"Fortunate Son"--Creedence Clearwater, the Vietnam War, Dick Nixon and Democratic Rifts

Seeing all the hullabaloo surrounding the recent political nominating conventions reminded me of this song. It came out about the same time as the 1968 Party Conventions, when the Vietnam War shook the Democratic Convention to the point of a "police riot" in the streets of Chicago. I watched the rioting and head-bashing by cops on television, and seeing people shoved into blue police wagons under arrest. I remember asking my dad, I was about to turn eight years old, if this was what happened usually at the politcal conventions? He glumly replied that it wasn't.  

I was a kid and my father and mother were supporting a Senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy, for President that year. McCarthy had made a strong showing in an early primary in New Hampshire had helped convince President Lyndon Johnson to opt out of another re-election bid. McCarthy had a lot of support with young people as well. Then my parents supported Robert Kennedy when he entereds the race a couple months after the New Hampshire Primary. They felt Kennedy had the best chance to beat the Republicans. Then they went sadly back to McCarthy again after RFK was assassinated in June of that year.  

But by then, as my father informed me during the convention coverage, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey had the necessasry votes locked up. He was none too happy about that. Humphrey wouldn't distance himself enough from President Johnson about getting serious about peace talks with Hanoi to end the war. Not enough of the Left in America came out to vote for Hubert and too many white conservative Southern Democrats were mad at the Johnson-Humphrey Administration for supporting Civil Rights for blacks. So they voted for the vile segregationist Governor of Alabama, George Wallace, on the American Party ticket. Many of these white voters defected to the Republicans in the main over the fissures of Civil Rights for the black minority in the South. It is an electoral loss that was morally right, and long overdue, but it cost the party dearly back then, and still today. 

The Republicans as I recall didn't seem to be too divided on the war in1968. They met in Miami that year. Their nominated candidate for President, Richard Nixon, promised "an honorable end to the war in Vietnam". That "honorable end" only came much, much later, after Nixon had widened America's role in the war to Cambodia and thousands of more men died. Four years later in 1972 Nixon ran again---and this time he promised an end to the war. Again.  

And, this time the Democrats were more united than in 1968, but even more ineffectual at the polling stations. Senator George McGovern, an anti-war candidate more strident about stopping the war than Hubert Humphrey was in 1968, carried only one state. Nixon won in a landslide in 1972--in part by promoting a "law and order" policy to white Southerners that was really a code policy for putting the brakes on further Civil Rights legislation and integration in schools for black and white kids through busing children to racially-balanced public schools. The war finally ended for America in 1973---only when Nixon got his second term.  

So America got "Tricky Dick" Nixon back from the political oblivion JFK had put him when he lost the race for President in 1960. (Nixon also lost the governorship of California in 1962) To my parents, especially my dad, Nixon was like a specter back from the dead. My mother was at least happy that her first son, Bob, had come back from his combat tour in Vietnam alive. I still remember walking to school on the day he took the Oath of Office on January 20, 1969. It was a bleak rainy day and my third grade teacher, Mrs. Alton, had borrowed a television from the school "audio-visual center" so our class could see "history being made" with Nixon back in Washington that morning--taking the oath and giving some long-forgotten foggy speech about a better America to come.  

I never liked Mrs. Alton that much.  

Back in October she had taken a poll of the students in the class I was in, to see "who your mommies and daddies would support in the next election." Nixon won the election in my class. (He was a California native. ) I think Mrs. Alton was pleased Dick was the favorite. (Mrs. Alton, if you're out there on Multiply, please tell me I'm wrong.) Even that jerk George Wallace got some votes from some kids--and this was San Jose, California(!) not the Deep South or the segregated cities back East. Turned out my little class was a bellweather for the national election results.  

The 1968 Cycle was my introduction to national politics--disappointment and chaos on the television screen and at school. Now Nixon's Big Moment had invaded my classroom via a big fat black and white television mounted on a four wheel utility cart. There was no escaping this guy!  

The 19th Century military strategist Carl Von Clauswitz wrote that "war is politics by another means." Music can be politics as well, as this song by John Fogarty proves. It was the #14 song on the Billboard Charts in the US in 1969, released in the fall of that year on the "Willie and The Poor Boys" Album by CCR. The song was inspired by David Eisenhower, grandson of the general and the former President, who married Nixon's daughter Julie and later served in the Naval Reserve far from the action. He was as fortunate a son as the man currently in the White House.