If You Were There, You Weren't There.
It might be better for historians without any lived experience of the 1960s to attempt to come to terms with them. Me? I was there and I didn't like it. "The America of the 1950s was an America that worked. The counterculture that followed did not. It's more accurate to describe aspects of it as alien, immoral, and destructive."
Let's yield the floor to Chapman historian Luke Nichter, who is probably young enough to have pored through the newspapers and scholarly writings without attempting to square what he found with his own experience. In The Year that Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 he presents a few surprises, which he obtained in conversations with people who were there, and have since crossed the final summit.
Let me open Book Review No. 6 by noting that, unlike depressingly many recent political histories, Year that Broke is not a hair-on-fire reaction to Donald Trump's 2016 win, or to the strength he seems to be showing again this election season. That concentration on the year, and the events of that year, are even more commendable given the opportunities to foreshadow the various forms of populism, the Summer of Rage, and futile nation building wars that still seem to structure an impossible politics. Nor is it the focus of Year that Broke to point out how Reliance on National Politics to Solve Problems is never going to end well. It's going to take each of us to figure that out.
In the Popular Perspective, 1968 was that Year from Hell, commencing with North Korea capturing Pueblo, the North Vietnamese suffering the reverse of a Pyrrhic victory in the Tet offensive, political assassinations, riots, and a nasty presidential election, but culminating with the first view of Earth from space. That's not how Year that Broke unfolds. The first section, "Spring Optimism," refers to the optimism of the retrospectively principal presidential hopefuls, those being Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace. Yes, there are bit parts for Eugene McCarthy and George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan and Robert Kennedy: one of the advantages of being able to write history is to organize the writing around the principal actors when the presidential election rolls around.
That's followed by "Summer Heat," visiting Paris (where there were some nasty student protests; that was also where the Vietnam peace talks took place), Miami and Chicago (the nominating convention cities), and Pittsburgh, where George Wallace announced his running mate, retired general Curtis LeMay, in what turned out to be an unforced error that well might have kept the electoral vote count out of the hands of Congress.
The final two sections, "Autumn" and "October Surprises," concentrate on the maneuverings, and there were many, among the diplomats, the campaigners, the journalists, and the clergymen. There are many possible ways in which that maneuvering ended up "breaking politics" although, I repeat, the fundamental problem with politics is our propensity to rely excessively on the most formally organized forms of it, which is to say the presidency and the international institutions.
What happened during the 1968 campaign continues to influence voter behavior today. On page 215, Professor Nichter offers a post-mortem on the Wallace campaign.
It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss his effort as little more than a regional campaign. "What George Wallace demonstrated," wrote Theodore White [in The Making of the President: 1968 - Ed.] "was that of all those alienated with the set of American government, perhaps the largest group were the white workingmen of America; and in so demonstrating, George Wallace uncovered a reality that will be of concern for years." The Democratic Party has steadily lost ground with these voters ever since.
Yes, if one thinks of the Trump campaigns as a weighted average of Nixon, Ross Perot, and Wallace, one does not go far wrong. That the court intellectuals for the Democrats continue to campaign and govern as if the Kerner Commission and the Diversity Bureaucracy have authorized the continued deplorable-shaming of those Angry White Guys doesn't help. Or perhaps that's echoes of my having lived through that campaign as a high school sophomore. In those days we had Greasers and Freaks, and that was to some extent political, even if it was primarily to determine who sat at the cool kids' table; and only as that generation passes from the scene will a more objective understanding of the politics of that era be possible.
Continuing in that vein, Richard Nixon's 301 electoral votes plus the 46 for George Wallace well swamped Hubert Humphrey's 191, "a powerful rebuke of liberalism and government overreach." There might be a lesson for people who see in Hope and Change or Build Back Better a restoration of the New Deal and Great Society. Remember how quickly "got a problem, get a program" turned into "malaise?"
I'll conclude with one mild spoiler: there was no intriguing among Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to delay the peace talks to undermine Hubert Humphrey. Yes, Johnson had more respect for Nixon (who he considered "presidential timber," does anyone even use that expression any more?) than for Humphrey, but in none of their memoirs did any of the principals accuse the others of dishonesty, let alone treasonable behavior.
On the other hand, those of us who lived through the late 1960s, which were a sort of cold civil war, continue to be dismayed but not driven to distress by recent political developments: no bombs planted in the Capitol, no political assassinations, no rigged conventions.
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.
Let's yield the floor to Chapman historian Luke Nichter, who is probably young enough to have pored through the newspapers and scholarly writings without attempting to square what he found with his own experience. In The Year that Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968 he presents a few surprises, which he obtained in conversations with people who were there, and have since crossed the final summit.
Let me open Book Review No. 6 by noting that, unlike depressingly many recent political histories, Year that Broke is not a hair-on-fire reaction to Donald Trump's 2016 win, or to the strength he seems to be showing again this election season. That concentration on the year, and the events of that year, are even more commendable given the opportunities to foreshadow the various forms of populism, the Summer of Rage, and futile nation building wars that still seem to structure an impossible politics. Nor is it the focus of Year that Broke to point out how Reliance on National Politics to Solve Problems is never going to end well. It's going to take each of us to figure that out.
In the Popular Perspective, 1968 was that Year from Hell, commencing with North Korea capturing Pueblo, the North Vietnamese suffering the reverse of a Pyrrhic victory in the Tet offensive, political assassinations, riots, and a nasty presidential election, but culminating with the first view of Earth from space. That's not how Year that Broke unfolds. The first section, "Spring Optimism," refers to the optimism of the retrospectively principal presidential hopefuls, those being Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Richard Nixon, and George Wallace. Yes, there are bit parts for Eugene McCarthy and George Romney and Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan and Robert Kennedy: one of the advantages of being able to write history is to organize the writing around the principal actors when the presidential election rolls around.
That's followed by "Summer Heat," visiting Paris (where there were some nasty student protests; that was also where the Vietnam peace talks took place), Miami and Chicago (the nominating convention cities), and Pittsburgh, where George Wallace announced his running mate, retired general Curtis LeMay, in what turned out to be an unforced error that well might have kept the electoral vote count out of the hands of Congress.
The final two sections, "Autumn" and "October Surprises," concentrate on the maneuverings, and there were many, among the diplomats, the campaigners, the journalists, and the clergymen. There are many possible ways in which that maneuvering ended up "breaking politics" although, I repeat, the fundamental problem with politics is our propensity to rely excessively on the most formally organized forms of it, which is to say the presidency and the international institutions.
What happened during the 1968 campaign continues to influence voter behavior today. On page 215, Professor Nichter offers a post-mortem on the Wallace campaign.
It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss his effort as little more than a regional campaign. "What George Wallace demonstrated," wrote Theodore White [in The Making of the President: 1968 - Ed.] "was that of all those alienated with the set of American government, perhaps the largest group were the white workingmen of America; and in so demonstrating, George Wallace uncovered a reality that will be of concern for years." The Democratic Party has steadily lost ground with these voters ever since.
Yes, if one thinks of the Trump campaigns as a weighted average of Nixon, Ross Perot, and Wallace, one does not go far wrong. That the court intellectuals for the Democrats continue to campaign and govern as if the Kerner Commission and the Diversity Bureaucracy have authorized the continued deplorable-shaming of those Angry White Guys doesn't help. Or perhaps that's echoes of my having lived through that campaign as a high school sophomore. In those days we had Greasers and Freaks, and that was to some extent political, even if it was primarily to determine who sat at the cool kids' table; and only as that generation passes from the scene will a more objective understanding of the politics of that era be possible.
Continuing in that vein, Richard Nixon's 301 electoral votes plus the 46 for George Wallace well swamped Hubert Humphrey's 191, "a powerful rebuke of liberalism and government overreach." There might be a lesson for people who see in Hope and Change or Build Back Better a restoration of the New Deal and Great Society. Remember how quickly "got a problem, get a program" turned into "malaise?"
I'll conclude with one mild spoiler: there was no intriguing among Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to delay the peace talks to undermine Hubert Humphrey. Yes, Johnson had more respect for Nixon (who he considered "presidential timber," does anyone even use that expression any more?) than for Humphrey, but in none of their memoirs did any of the principals accuse the others of dishonesty, let alone treasonable behavior.
On the other hand, those of us who lived through the late 1960s, which were a sort of cold civil war, continue to be dismayed but not driven to distress by recent political developments: no bombs planted in the Capitol, no political assassinations, no rigged conventions.
Cross-posted to Cold Spring Shops.