Part 3: From Republican to Democrat: What Made Me Change My Mind
This is an editorial piece and does not reflect the views or opinions of the Sumner County Democratic Party.
Editor’s Note: Thank you to SCDP Executive Committeewoman Kathy Ebbert for her willingness to share her story. This is an important topic and one that must be addressed, especially here in Sumner County.
As chaotic as the 1960s were in our country, the ‘70s were even more so politically. Political historians have considered Richard Nixon’s victory in 1968 to be a seismic “political realignment,” especially in the South. From 1932 to 1964, the Democratic party had won seven of nine presidential elections. However, during the 1960s the bitter splits over civil rights, the Vietnam war and accompanying protests, the social welfare programs comprising the Great Society, the violent riots following Martin Luther King’s murder, and other “culture wars” delivered five Southern states to independent candidate George Wallace in 1968. And the same culture wars underpinned Nixon’s promises to continue to focus on civil rights, stop the conflict in Vietnam, end the draft, restore law and order, improve education and stop forced busing, and remake the Supreme Court to take a less active role in creating social policy. This delivered the remaining former typically Democratic southern states to Nixon—including Tennessee.
It was a close race between Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey and Nixon, with Nixon bettering Humphrey by just over 500,000 popular votes, but by 110 electoral college votes. Even if George Wallace had not done so well in the Southern states, logging nearly 10 million votes, the states he won only earned him 46 electoral votes. His wins were not the reason Humphrey lost to Nixon. My family and other influencers were firmly in the Nixon camp, considering George Wallace to be an extremist, as did I. Tennessee went for Nixon. And of course, we were all ignorant of any of the “dirty tricks” employed by the Nixon campaign to sabotage the Vietnam peace talks prior to the election.
I graduated from high school and began my college education at Middle Tennessee State University in 1969. At the time, MTSU was a regional university that didn’t attract many out-of-state or international students, so my exposure to new and different people and ideologies was limited. If anything, my biases and beliefs were strengthened through the reinforcement of meeting so many new people who believed as I did. The Vietnam war had a huge impact on my peers and family. Its progress and horrors were part of every daily newscast and newspaper. Its impact and the draft permeated every factor of our lives from our music, conversation, art, and how we spent spare time. Young men I knew and loved entered college only to earn a deferment, joined the National Guard or Army Reserve, or made plans to move out of the country to avoid the draft. There were speeches and protests on campuses. Mainly, the protests were peaceful, until four student demonstrators were shot and killed and nine more were wounded by Ohio National Guard members at Kent State University May 4, 1970.
Nixon won the presidency in 1968 partly due to his campaign promise to end the Vietnam war. Though the war was portrayed in the news as winding down, on April 30, 1970, Nixon announced an invasion of Cambodia, which had triggered anti-war protests across college campuses, including the one at Kent State. The Kent State Massacre, as it was widely known, immediately triggered massive outrage, protests, and walk-outs at college campuses all over the U.S., including MTSU, and a rather awkward response from the Nixon White House.
Meanwhile, without informing President Johnson or Secretary of State Dean Rusk, on June 17, 1967 Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara created a Vietnam Study Task Force for the purpose of writing an “encyclopedic history of the Vietnam War” to leave a written record for historians in order to prevent policy errors in future administrations, according to him. McNamara posed a list of 100 questions to which he wanted answers in this study and requested the report from this study to be completed within three months. But the report was not completed until after McNamara left the Defense Department in February 1968, and it was delivered to his successor, Clark Clifford, on Jan. 15, 1969, which was five days before Richard Nixon’s first inauguration. Clifford later claimed he never ready the study, which consisted of 3,000 pages of historical analysis and 4,000 pages of original government documents.
The study is now widely known as the Pentagon Papers but is officially entitled The History of U.S. Decision-Making in Vietnam, 1945–1968. I will leave it to the reader to learn more about the actual writing, content, and impact of these papers. But within the context in this article, the import is that one of the 36 analysts that participated in the development of this study was a man named Daniel Ellsberg. Readers should also learn more about Daniel Ellsberg, his remarkable career, his opposition to the war, and his rationale for doing the thing for which he is most famous. Frustrated that the study he felt was so important and on which he and his colleagues had worked so diligently went nowhere, Ellsberg first approached Nixon’s National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger to try to persuade him to release the papers. When Kissinger was not interested, in 1970 he covertly, tried to persuade a few sympathetic Senators who were opposed to the war to release the papers on the Senate floor. When that effort was unsuccessful, Ellsberg released portions of the study to a former military colleague that now worked at the New York Times. On June 13, 1971, The New York Times published the first of nine excerpts from, and commentaries on, the 7,000-page collection.
The release of these papers was a media bombshell — and would have surely been more so in today’s age of the internet and the constant availability of “news.” Among many other previously unknown facts about the miscalculations the U.S. made in entering and executing on the war, the papers revealed that top U.S. officials were told in advance how long, costly, and improbable a victory would be in Vietnam. The revelations of the papers were politically embarrassing not only to those involved in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, but also to the incumbent Nixon administration as they revealed how futile Nixon’s promise to end the war actually was. Nixon’s administration immediately issued a telegram to The New York Times ordering that it halt publication of the papers. The New York Times refused, and the government brought suit against it. Although The New York Times eventually won the case before the Supreme Court, prior to that, an appellate court ordered that the New York Times temporarily halt further publication. In response, Ellsberg released the Pentagon Papers to 17 other newspapers in rapid succession.
More than the content itself, the release also set off a series of related events. Key ones are listed below:
Nixon White House staffers immediately began a campaign against further leaks and against Ellsberg personally, in the media and in the courts.
Ellsberg was arrested and faced charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 and other charges including theft and conspiracy, carrying a total maximum sentence of 115 years.
On Sept. 3, 1971, under the direction of White House Counsel John Ehrlichman or his staff, “White House Plumbers” E. Howard Hunt, G. Gordon Liddy, and others broke into the offices of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist searching for material that might discredit Ellsberg.
On June 17, 1972, the same team of “plumbers” is arrested at 2:30 a.m. in the process of burglarizing and planting surveillance bugs in the Democratic National Committee offices at the Watergate Building Complex. They were formally indicted for the break-in by a federal grand jury on Sept. 15, 1972.
During Nixon’s first term, the Vietnam war had continued unabated and still remained unpopular. I participated in a few of the anti-war protests at MTSU, but not many, as those years were extremely busy years for me. Working multiple jobs to pay for my own college and living expenses left me with little time for activism. What was different for me during the 1972 election season, though, was the dialog at MTSU with acquaintances and professions alike, following and about all the events listed above. The events of the times generated a rise in mass interest in matters of policy and a new questioning of the trustworthiness and integrity of political leaders and the government in general. I learned so many new perspectives surrounding the war, the role of government, and its leadership. I was asked questions about my beliefs and perspectives that I’d never been asked before and I began to question them. But I was overwhelmed at the time. And as we tend to do, I simply succumbed to inertia and held onto the views with which I had grown up and was comfortable.
The election held on Nov. 7, 1972, was my first opportunity to vote—and I did place my first vote for Richard Nixon. Nixon was soundly re-elected, defeating George McGovern with the largest plurality of votes in American history. George Wallace ran in the Democratic primary and was running a strong race focusing once again on his opposition to busing and integration, but his campaign ended when he was shot four times and paralyzed from the waist down. Nixon enjoyed little opposition from his own party in the primary, and focused his campaign fearmongering on the radical, left-wing views of McGovern. His administration stepped up negotiations to end the war, and days before the election, Kissinger announced “Peace is at hand.” Nixon highlighted his support of amnesty for Americans who fled to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, his sometime musings that marijuana might better be decriminalized, and his support of legalized abortion (though with restrictions). Unfortunately, just after the election, South Vietnam did not agree to a negotiated peace deal. No longer thwarted by a pending election, on December 18, 1972, Nixon launched the largest bombing campaign of the war, with a view toward getting everybody back to the table so he could ultimately keep his promise to end the war.
Now…suffice it to say, there were a lot more facts that came to light after the 1972 election and the entire series of events surrounding the White House plumbers, the Watergate cover-up, and the outright obstruction that followed was a scandal of epic proportions. Seven plumbers were found to be guilty and served time in prison. The Senate conducted televised hearings. Two special prosecutors at different times were assigned to investigate the matter. During 1973 and early 1974, multiple senior and even cabinet-level White House officials were fired, resigned, or were indicted and pleaded guilty or were convicted on various charges. After multiple court cases, including appeals to the Supreme Court, to thwart the investigation and withhold evidence, the investigations revealed the truth about Nixon’s direct involvement in both the Ellsberg and Watergate break-ins, the cover-up, and actual obstruction of the investigations.
In late July 1974, the House Judiciary drafted and passed Articles of Impeachment for Nixon. Some key Republican Senators met with Nixon personally to inform him that the evidence of his role in the events was compelling, and votes existed in the House to impeach him, and in the Senate to convict him. On Aug. 9, 1974, Nixon became the first president to resign the office. Spiro Agnew had already resigned as vice president. Gerald Ford was nominated and confirmed to replace Agnew as vice president. Ford became president upon Nixon’s resignation, and one month later, he ended further investigations by granting Nixon a full pardon. Additionally, amidst all the shenanigans, a federal judge dismissed all charges against Daniel Ellsberg on May 11, 1973. The presiding judge ruled: “The totality of the circumstances of this case, which I have only briefly sketched offends a sense of justice. The bizarre events have incurably infected the prosecution of this case.”
Whew. With apologies for the long history lesson, allow me to get back to my “conversion.” I graduated from college in May 1973 and started “adulting.” I had more time to become more informed about all the events taking place in Washington, D.C., and in Vietnam. The breadth and depth of the corruption, obstruction of justice, and perjury that pervaded Nixon’s presidency was shocking and shattered my youthful idealism. And I wasn’t the only one. In the 1974 mid-terms, the Democratic Party had picked up five Senate seats and 49 House seats and strengthened its control of both houses of Congress. Subsequently, in the 1976 Presidential election, Jimmy Carter won nationally, and even won in Tennessee. My vote was included in that total. I didn’t realize it at the time, but my conversion had begun.
Written by Kathy Ebbert