That saying back in 1968, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” clearly didn’t apply where Theodore H. White was concerned. When it came to that year’s presidential election, he handed you the whole meteorological report.
White’s “Making Of The President” series was three books into its four-book run when this 1968 edition came out, at over 500 pages by far the fattest and most sprawling of them all. He goes on too long in several places, data maven that he was, but when he’s done filling you in on the election’s many twists and turns, you get a strong sense of living through one chaotic year, and of why it turned out the way it did.
Did the country really go through a period of dramatic leftist radicalization and come out of it electing Richard Nixon? Yes, and the two things were closely related. White, a genteel liberal himself, makes clear a candidate touting law and order had considerable appeal when cities were ablaze with riot and campuses under student siege.
This contrasted with the Republican candidate White had known on the 1960 campaign trail:
Out there, in the sun, as one listened to the man in the open, one heard a 1968 Nixon quite different from the 1960 Nixon. The snarl and self-pity which had coated his campaigning of 1960 were gone; the years had mellowed him; what was left was genuine and authentic, true to the inner man. And the message, though the same as in 1960, was reaching an audience living in a country that violence, discontent, adventure and war had changed.
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| President Lyndon Johnson surprised the nation on March 31, 1968 by announcing he would not seek re-election. Just five days before, he gave White an interview for the first time as president. "How much time did a President have, anyway?" LBJ asked White. Image from https://www.usni.org/magazines/naval-history-magazine/2008/august/1968-distance |
How much Nixon changed is something White struggles to answer. He struggles with many concepts in this book, though not to its detriment.
White’s greatest trial writing about 1968 was the murder of another Kennedy brother. This time it was Robert, gunned down after winning the Democratic primary in California two months before the convention.
It is a hell of a thing to write that White benefitted from the death of a Kennedy. White was the man who coined the term “Camelot” describing the presidency of his brother John. But finding himself with no real horse in this race pushed White to be more independent, more candid. While Bobby was in the race, White filled the role of a trusted companion, enjoying long conversations with the candidate between campaign stops. With Bobby gone, White’s biases are less pronounced, his insights more nuanced.
He is not afraid to probe uncomfortable topics and offer unpopular conclusions, then or now. The result is a terrific book.
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| Robert F. Kennedy's ability to cross boundaries of race and age made him a unique candidate in 1968. White describes him as bounding with energy. "His passion aroused the best and the beast in man," he writes. "And the beast was waiting for him in the kitchen." Image from https://abcnews.go.com/US/campaign-tragedy-robert-kennedys-final-days/story?id=55595100 |
One thing he does very well here is fill out the portraits of the also-rans. George Romney, governor of Michigan, was the choice of establishment Republicans going into the campaign year. Romney was stolid, serious of purpose, liberal enough on social issues and civil rights to keep a changing nation on course, but a dead loss on foreign policy.
After telling reporters he had been “brainwashed” in his previous support for the Vietnam War, Romney lost any appeal he had within the GOP. Another Republican governor, Jim Rhodes of Ohio, explained it this way: “Watching George Romney run for the Presidency was like watching a duck try to make love to a football.”
More serious a candidate was Democratic Senator Eugene McCarthy, who ran as the anti-war candidate and managed to push out incumbent President Lyndon Johnson by nearly beating him in the New Hampshire primary. McCarthy was a man of uncompromising spirit, deep piety and unsettling rancor, especially once Bobby Kennedy entered the race.
Kennedy was to McCarthy a Johnny-come-lately to the fight, stealing McCarthy’s thunder. For his part, Kennedy viewed McCarthy as an unworthy candidate, “vain and lazy,” White quotes Bobby saying.
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| Richard Nixon won the election, but Eugene McCarthy (center) scored the upset of the year when he closed within a few hundred votes of Lyndon Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. White notes how many of his young male followers shaved and got haircuts to better appeal to middle-class American voters. Photo by Michael Rougier from https://images.google.com/hosted/life/095af61411c7b9b1.html |
As White was a Kennedy man, he knocks McCarthy for nursing a sore ego: “All through the year, one’s admiration of the man grew – and one’s affection lessened.” McCarthy also lacked Bobby’s common touch, snubbing reporters (including, it seems, White) while courting the counsel of outsiders like poet Robert Lowell.
If Bobby had lived through the primaries, White suggests optimistically that it would have been possible for him to have stitched together a winning coalition at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago:
Robert F. Kennedy always made fine copy and gave occasion to great filmic artistry; but there could be no doubt about the nature of his public image: he was the disturber. He meant what he said. If he were elected, he would perform as he promised and the country would change.
The wildest wild card in the race was Alabama governor George Wallace. Nominally a Democrat, Wallace was anti-civil rights and made his mark standing up for segregationist Jim Crow laws. Now he spoke for less permissive courts and bombing North Vietnam until they sued for peace.
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| A candidate with real momentum, Wallace in White's mind made a fatal mistake by choosing former Air Force general Curtis Le May as his running mate. Because Wallace's appeal was working-class in nature, picking a high-ranked officer could only sow doubts among a base of former enlisted men. Image from https://www.si.edu/object/button-george-wallace-1968%3Anmah_1052010 |
Wallace was a true reactionary, both in his politics and his appeal. White writes of Americans fed up with the direction of the nation – to the point they wanted someone as eager as they to lash out:
If George Wallace hates anything, it is not Negroes – it is the Federal government of the United States and its “pointy-head” advisers, the “intellectual morons,” the “guideline writers” of Washington who try to upset the national natural relation of races and force Negroes and whites to live together in unnatural mixing.
Wallace won five states in the Deep South, and substantial percentages of Americans in other states, too. It wasn’t the somewhat muted racism so much as provoking group hatred that unnerved White. At one Wallace rally White attended, reporters were jeered as Jews. It was a crazy year.
The war in Vietnam had blown up everything. In Making Of The President 1964, White praised President Johnson’s handling of the Gulf of Tonkin incident that activated American involvement. As a supporter of the reason for U. S. fighting in Vietnam, he was caught flat-footed:
Somewhere vaguely down the middle of every American conscience ran a dividing line of devotion, loyalty and morality: does one continue to fight a cruel and bloody war simply because honor is at stake? or does one quit and accept America’s first surrender simply because the nation is tired?
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| The Tet Offensive in early 1968 caught U. S. forces like these in the city of Hue by surprise, but even though our military would win a substantial victory on the field, the blow to morale back home proved fatal. The question then became one of whether to pull out immediately, or negotiate a tricky peace. Image from https://www.wgbh.org/news/2018-02-01/remembering-the-ghosts-of-the-tet-offensive |
White lays the failure of Vietnam at the feet of Lyndon Johnson, noting the president’s predictions of imminent victory came to define what was known as the nation’s “credibility gap.” White writes: Deception in war is always necessary; but the purpose of deception in war is to deceive the enemy, not one’s own.
He praises Johnson’s civil-rights gains, and the landmark wave of legislation which became known as “Great Society” programs. But Vietnam exposed a darker side to LBJ, a bitter, egotistical strain that in White’s view undid those considerable successes elsewhere:
He accepted war not out of malice, but in conscience, where war need not have been accepted… He left his leadership with no issues of any clarity, all pendant on the outcome of a war where honor lay on his side and common sense on the other.
Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president and Nixon’s opponent, would make the best of his bad situation with an October rally that pulled him close in the popular vote. But his failure to articulate a Vietnam policy dovish enough to placate his liberal base left him with too much ground to make up.
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| When Chicago police were not enough to contain demonstrators outside the International Amphitheatre, the National Guard were called in. The scenes replayed on television angered Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic nominee: "They put them on only when the cops are fighting with them," White records him complaining. Image from https://www.jsonline.com/picture-gallery/life/green-sheet/2018/08/17/photos-1968-democratic-gop-conventions-through-wisconsin-lens/985748002/ |
White records a senior official at the Democratic National Committee discussing Humphrey: “He’s got to bite on the nail. He’s got to be his own man, he’s got to break with LBJ, and he’s got to break on the Vietnam issue. Unless he breaks on the issue and becomes his own man, then he can’t be President, and maybe he doesn’t deserve to be President.”
White identifies two major events that affected the 1968 race which happened back in 1965. At Pleiku, South Vietnam, a Viet Cong assault forced the realization that the United States would have to fight a long, hard war. In Watts, a district of Los Angeles, a drunk driving arrest triggered a Black riot which sparked nationwide protests and lootings.
White, a longtime integrationist, was thunderstruck at how the race issue had become transformed: “Black Power” based itself squarely on bitterness, and sought to wrench from white guilt or supposed white cowardice by violence what it could not get by law.
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| Richard Nixon in a familiar pose on the campaign trail, July 1968. White notes the Republican was determined to run as a uniter, not a divider, avoiding discussion of race or war. While White admits to not liking Nixon, he describes him as a man who had changed, and could change a country headed in the wrong direction. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidential_election |
Even more wrenching for him were the white students who descended on Chicago and violently demonstrated against the Democratic convention there. For these long-haired obscenity spewers, White had little sympathy, contrasting them with the clean and polite anti-war youngsters he saw around Clean Gene McCarthy.
What
today reads as decidedly unwoke commentary has the advantage of showcasing how
perceptions and reality were making for difficult bedfellows in real time.
White’s liberalism had become outdated, but because he speaks honestly and
forcefully about the new reality, The Making Of The President 1968 has
both value and verve. It explains why Nixon, for the moment, made a lot of
sense to reasonable people trying to find their way back to the country they
thought they knew. It is also exciting, challenging, and often very
entertaining.
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