Nixon, Johnson, Wallace and the anguish of 1968

Luke A. Nichter's new book reveals LBJ opted out of the 1968 campaign, yet he preferred Nixon to his own VP and Democratic nominee, Hubert Humphrey

George Corley Wallace, the four term Governor of Alabama, and the last third party presidential candidate to actually win votes in the electoral college , may as well have been called Governor Grievance. In his rage against the American machine, Wallace arguably presaged the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement by nearly 40 years.

Though he was a lifelong Democrat, albeit of the Southern Segregationist sort, Wallace’s independent quest to stoke the flames of racial, populist anger won him 46 electoral votes among the states of the Old Confederacy along with 13.5% of the popular vote. He ran on the ticket of the American Independent Party, scrambling the 1968 presidential race whereby Republican Richard Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey. 1968 was a benchmark year in American political history, and with the passage of time, and thanks to the opening of historical archives, new revelations impel our rethinking of it.

Luke A. Nichter is a professor of history at Chapman University, and his new book, “The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968,” is a pulse racer. If it were fiction, 1968 could have very well been conjured up as its own disquieting, angst-ridden thriller what with the Tet Offensive in February, Johnson’s announcement on March 31st that he wouldn’t seek re-election, the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in Memphis in early April, Sirhan Sirhan’s assasination of Robert F. Kennedy in Los Angeles in June, the Soviet Union’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in August as well as the notorious Democratic Convention in Chicago where hordes of anti-war protesters clashed violently with the police.

Fortuitously, the seeds of “The Year That Broke Politics” were planted in a meeting between Nichter and Walter Mondale in December 2017. Mondale was Jimmy Carter’s vice-president from 1977-1981. In 1968, while serving in the same Minnesota senate seat which Humphey had relinquished when Johnson picked him to serve as the VP nominee on the 1964 ticket, Mondale also served as Humphrey’s 1968 campaign co-chair. As Nichter explained to me on a forthcoming episode on my podcast, Mondale implied that Johnson was secretly hoping Nixon would win. But much of the book’s backstage drama was connected to the late evangelist, Billy Graham, whose diaires opened up after his death in early 2018.

As Nichter makes clear, the diaries were a game changing portal into a unique historical archive. Graham had personal relationships with every president from Truman to Obama, and it was Graham who proved a crucial, if unlikely go between for a weary Johnson whose own unpopularity due to the Vietnam War informed his decision to step aside, and a hungry, revivified Nixon who was salivating for the White House 8 years after a painful loss to JFK. Via Graham’s intercession, Johnson would agree to a deal: if Nixon won he would honor Johnson’s Vietnam policy and not thwart his “Great Society” domestic agenda so long as Johnson would appear subdued in his support for Humphrey. Johnson obliged.

Indeed, the book turns much of the conventional wisdom about 1968 on its head. Johnson may have lost the support of much of his party, but he kept an eagle eye on the campaign, despite the long held view that he was sidelined. A common consensus is that the Vietnam War was a major factor in the presidential election, but the issue of law and order was top in the minds of the voters. Nixon was able ride that discontent to a robust electoral college victory (it was the razor thin margin in the popular vote by which the myth of a close election has long prevailed.)

By the fall, the Humphrey campaign was flailing. At a late September campaign stop in Salt Lake City, he promised to halt the bombing of North Vietnam. Although it’s long thought that this threw a lifeline to Humphrey’s campaign, it didn’t actually have an effect on the polls, Nichter argues. Rather, Nichter points out the way salient domestic issues which appealed to traditional Democratic constituencies from jobs to social security, and an aggressive push for the ‘hard hat’ organized labor vote were crucial in propelling Nixon to victory.

Now back to Wallace. Modern day assesements of Trump often refer to Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” as foundational to MAGA’s appeals to race based demographic panic. In truth, Nixon borrowed heavily from Wallace to siphon off support from Wallace’s blue collar coalition. But Nichter argues that Wallace’s appeal wasn’t uniformly race based. Wallace, Nichter asserts, was “the living embodiment of resistance to social change,” and he appealed to voters anxious about substantial increases in crime and the tearing of the social fabric. Nichter argues that historicans have long been too reductive in their analyses about Wallace which “by remaining focused on his racist origins, missed the deeper bonds he was forming with anti-establishment supporters.” Wallace’s apppeal was to be sure, abhorrent, but he “received high marks for ‘saying it the way it really is,’ (a description frequently applied to Trump,) and for having ‘the courage of his convictions.’ ” Nichter contends, it was the Wallace playbook after all, which has proved politically useful for “every conservative who has run for the presidency since 1968.” Yikes.

In the annals of presidential history, 1968 was nothing if not a watershed. The New Deal coalition which began in 1932 collapsed , especially around culture war issues like crime, race riots and campus unrest, to the point that Johnson came to believe that a President Nixon, rather than Humphrey, “would be better for Lyndon Johnson’s legacy.” Like Eisenhower before him with FDR’s legacy, Nixon reconciled himself to role of an activist government exemplified by Johnson’s passage of Medicare and landmark civil rights laws, even supporting affirmative action and overseeing the creation of the EPA. Wallace’s brand of grievance populism would explosively kindle the racial angst beneath white working class resentment and have a lasting impact. Since 1964, the Democratic Party has never carried a majority of white male voters in a presidential election.

Politics makes strange bedfellows, an old saying goes. 1968 was a tempest that exploded the proverbial teapot mocking any pretense to national unity . With America undergoing a massive realignmnent in our own divisive age, the 2024 election likely portends of further ruptures to come.

The episdode with Luke Nichter will drop May 16th so make sure and tune in.