In 1968, Democratic split helped Nixon win

WASHINGTON - The 1968 presidential campaign was so traumatic that a mere timeline can’t come close to recapturing the feel of it.

The drama unfolded in several acts of staggering succession:

• The Tet Offensive, a ferocious assault by Communist soldiers on U.S. military forces in Vietnam
• President Lyndon Johnson’s sudden decision to not run for re-election
• The assassinations of civil rights crusader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Democratic presidential contender Sen. Robert Kennedy
• Riots on the streets of Chicago at the Democratic National Convention which left the party torn asunder

In the end, it was the candidate of conservatism and stability, Republican Richard Nixon, who was elected president.

The year started with the Tet Offensive in South Vietnam, where 500,000 U.S. troops were desperately trying to save the anti-communist government. The Communist armies lost an estimated 58,000 men, but scored a propaganda victory.

“It was a turning point in the war,” said Johnson’s secretary of defense, Clark Clifford. “Its size and scope made mockery of what the American military had told the public about the war, and devastated administration credibility.”

In Tet’s aftermath, Johnson struggled to build support for sending more troops to Vietnam.

Johnson's pessimism over war
“We need more taxes — in an election year,” he told his generals on March 26, 1968. “We need more troops — in an election year. We need cuts in the domestic budget — in an election year. And yet I cannot tell the people what they will get in Vietnam in return for these cuts. We have no support for the war.”

At that point in the war, nearly 20,000 U.S. soldiers had been killed. And nearly 500 were dying in combat every week.

In the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 12, Johnson faced anti-war candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who alone dared to challenge the president.

McCarthy won 42 percent of the vote, a humiliation for Johnson.

Four days later, Kennedy, another opponent of the war, jumped in the race. Critics called him an opportunist.

Kennedy said he’d assured McCarthy “that my candidacy would not be in opposition to his, but in harmony.”

But only one man could end up winning the nomination, and in the end neither McCarthy nor Kennedy would be the one.

And it wasn't Johnson.

Two weeks after Kennedy joined the race, Johnson summoned Clifford to the White House and showed him the closing lines of a speech he was to deliver on his efforts to negotiate an end to the war.

“Nothing in my career ever surprised me so much as what I read,” Clifford said.

A shock from Johnson
On the sheet of paper Johnson handed Clifford were written the words with which Johnson would end his March 31 speech, “I shall not seek, and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

Four days later, a sniper shot King to death in Memphis, sparking riots in the nation’s capital and more than 100 other cities across the nation.

Then on June 5, moments after claiming victory in the California primary, Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles.

While Kennedy and McCarthy had been battling for the Democratic nomination, Vice President Hubert Humphrey also entered the race.

Humphrey left the primary battles to his two rivals, while he recruited party chieftains who has controlled some of the state delegations to the convention — enough delegations, as it turned out for Humphrey to win the nomination.

Third-party candidate George Wallace of Alabama posed a threat to both Nixon and Humphrey. His strategy was to deny either Nixon or Humphrey the Electoral College majority of 270, thus forcing the contest into the House of Representatives where Wallace could bargain for concessions.

The pugnacious populist
Wallace was a pugnacious populist who had expanded beyond his base of segregationists opposed to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

He railed against “federal judges playing God,” “pseudo-intellectuals,” and newspaper editors “who have looked down their noses long enough at the average man on the street.”

Referring to anti-war demonstrators who had lain down in front of Johnson’s presidential limousine, forcing it to stop, Wallace said when he became president he’d order the limo to keep going.

In the Republican contest, Nixon had outlasted challengers Michigan Gov. George Romney (father of Mitt) and New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

At the Republican convention in Miami Beach, Nixon had to contend with late entrant to the fray: California Gov. Ronald Reagan, conservative darling.

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