Godfrey Hodgson looks back at the most important US election before this one, 1968 when Richard Nixon won the White House.
In the first week of November, forty years ago, I was debating with a colleague which of us would spend election night in New York with Richard Nixon, the Republican, and which in Minneapolis, with Hubert Horatio Humphrey, the Democratic candidate.
I won: I got to go to Minneapolis. And I lost, because so did Humphrey.
With Hilary, who is now my wife, and was then working with me as a researcher, we allowed ourselves a brief holiday in Saratoga, not much more than a weekend. We thought of Adelaide’s Lament in Guys and Dolls:
When they get on that train to Niagara
And she can hear church bells chime
The compartment is air conditioned
And the moon sublime
Then they get off at Saratoga for the fourteenth time!
A person can develop la grippe,
Then we settled down, in the old Times Newspapers of Great Britain offices on the corner of 42nd Street and Third Avenue, to the hardest work of a lifetime.
The result was a book, published as An American Melodrama, that changed my life. It made a lot of money, though not for me. I was working on the staff of the Sunday Times, and the paper owned the rights and took the profits. But ever since I have been hired by publishers in New York to write a string of books about American history and politics. But the election also changed life for 300 million Americans too.
We were in our early 30s then, and capable of working in a way that gives me nightmares even to remember. We had to get the book out before Teddy White, the reigning champion for election books, did. We had an extra reason for beating him. White came up to me at a friend’s house and said, unprovoked, “So you are one of the three wise monkeys who think if you type enough you write Shakespeare?”
We typed, all right. I and my two co-authors, Lew Chester and Bruce Page, produced a book of 789 pages in about six weeks. We frequently wrote all night. I remember one particular evening when, after 12 hours at the typewriter, we staggered out of the office and walked up Third Avenue in the snow into P.J. Clarke’s bar, a classic New York Irish watering hole, where the waiters wore green aprons and you peed on blocks of ice in the gents. We stayed there until four a.m., first eating, then drinking, and at all times arguing, before slumping into bed for a few hours and then back to the typewriter in the morning.
That Heraklean labour was the culmination of a year covering what was the most exciting and the most important American presidential election — until this one.
1968 began with all the interest on the Democratic side. Succeeding the murdered Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson had thrown his titanic energy into passing the civil rights bill of 1964. He followed it with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. As he signed it he murmured to an aide, “There goes the South”, and that when the Solid South, Democratic ever since Lincoln freed the slaves, turned Republican.
Johnson tried to end poverty in America, and committed America to victory n Vietnam. By early 1967, he was deeply unpopular. Surreptitiously at first, then more boldly Democrat operatives were looking for a plausible candidate to challenge Johnson. They talked to John Kenneth Galbraith, but he was foreign-born, in Canada. They talked to Martin Luther King, but he would not do it. They canvassed liberal senators, but none would risk their career against an incumbent president who seemed invincible, until they persuaded senator Eugene McCarty to run.
McCarthy (who had nothing but Irish blood and Catholic faith in common with the other McCarthy, senator Joe) was a liberal Catholic, a poet, and an unpredictable politician. My colleagues, freshly arrived from London, saw him as a man of the Left, and it was true that many of the most idealistic young people in America joined his “Children’s Crusade”. I knew, however, because I had been working in Washington before, that McCarthy had infuriated liberals by his systematic cosying up to the big oil and gas interests.
The great question for the American Left was whether Bob Kennedy, who notoriously detested Lyndon Johnson (a book about their relationship was accurately entitled “Mutual Contempt”) would enter the race. If he did, he would be a stronger candidate than McCarthy, an obvious fact which McCarthy’s supporters, some of them close friends of mine, hated to hear.
Then, on March 12, a psephological bomb exploded. In the New Hampshire primary, which normally an incumbent president would have been expected to win easily if he even bothered to enter, President Johnson got 49 per cent of the vote. And senator Gene McCarthy got 42 per cent.
Nineteen days later, Lyndon Johnson inserted two sentences at the end of a nation-wide television speech. “I have concluded”, he said, “that I should not allow the presidency to be involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year. Accordingly I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president”.
After soul-searching, cold calculation and many changes of mind, Bob Kennedy entered the race. I went with him to California, when he first sussed out his chances. I tried to describe the extraordinary yearning for the crowds who surrounded him when he spoke from the back of a flatbed truck. In a pyramid of uplifted arms. I was with him again on June 4, when he won the California primary, and looked set to win first the Democratic nomination, and very possibly the election. I was in the hall when he gave his last speech, and I and a colleague were due to interview him, when he was murdered in the adjoining hallway by a Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan.
What we largely ignored in the excitement of that tumultuous election, was the real import of the 1968 election.
It was Richard Nixon who won. And Nixon’s victory marked the end of 35 years of Democratic hegemony in American politics, and the beginning of 40 years of the conservative Republican ascendancy.
To be sure, Nixon’s domestic policy turned out to be more liberal than many expected. But Nixon won, in 1968 and far more decisively four years later, in large part because of his “southern strategy”: by appealing, that is, to white southerners to abandon their Democratic inheritance and vote Republican.
Six years after his 1968 victory, Nixon was gone, just ahead of impeachment. The immediate result was a brief recovery for the Democrats. But then came Ronald Reagan, a more robustly ideological conservative. Only when Bill Clinton, parroting Reagan’s language about the end of the need for strong government, but also insisting that it was “the economy, stupid”, took advantage of George H. W. Bush’s failure to read the national mood, did a Democrat return to the White House.
This year, forty years after 1968, the issue was whether the conservative ascendancy would end. Was this what the political scientists call a defining election? Now a Republican administration had got the nation into a disastrous war, had shown itself comically incompetent in dealing with Hurricane Katrina, had favoured its rich constituency with unfair tax breaks in a shameless way?
For months, it seemed as if an opportunity for decisive, ideological change, would be missed. Senator Barack Obama called for change. It was his slogan. But in practice, as he competed for votes with senator Hillary Clinton, just like senators McCarthy and Kennedy in 1968, the election seemed bogged down in technicalities. Who could raise the most money? Who could spend it most effectually in caricaturing the policies and the personality of the rival?
Then like Nixon in 1968, after the disaster of senator Goldwater, the Republican overwhelmed by Lyndon Johnson in 1964, senator John McCain rose from the ashes. Now, days before the vote on November 4, senator Obama is ten percentage points ahead. Republican economics have brought the American economy and the world economy to the very brink of catastrophe. Now all that can save the conservative ascendancy is crass innuendo with coded racism from senator McCain’s desperate running-mate.
Will it work? Will we see a “Bradley effect”? That is the name, drawn from the fate of a black mayor of Los Angeles, who led in the polls and lost on the hustings, for the American voters who will tell pollsters they will vote for a black candidate, but don’t when they or pull the lever of a voting machine. Poor Tom Bradley is not the only example of that sadly prevalent electoral habit.
So, forty years after Dick Nixon came up on the rails to pip Hubert Humphrey, once again the American electorate faces a choice between ideological optimism — what Barack Obama calls “the audacity of hope” — and shameful, surreptitious racism. It has happened too often before in American elections, local, state and national.
Will Barack Obama make it to Niagara, so to speak? Will the nuptials take place? Or are we going to get off at Saratoga, for the fourteenth time?
In other words, as poor Adelaide sang,
“Just from worrying if the wedding is on or off
A person can develop a bad, bad cough.
