billy clubs and pushing protesters to the ground. A lot of people were getting hurt. It was a riot.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThere was even mayhem inside the convention hall, including assaults on journalists. Supporters of anti-war candidates such as senator Eugene McCarthy clashed with supporters of Humphrey, who won the nomination with the backing of party elites and dared not defy Johnson over the war until much later.At first glance Humphrey appears to have little in common with Harris. But there is tonal echo. Humphrey had “The Happy Warrior” painted on his plane and, when first declaring his candidacy, remarked: “Here we are the way politics ought to be in America, the politics of happiness, politics of purpose, politics of joy.” Terms such as “happy warriors” and “politics of joy” have been widely applied to Harris and Walz.Such an upbeat approach could come over as tone deaf as children are dying in Gaza, according to Norman Solomon, national director of the progressive group RootsAction. He said: “I was 17 in 1968 and I remember it was like, what are you talking about, the politics of joy? Maybe you’re happy but the administration that you’re part of continues to massacre people on a large scale in Vietnam.“Harris is on an upswing with Walz and in terms of defeating Trump that’s good but the disconnect with people in Dearborn [home of the biggest Arab American community] or people who will be in the streets in Chicago next week is pretty severe. She’s talking politics of joy and Congress is voting the billions more for weapons. The US keeps helping to kill people in Gaza and she dispatches her national security adviser to say she’s absolutely against an arms embargo. It’s almost split screen.”Harris’s acceptance speech on Thursday night will be watched closely for clues that, unlike Humphrey at the convention, she is ready to put some clear daylight between herself and Biden, an ardent Zionist, on the Gaza issue. That could be crucial in persuading Arab American, Muslim and young voters to give her the benefit of the doubt.James Zogby, the founder and president of the Arab American Institute in Washington, said: “She was the first one to call for a ceasefire. She was the first one to call for Palestinian self-determination. She was the first one to use very powerful language about the devastation of Gaza and the suffering of the people there.“She’s been about as clear as you could be that there is a difference in her outlook on this. I’m not going to let you in on all of them but there are indications we’re getting that they do want to turn corners here. They’ve opened a door already in terms of language and policy will follow.”Zogby also doubts that there will be any repeat of the mayhem inside the 1968 convention hall. Of more than 4,000 delegates, only 30 are “uncommitted”, representing a grassroots voter coalition that has opposed Biden’s Gaza policy. This is “nowhere near what you would require to have any kind of floor demonstration”, he said.View image in fullscreen“If there’s a disruption, it would be a handful of people in sea of other delegates. It would not be 1968. Outside, on the other hand, is a different story because, even though many of the groups demonstrating intend to keep it civil and constructive, anytime you get something that large, it develops a dynamic all of its own.”The parallels with 1968 are undoubtedly striking. But the difference may prove more important. The Vietnam war and its draft affected far more Americans than the current conflict in Gaza. Few analysts believe that Gaza will have as much electoral significance, except perhaps in Michigan. Nixon would become embroiled in the Watergate scandal but did not threaten democracy as Trump does.Wilentz commented: “1968 was a very different time than anything I’ve ever seen in this country. There’s certain similarities between this year and that year in the sense that you have events happening very quickly and they seem traumatic. But nothing in comparison to what 68 felt like.” More

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      I remember the 1960s crackdowns against war protesters. This is a repeat | Robert Reich

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      I’ve been spending the last several weeks trying to find out what’s really going on with the campus protests.I’ve met with students at Berkeley, where I teach. I’ve visited with faculty at Columbia University. I’ve spoken by phone with young people and professors at many other universities.My conclusion: while protest movements are often ignited by many different things and attract an assortment of people with a range of motives, this one is centered on one thing: moral outrage at the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent people – most of them women and children – in Gaza.To interpret these protests as anything else – as antisemitic or anti-Zionist or anti-American or pro-Palestinian – is to miss the essence of what’s going on and why.Most of the students and faculty I’ve spoken with found Hamas’s attack on October 7 odious. They also find Israel’s current government morally bankrupt, in that its response to Hamas’s attack has been disproportionate.Some protesters focus their anger on Israel, some on the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu, some on Joe Biden for failing to stand up to Netanyahu, for giving Israel additional armaments, and for what they perceive as Biden’s patronizing response to the protests.Like any protest movement, the actions have attracted a few on the fringe. I’ve heard scattered reports of antisemitism, although I haven’t witnessed or heard anything that might be interpreted as antisemitic. In fact, a significant number of the protesters are Jewish.To describe the protesters as “pro-Palestinian” is also inaccurate. Most do not support Palestine as such; they do not know enough about the history of Israel and Palestine to pass moral judgment.But they have a deep and abiding sense that what is happening in Gaza is morally wrong, and that the United States is complicit in that immorality.Many tell me they are planning not to vote this coming November – a clear danger to Biden’s re-election campaign, which in turn increases the odds of a Trump presidency.When I tell them that a failure to vote for Biden is in effect a vote for Trump, they say they cannot in good conscience vote for either candidate.Quite a number tell me that “the lesser of two evils is still evil”. I tell them Trump would be far worse for the world – truly evil. Many remain unconvinced.I have sharp memories of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations, in which I participated some 55 years ago.I remember being appalled at the unnecessary carnage in Vietnam. I was incensed that the first world, white and rich, was randomly killing people in the third world, mostly non-white and poor. As an American, I felt morally complicit.I was angry at college administrators who summoned police to clear protesters – using teargas, stun guns and mass arrests. The response only added fuel to the flames.The anti-Vietnam war movement became fodder for rightwing politicians like Richard Nixon, demanding “law and order”. The spectacle also appalled many non-college, working-class people who viewed the students as pampered, selfish, anti-American, unpatriotic.I vividly recall the anti war demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, and the brutality of the Chicago police and Illinois national guard – later described by the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence as a “police riot”.As the anti-war protesters chanted “The whole world is watching”, network television conveyed the riotous scene to what seemed like the whole world.I had spent months working for the anti-war presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. The convention nominated Hubert Humphrey. That November, the nation voted in Richard Nixon as president.History, as it is said, doesn’t repeat itself. It only rhymes.The mistakes made at one point in time have an eerie way of re-emerging two generations later, as memories fade.
      Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Saving Capitalism: For the Many, Not the Few and The Common Good. His newest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It, is out now. He is a Guardian US columnist. His newsletter is at robertreich.substack.com More

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      Chuck Mawhinney, 74, Dies; Deadliest Sniper in Marine Corps History

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      He put the experience behind him after he returned from the Vietnam War. But fame finally caught up to him in the 1990s.Chuck Mawhinney, whose ability to creep through the dense jungle and looming elephant grass of South Vietnam and then wait for hours with his scoped rifle to pick off an enemy soldier made him the deadliest sniper in the history of the Marine Corps, died on Feb. 12 in Baker City, a town in the northeastern corner of Oregon. He was 74.His death was announced by Coles Funeral Home in Baker City. No further details were available.Mr. Mawhinney, who served in Vietnam from May 1968 to March 1970, had 106 confirmed kills and another 216 probable kills, averaging about four a week — more than the average company, which comprised about 150 soldiers.Among American military snipers, only Chris Kyle, a Navy SEAL who served in Iraq and had 160 confirmed kills, and Adelbert Waldron, an Army sniper during the Vietnam War with 109 kills, had higher numbers than Mr. Mawhinney.As a sniper, Mr. Mawhinney filled a number of roles. He would stay up all night with his rifle and night scope, watching the perimeter of an encampment for incursions. He would go out on patrol with other Marines, ready to support them if a firefight broke out. But mostly he and his spotter, a novice sniper who helped him identify targets, went out alone, looking for individual targets to kill as a way of sapping enemy morale.Most of his kills came slowly, a single shot from his bolt-action M40 after hours of waiting. But some came in bursts: On the night of Feb. 14, 1969, Mr. Mawhinney watched as a column of North Vietnamese soldiers crossed a shallow river near Da Nang, making their way toward a Marine encampment. He started firing, quickly but methodically, and in 30 seconds he had killed 16. The rest retreated.He claimed no special talent as a sniper, just the willingness to put in endless hours of practice. But he also demonstrated an unusual ability to tolerate grueling hours of stillness hiding in the jungle, alert for targets while bugs and snakes crawled over him.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Biden will have ‘LBJ moment’ and not run for re-election, Cornel West says

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      Joe Biden will “have an LBJ moment” and decide not to run for re-election next year, the leftwing academic and independent presidential candidate Cornel West has predicted.“I’m not even sure whether I’ll be running against Biden,” West told Politico. “Biden – I think he’s going to have an LBJ moment [and] pull back.”West was referring to the moment on 31 March 1968 when Lyndon B Johnson, in office since the assassination of John F Kennedy in November 1963, announced that he would not seek re-election.Johnson cited the war in Vietnam and divisions at home. His former secretary, George Christian, said health was also a factor: Johnson was only 59 but had suffered a heart attack 13 years before. He had a fatal heart attack five years later.Already the oldest president ever sworn in, Biden is 81 and would be 86 at the end of a second term. In polling, clear majorities say he is too old.West told Politico he might end up running against a “B team” of younger Democrats including Gavin Newsom, governor of California, and Gretchen Whitmer, governor of Michigan, because Biden was “running out of gas”.He did not mention Kamala Harris, Biden’s vice-president.At 70, West is seven years younger than the most likely Republican candidate, the former president, 91-time criminal indictee and adjudicated rapist Donald Trump.Trump, West said, was a “bona fide gangster, neo-fascist Pied Piper leading the country for a second civil war”.But he called Biden “a milquetoast neoliberal with military adventurism, possibly leading the world toward world war three”.“I’m more concerned about Trump domestically,” West said. “I’m more concerned about Biden in terms of foreign policy.”The Biden campaign did not comment. A Trump spokesperson misspelled West’s name (“Cornell”) and said he should “go back to liberal academia instead of playing pretend politics. He still hasn’t graduated from the kids table.”West does not perform as strongly in polling as another independent seen as a potential spoiler in favour of Trump, the attorney and campaigner Robert F Kennedy Jr.West told Politico: “I don’t accept the spoiler category. A vote for Biden, a vote for Trump is a vote for Biden and a vote for Trump.“There might be slices of people [who say], ‘If I didn’t vote for West, I would have voted for Biden.’ But that’s not to me a spoiler. If you’re in a race, and you make a case, and they vote for you, how do you become the spoiler?”Polling indicates Biden’s weakness against all Republican candidates. West said he campaigned for Biden in 2020 but did not vote for him.“When I got in there,” he said, “I don’t know if it was the Holy Ghost [but] something hit me: I said, ‘Naw, I can’t vote for this gangster.’”West was linked to the People’s party and the Green party before becoming independent. He was, he said, “trying to touch that 38% who don’t vote at all and young people more and more wrestling with cynicism of various sorts”.Polling shows declining support for Biden among Black voters.West said: “If you are concerned, primarily and solely, with your president being married only one time, I’m not the one for you. And I’m certainly not the Black man for you.“But if you’re looking at somebody who has a record that encompasses a whole host of things, politically, intellectually, over time and space, alongside my personal life then I might in fact, be somebody you consider very seriously.” More

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      Kevin Phillips obituary

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      ‘The whole secret of politics is knowing who hates who,” Kevin Phillips told the journalist Garry Wills during the 1968 US presidential campaign.Phillips, who has died aged 82, was the political analyst behind Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”, aimed at exploiting racial tensions to draw to the Republican side the more conservative voters in the south, where the Democrats had dominated since the American civil war primarily because Abraham Lincoln had been a Republican.Although both he and Nixon later played down his direct influence, Phillips’ keen perception of the changing antipathies of the American electorate, detailed in his 1969 book The Emerging Republican Majority, lay at the heart of Nixon’s victory.Phillips’s analysis was not limited to the south. He realised that traditional working-class Democrats were becoming alienated not just by the party’s embrace of civil rights, but were also sympathetic to conservative positions against the Vietnam war, protest, federal spending and the 1960s “cultural revolution”.Though he predicted their drift rightward to the Republicans, he could not foresee the long-term effect of this political tsunami, stoked by culture wars, and he eventually disavowed the division his work had sowed, becoming, by the George W Bush presidency, a leading voice of apostate Republicanism.Phillips’ analysis echoed a century of US political history. After John F Kennedy’s assassination, Lyndon Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act (1964) and Voting Rights Act (1965) through Congress. Johnson was a master of political compromise, but when he signed the latter bill, he supposedly told an aide, “there goes the south”.The so-called “solid south” always voted Democrat, but these naturally conservative “Dixiecrats” were at odds with the rest of their party, which primarily represented working people in the north.Similarly, the Republicans were traditionally a party of big business, led by industrial magnates whose sense of noblesse oblige rendered them relatively liberal on social issues. But they also harboured a fierce right wing committed to undoing Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and opposed to any hint of government regulation.These factional divisions facilitated legislative compromise, but Johnson’s prediction soon proved true, as Dixiecrats deserted to the Republicans. Starting with Nixon’s re-election in 1972, Republicans swept the south five times in nine presidential elections, stymied only by the southerners Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.Phillips was born in New York City, where his father, William, was chairman of the New York State Liquor Authority, and his mother, Dorothy (nee Price), was a homemaker. He graduated from Bronx high school of science at 16, by which time he had already begun studying the political makeup of his city, discerning an antagonism towards the black and Hispanic community by the white working-class children of an older generation of immigrants.Already a loyal Republican, after graduation he headed the Bronx’s youth committee supporting the re-election of Dwight D Eisenhower. He earned his BA in political science from Colgate University in 1961, having spent a year at Edinburgh University studying economic history, and took a law degree from Harvard in 1964.His political career began as an aide to the Republican congressman Paul Fino, from the Bronx, where he realised that despite Fino’s relatively liberal domestic positions Republicans could not depend on minority voters.Phillips lent his prodigious research into the breakdown of the nation’s congressional districts to the Nixon campaign, and after the election he became a special assistant to the attorney general John Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager, who would be jailed in the fallout from the Watergate scandal.He left Mitchell in 1970, becoming a commentator, with a syndicated newspaper column, his own newsletter and regular appearances as a broadcasting pundit. Phillips later traced Republican failures back to Watergate, although ironically it was his tip to the Nixon aide Jeb Magruder about the damaging information that might be in the Democratic party chairman Larry O’Brien’s Watergate office that precipitated the fatal burglary.Phillips coined the terms “sun belt” for the fast-growing areas of the southern and south-western states, and “new right” to distinguish the populist politics of Ronald Reagan from those of “elitists” such as Nelson Rockefeller. But as the white working-class shrank, along with its jobs, the politics of resentment grew more divisive. Dog-whistles to racists, from Reagan’s “welfare queens” to George HW Bush’s Willie Horton ads portraying a black murderer, culminated in the 1994 “Republican revolution” which captured Congress and proceeded to shut down the government.What Phillips had not foreseen was the impossibility of political compromise now that all the different reactionaries were in the same Republican boat. Watching the growing economic inequality which sprang from the Reagan years, he began to have second thoughts. His belief in his party as a stable, serious preserver of the status quo began to fall apart.Starting with Wealth and Democracy (2002), Phillips produced a series of books excoriating what he saw as George W Bush’s plutocratic revolution, recalling the robber barons of the 19th-century Gilded Age. He warned of an instinct toward authoritarianism under the guise of fighting so-called liberal permissiveness.Phillips castigated the Bushes further in American Dynasty (2004) for aiding already rich investors, especially in the sun belt’s energy and defence industries, at the whim of the Pentagon and CIA. American Theocracy (2006) recognised the growing influence of fundamentalist Christians in the Republican party, a dystopian vision of ideological extremism mixed with greed-driven fiscal irresponsibility.His 2008 book Bad Money focused on what he called “bad capitalism”, relying on financial services instead of industrial production. After the 2008 financial crash, he wrote a sequel, After The Fall (2009). By now he was a regular in such centrist outlets as National Public Radio or the Atlantic, where he found himself explaining how his analysis of the changing American electorate led, with some inevitability, to the polarised society that elected the authoritarian Donald Trump.Among his 15 books, Phillips also produced a biography of the US president William McKinley (2003) and 1775: A Good Year for Revolution (2012), about the circumstances which precipitated that war.He is survived by his wife, Martha (nee Henderson), whom he married in 1968, and their three children, Betsy, Andrew and Alec. More

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      The Guardian view on supplying cluster bombs: not just a ‘difficult’ decision, but the wrong one | Editorial

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      Twenty-thousand Laotians, almost half of them children, have been killed or injured by unexploded ordnance since the Vietnam war ended. It is half a century since the US stopped bombing Laos, having dropped more than 2m tons of cluster munitions; decades on, people then unborn are still paying the price. On one estimate, it will take another 100 years to fully clear the country.This is the true cost of cluster munitions. They are not only indiscriminate in showering dozens or hundreds of bomblets over a large area, but also have a lethal legacy because so many fail to explode, only to later be trodden on or picked up – often by curious children. For these reasons, more than 120 countries have signed the convention prohibiting their use, production, transfer and stockpiling.The US, Russia and Ukraine, however, have never been signatories. Russia has used them extensively in Ukraine, including in populated areas where no military personnel or infrastructure were evident. Kyiv has also employed them, more sparingly, but reportedly at the cost of civilian lives in Izium (though it denies they were used there). Now the US will supply more as part of a $800m (£625m) military aid package, at Kyiv’s request. Thankfully, the UK, which has signed the convention but still holds some of the munitions, has ruled out following suit. Joe Biden has said he made a “difficult decision”. No doubt. But the president has made the wrong one.Ukraine’s counteroffensive has failed to gain the traction it needs, and supplies of artillery shells are running low. The argument is that, however significant the risks and long-term costs of using cluster bombs, civilians will pay a far higher price where Russian forces prevail. Cluster munitions are effective in combating dug-in ground troops, like the Russian forces along the vast frontline. But the same, of course, could be said for chemical weapons, and the US rightly finished destroying its remaining stockpile of those on Friday. Efficacy is why bans on such arms are needed in the first place. Russia’s use of them is not a reason to further drag down international norms.Ukraine’s defence minister, Oleksii Reznikov, says it has given written guarantees that it will not use the US-supplied weapons in Russia, nor in urban areas where civilians might be killed or wounded. It will also record their use, to expedite demining when the conflict is over. The US claims its munitions are far safer than those used by Moscow, with dud rates “not higher than 2.5%” versus Russian devices that reportedly fail 30-40% of the time. Experts say test results don’t reflect real world conditions and that, in any case, the sheer number of submunitions still means a deadly aftermath.Invasion has forced Ukraine to make tough decisions about how to defend itself. The US was nonetheless wrong to meet its request. The decisions of the world’s most powerful country and military are key to determining global norms. Before Donald Trump took office, it had made some recent steps towards controlling cluster munitions. But it should never have deployed them, including in Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 2000s. It should not have rejected the convention banning them. And it should not be supplying them to Ukraine. Their use will have terrible long-term consequences for civilians there – and perhaps, through the example it sets, for civilians elsewhere too. More

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      Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower, dies aged 92

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      Daniel Ellsberg, a US government analyst who became one of the most famous whistleblowers in world politics when he leaked the Pentagon Papers, exposing US government knowledge of the futility of the Vietnam war, has died. He was 92. His death was confirmed by his family on Friday.In March, Ellsberg announced that he had inoperable pancreatic cancer. Saying he had been given three to six months to live, he said he had chosen not to undergo chemotherapy and had been assured of hospice care.“I am not in any physical pain,” he wrote, adding: “My cardiologist has given me license to abandon my salt-free diet of the last six years. This has improved my life dramatically: the pleasure of eating my favourite foods!”On Friday, the family said Ellsberg “was not in pain” when he died. He spent his final months eating “hot chocolate, croissants, cake, poppyseed bagels and lox” and enjoying “several viewings of his all-time favourite [movie], Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”, the family statement added.“In his final days, surrounded by so much love from so many people, Daniel joked, ‘If I had known dying would be like this, I would have done it sooner …’“Thank you, everyone, for your outpouring of love, appreciation and well-wishes. It all warmed his heart at the end of his life.”Tributes were swift and many.Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of the Guardian, said Ellsberg “was widely, and rightly, acclaimed as a great and significant figure. But not by Richard Nixon, who wanted him locked up. He’s why the national interest should never be confused with the interest of whoever’s in power.”The Pulitzer-winning journalist Wesley Lowery wrote: “It was an honor knowing Daniel … I’ll remain inspired by his commitment to a mission bigger than himself.”The writer and political commentator Molly Jong-Fast said: “One of the few really brave people on this earth has left it.”The MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said: “Huge loss for this country. An inspiring, brave, and patriotic American. Rest in power, Dan, rest in power.”The Pentagon Papers covered US policy in Vietnam between 1945 and 1967 and showed that successive administrations were aware the US could not win.By the end of the war in 1975, more than 58,000 Americans were dead and 304,000 were wounded. Nearly 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers were killed, as were about 1 million North Vietnamese soldiers and Viet Cong guerillas and more than 2 million civilians in North and South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia.The Pentagon Papers caused a sensation in 1971, when they were published – first by the New York Times and then by the Washington Post and other papers – after the supreme court overruled the Nixon administration on whether publication threatened national security.In 2017, the story was retold in The Post, an Oscar-nominated film directed by Steven Spielberg in which Ellsberg was played by the British actor Matthew Rhys.Ellsberg served in the US Marine Corps in the 1950s but went to Vietnam in the mid-60s as a civilian analyst for the defense department, conducting a study of counter-insurgency tactics. When he leaked the Pentagon Papers, he was working for the Rand Corporation.In 2021, a half-century after he blew the whistle, he told the Guardian: “By two years in Vietnam, I was reporting very strongly that there was no prospect of progress of any kind so the war should not be continued. And that came to be the majority view of the American people before the Pentagon Papers came out.“By ’68 with the Tet offensive, by ’69, most Americans already thought it was immoral to continue but that had no effect on Nixon. He thought he was going to try to win it and they would be happy once he’d won it, however long it took.”In 1973, Ellsberg was put on trial. Charges of espionage, conspiracy and stealing government property adding up to a possible 115-year sentence were dismissed due to gross governmental misconduct, including a break-in at the office of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, part of the gathering scandal which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.Born in Chicago on 7 April 1931, Ellsberg was educated at Harvard and Cambridge, completing his PhD after serving as a marine. He was married twice and had two sons and a daughter.After the end of the Vietnam war he became by his own description “a lecturer, scholar, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful US interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing”.Ellsberg contributed to publications including the Guardian and published four books, among them an autobiography, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, and most recently The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.In recent years, he publicly supported Chelsea Manning, the US soldier who leaked records of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, who published Manning’s leaks, and Edward Snowden, who leaked records concerning surveillance by the National Security Agency.On Friday, the journalist Glenn Greenwald, one of the Guardian team which published the Snowden leaks in 2013, winning a Pulitzer prize, called Ellsberg “a true American hero” and “the most vocal defender” of Assange, Snowden, Manning and “others who followed in his brave footsteps”.Steven Donziger, an attorney who represented Indigenous people in the Amazon rainforest against the oil giant Chevron, a case that led to his own house arrest, said: “Today the world lost a singularly brave voice who spoke truth about the US military machine in Vietnam and risked his life in the process. I drew deep inspiration from the courage of Daniel Ellsberg and was deeply honored to have his support.”In 2018, in a joint Guardian interview with Snowden, Ellsberg paid tribute to those who refused to be drafted to fight in Vietnam.“I would not have thought of doing what I did,” he said, “which I knew would risk prison for life, without the public example of young Americans going to prison to make a strong statement that the Vietnam war was wrong and they would not participate, even at the cost of their own freedom.“Without them, there would have been no Pentagon Papers. Courage is contagious.”Three years later, in an interview to mark 50 years since the publication of the Pentagon Papers, he said he “never regretted for a moment” his decision to leak.His one regret, he said, was “that I didn’t release those documents much earlier when I think they would have been much more effective.“I’ve often said to whistleblowers, ‘Don’t do what I did, don’t wait years till the bombs are falling and people have been dying.’” More

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      Did Vietnam peace protests stop Nixon using nuclear weapons?

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      A new documentary about demonstrations against the Vietnam war in late 1969 argues that the hundreds of thousands who filled the streets in Washington and almost every major US city convinced Richard Nixon to abandon a plan to sharply escalate the war, including the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.The Movement and The “Madman” will air on PBS on Tuesday. Produced and directed by the veteran documentarian Stephen Talbot, it evokes a peak moment of 1960s activism – and the “absolute disconnection” between what Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, were “deciding to do and the human costs of it, whether it’s to our own soldiers or [Vietnam] civilians”.Those costs “had absolutely no part of their thinking” said the historian Carolyn Eisenberg. “They don’t care.”Talbot’s sure eye for searing images is matched by a perfect ear for songs. His soundtrack includes anti-establishment hymns by Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Jimi Hendrix and Judy Collins, plus the essential anti-war anthem, I-Feel-Like-I’m Fixin’-To Die Rag, which became world famous after Country Joe McDonald performed it at Woodstock in summer 1969.The one thing the documentary does not do is provide any convincing evidence that the demonstrations prevented the use of nuclear weapons.“It is a serious look at how one major demonstration was organized,” said Thomas Powers, author of The War at Home, a history of the anti-war movement; The Man Who Kept the Secrets, a widely-admired biography of former CIA director Richard Helms; and seven other books.But as far as the idea that “a real danger of the use of atomic weapons was prevented [by the Vietnam Moratorium] – I think that’s just plain wrong”, Powers told the Guardian.Talbot responded that declassified documents about Operation Duck Hook, which laid out options for Nixon, included the possible use of nuclear weapons as well as the mining of Haiphong harbor and the bombing of dykes that would have caused massive civilian casualties.As to whether Nixon seriously considered the nuclear option, Talbot said: “I literally don’t know and I don’t think anyone could say for sure. But it was on the table.”The “madman” of Talbot’s film is Nixon. One thing that is not in dispute is that the president worked hard to convince the North Vietnamese and the Russians he was crazy enough to do anything, including pulling the nuclear trigger, if Hanoi refused his demands to withdraw from the south.As Stephen Bull, a former Nixon aide, explains in the film, his boss wanted the Russians to “think that he was a madman. However, my personal observation was, it was a bluff. He was never going to use nuclear weapons, but he wanted the threat to be out there to force them to the table.”Powers likened Nixon’s threats to use nuclear bombs to Vladimir Putin’s current threats to use such weapons against Ukraine – which Powers doesn’t think are serious either. Talbot agreed that was a possibility.In his memoirs, Nixon wrote: “Although publicly I continued to ignore the raging anti-war controversy, I had to face the fact that it had probably destroyed the credibility of my ultimatum to Hanoi.”The other thing the demonstrations almost certainly accomplished was the passage of a law, signed by Nixon in November 1969, which created a draft lottery.On 1 December 1969, every draft-eligible young man born between 1944 and 1950 was assigned a number based on his birth date, from one to 365. The following year, the Pentagon announced that no one with a number higher than 195 would be drafted. A year later that number dropped to 125, then to 95 the year after that.Since everyone in the streets in 1969 was demonstrating in no small part because of an acute desire to avoid dying in what they considered a pointless conflict, the lottery had an immediate effect in reducing the number who felt a sense of urgency about the war.If you had a high enough number, your life was no longer in danger. After the very first lottery, more than a third of those previously subject to the draft no longer felt any imminent jeopardy. So there was less self-interest to propel the anti-war protests.Talbot agreed that the lottery was a direct result of the anti-war demonstrations, and said he included it in an earlier, longer version of his film – but it did not make the final cut. In fall 1969, he was a senior in high school. He went to DC to make his first film, March on Washington, which became his senior thesis when he attended Wesleyan University.“I used clips from my first student film for this documentary,” he told the Guardian.The truth is, while the Vietnam demonstrations did reduce the dangers of the draft, there is almost no evidence they shortened the war. When Nixon took office, 31,000 Americans had been killed in Vietnam, plus hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. By the time the last American combat troops left in March 1973, two months after the draft was abolished, 58,220 US soldiers had died – plus as many as 2 million Vietnamese civilians and 1.3 million Vietnamese soldiers.
      The Movement and The ‘Madman’ airs on PBS at 9pm ET on Tuesday and will stream on pbs.org
      Charles Kaiser’s books include 1968: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation More

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      in Elections

      Donald Trump, and the Tradition of Suppressing October Surprises

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      Secretive talks in the waning days of a campaign. Furtive phone calls. Ardent public denials.American history is full of October surprises — late revelations, sometimes engineered by an opponent, that shock the trajectory of a presidential election and that candidates dread. In 1880, a forged letter ostensibly written by James A. Garfield claimed he wanted more immigration from China, a position so unpopular it nearly cost him the election. Weeks before the 1940 election, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s press secretary kneed a Black police officer in the groin, just as the president was trying to woo skeptical Black voters. (Roosevelt’s response made history: He appointed the first Black general and created the Tuskegee Airmen.)But the scandal that has ensnared Donald J. Trump, the paying of hush money to a pornographic film star in 2016, is in a rare class: an attempt not to bring to light an election-altering event, but to suppress one.The payoff to Stormy Daniels that has a Manhattan grand jury weighing criminal charges against Mr. Trump can trace its lineage to at least two other episodes foiling an October surprise. The first was in 1968, when aides to Richard M. Nixon pressed the South Vietnamese government to thwart peace talks in the closing days of that election. The second was in 1980. Fresh revelations have emerged that allies of Ronald Reagan may well have labored to delay the release of American hostages from Iran until after the defeat of Jimmy Carter.Richard M. Nixon at the end of his presidential campaign in 1968.Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe tortured debate over precisely which election law might have been violated in 2016 is missing the broader point — all three events might have changed the course of history.“There have been three cases at a minimum,” said Gary Sick, a former national security aide to President Carter who for more than two decades has been pursuing his case that the Reagan campaign in 1980 delayed the release of the hostages from Iran. “And if you had the stomach for it, you’d have to say it worked.”The potential criminal charges against Mr. Trump for his role in the passing of hush money to Ms. Daniels — falsifying business records to cover up the payment and a possible election law violation — may seem trivial when compared to the prior efforts to fend off a history-altering October surprise.This month, a former lieutenant governor of Texas came forward to say that he accompanied a Reagan ally to the Middle East to try to delay the release of American hostages from Iran until after the 1980 election. And notes discovered in 2016 appeared to confirm that senior aides to Mr. Nixon worked through back channels in 1968 to hinder the commencement of peace talks to end the war in Vietnam — and secure Mr. Nixon’s victory over Hubert H. Humphrey.“Hold on,” Anna Chennault, Mr. Nixon’s emissary to the South Vietnamese, told Saigon government officials, as she pressed them to boycott the Paris peace talks. “We are gonna win.”But the chicaneries of 1968 and 1980 were left to historians and partisans to sort out and debate decades later. What separates the allegations against Mr. Trump is that they could make him the first former president to be indicted by a grand jury, forcing him to answer for charges in a court of law.President Lyndon B. Johnson announced a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam shortly before the presidential election in 1968.Bettmann/Getty ImagesThe concept of an October surprise has been around American politics since at least 1838, when federal prosecutors announced plans to charge top Whig Party officials with “most stupendous and atrocious fraud” for paying Pennsylvanians to vote in New York for their candidates.Two weeks before the 1888 election, Republicans published a letter from the British ambassador to the United States suggesting that the English favored Grover Cleveland, the Democratic candidate. It galvanized Irish American voters, and Mr. Cleveland lost the presidency to Benjamin Harrison.Just days before the 2000 election, Thomas J. Connolly, a defense lawyer and former Democratic candidate for governor in Maine, confirmed that George W. Bush had been arrested for driving while intoxicated in the state in 1976. Some have said it cost Mr. Bush just enough votes to turn a narrow popular-vote victory into one of the most contested presidential elections in American history.What links the allegations of 1968, 1980 and 2016 is the fear that such a surprise would happen. In all three cases, those accused of perpetrating the skulduggery palpably worried that it would..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“It is probably as old as campaigning itself,” said John Dean, the Nixon White House lawyer whose testimony before the congressional Watergate committees helped bring to light perhaps the most famous campaign dirty trick of all time. “I’m sure that when campaigns learn of negative stories, they do all they can to suppress them.”The accusations against Mr. Trump are of a different scale than 1968 or 1980. No Americans were left to languish in captivity. No armies remained on the battlefield longer than necessary. No civilians died in napalm conflagrations. Indeed, the passing of hush money to Ms. Daniels is hardly the worst accusation leveled against a president who was impeached for withholding military aid to Ukraine to extract a political favor, and impeached again for inciting a riot designed to overturn a lawful election that he lost.But because the 2016 election was so close, the suppression of a late-breaking sex scandal just may have delivered the White House to one of American history’s most divisive leaders. Mr. Trump lost the popular vote by 2.1 percentage points, and won the presidency by securing victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by a combined 78,652 votes, a smaller total than a sellout crowd at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.The plane carrying freed American hostages arriving at the Frankfurt airport. The hostages had been held in Iran for 444 days.Jean-Louis Atlan/Sygma, via Getty ImagesMr. Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, suffered her own surprise when just days before the 2016 election, the F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, reopened a closed investigation into emails she sent on a private server when she was secretary of state. Given the margin, that alone may have cost Mrs. Clinton the White House.Ms. Daniels’s claim that she had sex with Mr. Trump in 2006 while his wife, Melania, was nursing their only baby had been floating around since 2011, seemingly raising few fears in Trump world. But in early October 2016, that changed when The Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump described in lewd terms how he groped women.Amid the ensuing furor and defections from some Republican leaders, the effort to buy Ms. Daniels’s silence went into overdrive. Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael D. Cohen, and others feared that a second punch, landing just after the “Access Hollywood” outrage was dissipating, could knock their pugilistic boss out of the presidential race and expose them to legal action.“It could look awfully bad for everyone,” Dylan Howard, the editor of The National Enquirer, wrote in a text to Mr. Cohen, noting that if Ms. Daniels went public, their work to cover up her account of a sexual encounter might also become known.The 1980 election is remembered as a landslide victory, hardly one that seemed vulnerable to a late-breaking course change. But in fact, aides and allies of Mr. Reagan openly feared the release of the hostages in the campaign’s final weeks could re-elect Mr. Carter, so much so that the term “October surprise” is often attributed to the Reagan camp’s trepidations.“All I know is there’s concern, not just with us but I think generally amongst the electorate, well, this Carter’s a politically tough fellow, he’ll do anything to get re-elected, and let’s be prepared for some October surprise,” Mr. Reagan’s running mate, George H.W. Bush, said at the time.Ronald Reagan and his campaign feared an October surprise from President Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGerald Rafshoon, who was Mr. Carter’s White House communications director and campaign media adviser, said in an interview that he was confident the release of the hostages would have secured the president’s re-election. The polls had been tightening that fall amid rising optimism about the captives’ release. Then Mr. Carter’s position collapsed.“If the little farmer can’t handle a two-bit ayatollah,” Mr. Rafshoon recalled one woman telling him, “I’ll take my chances on the cowboy.”He added: “It’s not that I hold any grudges about those sons of bitches. I’ve gotten on with my life, and so has Jimmy.”Mr. Sick is not so sure a hostage release would have had much impact. “It would certainly have changed some votes, but would Carter have won? He only won one state,” he said. “People who run campaigns get very paranoid and talk themselves into these things.”The election of 1968 is a closer call.Ken Hughes, a researcher at the Miller Center of the University of Virginia, whose book “Chasing Shadows” chronicled the Nixon campaign’s efforts to impede peace talks, said Mr. Nixon had a strong lead in the polls over Mr. Humphrey in mid-September. By mid-October, Mr. Nixon’s lead was down to eight percentage points. Then, days before the election, President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered a halt to the bombing of North Vietnam, and the news media began reporting chatter of looming talks to end the war.Again, the candidate who went on to win showed his fears, which were based on Mr. Nixon’s conviction that Democratic dirty tricks in 1960 had denied him the presidency. “Keep Anna Chennault working on SVN,” or South Vietnam, Mr. Nixon implored, according to the notes of a top aide, H.R. Haldeman.On the eve of the election, The Christian Science Monitor was preparing an article on the efforts of the Nixon campaign to thwart the peace talks. Mr. Johnson convened a conference call with his security cabinet to seek advice on whether to confirm the story, which he knew to be true from F.B.I. and C.I.A. wiretaps.“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly have a certain individual elected,” his secretary of defense, Clark Clifford, said of Mr. Nixon on a recorded call. “It could cast his whole administration under such doubt that I would think it would be inimical to our country’s interests.”White House officials said nothing. More