David Mixner - Democratic Party Delegate Selection Committee

Democratic Party Delegate Selection Committee

In early 1969, Mixner was invited to join the Delegate Selection Committee, which had been created during the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Although Mixner’s appointment turned out to be a mistake, as Senator Fred R. Harris of Oklahoma was supposed to invite Mixner to join the less powerful Rules Committee, he nonetheless made his mark on the twenty-eight member body, which included Warren Christopher, who would later become Secretary of State, Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, Senator Harold Hughes of Iowa, Senator Adlai Stevenson III of Illinois and Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, who served as the Committee’s Chairman.

By virtue of his inadvertent inclusion on the Delegate Selection Committee, Mixner served as his generation’s lone voice, and he intended the use the platform to raise the issue of the violence at the previous year’s convention. When Senator Kennedy, a close friend of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley and the party’s front-runner for the 1972 Presidential nomination, took the witness stand, Mixner used the opportunity to ask Kennedy if he would publicly condemn both the tactics used by the Chicago police and the Mayor for his involvement. Kennedy dodged the question. Subsequently, Adlai Stevenson III sought to exclude Mixner from a committee meeting in Chicago where Mayor Daley was scheduled to testify. McGovern called Mixner, asking him not to attend, but Mixner refused. When he arrived for the meeting, drawing the ire of Senator Stevenson, McGovern offered him a compromise, promising to ask Daley to apologize for the violence and offer all those arrested amnesty if Mixner agreed to stay quiet. The resulting exchange between McGovern and Daley, included Daley’s insistence that "If people violate the law they should accept the consequences of the law."

The McGovern Commission, which had set out to reform the Presidential nomination process in order to avoid a repeat of the 1968 Convention, eventually issued its recommendations, including the requirement that all delegates be directly elected by the people, eviscerating the power of political bosses to control the nomination process.