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62 According to Charles Kaiser, the author of 1968 in America, 1968 “marked the end of hope.”1 John F. Kennedy had first inspired it in the 1960 campaign when he optimistically proclaimed that a New Frontier awaited America. Many young people especially heard his clarion call as they dedicated themselves to national service and public life. Martin Luther King Jr. had also personified it in his “I have a dream” speech before the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963. By then the civil rights movement had managed to achieve its first successes. But that hope and idealism slowly eroded beginning with the Kennedy assassination of November 22, 1963, the escalation of the Vietnam War, and the limitations of Johnson’s Great Society, leading to the student unrest on college campuses and rioting in our cities. The despair of the late 1960s reached its apex in 1968 following the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the assassination of King and Robert Kennedy, and the escalation of rioting on college campuses and in urban America. The Democratic Party particularly reflected the prevailing turmoil , as opposition mounted against the Johnson administration, led first by Eugene McCarthy and then Robert Kennedy just months prior to his death in June, contributing to Johnson’s reelection withdrawal in March. Party schism dramatically reached a climax at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August when Johnson’s successor Hubert Humphrey was nominated in the midst of protests and violence outside of the convention hall. The aforementioned events have been well chronicled. What has been ignored is the comparable division existing in the Missouri Democratic Party that led to the toppling of a Democratic incumbent senator, Edward V. Long of Pike County in Northeast Missouri. The issues that divided Missouri Democrats were a microcosm of prevailing national party Chapter 3 The inaugural 1968 senate Campaign 63 The inaugural 1968 senate Campaign sentiment. There were two significant challengers to Senator Long, the Johnson-supported candidate. St. Louis’s Tom Eagleton, the lieutenant governor, was by far the most important, but True Davis of St. Joseph, a former Kennedy and Johnson official, also mounted a significant effort. Of the three, the thirty-eight-year-old Eagleton more represented the “new politics,” first associated with McCarthy and Robert Kennedy nationally . He won the Democratic primary in August and defeated Republican Thomas B. Curtis of Webster Groves two months later. Thus, the significant three-term senatorial career of Tom Eagleton had begun. What Eagleton said in the 1968 campaign, particularly on matters of foreign policy, still seems applicable today to Americans who question the continued military involvement of the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. In that respect, Tom Eagleton remains relevant. Eagleton decided to seek the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator after conferring with Governor Hearnes in the spring of 1967. That conversation followed his discussion with Hearnes’s legal assistant, Eugene Walsh, at the Ramada Inn in Jefferson City. Eagleton told Walsh that he wanted to go to the “big club”—that is, the U.S. Senate. His concern was that this might conflict with Hearnes’s plans. Walsh said, “I don’t think so”; his understanding was that Hearnes wished to seek a second term as governor. Eagleton, with a six pack of beer in hand, went to the governor’s mansion; upon his arrival he found the governor sitting in the yard with his wife, Betty, who disapproved of alcohol at the mansion. So he slipped the Budweiser into the shrubs until the first lady went indoors. Eagleton shared the brew with Hearnes as they sat on the wooden swing. There Hearnes explained his intentions and then encouraged Eagleton to run for the Senate by advising, “Tom, you’re not going to get [it] on a silver platter. You have to fight for it, You have to take a chance if you think the timing is right.” Yet, despite their friendship, Hearnes had to remain neutral since Eagleton would be contesting a Democratic incumbent as well as other Democrats in the primary.2 The timing appeared right because Senator Long had allegedly engaged in unethical activities linked to the notorious James R. Hoffa’s Teamsters Union. In May 1967 Life first exposed the seeming improbability of a folksy, small-town Baptist deacon, former farmer, and prosecuting attorney from Pike County serving as one of Hoffa’s strongest political supporters. Yet the portly, bespectacled, gray-haired Long had intoned at the 1966 Teamsters convention, “You delight your friends and...

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