What's In a Number?

Where Were You When The Whites Went Out?

The Sixties
February 27, 2016

I was alive in the 1960s. How about you? I even remember some of it. How about you? Now I am in my own 60s. All of the Republican’t presidential candidates except Rubio and Cruz are at least 63. As is Hillary Clinton. Bernie Sanders can only see his 60s in the rear view mirror.

My first politically related memory was JFK’s assassination. Some years later I was made to stand out in the hallway in junior high school for refusing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance during the Vietnam War. I clearly remember despising Richard Nixon in 1968 and later reveling in the Watergate hearings in 1973.

I bring all of this up because I want to take a brief (I promise) look at what Clinton and Sanders were doing in the 1960s. We already know that Ben Carson was stabbing at people and going after his mother with a hammer. I neither know nor care what John Kasich was doing and I will assume that Chrump was busy staying out of the military using the Entitlement Deferment. His latest issue is threatening to re-work the First Amendment so he can sue the media for saying mean things about him. That and his game-changing endorsements from raging bully Chris Christie, flaming bigot/ex-KKK Grand Wizard David Duke and Kim Jong-un’s BFF Dennis Rodman. All hail The Chrump.

Bernie Sanders, age 20, became active in the University of Chicago chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality after arriving in Chicago in the fall of 1961 and before the academic year ended was voted the group's chairman. In January 1962 he took part in a 15-day sit in against segregated accommodation. Another man detained with Sanders in 1963 at a demonstration against school segregation says Bernie was one of tiny number of white activists. Two weeks later Sanders joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech. Though civil rights legend Congressman John Lewis somewhat crossly claimed that he never saw Bernie during his illustrious time fighting for equality, but he did see Hillary, there is photographic proof of Bernie’s involvement in the movement. It seems though that Clinton was not always enamored of the Civil Rights Movement.

Sanders being arrested during civil rights protest in Chicago 1963

Hillary Clinton spoke candidly about her political roots in a 1996 NPR interview. She worked on Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign at age 18. The Civil Rights Act was passed that year and Goldwater, who voted against it, advocated repealing the landmark legislation that established as law the right of people of color, women, religious minorities, and other groups to be free from discrimination. Goldwater promoted a segregation platform all the way to the 1964 Republican National Convention in San Francisco and railed against labor unions and welfare. Goldwater was of course crushed by Lyndon Johnson that year. While Clinton’s teenage support could be considered a youthful indiscretion, her nostalgic look back at Goldwater’s radical politics in 1996 is more difficult to defend.

Oh, and there's this...



Clinton said in 1996, “I feel like my political beliefs are rooted in the conservatism that I was raised with. I don’t recognize this new brand of Republicanism that is afoot now, which I consider to be very reactionary, not conservative in many respects. I am very proud that I was a Goldwater girl.” More recently she told us that she values the advice of 1960s secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Said Sanders, “I happen to believe that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of State in the modern history of this country.” Bernie Sanders does not seem to be particularly fond of Henry Kissinger. How about you?

Me? I. Mangrey. Gotta love the 60s.