Oct 26 2008
My First Time: To Vote for President
My First Time to Vote for President was 1968.
I was in the Navy and my ship, the USS FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT, an aircraft carrier, had recently returned from a nine-month deployment to the Mediterranean Sea. I was 21, and I remember that I voted with an absentee ballot from Montana.
I recall that during the ship’s deployment, a Navy teletype message came across from the President of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, in which he announced that he would not seek, nor accept, his party’s nomination for a second term. I saved that piece of yellow teletype paper, and still have it in an old footlocker in the basement of my house.
The election year of 1968 was violent: the Tet Offensive in Vietnam in January, the assassinations of Martin Luther King in April and Bobby Kennedy in June, and the demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago that summer. The details of these events we witnessed on television, which was quite a remarkable medium at that time. Even we sailors on liberty were pelted with tomatoes by local residents overseas who protested the U.S. presence in Vietnam.
The Presidential candidates were Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace, at that time, Governor of Alabama.
I didn’t know shinola about politics or political parties. Like so many other youngsters voting in their first elections back in those days, at least the young sailors that I knew, we just assumed that we “were whatever our parents were.” So the Democratic candidate received my vote. I do have to admit to not liking the other candidates very much. Hubert Humphrey was known as “The Happy Warrior.” I liked that.
That’s my First Vote story.
And…this ends my series of “My First Time:” posts. I have “worked” this theme for a total of 29 Posts! I thought I could get 30, but the well has run dry.
Tomorrow I begin a new theme: “Why Didn’t I?” I hope readers will be able to identify with the questions I pose for myself, including “Why Didn’t I Marry My First Love?,” “Why Didn’t I Become an Astronaut?,” “Why Didn’t I Ever Get a Tattoo?,” and “Why Didn’t I ever Skydive?”
I’ll have the answers, beginning tomorrow, Thanks for Reading!
