Opinion: My experience at an ‘open’ national nominating convention

A Democratic president resigning; a vice president trying to secure the nomination; the possibility of a divisive, contested convention looming in Chicago; the likelihood of further polarization and protests. It has all happened before, 56 years ago, and I had a front-row seat, so today I have some observations.

There has not been an “open” national political convention, either on the Democratic or Republican side, since 1968. In that tumultuous year, both parties had open or contested conventions, which began with their presidential candidate not yet decided.

Lyndon B. Johnson had stepped down, indicating that he would not pursue or accept nomination for another term. Vice President Hubert Humphrey was maneuvering to secure the nomination at the Democratic convention coming up in Chicago. There was wide division in both parties as the Vietnam War raged.

I had spent 1967 in the run-up to the presidential election working for George Romney, Mitt’s father, who was the governor of Michigan and, in the early going, the leading candidate for the Republican nomination. I was a young college student and had become Romney’s national college coordinator, traveling around the country and organizing campus Romney-for-President clubs.

That winter, I moved to New Hampshire along with most of Romney’s paid staff to work in the nation’s first presidential primary. Romney was slipping in the polls, and many of us felt desperate to turn things around. Romney had traveled to Vietnam (the war there was the main issue in the campaign) and came back saying he had been “brainwashed” by the Johnson administration and had misgivings about the war. That and other statements had begun to work against him, and he opted to drop out of the race before the New Hampshire vote on March 12.

I decided, along with several other members of the Romney staff, to accept New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller’s invitation to join his presidential campaign. Rockefeller, with Romney’s withdrawal, was seen as the only moderate candidate with a chance of stopping Richard Nixon from getting the Republican nomination.

I was in the Army ROTC and had to go to a six-week summer camp at Fort Benning in Georgia that summer, but someone (I still don’t know who) pulled some strings and I was able to get weekend passes to go to Miami, the site of the Republican National Convention, to help with Rockefeller’s convention strategy.

I finished the summer camp and got to Miami a couple of weeks before the convention was to start on Aug. 5. It was a rare open convention, because the party had yet to pick its nominee — the primaries had not been decisive. One of my most vivid memories was in the middle of the night on the eve of the convention, placing a copy of The New York Times on every single seat in the arena, having bought all the copies of the paper we could find in Miami before they even hit the newsstands. We wanted to get that issue in the hands of delegates because its banner headline announced that in head-to-head polls, Rockefeller beat Hubert Humphrey, the presumptive Democratic nominee, while Nixon lost to him.

Our hope was that delegates would swing their support to Rockefeller, believing that he was the one that could win the general election in November.

My point is that 1968, 56 years ago, was the last time we have seen an open convention. Both the Republican and Democratic conventions were contested, meaning their candidate had not been decided prior to the convention, and in the three or four whirlwind days of the convention, a nominee would be chosen.

1968 had been, arguably, the most tumultuous political year in our history: The Vietnam War was dividing the country, Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated in April and Robert F. Kennedy was shot dead in June after winning the California primary. Kennedy was attempting to challenge Humphrey, who had the inside track on the nomination as Johnson’s vice president (similar to Kamala Harris as Biden’s vice president today). 1968 was also the year of voting reform that allowed potential draftees to vote for the first time. Both conventions marked a turning point where previously uninvolved groups such as youth and minorities became more involved in politics and voting.

When our efforts in Miami failed to get Rockefeller nominated instead of Nixon, and after Nixon chose Spiro Agnew as his vice presidential candidate, I went home to Logan and Utah State and watched on TV as the Democratic National Convention unfolded in Chicago from Aug. 26-29. Thousands of war protesters converged on Chicago, and Mayor Richard Daley put over 11,000 police officers on 12-hour shifts around the convention hall to keep order. Violence broke out in the streets, and there were credential fights, platform fights and even reports of physical fights on the floor of the convention. Humphrey was finally nominated, but the negative spectacle of the convention played into his losing to Nixon in the fall.

So, what can we predict about this year based on the last time it happened? Well, from the 1968 Republican convention, we can conclude that the candidate with momentum (Nixon) will usually beat another candidate (Rockefeller) despite not doing as well in head-to-head polls with the opposite party’s nominee. From the 1968 Democratic convention, we can guess that the vice president of a stepping-down president will likely prevail as the party’s nominee, and we can take warning that the volatile situation of picking a candidate outside of normal party procedures can further polarize people and potentially lead to protests and violence.

It will be interesting (and maybe a little frightening) to watch!

Richard Eyre, a New York Times No. 1 bestselling author, spent his early career as a Washington-based political consultant and was later a candidate for governor in Utah.