Dan Cirucci as he appeared in Life magazine (circled) holding the McCarthy for President sign and campaigning with actor Tony Randall in Concord, New Hampshire in 1968.
I wouldn’t dismiss them quite so easily. Nor would I underestimate the impact of a national youth-driven movement.
That’s because I was part of just such an effort exactly 50 years ago this spring.
In 1968, the media called it a “children’s crusade.” But those of us who participated were hardly children, even though many of us were novices to the pugnacious world of national politics. We were mostly college kids watching our contemporaries die by the thousands in a senseless war halfway around the world.
I lost four of my high school classmates in Vietnam. Multiply that figure out across the nation and over the decade-long war and you have more than 58,000 fatalities.
In the spring of 1968, we were in the throes of it. And I was a senior at Villanova University. I knew that I could not simply stand aside and watch the carnage continue. So, as a political science major, I decided to work within the system to bring about change.
I joined the campaign of the Democratic peace candidate, Sen. Gene McCarthy. The cerebral senator was the only Democrat who dared to challenge President Lyndon Johnson early on. Few people gave him any chance of dethroning an incumbent president. But that didn’t matter to me when I joined some of my classmates and went to work for McCarthy in New Hampshire, where he unexpectedly captured such a huge portion of the primary vote that he sent shock waves through the party establishment. By the end of March, Johnson bailed and announced he would not seek re-election.
I followed McCarthy through other primary states (New York, Indiana, Pennsylvania) and on to the infamous Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
By that summer, the nation witnessed horrific events. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in April and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (who had entered the presidential race and may have been headed toward the nomination) was gunned down in June.
In August, the party convention was a veritable bloodbath. Still, our band of “neat and clean for Gene” loyalists played by the rules. We didn’t . . . . . CLICK HERE to read the rest of Dan Cirucci's recollection of 1968 and his warning for today's young activists, as published in the Courier Post.
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