In my youth and absolutism, new to the real world of incremental gains and accommodation, I was among many who said, “The lesser of two evils is still an evil” and refused to vote for either of them. (In my wisdom I voted the Peace and Freedom Party line for Eldridge Cleaver.) The phrase popular at the time was “to make the contradictions manifest.” As if, when a man so obviously corrupt as Nixon was elected, the American people would immediately become aware of their terrible mistake and rise up en masse to replace one class of rulers with another. I wanted all of what I wanted and would be satisfied with nothing less.
Our numbers were significant. Never mind that as a senator from Minnesota, Humphrey was the lead author of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was intimately involved in creating the Peace Corps and had chaired the Senate Select Committee on Disarmament—we simply could not in good conscience put into power a man who was so compromised.
And so we got two terms of Nixon—or actually a term and a half.
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