Luke A. Nichter’s The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 tackles a common subject uncommonly.
Like Abraham Lincoln, the Holocaust, and the John F. Kennedy assassination, 1968 strikes as a subject spurring so many books as to obscure any new illumination. The Year That Broke Politics makes a stale subject fresh by focusing on the circus instead of the sideshow, a conventional approach to other subjects but counterintuitive somehow in dealing with 1968. Whereas other treatments of the era might fixate on figuring out the issue that wasn’t the issue in the Columbia campus takeover that spring or the roster of who was being watched by the whole world outside the Conrad Hilton that summer, Nichter focuses on Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, George Wallace, and Vietnam.
The author shows Johnson more encouraging of Republicans than of the presidential candidates of his own party. Regarding the former, he privately lobbied New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller to run for president and essentially agreed to a non-disparagement treaty with Nixon during his run. Through Billy Graham acting as a go-between, the former colleagues in the House and the Senate forged a stronger bond. As the author says of the successive presidents, “[T]hey admired each other.”
In response to columnist Jack Anderson reporting on Robert F. Kennedy’s role in using the power of the state to dig up dirt on Martin Luther King Jr., Nichter rightly points out, “A leak like that could only have been authorized by the White House.” He provided his own vice president the same number of phone lines as he did Eugene McCarthy at the Democratic National Convention. When Humphrey secured the nomination, Johnson consented to campaign with him once and essentially made his ostensible support conditional on Humphrey embracing his policies in Vietnam. Nichter points out, “Johnson himself froze $700,000 raised by the DNC and suggested that it be returned to donors after the election.” Many people, to include seemingly the author, believed the Democratic president wanted the Republican nominee to replace him rather than his own vice president. (READ MORE: The Democrat Party Hates America: The Book Every American Needs)
A mythology builds around the year that the author happily obliterates.
Nixon never opposed a civil rights bill, refused to seek to peel off Wallace vote for himself, and ultimately split Southern electoral votes with Wallace and Humphrey. “For those looking for evidence of a cynical ‘Southern Strategy,’” Nichter writes of a surreptitious recording of Nixon speaking to Southern delegates, “it was a great disappointment.”
Vietnam, the issue that cleaved the president from his vice president and from much of his party, did not play as the real-time political loser that it did long after the fact. Tellingly, none of the three major candidates that year ran as a peace candidate calling for immediate withdrawal. “As late as October 31,” Nichter notes, “Americans disapproved of a bombing halt by a margin of two to one.”
The election, both in the widespread delusion that Robert Kennedy’s assassination denied him a nomination really not plausible prior to it and the supposed snugness of the general, propelled myths. “The conventional wisdom is that it was one of the closest elections in history, decided by a half million votes,” Nichter writes. “But the Electoral College vote of 301-191, plus Wallace’s 46, was a terrible rebuke of a decade of liberalism and overreach.” The popular disgust with that liberalism and overreach resulted in Republican presidents in 20 of the next 24 years. (READ MORE: Clarence Thomas: The True People’s Justice)
Throughout, Nichter lays breadcrumbs to lead the reader from 1968 to our times. Some do. Some don’t.
He talks about a candidate (Humphrey) feasting on McDonald’s when more refined gustatory choices surrounded; the president, à la Barack Obama, unable to fill a Supreme Court vacancy; and Russian attempts to tilt the election in favor of a candidate (Humphrey). Wallace becomes, unsubtly, a proto–Donald Trump. Nichter writes, “The Democratic consensus, found in many accounts, is that Nixon stole the 1968 election by committing treason and violating the Logan Act.”
Some of this, particularly concerns about a Nixon enthusiast seeking to derail Vietnamese peace talks to upend the election, seem overstated. More germanely, their inclusion likely stems from that uncouth desire among publishers, even academic publishers, to make the past about the present, which then alchemizes history into yet another weapon in partisan food fights. Parallels between the two eras certainly exist; extraordinary division and unsettling disorder constitute the primary ones.
No drama casts side players in starring roles so much as 1968. Nichter wrestles controls of the spotlight from, one assumes, the well-wishers of these fringe actors and reorients back to center stage.