There may have been worse years in world history—1939 comes to mind—but for sheer gloom and despair with few beams of sunshine, 1968 will do very well. Short of the fact that war didn’t break out, just about nothing good happened in politics that year. Every hope at the start was crushed or died later. Every good reputation was diminished, save for those of the men who failed to leave the year alive: Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy lived on in legend, whereas everyone else in politics that year was disgraced or greatly damaged, either then, or, like the winner of the 1968 presidential election, Richard M. Nixon, later. Talented people like Nixon, Hubert H. Humphrey, and Eugene McCarthy turned out to have weaknesses that made their gifts useless. All failed their country and those who had backed them.
How did it begin? Did it begin with Lyndon B. Johnson, who squandered the nation’s immense goodwill following the Kennedy assassination with his failure to manage domestic upheavals and the Vietnam conflict, which had grown on his watch from a small-bore engagement to a war without end? Did it begin with Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon, men of huge promise who each wished to rebound from the humiliations incurred from being vice president and from losing to John F. Kennedy? Did it begin with Bobby Kennedy, who believed the moral arc of the world would not be restored until he assumed the seat of his brother?
Or did it perhaps begin with Allard K. Lowenstein, then 39, a social justice warrior before the phrase was invented, whose gig was crusading and whose realm was the world? The year before, Lowenstein, about a dozen years out of law school (and three years after his involvement with the Freedom Riders), began looking for members of Congress who might want to run against Johnson in 1968 and thus bring an end to the war.
The obvious choice was Robert F. Kennedy, brother and heir to the much-missed former president, who had talent, charisma, and a two-tier following—his own and his brother’s—big enough to take on an incumbent president. The problem was that he was the late president’s brother, so a challenge by him would be traced less to a cause than to resentment and jealousy, to a sense of entitlement and, like his brother, an unwillingness to wait his turn. Bobby Kennedy’s dislike of Johnson, shared and returned, was a very old story. He and his team had long planned on a run, but in 1972, when the race would be wide open and his problems with Johnson would not be an issue. His brother Ted was against it; so were most of his late brother’s advisers, who wanted a return as badly as he did but felt that the time wasn’t right. Challenging a sitting president of one’s own party was a huge undertaking; Bobby could easily lose, and in that case the hopes for a Kennedy restoration would be over forever. In September 1967, Bobby told Lowenstein he wouldn’t be running. Two months later, Senator Eugene McCarthy said that he would.
A part-time poet and an ex-seminarian, McCarthy described himself as more Catholic and smarter than both the Kennedys, and his low-key and somewhat professorial manner was a good fit for the army of students and depressed intellectuals he would find himself called on to lead. The downside was that he was not at all gifted at stirring emotions: Lowenstein’s friend Jack Newfield called him “vain and lazy.” “No one was better at dulling the excitement of the McCarthy campaign than Gene McCarthy,” writes Lawrence O’Donnell in Playing with Fire, his 2017 book about the 1968 election, just released in paperback. “When he arrived to make a speech to thousands of students in New Bedford, Massachusetts, they gave him a standing ovation. When he left the stage, they didn’t move.” Blair Clark, his campaign manager, “started to feel that his candidate was deliberately running an anticampaign.”
What changed everything was the Tet Offensive, begun in the early morning of January 30, 1968: a massive, coordinated surprise attack by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces against dozens of South Vietnamese military and civilian targets. It was intended to provoke the collapse of the South Vietnamese government; instead, it provoked the collapse of the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, his entire war policy, and his political base. All of a sudden, Johnson seemed vulnerable, his support in the polls slipping to 41 percent and support for the war to a number 6 points below that. All of a sudden, volunteers flooded into the McCarthy campaign in New Hampshire. All of a sudden, McCarthy, always before a passive, elusive, diffident figure, looked like a hero and sage, his professorial style suited to the moment.
In December, McCarthy’s aides had thought 10 percent of the vote in the New Hampshire primary would be an accomplishment; early in March they thought 25 percent was more like it; a few days before, 40 percent seemed likely. On March 12, he won 42 percent against 49 percent for the president, a victorious loss. In the delegate count, he won 20 to the president’s 4. Lowenstein’s vision had proved prescient.
But the year of upheavals had only begun. In the days just before the New Hampshire primary, Bobby Kennedy, who had never completely ruled out a run, began to sense that the train was leaving the station. By this late stage in the process, all of his options looked terrible: He could let this chance pass and with it his mission, or he could get into the race and be widely described as an opportunist and coward, someone who let another man take the biggest risks and entered only after the doors were pried open.
In fact, the difference between McCarthy and Bobby lay less in their courage than in what each had to lose. McCarthy was an unknown with no base of power and nothing at risk in losing to Johnson. Bobby was heir to the great, complex whole of the Kennedy drama; to the two lost brothers who had perished before him; to the hopes of all those who had worked for JFK and who now looked to him to redeem their investment. Risking all this without a strong chance of success had been out of the question, but the cost of waiting until success seemed assured was also high. “Kennedy’s people had hoped McCarthy would show that Johnson was vulnerable, but that it would take a stronger candidate than McCarthy to dump Johnson,” O’Donnell writes. This had not happened: It now appeared as if Gene McCarthy might be able to knock off LBJ by himself. But Bobby believed that McCarthy didn’t have it in him to beat Johnson, let alone Nixon (a belief that was proven correct after Bobby was murdered). The morning after the New Hampshire primary, Bobby told reporters he was reassessing his options. On March 16, four years ahead of his previous schedule, and knowing he would be labeled ruthless, he announced he was in.
For President Johnson, this was the long-dreaded nightmare: “The thing I feared from the first day of my presidency was actually coming true,” he later told biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin. “Robert Kennedy had openly announced his intention to reclaim the throne in the memory of his brother. And the American people, swayed by the magic of the name, were dancing in the streets.” On March 31, at the end of a long speech on the war’s progress, he announced, to the shock of everyone listening, that he would not seek reelection.
For Robert F. Kennedy, this was the start of a nightmare: The man he had loathed for five years and had wanted to battle was suddenly gone, and in his place was a person not really his enemy, who led what RFK thought in his heart was his army and whose ideas were not far from his own. Some on “his” side now thought he was the enemy. Some of his friends, including Al Lowenstein, were now with McCarthy and were also conflicted, and Bobby’s campaign would never be whole. “There is a general feeling that the campaign is not quite working,” Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. would lament in his diary. “The basic trouble is that McCarthy, by the single act of prior entry, captured Bobby’s constituency and, with it, a lot of the dynamism of the campaign.” With Johnson out and Humphrey refusing to enter the primaries (counting on delegates he would inherit as Johnson’s vice president), Kennedy and McCarthy would battle up and down the West Coast, with McCarthy defeating Kennedy in the Oregon primary (the first electoral setback suffered by a Kennedy in more than two decades) and losing to him a week later in California.
Then Bobby was shot. Were it McCarthy who had died, Bobby would have gone to his supporters at once to express his regrets and urge them to join him in fighting all the harder. Instead, McCarthy threw in the towel. He sought “symbolic” concessions—asking Humphrey to take a softer line on Vietnam so that McCarthy could exit with at least that much accomplished—but Humphrey refused. Four days later McCarthy met Johnson in Washington, and the same conversation occurred. The Kennedy people and the McCarthy people were suddenly all out in the cold. “In the coming months [McCarthy] did not reach out to the bereft Kennedy supporters and campaigned as though he had given up,” writes Arnold A. Offner, author of the new biography Hubert Humphrey: The Conscience of the Country.
The Democratic convention in August was a predictable riot, with the orphaned and leaderless antiwar forces expressing their rage by engaging in futile and badly planned demonstrations where they were gassed, beaten, and crushed into submission by Mayor Richard Daley’s police. Among the many low points, it’s hard to pick the lowest. One was when Daley shouted “F— you, you Jew son of a bitch” at JFK confidant Abraham Ribicoff, who had complained about “Gestapo tactics in the streets of Chicago” and then answered Daley with a very slight smile, “How hard it is to accept the truth.” Another came when Humphrey, told he had gone over the top in the number of delegates, happily kissed a televised image of his wife’s face, oblivious to the fact that his world and his party were falling to pieces around him. Richard Nixon would not be that different. By the time the nominees of both major parties had arrived at their prizes, they had been so badly damaged by prior experience they were unable to use it for good.
The problems of both men were the same only different. Both Humphrey and Nixon had come into conflict with the era’s most dominant figures, whom they failed to evade or survive. In 1960, each had lost the presidency to the money, connections, pizzazz, and overwhelming political gifts of John Kennedy, and neither ever got over it; each had spent years as vice president in the shade of a powerhouse president whose personal presence was overwhelming and who seemed impossible to please. A poor boy from Whittier, California, whose pre-Navy days were lived in desperate poverty, Nixon was looked down on by his war-hero president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who made him know in the Checkers flap that he was expendable; used him as a hatchet man against Joe McCarthy and the Democrats; never asked him or his wife into the living quarters of any house that he lived in; and in the 1960 campaign humiliatingly failed to name any one thing that Nixon had done for him: “If you give me a week, I might think of one,” he said.
But if Ike by and large ignored Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson paid all too much attention to Humphrey, much of it spent tearing him down. In the index of Offner’s biography of Humphrey, “Johnson, Lyndon B., HHH tormented by” gets a line of its own and 15 entries. “Humphrey was highly dependent emotionally on Johnson’s goodwill,” Offner writes. “He was extremely happy when Johnson gave him a watch and some ‘wonderful pictures.’ ” After LBJ “put his arm around him at the White House reception” following the wedding of LBJ’s daughter, Humphrey said “I was just like his son.” Even when he was the nominee and Johnson had no further power over him, Humphrey was always afraid to incur LBJ’s displeasure, refusing to say he would change his war policy until almost the last days of the campaign.
But while Humphrey’s dysfunction was on full display, Nixon’s was hidden: His outburst in 1962 when he lost a race for governor in California and told the press it wouldn’t “have Nixon to kick around anymore” was never repeated in public, though it remained very much what he felt. Nixon’s belief that he had been treated so badly that from then on he was entitled to do anything that he could to even the score would govern his life—through his victory in 1968, to his staggering, 49-state victory in 1972, and even after he was forced out of office following the Watergate scandal. The fact remains that in 1968 not Nixon or Humphrey or anyone else left alive at the end had the character, strength, or competence to give the country the guidance and leadership it so badly needed. The worst campaign ever, it was also the longest: It was not until Gerald R. Ford took the oath of office on August 9, 1974, that the long, tortured election of 1968 finally came to its end.
