68 in the Shadow of 25

Luke Nichter's "The Year that Broke Politics" has me wondering the degree to which the past is prologue

It’s taken a while, but I’m finally whittling down my Christmas pile of books. The latest one I’ve finished, gifted me by my political maverick son (a Bernie Sanders fan who spends his spare time campaigning, protesting, and registering voters) is Luke Nichter’s The Year that Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968. This one was not at the top of that living room pile, in part because the election of 1968 is terrain I felt I knew pretty well. But I quickly found myself hooked on this treatment of it for the fresh angles I encountered.

The first, ironically, is its topic. Nineteen sixty-eight was one of the most consequential years in American history, notable for the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and chaotic protests in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention, among other landmarks (like a Super Bowl season for my beloved New York Jets). But the actual presidential race is usually embedded in chronicles of these momentous events. That Nichter, who holds an endowed chair at Chapman University, foregrounds the campaign itself makes the book seem surprisingly fresh. His account, which runs from President Lyndon Johnson’s decision not to run for re-election on March 31 until Election Day on November 5, offers skillful portraits of the three main candidates—Richard Nixon, Hubert Humphrey, and George Wallace—as well as their challengers (RFK and Eugene McCarthy for the Democrats; Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan for the Republicans) who fell to the wayside. The book is organized into four seasons, each consisting of four chapters, which confers shape and elegance on his narrative.

The second perhaps paradoxical reason I found Nichter’s history of the 1968 race interesting is that it really is history. I couldn’t locate his age, but judging from his author photo, Nichter’s younger than 57. (One of my earliest childhood memories is the delivery of my first twin bed to my family’s Queens apartment on June 4, 1968, the day Kennedy was assassinated, when I was five years old.) Most accounts of 1968 that I’ve read have come from journalists, or at any rate those with clear memories of the events they describe. It’s clear in reading his rendition of the year that Nichter is not enmeshed in the multifaceted mythologies of the sixties—in fact, he actively refutes a number of them, including versions of the story in which Nixon colluded with the Vietnamese government or ran a campaign where his notorious “Southern Strategy” of appealing to white racists was the key to his victory. There’s no sign here of the obsessively calculating Nixon whose dirty tricks and electoral subversion would become a matter of record once he entered the White House.

As such interpretive moves suggest, this is very much a right-of-center reading of 1968. Nichter is respectful of Wallace and argues that his racism was not really central to his political identity the way it had been earlier in the decade. Yet the most compelling aspects of The Year that Broke Politics are less ideological than personal. The most attractive figure to emerge in this telling of the story is liberal lion Hubert Humphrey, a remarkably skilled and honorable man faced with a seemingly impossible situation in holding the Democratic Party together—which he very nearly accomplished. And the villain of the tale is Johnson, who rewarded Humphrey’s loyalty with appalling disrespect in ways that can be considered entirely separate from his surprising cooperation with Nixon. Yet Nichter’s LBJ is also a deeply human ailing giant of a man whose misplaced obsession with his legacy led him to play a far larger role in the campaign than is commonly recognized.

Naturally, I read this story of 1968 with 2025 very much on my mind. But the key year in the back of my mind was 1964, when LBJ won re-election after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in a landslide over Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater. Johnson used his mandate—far greater than that of Donald Trump sixty years later—to ram through the Great Society, a gigantic agenda that included Medicare, Medicaid, and a raft of social welfare programs. Yet many of these legislative initiatives, such as the Community Action Program, were poorly planned and implemented, which exacerbated the backlash that inevitably followed. By 1966, the Democrats had lost control of Congress, and by 1968 Johnson effectively conceded defeat by deciding not to run for re-election. In 1980, Reagan—a man considered far too far to the right to be elected a dozen years earlier—inaugurated a generation of conservative dominance in American politics.

President Trump is now engaged in an effort to tear down some of the most durable legacies of the Great Society. He’s going about it with a recklessness even greater than that which Johnson built it up. I wonder if he will pay a price for his hubris comparable to that of Johnson. Perhaps the past will be prologue.