Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (104 page)

Only one issue seemed likely to derail Nixon as the campaign progressed: Vietnam. If Humphrey could win over McCarthy, McGovern, and onetime Kennedy supporters, he might patch up the badly tattered Democratic party. This, of course, was an extraordinarily difficult task, because he did not want to alienate the President, who adamantly refused to stop the bombing. But Humphrey knew he had to try. On September 30 he bought television time for a well-advertised speech in Salt Lake City, which he gave at a lectern without the vice-presidential seal. In the speech Humphrey proclaimed his willingness, under certain conditions, to "stop the bombing of North Vietnam as an acceptable risk for peace because I believe it could lead to the success in the negotiations [in Paris] and thereby shorten the war." His statement was hedged and pleased neither Johnson, who fumed that Humphrey had gone too far, nor McCarthy, who waited another month before endorsing the party ticket—and then only weakly. At first the speech made no difference in polls of voters. But by mid-October political observers sensed a change in the mood of people, especially liberals and opponents of Johnson's conduct of the war. They had never had any use for Nixon, let alone Wallace, and they yearned for a reason to return to the Democratic fold.
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Humphrey, too, seemed rejuvenated by the shift in popular mood. Until then a somewhat demoralized campaigner, he became ever more passionate in his backing of social programs, including civil rights, that liberal Democrats had traditionally supported. Labor union leaders, who had always admired Humphrey, redoubled their efforts to draw workers out of the clutches of Wallace and back into the party of FDR and Truman. The Democratic coalition that had been a key element in American politics since the 1930s seemed to be coming together again. Wallace, meanwhile, started to sink in the polls, partly because of LeMay, partly because voters recognized in the end that they would be wasting their votes on him. The polls showed Humphrey's resurgence. In late September, Gallup had given Nixon 43 percent, Humphrey 28 percent, and Wallace 21 percent. By October 24, two weeks before the election, Humphrey still lagged, but the numbers—44 percent for Nixon, 36 percent for Humphrey, 15 percent for Wallace—showed movement. What had seemed in early September to be an open-and-shut election was growing exciting.
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At this point rumors flew about that the Johnson administration was reaching an agreement that might cut the carnage in Vietnam: a total bombing halt by the United States and reciprocal though unspecified military restraint by North Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh, it seemed, was willing to negotiate directly with South Vietnam, which he had always refused to recognize as a legitimate state. In return the United States would no longer balk at involvement in the talks of the National Liberation Front. On October 31 LBJ announced that the United States would stop the bombing. This softening of American policy infuriated Nixon, who accused the administration of playing politics with the war.

South Vietnamese president Nguyen Van Thieu, however, then spiked hopes for negotiations by announcing that he would not take part in peace talks in Paris if the NLF was involved. Why he did so caused great political controversy in the United States. Johnson, high-handedly ordering the FBI to wiretap the South Vietnamese embassy, blamed Anna Chan Chennault, the Chinese-born widow of General Claire Chennault of Flying Tigers fame. She was then vice-chairman of the GOP National Finance Committee. The tapes revealed that Chennault, who had some access to Nixon, called the embassy on November 2 and urged that Thieu hold his ground. Nixon, she added, would offer South Vietnam a better deal. Johnson angrily phoned Nixon, who denied any involvement in Chennault's machinations.

Nixon was indeed deeply interested in the negotiations that Harriman and others were frantically conducting in Paris. Henry Kissinger, a Harvard professor of government who was supposedly helping the administration in Paris, was in fact double-dealing. Eager to secure a high-ranking job in Washington, Kissinger sought to curry favor with Nixon (who he thought would win), by secretly relaying classified information about diplomatic developments to the GOP.
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Nixon was thus well briefed on all that was happening and in a good position to take actions that would delay progress.

There was no solid evidence, however, that Nixon instigated or knew of Chennault's actions. Most likely, Thieu, who was a shrewd politician, needed no prodding from Chennault or others to anticipate a better relationship with a Republican administration in Washington. He also faced strong pressure from political allies in South Vietnam who understandably feared any lessening of American resolve. He therefore refused to relent under American pressure. Hanoi, he said, must formally agree to de-escalate the war and must negotiate directly with South Vietnam. He did not back down from this position until two weeks after the election, following still stronger pressure from the United States. The South Vietnamese did not join the negotiations in Paris until mid-January.
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Humphrey, too, was unhappy with Johnson, in part because LBJ had done little to support the campaign, in part because the President did not keep him well informed about the negotiations. By election day the two men were barely on speaking terms. Still, the President's decision to halt the bombing greatly encouraged advocates of de-escalation and further boosted Humphrey's now fast-moving effort for the presidency. Campaigning enthusiastically, he surged forward. Final polls indicated that the election was a toss-up, too close to call.

N
IXON WON, BUT ONLY BARELY
. He received 31,785,480 votes to 31,275,166 for Humphrey and won the electoral college by a margin of 301 to 191. Wallace captured 9,906,473 votes, taking Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi and scoring 46 in the electoral college.
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Nixon received only 43.4 percent of the vote, Humphrey 42.7 percent, Wallace 13.5 percent. If Wallace and Humphrey between them had managed to secure thirty-two more electoral votes, they would have denied Nixon an electoral college majority, throwing the election into the heavily Democratic House of Representatives.

Democrats could take some solace from the fact that Humphrey had managed to make things close. Indeed, some of the groups that made up the Democratic coalition held firm. This was especially true of black voters, an estimated 97 percent of whom backed Humphrey. The coalition further proved its endurance in races for the House of Representatives, where the party maintained a margin of 245 to 187. In the Bedford-Stuyvesant district of New York City they elected Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman ever to win a House seat, over James Farmer. Although they lost seven seats in the Senate, they still could look forward to a margin of 57 to 43 in 1969. Among the Democratic senators re-elected were Ribicoff, McGovern, and others who would uphold the liberal cause.

Those who had feared Wallace also derived some satisfaction from the election returns. Outside the Deep South he did much less well than it had seemed he would earlier in the year. Strom Thurmond, running on the States' Rights ticket in 1948, had won thirty-nine electoral votes, almost as many as Wallace did twenty years later. Although Wallace made inroads among working-class people, especially among Catholics and Italian-, Irish-, and Slavic-Americans, he failed to break the grip that Democrats had on the majority of blue-collar Americans. It was estimated that Wallace received around 9 percent of the votes of white manual workers in the North. Most blue-collar Americans, like most blacks, seemed to remain reliable members of the Democratic coalition.
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It was obvious, however, that the election of 1968 marked a huge turnabout from 1964. In that year 43.1 million voters had opted for LBJ, almost 12 million more than Humphrey received (in a turnout that was 3 million higher) four years later. Even Kennedy, winning slightly fewer than 50 percent of the ballots in 1960, had attracted 34.2 million voters, 3 million more than Humphrey did. Between them Nixon and Wallace won 57 percent of the vote.
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No amount of wishful thinking could obscure the fact that the 1968 election boded ill for the future of the Democratic party.
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This did not mean that voters were elated to see Nixon in the White House. He had run a banal, lackluster campaign and had watched an enormous lead dwindle to almost nothing. He would be a minority President with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress. Having offered little in the way of positive programs, he had no mandate for much of anything, except perhaps to dismantle things that Johnson had erected. As Samuel Lubell, a student of elections, put it, Nixon was "little more than a convenient collection basket, the only one available into which [voters] were depositing their numerous discontents with the Johnson administration."
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Still, reflections on the 1968 campaign and election showed how deep the trouble had become for the Democrats. The course of events in that unusually turbulent year first of all exposed a further decomposition of the political parties. This was a major legacy of the McCarthy movement, which indicated that a largely unheralded candidate—especially if he had a powerful issue—could come out of nowhere and destabilize a major party organization. The political coming of age of television, well advanced by 1968, further abetted political figures who ran more as individuals than as party regulars. Although it was not fully appreciated at the time, the election of 1968 also presaged the sharp decline of a system of nominating presidential candidates that had featured the role of party bosses and state conventions. Henceforth presidential nominations—and campaigns—depended much more on the ability of individuals to tap into grass-roots feelings, to exploit primaries, which proliferated after 1968, and to sound impressive on the sound bites of television. These changes affected Republicans, but they especially changed things for the Democrats, who were more divided and unruly. After 1968 the Democratic party became less and less a purposeful political organization when it came to presidential politics and more and more a loose coalition of free-wheeling individuals.
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The campaign and election of 1968 also revealed the persistent power of regional differences in the United States. This was especially obvious, of course, in the Deep South, where racial hostilities drove political life. Wallace, like Strom Thurmond in 1948 and Barry Goldwater in 1964, exposed the weakness of Democratic presidential candidates in the area. As Johnson himself had predicted following passage of the 1964 civil rights bill, the identification of northern Democrats with civil rights destroyed the hold that the party had once had in the region. Humphrey, indeed, fared poorly not only in the Deep South but also in the Upper South and the border states, where Wallace and Nixon divided up most of the votes. Nixon carried Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Missouri, Oklahoma, and (thanks in part to Thurmond, who had switched to the GOP) South Carolina.

Nixon also did extraordinarily well in states west of the Mississippi. His strength there did not attract much notice at the time, but it accelerated a trend that, like the rise of the GOP in the South and border states, became central to American presidential politics for the next several decades. The only states that Humphrey won west of the Mississippi were Minnesota, Texas, Washington, and Hawaii. All but Texas were historically liberal states. The other western states, however, including the key state of California, almost always went Republican after 1968. From then on GOP presidential candidates could run confidently in most states outside of the Middle West and Northeast. This was a comfortable feeling.

The sources of Republicanism in the Plains and West were not so obvious as those that affected politics in the South. They also varied, for there were significant differences between the politics of a state such as Arizona and those of North Dakota or California. Local issues often figured in major ways. In general, however, the rise of the GOP in the West reflected the resentments that Goldwater in 1964 and Wallace and Nixon in 1968 tried to exploit: distrust of far-off government bureaucrats, especially liberals, who tried to tell people what to do. Some of those with the most vocal resentments in the West represented powerful special interests—oil and mining companies, large-scale farmers, ranchers, real estate developers—who raged at federal efforts in support of the environment, Indians, or exploited farm workers. "Rights," they said, meant freedom from government interference. Others were fundamentalists—they were especially numerous in the South and the West—who perceived liberals, such as the majority on the Warren Court, to be heretical. But the rise of Republicanism in the region also affected millions of other people who were neither conservative on economic issues nor fundamentalist. Save in Hawaii, where Asian-Americans were an important voice, in enclaves such as Watts, and places in the Southwest where people of Hispanic background were developing a political voice, the mass of voters west of the Mississippi were non-Hispanic whites. Most of them lived in the country, in small towns, in suburbs, or in cities of modest size. They were increasingly repelled by the ethnic, big-city eastern world that seemed to them to consist of ghettos, riots, crime, welfare, and family break-up. Their feelings of backlash, exacerbated by the polarizing events of the mid-1960s, seemed if anything to grow over time.

Backlash was indeed the dominant force in the exciting campaign and election of 1968. Much of this continued to reflect racial antagonisms, the most powerful determinant of electoral behavior in the 1960s.
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Humphrey received less than 35 percent of the white vote—a remarkable statistic—in 1968. But backlash transcended racial divisions, fundamental though those were to an understanding of American society in the late 1960s. It stemmed also from rising dissatisfaction with Johnson's policies in Vietnam and from doubts—well exploited by Wallace and Nixon—about the liberal social policies that the Great Society bureaucrats had oversold after 1964. The backlash represented a powerful reaction against liberalism, a major casualty of the 1960s.
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