The Men and the Moment: The Election of 1968 and the Rise of Partisan Politics in America

"The Men and the Moment: The Election of 1968 and the Rise of Partisan Politics in America"
by Aram Goudsouzian

It was a bloody year. Every night in 1968 Americans watched the Vietnam War rage on television. Casualties from the war had increased dramatically in 1966, again in 1967 and again in 1968. When Americans weren’t tuning into the dismal news from Vietnam, they were watching race riots in major cities. In the nation’s capital, the barbed wire and soldiers at Chevy Chase Circle were just one painful indication of the conflict erupting between black America and white America. The violence spread across college campuses and struck major political figures: Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968; Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the assassinated president, was gunned down on June 6, 1968.

It was in this climate that “America the Violent” (as Time magazine described the nation) held the 1968 election. Aram Goudsouzian, chair of the history department at the University of Memphis, recounts the campaign through the stories of eight major players: President Lyndon B. Johnson, former vice president Richard Nixon, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller, Sen. Robert Kennedy, California Gov. Ronald Reagan, Vice President Hubert Humphrey and former Alabama governor George Wallace.

In the 1968 election cycle, the last of its kind, a strong primary performance did not automatically translate into delegates. The primaries were more like tryouts for professional sports teams, with the scouts being the powerful party leaders who made the ultimate decision on which candidate prevailed as the party’s representative. (In today’s parlance those party leaders are the much-maligned “superdelegates.”) In the chapter on Nixon, Goudsouzian shows that his challenge was to prove himself to the bigwigs on television so that he could erase the memory of his disastrous television debate with John Kennedy in 1960. And he did. Under the tutelage of the late Roger Ailes, later the Fox News impresario, Nixon showed himself to be a competent, if not charismatic, TV performer.

On the Democratic side, McCarthy, voicing strong opposition to the Vietnam War, shook the political establishment with a surprise second-place finish in New Hampshire. His strong showing and widening protests later prompted Johnson to withdraw from the race. Humphrey won the Democratic nomination, but his delegates were Johnson’s people. He needed the president’s support to keep the delegates. In those days delegates were semiautonomous actors, and Humphrey risked losing Johnson’s support — and the delegates — if he broke with the president too radically. But at the same time, to win over the new antiwar faction of the party represented by Kennedy and McCarthy, and to heal the divisions in the party, Humphrey needed to signal some distance on Vietnam. But the 1968 system stymied Humphrey’s effort. He had entered the race too late to run in primaries where he could have perhaps carved out his own position on the war.



Full book review at:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/eight-men-one-chaotic-election-and-the-birth-of-the-modern-primary-system/2019/07/18/774ce6d2-87ab-11e9-a870-b9c411dc4312_story.html?utm_term=.434d377f7116