There was never a campaign like 1968. Odds are there will never be another one like it again, at least not in America. It was the first Presidential campaign since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It was the first that could be seen by a majority of the country on color television. It was one of the first campaigns to show the importance that raising money to achieve success. It was the last campaign that provided any sort of competition between the liberal Eastern Establishment wing of the Republican Party and the more conservative grass roots. It was the last campaign before the McGovern-Fraser Commission forced state primaries and caucuses on the electorate. And it was the last time the Democratic Party nominated a standard bearer who would overtly criticize the Communist cause.
It is also a campaign that has provided more myths perhaps than any other race in American history. Did Richard Nixon promise he had a "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War? Did President Johnson withdraw because of the success of the Eugene McCarthy campaign in New Hampshire or did he plan to do so prior to the beginning of the campaign? What if Robert F. Kennedy had lived, would he have won the nomination? What about the general election? Did George Wallace help or hurt Hubert Humphrey or Richard Nixon more? Did he hurt either candidate at all? Did Nixon win with the help of a Southern strategy based upon racial code words? Perhaps most enduring of all, did Nixon sabotage the Paris Peace Talks and thus prevent an earlier end to the Vietnam War?
Over the course of several posts, I will be sharing information gleaned from years of reading virtually every tome I can find on the subject of the 1968 Presidential election. Though I do not expect all of my readers to agree with me, I hope we can share information in a spirit of civility and challenge one another's thinking to come to more historically accurate conclusions. I will begin with an overview of what led into the 1968 election through the next few posts.
