Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register and the Substack newsletter Showing Up, where this essay first appeared. He served as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.

You’re invited to time travel with me today, to April 1968, fifty-six years ago. Newspaper headlines on April 1 said President Lyndon Johnson won’t seek reelection. Some might have thought it was an April Fool prank. A much bigger jolt came April 4, with the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The number of Marines in Vietnam peaked just under 86,000. Tragically, U.S. fatalities in Vietnam also crested in 1968, almost 30 percent of all American battle deaths happening that year. And, after 249 shows, the final episode of the Andy Griffith Show aired. Bucolic Mayberry seemed strangely out of synch with what was going on in America.

On April 27, 1968, Vice President Hubert Humphrey formally declared his candidacy for president. The second paragraph of his announcement:

Kurt Meyer writes a weekly column for the Nora Springs – Rockford Register and the Substack newsletter Showing Up, where this essay first appeared. He served as chair of the executive committee (the equivalent of board chair) of Americans for Democratic Action, America’s most experienced liberal organization.

By the time you read this, I will have been in Washington D.C. to participate in the annual awards gathering of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). I’ve attended these events for the last dozen years although, as for most organizations, the ADA get-together went “virtual” during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, it’s a hybrid, virtual/in-person event.

Americans for Democratic Action was founded in the aftermath of World War II by a distinguished group of progressives, led by Eleanor Roosevelt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Walter Reuther, and Hubert Humphrey, then Minneapolis mayor. This gathering is special for me, for although I’ve introduced numerous honorees before, this year I received ADA’s “Timeless Liberal” award.