ustxtxb_obs_1968_09_06_50_00013-00000_000.pdf

LET THE TEXAS OBSERVER SERVICE YOUR BOOK NEWS . . . AT A 20% DISCOUNT* Some recent additions List Mem. to our stock: Price Price THE DRUGSTORE LIBERAL: HUBERT H. HUMPHREY IN POLITICS Robert Sherrill & Harry W. Ernst $ 4.95 $ 3.96 . .. AND OTHER DIRTY STORIES Larry L. King $ 5.50 $ 4.40 THE ALGIERS MOTEL INCIDENT John Hersey $ 5.95 $ 4.76 $ 5.95 $ 4.76 THE AMERICAN CHALLENGE J. J. Servan-Schreiber $ 6.95 $ 5.56 THE RICH AND THE SUPER-RICH Ferdinand Lundberg $12.50 $10.00 YOUNG RADICALS: NOTES ON COMMITTED YOUTH Kenneth Keniston $ 5.95 $ 4.76 SOUL ON ICE Eldridge Cleaver $ 5.95 $ 4.76 ONE-DIMENSIONAL MAN Herbert Marcuse $ 2.25 $ 1.80 THE TEXANS: WHAT THEY ARE AND WHY David Nevin $ 5.95 $ 4.76 JFK AND LBJ Tom Wicker $ 5.00 $ 4.00 A VERY PERSONAL PRESIDENCY: LYNDON JOHNSON IN THE WHITE HOUSE Hugh Sidey $ 5.95 $ 4.76 TOWARD A DEMOCRATIC LEFT Michael Harrington $ 5.95 $ 4.76 ‘Send your order, and $5.00 membership if the 20% discount price is desired, to THE TEX-AS OBSERVER, 504 W. 24th, Austin 78705. \(See prior issues or write for information regarding Texas residents please include the 3% state and Austin sales tax with your remittance. Or, if you prefer, we will bill you for a 25c service charge. Buy All Your Books From The Observer BLACK RAGE William H. Grier & Price M. Cobbs tion depends on defeating the vice president in November. Other things being equal, this is a defeat we should strive to bring about. For without reorganization the Democratic party cannot become the instrument for basic change the country so desperately requires. On the other hand, if established party leaders help to stop Humphrey, then new relationships designed to make the party vital can be worked out. “And all things are not as unequal as Nixon-haters would have us believe. Nixon is a consummate opportunist. He will do anything he needs to do, first to win, -then to govern effectively enough to win again. Hence he has even more reason than Humphrey to liquidate the war that has clearly become an enormous political liability. And despite a pre-election rhetoric of ‘law and order’ Nixon knows that persistent disorder in the ghettoes can be ended only by genocidal repression. . . . The administration that set its foot on that path would suffer political disaster. Nixon then is likely to mix force with the traditionally effective remedy for chronic disorderbuying off the discontented. “Hence the differences between Humphrey and Nixon on the central issues are not likely to be nearly as great as many ardent supporters of the vice president claim.” Either Humphrey or Nixon might end the war. McCarthy believes that although the Vietnam plank was lost in the convention, the dissent against the war has succeeded because any new president who does not bring peace promptly will not be able to govern the country, much less be re-elected. However, either Humphrey or Nixon might carry on Johnson’s Vietnam policy; neither has given the country any specific basis for believing otherwise. There is at least a fair argument that Nixon is liklier to end the war than Humphrey. Nixon is not imprisoned by Johnson’s policies and ways of reasoning, as Humphrey may be. Nixon also has available to him an analogy between his ending the war in Vietnam and Eisenhower ending the Korean war in the first of the Eisenhower years. In its policy statement, the New Democratic Coalition takes no position on Humphrey, other than to condemn his nomination. Lowenstein, for his part, has conceded the possibility that by specific verbal commitments on the war, Humphrey might earn the right to consideration by Novemberhe doesn’t have it now. I cannot myself visualize how Humphrey can sway the balance of reason in his favor against Kaufman’s line of reasoning. As a mere candidate there is nothing Humphrey car do about the war, and Johnson’s decei. with words has made every Johnson-associated use of them suspect. IN THE STATES where it makes sense, participants in the strategy of the New Democratic Coalition will continue or create separate and parallel political institutions within the Democratic Party. I agree with Mrs. Billie Carr of Houston, co-chairman of the Texas challenge delegation in Chicago, that this course is required in Texas. Mrs. Carr announced a program of break-away from the Connally-controlled state party machinery, and the delegation ratified this program by a vote. This is a program by which the state’s international liberals, the new national Democrats, can organize on their own and work to control the Democratic party in Texas by 1970. In the fifties the object of similar activity was state-oriented: the liberals wanted control of Texas affairs. They still do but the perspective is now national, and the time-span is now four years. The idea, nurtured by the Texas challenge delegations remarkable success at Chicago, is to charge from here to 1972 into the Democratic national convention. “We’re not going back into John Connally’s and Preston Smith’s convention,” Mrs. Carr told the challenge delegation at the Y here. There will be another convention in Austin Sept. 14, a convention of the international liberals, the peace Democrats, the McCarthy-McGovern-Kennedy people. “People are going to have to choose; they can’t go to both of them,” Mrs. Carr said. Her idea is that this parallel, separate convention set up a State Democratic Executive Council\(the official state party agency is named the State Democratic once to turn out in the precinct conventions of May, 1970, and liberalize the state party machinery that year. If the state convention were still controlled by the conservatives or did not treat the liberals fairly, the liberals would go back to separatism for two more years and fight again in the precincts in 1972. From Chicago, we know this: a liberal delegation from Texas has powerful friends in many of the delegations from the great states at a Democratic national convention. Despite the arguability of the Texas challenge, and despite the fact that the Connally delegation had the president, the party’s imminent presidential nominee, big business, big government, and big labor behind it, the Texas liberals received 955 votes, against only 1,368 for the Connally delegation. California, New York, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, the black caucus, the Mexican-American caucus, lined up for the Texas challengers. Even Humphrey-dominated states like New Hampshire and Ohio split, with many abstentions. Pennsylvania’s boss refused to poll his delegation’s top-heavy vote for Connally, and when he was forced to it, he lost 20 or so votes. While the Southern states’ delegations voted mostly with Connally, Senator Yarborough’s work among the Virginians divided their vote, and although the liberal Mississippians had pledged to Humperhy in the process of getting seated, they voted overwhelmingly for the pro-McCarthy Texas challengers. The Democratic party can become a great progressive party again in the next four years; this is a goal that can be accomplished. The prospect, I sub mit, is excellent for a 1972 national convention at which McCarthy, McGovern, Kennedy, or someone else of this kind can be nominated to run against the incumbent Nixon \(for surely, whoever you Can we wait four more years? Of course we cannot. That was the reason Humphrey should not have been nominated! If, now, the fourth party comes up with a candidate who actually gives us a chance of not having to wait four more years, then it’s a different ball game this fall. But otherwise, either we do not have four more years, in which case it doesn’t matter what we do, or we do have four more years, in which case the New Democratic Coalition should be gone ahead with. The fourth course of action, supporting Humphrey, will be urged on us not only, evidently, by John Connally \(although September 6, 1968 13