ThePoliticsOf
JoyVilleAs 1974 dawned, it was becoming increasingly clear that Richard Nixon's US'ian presidency was doomed.
At that time, writing not for Jann Wenner and his hippie rag, but instead for Punch Sulzberger's New York Times,
Hunter Thompson had this to say:...Richard Nixon is living in the White House today because of what happened that night in Chicago (in 1968). Hubert Humphrey lost that election by a handful of votes — mine among them — and if I had to do it again I would still vote for Dick Gregory.
If nothing else, I take a certain pride in knowing that I helped spare the nation eight years of President Humphrey — an Administration that would have been equally corrupt and wrongheaded as Richard Nixon's, far more devious, and probably. just competent enough to keep the ship of state from sinking until 1976. Then with the boiler about to explode from eight years of blather and neglect, Humphrey's cold‐war liberals could have fled down the ratlines and left the disaster to whoever inherited it...
So.
What if Chicago mayor Richard Daley's trigger finger had been restrained and all of the rioting and bashing of young people's heads had never happened during the fateful 1968 Democratic National Convention?
Would that have made it possible for the young radical left that sent Lyndon Johnson packing earlier that year to embrace Hubert Humphrey and his cynical
'Politics of Joy' just enough to give 'The Hube', pictured above, the oomph he needed to defeat Richard Nixon for president later that fall?
And if, as Thompson speculated in his NYT OpEd, there had thus been eight years of a Humphrey Administration that kept all the cold-war liberals in line, would so many of them have jumped aboard the neo-liberal bandwagon that still plagues us today.
And, perhaps most importantly, if Humphrey had won, who would have been the Republican nominee in 1976? Personally, I don't think that it is inconceivable to think that the country club wing of the party of Lincoln would have made moderate, and former four time New York governor, Nelson Rockefeller their man.
And if Rockefeller had become president in 1976, the bicentennial year, would Reaganism and all the extremism it has wrought even exist?
Any way you slice it, it would be a very different world today.
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When The Hube tried to swoop in and swipe the Democratic nomination from George McGovern late in the 1972 primary season, the good Docktor took to calling Humphrey a 'treacherous, gutless old ward-heeler'...
Another thing to consider...If Rockefeller had been president when he died of a sudden heart attack under somewhat mysterious circumstances in 1979, who would his VP, who would then have likely ascended to the throne, have been?
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