New Book on ’68 Election: The Year That Broke Politics

The 1968 election is still widely discussed by political scientists, the punditocracy and the surviving veterans of its presidential campaigns. It was the culmination of Richard Nixon’s amazing comeback after two heart-breaking defeats at the polls, in which the former Republican vice president edged out Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey. 

It was also a race complicated by the strong (13%) third party candidacy of former Alabama Gov. George Wallace, a midwife of the law and order issue that is a powerful political force today.

Played on the set of the increasingly unpopular Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the decision of President Lyndon B. Johnson not to seek re-election, 1968 was, to say the least, an explosive and significant year in the quadrennial American exercise of choosing a president.

In “1968: The Year That Broke Politics,” historian Luke Nichter gives readers what is surely the last word on this significant election. In the process, the reader discovers some obscure-but-captivating facts ranging from Elvis Presley posting a “Wallace for President” yard sign at Graceland to a Russian attempt at collusion in the election.

That’s right: Russian Premier Alexei Kosygin and Communist Party boss Leonid Brezhnev, clearly preferring to deal with Humphrey over seasoned anti-Communist Nixon, sent an offer of financial help to the cash-strapped Democrat through Ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Dobrynin (who wrote in his memoirs of making the offer to Humphrey himself: There is no evidence he ever considered it).

Incredibly, the author, appears to have read every memoir or biography of every major figure in the 1968 campaign. Moreover, he interviewed known and little-known players of this high political drama. Bui Diem, South Vietnam’s ambassador to the U.S., and Ed Nixon, the Republican nominee’s younger brother, both talked to Nichter at length before their recent deaths.

The highly significant role of Billy Graham in the campaign is a case that is fully illustrated in Nichter’s hand. Although he never endorsed a candidate before or after 1968, America’s best-loved evangelist was a close friend of both Nixon and outgoing President Johnson and served as a conduit between them. He informed the Democratic president that the Republican nominee would not undercut his handling of the Vietnam War or efforts to end it.

Johnson obviously appreciated this and almost certainly preferred Nixon as his successor to his own vice president.

“I told Nixon every bit as much, if not more, as Humphrey knows,” Johnson said privately before the election, “I’ve given Humphrey nothing.”

Humphrey, in fact, made it clear he was distancing himself from his president by calling for a bombing halt of the communist North on Sept. 30. When Republican Senate staffer Tom Korologos discovered the script of the speech in the TV studio where Humphrey taped it, he got word to the Nixon campaign and Nixon, in turn, telephoned the White House to inform Johnson.

Humphrey hagiographers and, in fact, most historians, conclude his break with Johnson by calling for a bombing halt was the decisive ingredient in the Democratic nominee’s big rebound. Polls had hitherto showed him trailing Nixon by double-digits and barely ahead of insurgent Wallace.

Not so, counters Nichter. By the time of Humphrey’s speech, polls showed most Americans still backed bombing North Vietnam and that Vietnam trailed the economy and law and order as the most important issue of the race.

What was decisive in Humphrey’s rebound was that organized labor began an all-out drive nationwide to reach out to members who supported Wallace and win them back to the Democrats. Union phonebanks reminded them that Alabama was one of 16 states without a minimum wage law and that Wallace had used state police to thwart union organizers.

“All Humphrey had was us,” said AFL-CIO President George Meany.

Wallace, largely consigned to history as racist and segregationist, emerges in Nichter’s account as a much better person and more significant figure than Sen. Eugene McCarthy — lionized by campaign volunteers such as Bill Clinton (who gave the eulogy at his funeral) with convincing LBJ to step down by his larger-than-expected showing as an anti-war candidate in the New Hampshire primaries.

Aloof, dismissive, and uncomfortable campaigning among minorities, McCarthy scored 43% of the vote in New Hampshire in large part because he was the only candidate on the ballot.

Johnson actually won with 47% as a write-in candidate. Most Granite State voters did not even know McCarthy’s position on Vietnam and quite a few thought he was GOP anti-communist Sen. Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin, dead for a decade.

Beaten for nomination, McCarthy grudgingly endorsed fellow Minnesota Democrat Humphrey on election eve. 

Wallace, who began his career as a racial moderate and lost the governorship, embraced racism and segregation and won the next time. By 1968, however, he almost never talked about race and focused his presidential bid on law and order and the “pointy-headed elites” looking down at “the little guys.”

His message resonated with blue-collar Democrats and some conservative Republicans and inarguably helped pave the way for future candidates without his controversial past — Ronald Reagan, Pat Buchanan, and Donald Trump — to run and sometimes win.

Nichter’s book offers the most evidence yet to dispel what Nixon enemies have long peddled as proof of his underhandedness and that he “stole” the race from Humphrey: the Anna Chennault affair, in which Chinese-American socialite Chennault, at Nixon’s behest, convinced South Vietnamese President Nguyen van Thieu to resist sitting down at the Paris Peace Talks with North Vietnam in October 1968 because he would get a better deal with Nixon as president. The author offers evidence that Chennault was just that — a socialite — and that she did not know Nixon that well, that any outreach to South Vietnam was done by her without the campaign’s blessing, and that Nixon made clear he would not violate his vow to undercut Johnson’s peace efforts.

“1968: The Year That Broke Politics” answers a lot of lingering questions for history and, in the process, is a fun read.

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.