Pivotal Tuesdays

by Margaret O'Mara

  Then, to further complicate the Democrats’ civil war, there was Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey had been among the first to learn that Johnson was not running, and on hearing the news had burst into tears—for Johnson, and for his own political prospects. He had long had White House ambitions, but being Johnson’s number-two was not an electoral advantage this turbulent season. “Hubert has always been in trouble because he was ahead of his time,” commented Washington pundit James “Scotty” Reston, “but now, for once, he seems to be late and out of luck. He has been punished for playing a role he didn’t like and couldn’t avoid.” Off the record, Humphrey’s Democratic colleagues were blunter in their assessment. “He has all the disabilities without any of the strengths that Johnson has,” one grumbled. Undeterred, Humphrey started to work the phones, asking his friends in the Democratic establishment to refrain from committing to either of the antiwar candidates just yet.40

  The political reforms that had introduced the direct primary system were more than five decades old, but the system of choosing party nominees still remained a game insiders could dominate if they so chose. There were still 33 states that did not have binding primaries, meaning their delegates were not locked into support for any particular candidates until the convention. The exhaustive press coverage of the primary battles had not increased transparency, but instead created more opportunities for political spin. Media-saturated primaries had become “costly battles between the candidates for cards to play when the backroom dealing starts.” This was all good news for Hubert Humphrey. He was not on the ballot in any primary states, and didn’t have to be. He could still win the nomination if the party regulars were with him. Instead he ran proxy candidates in primary states, so that his opponents couldn’t get enough delegates to win.41

  So it was a real three-way race, not the simple path for which Kennedy and his supporters might have hoped. However, RFK was certainly number one when it came to attention from the press. Reporters who covered both Kennedys observed that their politics was an artful combination of grassroots constituency-building and charismatic image-making. Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign involved both, but the charismatic side of things dominated. As he told a student audience, “The contest in 1968 is not for the rule of America, but for its heart.”42

  Kennedy’s grasp of this politics of the heart showed itself on the day Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. Coming on the heels of events at home and abroad that already had rocked the nation since the New Year, King’s death on 4 April triggered violent convulsions of destruction and looting in cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Washington. On that dreadful day, Robert Kennedy was campaigning in Indianapolis. The state was a tough one for Democrats. Gritty steel towns in the north filled with racial tensions and growing white working-class resentment; its southern hill country was home to a mix of conservative and populist politics, and only forty years earlier had been home to some of the nation’s largest chapters of the Ku Klux Klan. Pure liberalism did not go over well in Indiana. Kennedy started the campaign painfully, giving earnest speeches on poverty to small-town civic clubs that didn’t want to hear about it. McCarthy, too, found his antiwar message had far less steam in Indiana than elsewhere.43

  Kennedy was campaigning in a black neighborhood as the news of King’s death came over the wire. Recognizing the potential for the moment to turn violent, Kennedy’s advisors urged him to stay in his hotel room. Indianapolis police did the same. Instead, Kennedy went ahead as planned with a nighttime rally, rising up before the large crowd and breaking the news. After the gasps from the audience had died down, Kennedy stood in the cold and dark, and delivered an ad-lib and very personal speech. “I can only say that I feel in my heart the same kind of feeling,” he said, and as if anyone needed reminding, “I had a member of my own family killed.” Then he pleaded for peace. “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and to make gentle the life of this world.” Rioting did not break out in Indianapolis that night, and reporters broadcast news of Kennedy’s eloquence across the nation. At last, the younger Kennedy seemed to be rising to the greatness of his mourned older brother. He won Indiana, and the momentum grew from there.44

  Figure 20. Eugene McCarthy at Campaign Headquarters Opening, Manhattan, 23 April 1968. Once Robert F. Kennedy entered the race, he siphoned off both supporters and media attention from McCarthy. As McCarthy geared up for the New York State primary, he could not escape the looming presence of student activists who now backed RFK. Bettman/Corbis/AP Images.

  The reputation of Kennedy grew, especially among the under twenty-five generation. Many college students still gravitated to McCarthy, but Kennedy had the star power McCarthy lacked. Posters of RFK became a dorm room staple. One sign in the crowd at a Kennedy rally proclaimed, “Bobby is Groovy.” He held fundraisers featuring the Byrds and Sonny and Cher. Crowds surged around him at his appearances, reaching grasping hands toward him, to touch him, to feel the magic. Kennedy started to knit together the different groups who were turning their back on big politics and embracing identity politics. He was no longer a consensus liberal. He was a standard-bearer for the New Left. He had the youth and charisma to glue together these anxious and agitated interest groups into a larger cause.45

  The primary season was full of tightly fought contests. Kennedy won Indiana and Nebraska and South Dakota. McCarthy won Pennsylvania and Massachusetts and Oregon. By April, Humphrey had officially thrown his hat into the ring and was zinging his Democratic rivals relentlessly. “I do believe,” Humphrey said of Kennedy, “there is such a thing as too much ambition.” He decried both of his opponents for their dour assessments of America’s trajectory. “You won’t make this country better by leading from fear, despair and doubt,” said the vice president. Instead, Humphrey made his campaign theme “the spirit of happiness.” Yet Hubert Humphrey, for all his intelligence and likability, was such a workmanlike politician his optimistic urgings had little of the emotional pull of Robert Kennedy’s poetics or even Gene McCarthy’s low-key persuasion. “There’s very little poetry in him,” one Democratic senator confided of Humphrey. “He says very few things you want to remember, let alone quote.”46

  With the Democratic establishment behind him, however, Humphrey was still the man for McCarthy and Kennedy to beat. By late spring, all the key elements of the Democratic power structure forged by the New Deal order had come down on the side of Humphrey: the labor unions, business leaders, and big-city political bosses. It all came down to the California primary on 5 June. The winner of that would be the person who would take on Humphrey for the nomination.

  Kennedy won, narrowly. He gave a rousing victory speech just before midnight at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Then, as he exited through the hotel kitchen, six shots fired out. Robert Kennedy was dead, killed by a gunman angry about Kennedy’s support of Israel.

  The nation once again went into mourning. Crowds lined the tracks as the train bearing Kennedy’s body rolled across the country, from California back east for burial in Arlington National Cemetery. Before that, his body lay in state in New York City’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where more than 150,000 people waited up to six hours to file through, paying their respects to their fallen hero. With Bobby Kennedy’s death, the constellation of factions that was the New Left lost their most compelling leader, the glue that stuck them together, the man who had seized the mantle from McCarthy to become the antiwar candidate. The rest of the country mourned as well. The cover of Newsweek asked, “Has Violence Become an American Way of Life?” One newspaper columnist declared, “The country does not work anymore.” The candidates suspended their campaigns for two weeks.47

  From 1963 to 1968, three icons—two Kennedys and one King—perished in a hail of assassins’ bullets. The men to whom many Americans had turned to make sense of a rapidly changing world were all killed in their prime. The depths of this trauma spilled through politics, making so
me people want to abandon formal politics altogether. It made others look for bolder, more radical political solutions. The fracturing of America, and the fracturing of the Democratic Party, were well underway before Robert Kennedy died, but his killing seemed to fracture things further. For the worst days of the Democratic Party’s election season were still to come.

  CHAPTER 6

  Improbable Victories

  In early January 1968, Democratic National Committee Chairman John Bailey made a prediction. No matter how unpopular Lyndon Johnson had become, Eugene McCarthy was a mere irritant who posed no real challenge to the president: “we know who our nominees will be.” Instead, chuckled Bailey, “I’m happy to be able to say the Republicans have all their bloody infighting to look forward to.”1 Bailey was spinning the party line, but it resonated with the conventional wisdom in Washington at the start of the election year. The Republican Party remained a house divided between Rockefeller-style moderates and Goldwater-Reagan conservatives. Before the GOP could make a credible challenge for the White House, it needed to come to terms with which side of the party would prevail in nominating a candidate. Whoever won the nomination would, in turn, need a message that could win nationally.

  In finding this candidate and this message, the Republican Party began to shift itself rightward, beginning a process that fundamentally recast the GOP, its constituencies, and its leadership. This rightward shift was not wholly visible to observers in 1968, but it found its direction and gained its momentum from gut-wrenching changes experienced by Americans of the New Deal generation that turbulent year. The causes of all these changes became conflated in voters’ minds—war, youth in revolt, and ghettos on fire all seemed symptoms of the same national illness. Politics followed society, not the other way around. The disintegration of big-politics America pulled citizens to the outer edges. And it was the rightward edge, rather than the leftward, that ultimately won the battle for the Republican Party’s soul.

  The construction of a new conservatism was not the GOP’s doing alone, but also came from the fractures within the Democratic Party in the post-civil rights era. For the Democrats of 1968 were not all liberals or peaceniks, campaigning on an end to war and the end of poverty. Some of them were very, very conservative, and the journey of these voters and their leaders out of the Democratic Party and toward the GOP turned conventional wisdom on its head, redrew the electoral map, and reshaped the two parties going forward.

  The Southern Question

  The Republican Party had a numbers problem in the mid-1960s. Nationally, only 27 percent of Americans identified themselves as Republican while 48 percent called themselves Democrats. Yet much of that Democratic margin came from Southern states where federal action on civil rights had begun to break down white voters’ formerly rock-solid allegiance to the Democratic Party. Outside his home state of Arizona, the only states conservative Barry Goldwater won in 1964 were in the Deep South. More important, the changes in the South’s population and economic geography since World War II profoundly altered who voted, why they voted, and what sorts of political messages resonated. The region was exploding in population, and the areas that were growing the fastest were middle-class suburbs ringing cities like Atlanta and Charlotte and Dallas and Houston. The emergence of what came to be called the New South moved the region from one-party rule to a two-party system. The South had been a critical bloc in nearly every presidential election since Jefferson and Adams, but the bigger, bolder, richer New South mattered more than ever before.2

  Yet the Old South persisted. The disintegration of the old racial order had fueled the rise of a set of fiercely segregationist politicians who spoke about states’ rights and law and order in ways that appealed to the rural white constituencies who felt both economically and politically marginalized in the Space Age, suburbanized South of the 1960s. South Carolinian Strom Thurmond had been the first of these politicians to use segregation as a platform to challenge the status quo, breaking from the Democrats in 1948 over their pro-civil rights platform plank and running an insurgent campaign as candidate of the States’ Rights Democratic Party, known as the “Dixiecrats.”

  By the mid-1960s, Alabama governor George Wallace had emerged as the inheritor to Thurmond’s states rights throne. A Democrat, Wallace first ran for Alabama governor in 1958 as a racial moderate. He rejected the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan and accepted that of the NAACP. He lost, badly. After that defeat, Wallace’s racial attitudes transformed. In 1962 he ran again for governor, and won. He became a staunch defender of segregation. And he had a flair for theatrical gestures that generated media attention and increased his national profile.

  At his inauguration in 1963, Wallace proclaimed: “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say, Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” Shortly after that, he protested integration by literally standing at the door of a University of Alabama building to block its first two black students from registering, giving a fiery speech that made the national television newscasts. He first ran for the Democratic nomination for president in 1964.3

  Wallace played off 1960s-era white voters’ fears of the changes that came in the wake of federal integration orders, but in his methods and his message he was a classic populist, fighting for the people against powerful, far-off, faceless interests who sought to unfairly constrain their lives. It was a message that had resonated with beleaguered small farmers in the 1880s Middle West, radicals and Socialists in the Progressive Era, and unemployed laborers in the Great Depression. It had been a language that historically had pressed toward left-wing political solutions, but by the time it got to Wallace, it had turned sharply toward the right. Wallace realized that only the South cared so deeply about preserving segregation, but voters across the nation could relate to the broader populist idea, especially at a moment when an intrusive and untrustworthy big government was becoming so unpopular. Wallace was a Democrat, but a dramatically different sort of Democrat than Gene McCarthy, or Bobby Kennedy, or the Great Society-era Lyndon Johnson. He started thinking about another try for the White House.4

  Meanwhile, Republicans saw the electoral opportunity that lay in Southern states, but they also recognized that uncompromising opposition to civil rights could alienate the constituencies of the New South. In the 1950s Dwight Eisenhower had won significant inroads into the region, in large part because of the appeal of the GOP’s pro-business message to urban and suburban white-collar professionals. Another part of the Southern opportunity lay in shoring up support of African Americans who had once had such a strong allegiance to the Party of Lincoln. In 1960, Richard Nixon had won the support of more than half of Atlanta’s black population. In 1964, Barry Goldwater had come out swinging against civil rights, reasoning that to win the region he needed to be more like Strom Thurmond than Dwight Eisenhower, and go “hunting where the ducks are.” The strategy had won him 71 percent of the vote in the Deep-South states but only 49 percent in the upper South. He had lost support among the Eisenhower Republicans in metropolitan areas as well as losing the black vote. In contrast, in Arkansas in 1966, moderate Winthrop Rockefeller (brother of Nelson) won over 90 percent of the African American vote and became the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction.5

  Figure 21. Governor George Wallace attempting to block integration at the University of Alabama. Warren K. Leffler, photographer. As governor of Alabama, Wallace fiercely defended the continuation of the Southern segregationist order, calling it a matter of protecting “states’ rights” against an intrusive national government. In an attempt to stop integration of the University of Alabama in 1963, Wallace stood at the door of a university building, surrounded by the National Guard. Standing opposite is the Kennedy administration representative dispatched to confront him, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach. Library of Congress.

  To the moderates in the GOP
, all these seemed proof points for a Southern strategy focusing on the moderate middle, not the racial extremists. Yet there also was growing evidence that a third path could be carved out that appealed to both. In 1966, the same year Win Rockefeller was elected in Arkansas, a Democrat-turned-Republican named Claude Kirk won the governorship of Florida.

  Kirk’s key to victory was a message that went straight to the racial anxieties of Southern whites, but did it in a way that spoke to both the rural hardliners and the suburban middle. Florida cities like Tampa and Miami and Jacksonville were now filled with migrants who brought with them a habit of voting Republican and a dislike of strongly racist language. So Kirk started talking in code. Like Reagan in California, he spoke the language of law and order, and of the protection of individual rights and economic opportunity. He talked about the rights of homeowners and of independence from intrusive government mandates. He appealed to the fears whites had about the new world of court-ordered integration, civil rights, youth power. Appealing to this new, anxious homeowning class, Kirk revolved his campaign around the slogan “Your home is your castle—protect it.” It was devastatingly effective.6

  The GOP task in 1968 was to find a strategy—and a candidate—able to woo the segregationists away from Wallace, speak to the concerns of the new suburbanites, and not alienate everyone else in the process. The party needed not simply a Southern strategy, but a national strategy. The code words used by politicians like Regan and Kirk provided, just perhaps, the way to do that.