Fein · Hate Burst Out: Chicago, 1968
Kim Phillips-Fein
Trump’s denunciations of academia, liberals and protesters echoes George Wallace’s angry rhetoric. And students are...
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London Review of Books
The​ US presidential election in 1968 was one of surprises. First, the incumbent Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson withdrew from the race in the middle of primary season; after a strong challenge from the anti-Vietnam candidate Eugene McCarthy and facing dissent in his party, he became convinced he wasn’t going to win. Then Robert F. Kennedy, one of three main Democratic contenders (alongside McCarthy and the vice president, Hubert Humphrey), was assassinated, only two months after the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. The former governor of Alabama George Wallace ran a ferocious campaign as an independent, which broke new ground by rallying the white working class against intellectuals and anti-war hippies. Though always less popular than Johnson, Humphrey won the party’s nomination at a chaotic Democratic National Convention. And finally, Richard Nixon demonstrated how many second chances there are in American politics by winning the presidency only six years after telling reporters, following a humiliating defeat running to be governor of California, that he was retiring so they wouldn’t have ‘Nixon to kick around anymore’.

With the Democrats now poised once more to confirm a last-minute candidate at a convention in Chicago, what the historian Kevin Boyle described as Johnson’s ‘wrenching and profoundly courageous’ decision not to run for re-election has been seen as a model for Joe Biden’s attempt to keep his legacy intact – though Nixon’s triumph might give Kamala Harris pause. (Johnson claimed that he couldn’t focus on Vietnam at the same time as he was campaigning to retain the presidency: ‘I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day of my time to any personal partisan causes, or to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office.’) Trump’s denunciations of academia, liberals and protesters echoes Wallace’s angry rhetoric. And students are again protesting about American participation in a foreign war, though it’s a war that asks much less of the public than Vietnam did. It is hard not to figure the 1968 election as inaugurating the cultural and political polarisation of the American electorate so evident today.

As a turning point in American history, the 1968 contest doesn’t match up to the election of 1860 (won by Abraham Lincoln) or 1932 (Franklin D. Roosevelt), but it’s close. The election marked the end of the liberal ascendancy that started with the New Deal and of the electoral politics that saw no Republican president but Eisenhower in the White House for more than three decades (even he was elected only after accepting the basic tenets of New Deal liberalism). Luke Nichter’s brisk analysis reveals the ways in which Nixon used social conservatism and the widespread fear of social disorder to spearhead an attack on the shaky liberal consensus. The crucial significance of 1968, Nichter argues, lies less in popular opposition to the war than in disillusionment with liberalism: Humphrey was the last New Deal Democrat who had a real shot at the White House, and his defeat ushered in a new era in American political life. Although Nichter’s title alludes to the broader ways in which the campaign of 1968 destabilised American political institutions and the postwar consensus, his focus is on high presidential politics, and he makes much of the newly available diaries of the evangelical minister Billy Graham, who was close to both Johnson and Nixon. Where he differs from conventional interpretations is in his claim that Johnson, with the Cold War and his long-term reputation in mind, secretly supported Nixon and betrayed Humphrey.

Johnson’s decision not to seek re-election came as a surprise even to his closest advisers. He was a New Deal politician, confident that the government’s function of protecting and improving the lives of citizens was entirely in keeping with the norms of a capitalist society. Elected to the House in 1937 to represent a dirt-poor Texas region on a New Deal platform, he won a Senate seat in 1948 and became majority leader in 1954. Having grown up in hardscrabble poverty, he disdained the prep-school, Ivy League politesse of the Eastern elite. He knew how to strongarm a vote and how to hold a grudge. He was a rival to the stylish, charismatic John F. Kennedy, but as his running mate was vital to JFK’s election in 1960; the alliance brought him to power after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Kennedy’s death more or less ensured that Johnson would be elected the following year, but when he defeated Barry Goldwater with 61 per cent of the vote and the largest popular margin in American history, it seemed a ringing endorsement of his liberal vision and a trouncing of Goldwater’s small government conservatism. With this mandate, Johnson ended formalised Jim Crow and expanded the welfare state. He oversaw the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which dismantled Southern segregation, and supported a broad legislative agenda. It is thanks to Johnson that Americans have federal provision of early childhood education (Head Start), aid for higher education, urban block grants to fight poverty and national health insurance for the elderly and the very poor – still the only universal healthcare in the US.

In the affluent early years of the 1960s, passing this legislation was relatively easy. By 1968, however, inflation had begun to erode working-class incomes, and the first hints of deindustrialisation and plant closure in Northern cities had generated new anxieties. As prices rose and steady work disappeared, the Great Society policies that many had seen as generous and sensible became more divisive. Recent histories of Johnson’s presidency have emphasised the way that his liberalism managed to encode a range of racial stereotypes and to lay the basis for the subsequent growth of the carceral state by tying forms of aid to funding for local police departments. Poor people were treated as the target of public charity or public fear – not as part of a broader democratic politics. The riots in Harlem in 1964, Watts in 1965, and in Detroit and Newark in the summer of 1967 (in each case triggered by police brutality), exposed the limits of Johnson’s ‘war on poverty’, the many areas of exclusion and inequality that it did not touch. Fears around rising street crime (the homicide rate climbed sharply in the 1960s) became for many Americans inseparable from their sense of disquiet about the challenges to American social and racial order embodied by the Black freedom movement.

Johnson faced an even greater challenge in foreign affairs. He remained absolutely committed to the ‘domino theory’ that had guided American policy since the start of the Cold War. When Johnson made the decision to bomb North Vietnam in March 1965, Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon predicted that it would send him ‘out of office as the most discredited president in the history of this nation’. At the time, only a few people agreed. But as the war went on, and the number of American troops on the ground increased, so did displeasure with it – among the young people who were being sent to fight, among liberal intellectuals and before long among Democratic politicians. In April 1967, Martin Luther King spoke at Riverside Church, denouncing the war as an ‘enemy of the poor’, the product of ‘racism, extreme materialism and militarism’. By the end of the year, a breakaway faction within the Democratic Party, led by the aloof, moody McCarthy (who in his youth had spent almost a year as a novice at a Benedictine monastery), was preparing to ‘dump Johnson’ and endorse a candidate committed to ending the war. The defence secretary, Robert McNamara, resigned, believing that victory was impossible. Much of the American population still backed fighting communism in Vietnam – but anti-war feeling, to a degree that would have been unthinkable during the Korean War, quickly gained momentum. New questions arose: what if communism in a country such as Vietnam was not a conspiracy orchestrated by Moscow, but a domestic politics that had authentic support? What if the democratic regime backed by America was itself a corrupt, brutal force?

In March, McCarthy performed well in the New Hampshire primary, winning more than 40 per cent of the vote two days after it emerged that American generals had told Johnson 200,000 more troops were needed to win the war. Four days later, Bobby Kennedy, the crusading New York senator and former attorney general, entered the race. Nichter argues that Johnson was wary about running again because of his health, without saying why the campaign would have been so stressful as to endanger it: the liberal anti-communism Johnson represented was coming under attack. On 31 March Johnson gave a televised speech in which he announced that he would stop the bombardment of North Vietnam above a certain parallel, in the hope that this would encourage Hanoi to negotiate. At the same time, he said he recognised the profound ‘division in the American house’: to make sure that his presidency remained above the partisan fray, ‘I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.’

The next months were some of the most frantic in American political history. On 4 April, King was assassinated in Memphis (he was there to speak in support of striking sanitation workers), setting off unrest in more than 120 cities. The international monetary system came under strain as investors sold off dollars; the Federal Reserve hiked interest rates in response, leading to an economic slowdown. At the end of April, students at Columbia University who were protesting against its administration’s plan to build a gym in a popular park in Harlem, as well as the ties between the university and the Department of Defence, commandeered five buildings on campus. Hundreds slept in the buildings; a handful occupied the university president’s office. After a week, Columbia’s leadership called in the cops. More than seven hundred students were arrested, many of them assaulted and beaten in the process. (The events at Columbia helped to inspire the uprisings in France in May 1968.) Early in June, Kennedy, whose ability to tap into the civil rights movement might have enabled him to translate anti-war activism into electoral appeal, was assassinated by a Palestinian man who claimed he had acted out of anger at Kennedy’s support for Israel during the 1967 war.

Humphrey was left with a dilemma. He couldn’t easily break with Johnson, in whose administration he still served, on Vietnam or on any other issue. Johnson had already showed himself to be a difficult boss, keeping Humphrey waiting for hours to meet and once telling the press that the vice president’s biggest problem was that he cried too often. Humphrey had meant to announce his candidacy on 4 April but cancelled after King was killed. When he finally declared on 27 April, he invoked ‘the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose, and the politics of joy’, only weeks after the National Guard had been called out to occupy Washington DC. Almost everywhere that Humphrey went he had to contend with young people showing up to heckle him (‘Dump the Hump!’).

Johnson’s announcement of the partial cessation of fighting failed to give Humphrey a boost. Hanoi agreed to negotiate, at least initially, and American and North Vietnamese representatives met for the first time in May, but much of the rest of the year was taken up with talks about talks: where they should happen, whether the National Liberation Front (the communist rebel forces in South Vietnam) should be allowed to participate, whether negotiations could begin at all while the US was still dropping bombs on any part of the North. Johnson was reluctant to further halt military operations, and as a result, the negotiations stalled while the killing went on and protests against the war continued.

The upheaval on the left climaxed at the Democratic Convention. Thousands of young anti-war protesters travelled to Chicago. There were clean-cut college students still campaigning for McCarthy; critics of the war organising a mass march for peace and against racism; and the countercultural Yippies, who nominated a pig called Pigasus for president. The Chicago police, mobilised by Democratic Mayor Richard Daley, made few distinctions between them. As Heather Hendershot recounts in a recent study of the news coverage of the convention, protesters were recorded being tear-gassed on Michigan Avenue; the journalists reporting on the protests had to contend with the gas on live TV. It was so thick that it seeped into Humphrey’s suite on the 29th floor of the Conrad Hilton Hotel, making him retreat to the shower. McCarthy campaign volunteers tore up bed sheets to make bandages for wounded protesters. When Senator Abraham Ribicoff accused Daley of using ‘Gestapo’ tactics, the cameras captured his obscene response (Daley later claimed he’d said ‘faker’). Both the intensity of the protests and the ferocity of the crackdown suggested that the normal structures of political debate were no longer adequate to contain the rebellion rising throughout the country. Humphrey won the nomination, but the party he was supposed to lead was in tatters.

The Republicans​ had an easier task. Even though some advisers (including F. Clifton White, the political strategist who engineered the Goldwater nomination in 1964) had hoped Ronald Reagan would be the nominee, the party quickly coalesced around Nixon, who sailed to victory in the primaries. He was no one’s idea of a dream candidate. He had lost a presidential election once before, in 1960, albeit by the narrowest of margins. He was defensive, prickly, hostile to the press. But he was able to convey a vision of stability to a white middle class troubled by the civil rights movement, the New Left and the counterculture. He invoked ‘law and order’ to indicate his hostility not only to criminal activity but also to riots, anti-war protests and broader social transformation. He insisted that encouraging Black capitalists to invest in the ghetto would resolve racial inequality far more effectively than any welfare state could. And he promised that he had a ‘secret’ plan to end the Vietnam War.

Although Nixon ran against the Great Society, he had much in common with Johnson. They had come of age at the same time, had both served as vice president, were organisation men who had worked their way up, and were both committed to the principles of Cold War politics, according to which the only successful outcome in Vietnam would be some form of military victory. Nichter’s most noteworthy archival find concerns the relationship between Nixon and Johnson, particularly the role played by Graham as a go-between. Graham was known for his ‘prayer crusades’, which gathered tens of thousands of worshippers in public arenas. He was a Southern Baptist and ardent anti-communist Cold Warrior who belonged to the Democratic Party but held integrated crusade meetings even in the Jim Crow South. Although he was close to Johnson, he believed Nixon to be the strongest candidate in 1968, ‘morally, spiritually and intellectually’. Nichter draws on Graham’s private journals to show that he met one-on-one with Johnson to tell him that Nixon, if he won the election, would never publicly attack his predecessor. At a time when Johnson was aware of the political gains Humphrey could make by breaking with the administration, such a promise of fealty meant a great deal. After all, Johnson had a role in the party and a legacy to maintain. Graham wrote in his diary that he felt Johnson was ‘appreciative’ and ‘touched’ by Nixon’s gesture of respect – and that he may privately even have wanted him to win, believing that Nixon’s position on Vietnam was closer to his own than Humphrey’s.

Nichter’s argument about Johnson’s affinity with Nixon informs his reinterpretation of a celebrated episode in the 1968 campaign: Nixon’s supposed behind-the-scenes manoeuvring to ‘monkey wrench’ the Paris negotiations. The US was ready to agree to cease bombing Hanoi in exchange for concessions that would pause the conflict. Then, just before the election, South Vietnam walked away from the negotiating table. The Nixon biographer John Farrell, Watergate chronicler Garrett Graff and others have stressed the importance of Nixon using Anna Chennault – Washington socialite, anti-communist activist, Nixon ally and widow of an American general – to relay to South Vietnamese leaders that if they delayed participating in the talks until after the election, they would be granted bigger concessions. Illegal wiretaps revealed that Chennault delivered such a message, though not that she was acting on Nixon’s orders. In a memo written by one of his aides, Nixon is recorded saying ‘Keep Anna Chennault working on South Vietnam,’ while insisting publicly on support for Johnson. Farrell et al argue that Johnson knew about Nixon’s involvement and called it ‘treason’; apparently he offered Humphrey the chance to go public, but Humphrey was afraid that the charges would be seen as dirty tricks. For Nichter, the memo isn’t sufficient evidence to prove that Nixon was using his private connections to interfere with foreign policy. I disagree, but he’s right to note that Nixon and Johnson were of similar mind when it came to Vietnam and the importance of preserving the opportunity to declare military victory, a position that was increasingly difficult to maintain within the Democratic Party. In 1968 the Cold War assumptions that had governed US policy since the Second World War were coming under pressure; trying to cling to them in the face of a public ever more resistant to the war would in time sink Nixon as well.

By the end of the summer, Humphrey was trailing Nixon: polls indicated that he had 29 per cent of the vote compared to Nixon’s 44 per cent; George Wallace was at 21 per cent. Wallace presented himself as a viable candidate for president, but he also had a different goal in mind: if he could prevent either of the major party candidates from winning a majority in the electoral college, the election would be decided in the House of Representatives, where he had powerful friends. In 1963, when he became famous for ‘standing in the schoolhouse door’ to block Black students from entering the University of Alabama, Wallace explained that his cause was a national one. In his inaugural address as governor he argued for ‘segregation now, segregation today, segregation for ever,’ appealing to the ‘sons and daughters of old New England’s rock-ribbed patriotism’, the ‘sturdy natives of the great Midwest’ and the ‘descendants of the far West flaming spirit of pioneer freedom’: ‘You are Southerners too and brothers with us in our fight.’ Wallace went so far as to present white people as victims on the global stage. By defending Southern segregation, he argued, white Southerners were also defending the freedom of the Belgians in the Congo or the Portuguese in Angola, standing up against the ‘international racism of the liberals’, who would prostrate the ‘international white minority to the whim of the international coloured majority, so that we are footballed about according to the whims of the Afro-Asian bloc’.

In 1968 Wallace took this spirit of victimisation into national politics. (Nichter differs from other historians in his insistence that Wallace’s campaign largely abandoned appeals to racism.) His candidacy tapped into a right-wing activist network that had flourished in the wake of Goldwater’s failed campaign and involved such fervent anti-communist organisations as the John Birch Society. But it also spoke to a new constituency: blue-collar workers and low-income service workers in Northern cities who were starting to lose the factory jobs that had brought them security in the postwar era. As Wallace put it, he spoke for the ‘man in the textile mill, [the] man in the steel mill, [the] barber, [the] beautician, the policeman on the beat’. ‘Yes, they’ve looked down their nose at you and me a long time. They’ve called us rednecks … Well, we’re going to show Mr Nixon and Mr Humphrey that there sure are a lot of rednecks in this country.’ Workers weren’t encouraged to unite against bosses but to rally against the ‘pseudo-intellectuals’, the ‘over-educated, ivory-tower folks with pointed heads’ who claimed to have the answers in Vietnam when in fact they couldn’t ‘park a bicycle straight’. Wallace wasn’t the only politician who adopted this populist register in the late 1960s. Mario Procaccino, the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor in 1969, coined the phrase ‘limousine liberal’ to describe the people Wallace was campaigning against, and Frank Rizzo governed Philadelphia in a similar way in the 1970s. But Wallace brought this language into national politics, showing that it was possible to build a campaign that united the white South with a disaffected core of previously Democratic voters in the North and Midwest.

Whatever chance Wallace had of getting enough votes to determine the course of the election vanished when his running mate, Curtis LeMay, a retired Air Force chief of staff, began to rail against the American ‘phobia’ of nuclear weapons, suggesting that the only thing preventing the US from victory in Vietnam was squeamishness. (In one speech, LeMay described the abundant natural beauty of the nuclear test sites in Bikini Atoll – who cared if a few land crabs on the beach were ‘hot’?) But the rhetoric of white working-class resentment and its targets – liberals, hippies, students, people on welfare – has never left American politics. Wallace’s quixotic campaign was co-opted by the right, most immediately in Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy’. In the decades since 1968, politicians from Pat Buchanan to Trump have borrowed from his script.

Humphrey made up some ground late in the race. First, he promised that as president, he would stop all bombing of North Vietnam to maximise the chances of peace. Slogans of support began to pop up: ‘If You Mean It, We’re with You’ and ‘Stop the War – Humphrey, We Trust You.’ Then in the last days of the race, Johnson did what had previously been unthinkable and halted the bombs. In a televised address to the nation, he announced: ‘I have now ordered that all air, naval and artillery bombardment of North Vietnam cease … What we now expect – what we have a right to expect – are prompt, productive, serious and intensive negotiations.’ This has often been interpreted as Johnson’s Hail Mary to keep the Democrats in power. Nichter, however, suggests that Johnson was focused on his own legacy, not on helping Humphrey: after the election, Time said the address would come to be seen as a ‘high point’ of LBJ’s career, and he likely hoped his decision might ameliorate the degree to which his reputation was tainted by the war. Nichter quotes Johnson’s secretary of defence Clark Clifford: ‘I happen to know LBJ didn’t end the bombing on 31 October just to elect Humphrey because I’ve never believed he wanted Humphrey to win!’

Humphrey gained traction towards the end of the campaign by making a concerted pitch to regain the ‘blue-collar worker’ who had once been a Democratic stalwart, urging labour unions to do more to support his candidacy. His advisers had warned that ‘the group we have often depended on as the backbone of the Democratic vote is leaving us by the droves.’ By involving the unions and distancing himself from Johnson, Humphrey was able to win some additional supporters. But not enough. In the end, Nixon carried 32 states and 301 electoral college votes, while Humphrey got only 191 (and Wallace 46). Once in office, Nixon began the covert bombing of North Vietnamese camps in Cambodia. The subsequent invasion of Cambodia by American and South Vietnamese forces helped bring the Khmer Rouge to power. Nixon oversaw the bombing of cities in North Vietnam and the mining of Vietnamese harbours. Despite his plan for ‘Vietnamisation’ – according to which the South Vietnamese would take on a larger role in ground warfare – about a third of all Americans who died in Vietnam perished while Nixon was in the White House. The war wouldn’t end until April 1975, by which time some two million Vietnamese people had died, and Nixon – consumed by paranoia, furious at the left, desperately trying to save his own political career and, he thought, the nation – had already left office in ignominy after being impeached for Watergate.

We are now at the far end of changes that were only beginning to be visible in 1968. The historian Steve Fraser has warned of the seductive power of nostalgia in American politics, the dream of postwar order that shapes left and right alike. But the underlying foundation of that consensus (such as it ever was) has long since crumbled. And, most important, the prosperity and rising economic expectations of the postwar years contrast dramatically with today’s economic anxiety, instability and increasing inequality. The wealth of postwar America shaped the protest politics of the day. Massive public investment in higher education created the university towns that nurtured generational identity; young people felt able to take political risks because they knew that jobs were plentiful. Protest was driven, too, by the idealism that had been inherited from the New Deal and victory in Europe. The young of the postwar years had been raised to believe the US was a land of freedom, democracy and equality – an image insulted by the reality of racial segregation and napalm falling on Vietnamese villages. Today’s student protesters, on the other hand, are facing educational debt and insecure jobs. The nation’s political leadership appears incapable of addressing the crises of economic inequality and climate change. Students protesting against American support for the war in Gaza recognise in the constriction of the political conversation about the war a familiar form of betrayal. In 1968, activists seeking to advance a different approach to the war organised within the party; today, the idea of laying claim to the party machinery without getting donors onside seems inconceivable.

In 1968 George Wallace talked to a working class that was afraid of dispossession. Trump speaks to workers too, but more directly uses the language of money and corporate success; his appeal derives from identification with the boss – reflecting the extent to which he seeks to win the allegiance of small business owners. Just as American political institutions have been hollowed out since the 1960s, so has the country’s political economy, in ways that have helped to increase Trump’s appeal. Although Wallace’s populist politics were for some time contained behind Reagan’s free-market messianism, they have gradually found a place in the big-box stores and delivery warehouses that replaced the factories of the mid-20th century. Theodore White wrote of America in 1968 that ‘hate burst out of the channel.’ It hasn’t been contained since.