In the wake of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King on April 4th, riots erupted around the country. In fact, there were riots in 110 American cities. This included, quite dramatically, a six-day siege in Washington, D.C. By the very next day - April 5th - the rioting in the nation’s capital was so bad that President Lyndon Johnson, the Democratic incumbent who had only days before withdrawn himself as a candidate for re-election, was forced to send in the military to assist the DC police. A full 13,600 US troops, including 1,750 from a federalized National Guard, patrolled the streets of the nation’s capital.
Television and still pictures with aerial shots of a burning Washington were everywhere. Perhaps most notably there was this photograph of a soldier on the Capitol steps - manning a machine gun. Another, seen here, showed a group of soldiers in front of the Capitol - one of them clutching his rifle.
Two months later Senator Robert Kennedy was assassinated the night he had just won the California Democratic primary. Shot to death, eerily, by a Palestinian-sympathizer angry over RFK’s support for Israel. The moments after RFK’s shooting were captured in graphic photographs.
Two months after that, as Democrats gathered in Chicago to nominate Hubert Humphrey, the Chicago streets exploded in violence as anti-Vietnam war demonstrators fought a pitched battle - under the full glare of television lights - with Chicago police. There were also disturbances on the convention floor itself, both seen in this newsreel film from the day. The rioters outside the hall were yelling the absolutely correct words: “The whole world is watching.” And it was, or at least the “whole world” that consisted of the American electorate.
And lest the impression be left that riots were a creature of 1968, in fact during the mid 1960s every summer was marked by television and print coverage of riots. From the Watts riots in 1965 Los Angeles to the 1966 riots in Cleveland, Omaha, Des Moines and Chicago and on to what presidential historian Theodore H. White called a “summer of barbarism” in 1967 with riots erupting in April. Within four weeks, White records, “Omaha, Nashville, Cleveland, Louisville and Washington all flared.” Television captured all of this, broadcasting the violent images night after endless summer night.
In 1968, the GOP Convention preceded the Democrats. So when Richard Nixon, the GOP’s nominee campaigning on a law and order theme, stood in front of the GOP Convention to deliver his acceptance speech, the Chicago riots were still weeks away. But there was more than enough evidence of violence abroad in the country for Nixon to say this:
“As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame.
We hear sirens in the night.
We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad.
We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.
And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish.
Did we come all this way for this?
Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this?
Listen to the answer to those questions.
It is another voice. It is the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting.
It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans -- the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators.
They are not racists or sick; they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land.
They are black and they are white -- they're native born and foreign born -- they're young and they're old.
They work in America's factories.
They run America's businesses.
They serve in government.
They provide most of the soldiers who died to keep us free.
They give drive to the spirit of America.
They give lift to the American Dream.
They give steel to the backbone of America. They are good people, they are decent people; they work, and they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care.
Like Theodore Roosevelt, they know that this country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless it is a good place for all of us to live in.
This I say to you tonight is the real voice of America. In this year 1968, this is the message it will broadcast to America and to the world.”
The contrast between Nixon’s calm, measured words and the chaos around the land that was beaming into American living rooms through that year and the several preceding it was striking. In the end the endless images of violence and turmoil, linked to the Democrats by Nixon, provided the political fuel for his victory over Humphrey in the fall.
Move ahead 24 years. In 1992 the shoe was on the other partisan foot. When a jury delivered an acquittal of four white Los Angeles of police officers using excessive force against the black Rodney King, after King’s arrest and beating had been captured on video - riots erupted in Los Angeles. They went on for six days, the cameras capturing it all. This time the Republicans were in the White House, with President George H.W. Bush already under assault by Democrat Bill Clinton as being out of touch with the American people. A third party candidacy from billionaire Ross Perot was also taking whacks at Bush. Clinton blamed the riots on Reagan and Bush-era budget cuts and depriving African-Americans in poorer communities of economic opportunity. By November, Clinton was president-elect.
Today? In the last year the nation’s media - no friends to either Republicans or Donald Trump - have been forced by events to provide massive coverage of terrorist attacks in places like Paris, Brussels, San Bernardino, Orlando and, mere days ago, Minnesota, New Jersey and New York. Now comes the wall-to-wall coverage of rioting in Charlotte, North Carolina after a police shooting. Which in turn follows massive coverage of riots in Ferguson, Missouri and Baltimore.
If in fact Donald Trump is elected president in November, perhaps the greatest irony in a Trump victory would be that he is being aided by the very nature of the modern media - the cable news networks, the broadcast networks and most importantly social media. All of which, in “breaking news” fashion, forces media outlets that can’t abide Trump to help the candidate make his argument with their coverage of riots and terrorists attacks.
