Resilient America

Electing Nixon in 1968, Channeling Dissent, and Dividing Government

Michael Nelson

• Publisher: University Press of Kansas
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780700624423, 9780700619634
• eBook ISBN: 9780700620340
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Richard E. Neustadt Award

The paperback edition includes new material based on sources made available after the hardback’s publication in 2014.

To look at the partisan polarization that paralyzes Washington today is to see what first took shape with the presidential election of 1968. This book explains why. Urban riots and the Tet Offensive, the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, the politics of outrage and race—all pointed to a reordering of party coalitions, of groups and regions, a hardening and widening of an ideological divide—and to the historical importance of the 1968 election as a watershed event.

Resilient America captures this extraordinary time in all its drama—the personalities, the politics, the parties, the events and the circumstances, from the shadow of 1964 through the primaries to the general election that pitted Richard Nixon against Hubert Humphrey, with George Wallace and Eugene McCarthy as the interlopers. Where most accounts of this pivotal year—and the decade that followed—emphasize the coming apart of the nation, this book focuses on the fact that because of measures taken after the election the country actually held together. An esteemed scholar of the American presidency, Michael Nelson turns our attention to how, in spite of increasing (and increasingly vehement) differences, the parties of the time managed to make divided government work. Conventional political processes—peaceful demonstrations, congressional legislation, executive initiatives, Supreme Court decisions, party reforms, and presidential politics—were flexible enough to absorb most of the dissent that tore America deeply in 1968 and might otherwise have torn it apart. This fraught time, as Nelson’s work clearly demonstrates, produced unity as well as results well worth noting in our current predicament.

1	THE VIEW FROM 1964

On election night in 1964 it was clear that the times were changing, but it was less clear how.

The results presented one of the strangest maps in the history of presidential elections. As in 1932, the election that ushered in the generation-old New Deal Democratic majority, the Democratic nominee lost only six states to his Republican opponent. In 1932 the six states that Republican president Herbert Hoover carried against Gov. Franklin D. Roosevelt of New York were all in the Northeast: Connecticut, Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont. Thirty-two years later, the Northeast was Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater’s worst region. Aside from his home state of Arizona, Senator Goldwater carried only the five states that constituted the Deep South, the region with the nation’s largest African American population but also, because blacks were still substantially disenfranchised, an almost monochromatically white electorate. Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina, states in which Hoover had averaged 7 percent of the vote in 1932, voted overwhelmingly for Goldwater. As recently as 1960, except for South Carolina, all of the Deep South states that Goldwater carried were among Republican nominee Richard Nixon’s least successful states, and the vice president lost all five of them to his Democratic rival, Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, or to independent conservative Democratic electors.

The Republicans’ success in 1964 was regional, but that of the Democrats was national. The ticket of incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson for president and Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota for vice president prevailed in forty-five states with 486 electoral votes, including nine states that no Democrat since FDR had carried and one, Vermont, that no Democrat had ever carried. Johnson won 61.1 percent of the national popular vote, exceeding Roosevelt’s previous record of 60.8 percent in 1936. His party’s national sweep extended to a thirty-seven-seat gain in the House of Representatives, increasing the Democrats’ 82-seat majority to 155. Even their one-seat increase in the Senate was a triumph. Because the party had done so well in the 1958 Senate elections, twenty-six Democratic seats were on the 1964 ballot compared with only nine seats occupied by Republicans. With much more to lose, the Democrats actually won, leaving the Senate, like the House, more than two-thirds Democratic. Nearly all of the new Democrats in both chambers were northern and western liberals, tilting leftward a congressional party that had long been dominated by conservative southerners. Meanwhile, the loss of dozens of moderate-to-liberal Republican members and the gain of seven new conservatives in the Deep South—the Republicans’ first representatives from that region since Reconstruction—tilted the congressional GOP rightward.

In an equal and opposite reaction to their gains among Deep South whites in 1964, the Republicans lost the African American vote almost entirely. Just four years before, Nixon had earned the support of 32 percent of black voters. Dwight D. Eisenhower had done even better, earning 39 percent in 1956.¹ Although Kennedy introduced what became the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Johnson shepherded it to passage after succeeding to the presidency when Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, only about three-fifths of House and Senate Democrats voted for the bill, compared with more than four-fifths of congressional Republicans.² Among the GOP senators opposed to the act, however, was the party’s candidate for president, whose share of the black vote on Election Day dropped to 6 percent. In fact, while doing well in the Deep South, Goldwater lost the four Outer South states carried by Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, Nixon in 1960, or by both Republican nominees: Florida, Texas, Virginia, and Tennessee. As for Hoover’s six northeastern states in 1932, they were among Johnson’s best in 1964, auguring the Northeast’s eventual transformation from the GOP’s strongest region to the Democrats’ main stronghold.

Goldwater ran an ardently ideological campaign, arguably the most conservative of any major party nominee in history. Long a big-tent Republican, who as chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee in the mid-1950s and early 1960s worked as hard to elect liberal Republicans as conservatives, Goldwater nevertheless made no serious effort to unite all the wings of the party behind him in his presidential campaign. At the GOP nominating convention he insisted on a strongly conservative platform and chose a conservative vice presidential running mate, Rep. William Miller of New York. Defending “extremism” and attacking “moderation” in his acceptance speech, Goldwater told convention and country: “Those who do not care for our cause, we don’t expect to join our ranks in any case.”³ Apart from his strong ideological views, Goldwater also frightened many voters with off-the-cuff comments about wanting to “lob” a nuclear weapon “into the men’s room of the Kremlin” and “drop a low-yield atomic bomb on Chinese supply lines into North Vietnam.”⁴ Along with William Jennings Bryan in 1896, Tom Wicker observed, Goldwater “was only the second presidential challenger in history who became the issue.”⁵

In contrast, Johnson ran a serenely nonideological campaign whose main theme was that he was the safe alternative to a dangerous extremist. “Vote to save your Social Security from going down the drain,” Johnson told voters. “Vote to keep a prudent hand which will not mash the nuclear button.”⁶ He used this theme to good effect in uniting labor with management, blacks with whites, women with men, Protestants with Catholics and Jews, young with old, and moderates with liberals. Except for self-identified Republicans, Johnson carried every demographic and political group polled by Gallup.⁷ Members of the Business Council, who had donated to Republicans over Democrats by 73 to 7 in 1960, broke only 36 to 33 for the GOP in 1964.⁸ “We’re in favor of a lot of things and we’re against mighty few,” Johnson said in campaign speeches.⁹ The New York Herald Tribune was one of many old and staunchly Republican newspapers to endorse a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time. Yet neither Johnson nor the Democratic platform had much to say about what he intended to do if he was elected to a full term. By David Broder’s count, “The Democratic Platform devoted three times as much space to reciting the accomplishments of the previous four years as to listing the promises of the next four.”¹⁰ As a rule, the recitations were specific and the promises general. The result of “failing to make explicit where he intended to take the country in the next four years,” Robert Dallek has argued, was that “Johnson won less than a solid consensus for bold change in either domestic or foreign affairs.”¹¹

The Democratic sweep was massive: in addition to winning the White House and 363 of 535 seats in Congress, the party gained 540 new state legislative seats and an additional governorship, reducing the number of Republican state chief executives to sixteen. Postelection handwringing immediately ensued among established Republican leaders and political pundits about what the GOP needed to do to survive. “He has wrecked his party for a long time to come,” wrote New York Times columnist James Reston about Goldwater.¹² Another leading political journalist, Robert J. Donovan, foresaw a quarter century of Democratic control of the White House, with Johnson reelected in 1968, Vice President Humphrey succeeding him in 1972 and 1976, and either Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York or Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts winning the elections of 1980 and 1984.¹³ Prominent liberal Republicans, including Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller of New York and Gov. George Romney of Michigan, felt vindicated by their decision not to endorse Goldwater against Johnson. Rep. John V. Lindsay of New York, speaking for the small group of surviving liberal House Republicans, said they would “have to rebuild the Republican party out of the ashes . . . to return the party to the tradition of Lincoln.”¹⁴

Leading scholars of American politics buttressed the establishment consensus. James MacGregor Burns predicted that, having ceded the nomination once to its rural, retrograde “congressional party,” the more “urban, liberally oriented presidential Republicans” would “not display the fumbling grasp of convention politics in 1968 or 1972 that they had in 1964,” thereby regaining control of the GOP.¹⁵ Gerald Pomper even suggested that 1964 was a critical election on the scale of 1896, “the classical critical contest” in all of American history and one in which the majority party secured its supremacy for another generation.¹⁶ Lending weight to this interpretation was that Goldwater’s defeat was the GOP’s seventh in the last nine presidential elections. The party’s only successful nominee, former World War II Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, could just as easily have been elected as a Democrat. And despite Ike’s personal popularity, his party’s congressional ranks were considerably smaller when his two terms ended than when they began.

Nevertheless Republicans, between conservative Republicans were cheered by Goldwater’s success at energizing a broad network of grassroots supporters. Nearly four million people worked to elect him in some capacity, and more than a million donated money to his campaign (compared with just 22,000 who donated to Kennedy in 1960). They also were heartened by Goldwater’s sweep of the Deep South. Except for Louisiana, which voted for Eisenhower in 1956, no Deep South state had gone Republican since Reconstruction—indeed, to the extent that Goldwater’s electoral map resembled anyone’s, it was that of the States’ Rights Party nominee, Gov. J. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, in 1948. Goldwater carried all four of Thurmond’s states by margins ranging from 13.6 to 74.2 percentage points, meaning that except for Arkansas and North Carolina, every state in the heretofore solidly Democratic South had gone Republican in at least one recent presidential election. The GOP could now compete in every region, conservative Republicans claimed, which meant they no longer would have to win about 70 percent of the North and West to elect a president or control the House. And, devoted though they were to Goldwater, conservatives also argued that their political philosophy did not receive a fair test in 1964 because most voters perceived their candidate not as a conservative but as an unstable extremist who was “trigger-happy,” “radical,” and “impulsive—shoots from the hip.”¹⁷ The messenger may have been flawed, they conceded, but not the message. Goldwater, who had been a reluctant candidate, happily abandoned presidential politics after the election.

Other political figures emerged from the 1964 election with their gaze fixed on 1968 and beyond. Among Democrats these included Johnson and Humphrey, who looked forward to being reelected as a ticket in four years; Robert Kennedy, the slain president’s oldest living brother, who was elected to the Senate from New York in 1964; Sen. Eugene McCarthy, Humphrey’s fellow Minnesotan and finalist for the vice presidential nomination; and Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama, who had run a socially conservative protest campaign against Johnson in three northern primaries and won surprisingly strong support from white working-class Democrats.

Four Republicans rose from the wreckage of their party’s 1964 defeat in varying states of ambition. Nixon, defeated narrowly for president in 1960 and handily for governor of California in 1962, campaigned ardently for Goldwater against Johnson with an eye toward a possible political comeback. Ronald Reagan, best known as a screen actor, gave a brilliantly effective nationally televised speech for Goldwater a week before the election that raised conservatives’ hopes that he might become the appealing advocate of conservatism that the candidate himself was not. In contrast, Governors Rockefeller and Romney were determined to take back the GOP from the conservatives who had—temporarily, they hoped—seized it.

THE DEMOCRATS

In the view from 1964, no Democrat foresaw anything other than a reelection campaign for Johnson and Humphrey in 1968. Kennedy, like Humphrey, had his eye on 1972, when Johnson would be barred by the Twenty-second Amendment from seeking another term. McCarthy, who believed that he, not John Kennedy, should have been the nation’s first Roman Catholic president, reluctantly returned to the Senate, where he was bored and restless. Meanwhile, Wallace resolved to find a way to translate his vote-getting ability as a critic of Democratic liberalism into something bigger.

JOHNSON

Lyndon B. Johnson was a product of the Texas Hill Country west of Austin, where he grew up and spent his first twenty-three years. But he was a creature of Washington and, in particular, of Congress. Johnson had more congressional experience than any other president before or since. Starting in 1931, he spent three years as a House staffer, two years as the Texas director of the New Deal’s job-giving National Youth Administration, eleven years as a House member, and twelve years as a senator. In 1955, after two years as Senate minority leader, he became the youngest and, soon, the most influential majority leader in history when the Democrats regained control of that chamber.

Being from Texas was a burden when Johnson sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1960. No southerners had been elected president since before the Civil War, largely because their constituents expected them to oppose legislation advancing national causes such as civil rights, labor unions, and business regulation. Johnson did so during his nearly thirty years in and around Congress, especially after making the move from the moderately liberal Tenth District to a Senate seat representing a conservative state. In hopes of rebranding himself as a westerner, Johnson bought a 418-acre ranch where he raised cattle, wore a cowboy hat, and hosted numerous political leaders and reporters to impress on them his ties to a region most Americans admired rather than distrusted.

Being from Washington, on the other hand, offered certain advantages. The federal government enjoyed the trust of the American people during the 1950s, and the Cold War rivalry with Soviet communism placed a political premium on service in the Senate because of that body’s distinctive constitutional responsibilities in foreign affairs. From 1952 to 1972 seventeen of twenty major party nominees for president and vice president were experienced federal office holders, most of them senators.¹⁸ As one of the two or three most powerful leaders in Washington, Johnson was a prima facie serious presidential contender.

But Johnson’s experience in the capital blinded him to some inconvenient political realities. It convinced him that support from his fellow Democratic senators could secure the votes of their state delegations at the 1960 convention. In truth, governors and other state and local party leaders, who were on the scene in their communities and had jobs and contracts to dispense, typically led their delegations. “It was not e...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 The View from 1964
• 2 Peaks and Valleys: The Parties and the Candidates, 1965–1966
• 3 Johnson, McCarthy, Kennedy, Humphrey: The Democratic Battle, Round One
• 4 Reagan, Romney, Nixon, Rockefeller: The Republican Battle, Round One (and Wallace)
• 5 The Conventions
• 6 The General Election: September
• 7 The General Election: October and November
• 8 Resilient America
• Appendix A: 1968 Primaries
• Appendix B: 1968 Republican Convention, Balloting for President
• Appendix C: 1968 Democratic Convention, Key Ballots
• Appendix D: 1968 Presidential Election Results
• Appendix E: Richard M. Nixon’s Inaugural Address, January 20, 1969
• Notes
• Bibliographic Essay
• Index
• Back Cover