The Dissidents

On Labor Day, three days after the Democratic Convention has dissolved, thousands of delegates, newsmen, candidates and aides converge on Chicago's International Amphitheater. Outside, 100,000 demonstrators chant, "We want peace! We want peace!"

Next day, Tuesday, the platform committee meets, approves a strong peace plank calling for an end to the war in Viet Nam, endorses black power and recommends a massive infusion of federal funds into the nation's cities. All-Negro delegations from the South are seated without challenge.

On Wednesday, seats in the amphitheater are filled early. Convention Chairman Thruston Morton gavels the delegates to order. Ted Kennedy strides to the platform, and after a frenetic ten-minute ovation nominates Nelson Rockefeller for President. After an hour's floor demonstration, Allard Lowenstein, chairman of the New York delegation, moves that the delegates nominate Rockefeller by acclamation, and the delegates respond without a single dissenting vote.

Next day, New York's Mayor John

Lindsay, in a passionate appeal for nonpartisanship, proposes Eugene McCarthy for Vice President, and again the nomination is unanimously approved. In the evening, Rockefeller and McCarthy appear together on the platform. Rocky acknowledges the cheers with repeated winks, then cries: "Let the new politics continue from this day forward!" McCarthy predicts that "the Fusion Party will sweep to victory in November."

That imaginary scenario and sundry variations of the improbable dream are more and more beguiling the minds of dissident liberals who have all but abandoned their faith in the conventional processes of party politics. With Humphrey and Nixon seemingly assured of their parties' nominations in August, many McCarthy supporters and the leaderless partisans of Senator Robert Kennedy are pondering the feasibility of mobilizing a fourth party (George Wallace's being the third) to challenge both Republicans and Democrats in November. In Chicago last week, more than 1,000 hastily summoned members of the new Coalition for an Open Convention came to the conclusion that a fourth-party drive would be technically possible but almost prohibitively difficult to mount at such a late stage in the election year. Instead, the coalitionists are falling back for the present upon a nationwide stop-Humphrey drive aimed at challenging the overwhelming delegate strength that the Vice President has amassed. "Running a Railroad." Across the U.S., local chapters of the coalition will sponsor public meetings insisting that Humphrey-committed delegates explain their allegiance to the Vice President. A lawyers' committee will push legal challenges of state unit rules, arguing that such delegations as New York's and Minnesota's are denying McCarthy strength proportionate to his showing in the primaries. Before the August 26 Democratic Convention, the dissidents will blanket the nation with TV, radio and newspaper ads demanding an open convention. "So far the democratic process has not worked," said erstwhile Manhattan Attorney Lowenstein, a coalition leader, who initiated the "Dump Johnson" movement a year ago. "Either some changes are going to be brought about, or they will have to show everyone, over national TV, that they are running a railroad."

Some 200 coalitionists led by Marcus Raskin, co-director of the Institute for Policy Studies and a violent critic of the Viet Nam war, have decided not to risk waiting until the convention to begin a fourth-party drive. Even now, because of various state election rules, a fourth-party ticket could legally be listed on the ballot in only 37 states. After the Democratic Convention, that number will dwindle to 27 states, holding a combined total of 265 electoral votes--or five short of the number needed to elect a President. Fourth-party leaders might also promote a write-in campaign for Senator McCarthy or some other peace candidate, although that effort, too, might well be futile, since many states require the voter to write in the names of the entire slate of electors supporting his candidate.

Back in October. Allard Lowenstein believes that for now the coalition should fight within the regular party framework rather than bolt it in outright rebellion. Like most of the dissidents, he remains uncertain what he will do if Humphrey takes the nomination. "If we get to that bridge," he says wryly, "I'll jump off it."

Lowenstein, 39, is a rumpled, tireless organizer who has long specialized in politics as the art of the impossible. Although he was once a foreign policy adviser to then Senator Hubert Humphrey, it was his speech last August to the National Student Association that began the ''children's crusade" of college students to the McCarthy campaign in New Hampshire.

Before the coalition's Chicago meeting, says Lowenstein, "we were psychologically back where we were in October, thinking that we've lost and can't do it. The difference is, now we know we represent the majority." His argument is that in the winter and spring primaries, McCarthy and Kennedy, both representing dissident Democrats and anti-war partisans of all stripes and persuasions, collected some 80% of the vote--a clear mandate that the Administration and party operatives are undemocratically ignoring.

One-Issue Parties. Somewhat unconvincingly, Humphrey compares a possible McCarthy fourth-party bid to Henry Wallace's 1948 Progressive Party campaign, which, along with Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat drive, nearly denied Harry Truman reelection. But unlike Henry Wallace, McCarthy has run in the primaries, has a sizable personal following and a major issue--the war. The U.S. political climate in 1968 is not that of 1948. Third and fourth parties have generally been one-issue, one-man phenomena in the U.S.--like Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moosers or Thurmond's Dixiecrats. Now the dissident coalition includes protesters of nearly every faction of the left, and the regular party may have more trouble readjusting itself to assimilate all the rebels than it has in the past. The likelihood is that this year's fourth-party campaign will indeed be mounted, but in such a scattershot way that it will either make little effectual difference in the election's outcome or else draw off enough Democratic votes from Humphrey to throw the election to Nixon if he wins the nomination.

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