Will 2024 Be 1968 Redux?

‘H appy New Year and welcome to 1968 all over again.” With war abroad, chaos and crime at home, and political dysfunction in Washington, all against the backdrop of a consequential presidential election, commentator Hugh Hewitt began 2024 with a sober reminder of today’s parallels with a terrible year in American politics.

In every contentious election season, commentators and politicians alike return to 1968 to remind us of how quickly things can fall apart. But it turns out that, for 56 years, we’ve been getting much of the well-known history of that year wrong. That’s the conclusion of historian Luke Nichter’s The Year That Broke Politics: Chaos and Collusion in the Presidential Election of 1968. Nichter reveals that what may be the most famous political contest of the 20th century could also be its least understood, and that even when American politics seems broken, it often works.

At least one candidate for president this year hopes that 2024 is a repeat of 1968. Back then Eugene McCarthy, a senator from Minnesota, challenged President Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination. Today, another Minnesotan, Representative Dean Phillips (currently polling at 4 percent), has cast his challenge to President Joe Biden as the modern equivalent, telling voters that it was McCarthy’s strong showing in New Hampshire that persuaded Johnson to drop out. Had Congressman Phillips read Nichter, however, he would have realized that the theory behind his campaign is a myth.

McCarthy’s second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary on March 12 didn’t persuade Lyndon Johnson to drop out of the race two weeks later — the timing was a coincidence. McCarthy won 42 percent of the vote, but he also was the only candidate on offer and Johnson won the New Hampshire primary as a write-in, “defeating all challengers despite having no campaign organization and no line on the ballot.” Johnson didn’t drop out because he thought he’d lose — he was confident that he would have won not only the Democratic nomination but the general election, later recalling, “I have not the slightest doubt that if I’d wanted to, I could have been reelected.”

Why did Johnson drop out? As a senator, he’d smoked three packs of cigarettes a day and suffered a heart attack in 1955, at just 46 years old. During his presidency, he was hospitalized for surgery twice and his health was failing — Lady Bird bought a black funeral dress in 1965. He was also worried that, even if reelected, he could not unite the country. As more evidence that it wasn’t McCarthy’s strength, Nichter points out that Johnson informed Vice President Hubert Humphrey of his plans more than a year beforehand — the New Hampshire primary was a long way away.

There is at least one obvious repeat of 1968 in 2024 — a man named Robert Kennedy is running for president. But Nichter’s meticulous research shows that, despite the conventional wisdom, no one with the initials RFK has ever come close to winning the Oval Office.

Even after Bobby Kennedy’s victory in the California primary, the night he was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan, “the odds for a Kennedy nomination still seemed long.” At that point, Kennedy was competing with McCarthy for the support of the left wing of the Democratic Party. But McCarthy and the centrist Hubert Humphrey had both won more primaries than the heir to Camelot. Most importantly, Humphrey — the establishment candidate and vice president — already controlled the lion’s share of the delegates (1,200 of the 1,312 needed to win the nomination).

As Nichter shows, allegations of collusion with foreign powers aren’t new to American politics, and whatever the truth, once a conspiracy theory catches on, it’s hard to kill. According to many mainstream histories and accounts, Richard Nixon didn’t win the election that year fair and square — he reportedly colluded with South Vietnam to sabotage the Paris peace talks between North Vietnam and the United States, aiming to prolong the war and increase his chances of victory. Nixon supposedly did so with the assistance of Anna Chennault, the Chinese-born socialite and widow of Claire Chennault, of Flying Tigers fame, who reportedly served as a liaison between Nixon and South Vietnam.

None of that turns out to be true, and Nichter has an appendix with scanned copies of the protagonists’ notes to prove it. In order to “scuttle the peace talks,” Nixon “would have needed to know what was taking place so he would know what to scuttle.” But as Nixon’s future chief of staff, Bob Haldeman, wrote, Nixon was kept in the dark about Paris. So too were the South Vietnamese. Chennault and the Nixon campaign were in contact twice that fall, once about fundraising and once about her suggestions for potential cabinet nominations. The counterintuitive truth is that Vice President Hubert Humphrey undermined his own administration’s Vietnam policy, and he did so publicly when in a nationally televised speech he said that as president he “would stop the bombing of the North.” Far from betraying Johnson, it was “Nixon, not Humphrey, who maintained Johnson’s Vietnam policy throughout the campaign,” Nichter writes. Nixon told his staff to “insist publicly” on Johnson’s conditions for the peace talks.

Of course, as a candidate, Humphrey was free to propose his own policies, and in Nichter’s account he “was a great American who deserved better” than he got in 1968 and “would have made a great president in a relatively tranquil era.” But what cost him the election was the voters’ decisions, not collusion between the Republicans and Saigon, or a cynical “Southern strategy” aimed at courting the racist vote in the Deep South. That year, the racist vote went to third-party candidate George Wallace, and Nixon told his aides to “forget the Goldwater South.” Nixon won the center between the right-wing populist Wallace and the left-leaning Humphrey. And by 1968, as Nichter shows, even Wallace “had undergone a transformation from a segregationist demagogue to a populist conservative for whom racial resentment, while not abandoned as a source of his political appeal, was folded into a larger set of grievances.” That’s why the Alabama governor didn’t launch his campaign in Montgomery, instead choosing Pittsburgh, a Rust Belt launching pad to appeal to the white working class nationally.

Whatever the myths of 1968, the reality is that President Lyndon Johnson favored Nixon. With growing differences over Vietnam, Johnson described Humphrey as “disloyal” and lacking the “balls” and “ability to be president.” Johnson saw that the country was moving to the right. He believed that Nixon would be better for his legacy. After all, a Republican victory would ensure that his own presidency would not be overshadowed between two Democratic administrations. He could remain the leader of the party during his post-presidency. Meanwhile, President Nixon made peace with the Great Society (as Eisenhower had done with the New Deal) and would continue many of Johnson’s Vietnam policies. Though President Johnson communicated with both campaigns, he later wrote, “I told Nixon every bit as much, if not more, as Humphrey knows. I’ve given Humphrey nothing.”

Even with the disorder of 1968, and despite Nichter’s book’s title, American politics was far from broken that year. The institutions held, and they delivered. After his loss, Humphrey went on vacation to the U.S. Virgin Islands. When he was asked to comment on what he had done since Election Day, he responded, “You don’t wear shoes and you get over being mad.” In the meantime, Johnson developed what he called a “close working relationship” with his successor, inviting President-elect and Mrs. Nixon to the White House for four hours of meetings. The Johnsons took the Nixons on a tour of the White House residence, the first time that either of them had seen the living quarters, even though Nixon had served as vice president for eight years. Johnson told Nixon that he knew they would disagree in the future “but you can be sure that I won’t criticize you publicly. Eisenhower did the same for me.”

Nichter is a revisionist, but he doesn’t paint the 1968 election — or its aftermath — as genteel. After chaos, though, there was the prospect of calm. When 2024 is in the history books, we may not immediately understand what happened, and future historians might see it as another year that “broke” politics. But a look back at 1968 — when politics threatened to tear the country apart — shows that, even at its most chaotic, America’s system of government can be repaired and that it works. We just don’t always understand how or by what special providence.