The Road to “The One”
For the moderates and Rockefeller-Republican types, as well as for the national media, the most appealing candidate of 1966 and 1967 was Michigan governor George Romney. A sixty-year-old Mormon, handsome and filled with “high-compression energy,” Romney was an auto industry CEO who had become a politician with bipartisan appeal.7 He had won repeatedly in Michigan, a heavily Democratic state. Sometimes he even sounded like a Democrat. He was one of the few Republicans who had survived the bloodbath of 1964, because he actively distanced himself from the party’s nominee, Goldwater, and his conservative politics. He called America’s worship of individualism “nothing but a political banner to cover up greed.” Jack Kennedy considered Romney a formidable opponent, telling a confidant that in 1964 “the fellow I don’t want to run against is Romney.” In the run-up to the 1968 election, Nelson Rockefeller had taken himself out of presidential contention and had, instead, endorsed Romney as heir to the moderate Republican throne. By late 1966, polls showed Romney winning a hypothetical matchup with Johnson by 6 percentage points.8
However, it turned out that Romney was not quite ready for prime time. When he started hitting the road to lay the groundwork for a presidential run, he started getting questions on policy matters he could not answer very well. Especially on issue number one: Vietnam. At first, he said he wouldn’t comment on the war until he had studied the issue further. But Romney was a man who said what he thought; he never had mastered the dark arts of political spin. Journalist Theodore White once described him as having “a sincerity so profound that, in conversation, one was almost embarrassed.”9 On the trail, Romney made some offhand comments about how Republicans would handle Vietnam better because Johnson was “locked in” to certain approaches. Reporters pounced. What did Romney mean? What was his position on the war? Romney didn’t have a good answer. Eventually, at the tail end of a summer of nonstop fundraising and glad-handing, Romney’s weariness got him to make a mistake.
In late August 1967, he told a television interviewer his earlier support for the war was the result of what generals and diplomats had told him when he visited there in 1965. They were wrong, he concluded. In fact, they’d given him “the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.” He continued, quite thoughtfully, that when he dug deeper into the history and complexities of the conflict (something few politicians or diplomats had actually done), it was clear this was a disastrous endeavor. Romney’s observation was utterly honest, nuanced, and prescient, but in the hothouse atmosphere of the presidential election cycle, all the press corps heard was “brainwashing.” It ultimately became the mistake that came back to haunt his candidacy. By the time Romney formally announced that he’d run in November 1967, the journalists who once had embraced him had become dismissive. On top of being gaffe-prone, Romney turned out to be rather boring. He didn’t have the magnetism to sustain the attention of a press corps in search of drama and a television news machine looking for a compelling three-minute lead story.10
The other significant candidate in the GOP race was becoming worthy of sustained press attention, however. And it was the unlikeliest of people: Richard M. Nixon. The poor boy from Whittier, California, already had lived an extraordinary life and remarkable career. Soon after being elected to Congress, Nixon had skyrocketed to national prominence by becoming one of the earliest and fiercest anti-Communist crusaders in politics. His House Un-American Activities Committee relentlessly pursued those it suspected to be Communist spies, and he parlayed this notoriety into a run for Senate, mercilessly attacking his liberal female opponent as “pink” and soft on Communism. Tapped as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president in 1952, Nixon went from partisan attack dog to Cold War insider. Motivated by an intensely competitive spirit and a visceral dislike of the Ivy League-educated intellectual establishment, Nixon was a man of action and risk. “I can’t understand people who won’t take the chance of failure,” he once remarked.11 Failure came. He narrowly lost to John F. Kennedy in 1960, felled in part by an unlikable public persona that translated awkwardly into the powerful new political medium of television.12
After his California gubernatorial defeat in 1962, Nixon had left public life and joined a New York law firm. His name was floated as a possible presidential nominee in 1964, and his presidential ambitions began to reignite. Yet Republicans of all stripes worried that Nixon was not electable. The moderates didn’t like him. One, Senator Ed Brooke of Massachusetts, said if Nixon was the nominee “it wouldn’t be a contest in ’68—we’d give it away.” The conservatives didn’t like his chances much either. Colorado Senator Pete Dominick, a close friend of Goldwater’s, said, “he’s the most qualified man, but can we win with a man who’s lost twice?”13
Perhaps they had not been paying attention to what Nixon had been doing for the past several years. After Johnson’s 1964 landslide, Nixon had started a quiet campaign to win over the hearts of the Republican establishment and its new conservative flank, including the young people who had campaigned so fiercely for Barry Goldwater. He enlisted the help of key advisors. He made his law partner John Mitchell his top advisor and fundraiser, calling Mitchell “the heavyweight.”
Others who later made an important mark in national politics joined the team. A young press aide named Patrick Buchanan started planting stories in the national media that tried to change the narrative that Nixon was a political loser. He brought on a savvy communications director named William Safire, who had a talent for crafting punchy speeches and memorable sound bites. He recruited the producer of the hit Mike Douglas Show, a brash twenty-eight-year-old named Roger Ailes, who started thinking about how to win over hearts and minds through television. “This is an electronic election,” Ailes told his new colleagues. “The first there’s ever been. TV has the power now.”14
The campaign included other future political power brokers as well. Nixon’s head of economic research, Alan Greenspan, crafted a policy platform advocating for free and untrammeled markets. “Sure I’m a liberal,” Greenspan remarked, “but I’m a nineteenth century liberal.” The key to saving America, he argued, was to liberate businesses from high taxes and burdensome regulations.15
Nixon started to make himself indispensable. In the 1966 midterm election, Nixon campaigned energetically for Republican congressional and gubernatorial candidates, helping the GOP win a wave of victories. Democrats noticed Nixon’s emerging respectability, and tried to tear it down. Scoffed DNC Chair Bailey, “there is no ‘new Nixon,’ only a retread of the old slasher of the ’50s.” Safire complained that the mainstream press paid little attention; Nixon barely made “the furniture pages of the New York Times.”16
Other “glamor boys” like Romney got the spotlight in the early months, and Nixon let them have it. He traveled on assignment for Reader’s Digest and worked the politics out of the spotlight, biding his time as the media fell in love—and then out of love—with other Republican contenders. Then, as the election season got underway in earnest, Nixon proved formidable. The network he had built steadily over the past several years started to pay dividends. The ardent support he had from ordinary folk away from the coastal power centers buoyed his popularity. He was more conservative than Rockefeller, more intellectual than Reagan, more strategic than Romney or Goldwater. His straddling of the GOP divide was precisely what was needed in a year when the general political spirit leaned to the left, but where primary-state sensibilities demanded careful political maneuvering on hot-button issues like the war and civil rights. Richard Nixon had done the math. A survey of Republican delegates in 1968 had found that 75 percent identified themselves as conservatives. To win the nomination, he needed to tack right, but carefully.
Nixon’s response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., provides one example. After the killing, conservatives roared that King’s death was something he brought on himself. Strom Thurmond waxed biblical as he wrote supporters, “we are now witnessing the whirlwind sowed years ago when
some preachers and teachers began telling people that each man could be his own judge in his own case.” Ronald Reagan linked King’s death to the greater breakdown in law and order, a “great tragedy that began when … people started choosing which laws they’d break.” Nixon and his aides debated whether he should attend the funeral. He went to Atlanta—to privately pay his respects to the King family and attend the funeral service. When the funeral procession rolled through the streets of the city, Nixon was nowhere to be seen. The next day, Nixon’s Southern campaign director Brad Hayes did some retail politics, making telephone calls to every key Southern Republican who might be worried that Nixon was kowtowing to the family of a liberal icon. “Yes, I’m as concerned as you are about this,” he assured them, “but it was something the candidate felt he had to do.”17
Two months later, Nixon flew once again to Atlanta, but this time he met with a very different group: South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, Texas senator John Tower, and key Republican Party leaders from the South. Nixon assured them that he agreed school busing to achieve integration was wrong. He promised Southerners key roles in his future Administration. He spoke of his commitment to a strong military—an important issue for a conservative region that also was highly dependent on defense spending. Leaving the meeting, Nixon and his aides were confident that they had the Southern delegates locked up.18
Through the primary season, the other Republican contenders fell by the wayside. Reagan toyed with putting his name in the mix, but held back. Romney dropped out in April. Nelson Rockefeller jumped in, then out, then in again after Romney’s withdrawal.
Rockefeller’s bid employed expensive high-tech tools to make his case. He commissioned a New York ad agency to do intensive market research on his chances against Nixon. Rich and powerful friends urged him on, arguing that while Nixon might appeal to the conservative base, only a moderate like Rockefeller could win in November. With the primaries nearly done, Rockefeller had to appeal to the influencers outside the party machinery. Drawing on his own deep pockets and those of his family and friends, he launched a high-priced media campaign and commissioned poll after poll to make the case that he was more electable than Nixon. Perhaps money, and sheer force of will, could convince GOP delegates that their future lay in the moderate, not the conservative, direction.19
At the end of July, however, days before the opening of the GOP convention in Miami, Rockefeller’s poll- and media-driven strategy ran out of air. A Gallup Poll concluded that Nixon would beat Humphrey by 7 points in a national matchup, while Rockefeller and Humphrey were dead even. Another poll a few days later showed Rockefeller ahead—and was more meaningful, as it focused on key industrial swing states—but the blow had been dealt. Without being the clear-cut leader in the polls, Rockefeller didn’t have a strong case to make to party delegates.
By the Miami convention, Richard Nixon was, as his campaign slogan put it, “the One.” As he accepted the nomination, he acknowledged his vanquished rivals—Romney, Rockefeller, Reagan—and gave one of his most stirring speeches. In 1932, Franklin Roosevelt had spoken of “the forgotten man.” In 1968, Nixon addressed the convention hall, and the millions of television viewers at home, and presented himself as the candidate of “the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators…. They are not racists or sick; they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land…. They are good people, they are decent people; they work, and they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care.” This was the message Nixon took forth as the Republican nominee. Yet the historical resonance of this pivotal election came not just from the messages Nixon delivered, but the tools he employed to deliver them.20
The Whole World Was Watching
From Tet to global countercultural protests to the assassinations of King and Kennedy, television had not only delivered the news of the year but also shaped how people understood it. Television had been the stage on which presidential elections played since the medium’s infancy. Networks covered the conventions starting in 1948, and the first political ads appeared in 1952. In 1960 the televised debates between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon had proved to be a pivotal moment in a tight campaign, the bright studio lights framing a starkly contrasting pair of candidates: a sweaty and shifty-eyed Nixon and a smooth and telegenic Kennedy. Those who heard the first debate on the radio concluded that Nixon had won; those who saw it on television considered the event a big win for Kennedy.21 By 1968 television had become the beating heart of a massive and technologically sophisticated political machine of media, polling, and professional campaign management that reporter James Perry termed “the new politics.” In a book of the same name published at the start of 1968, Perry gave a dour assessment of what this new approach meant, fearing it would “dehumanize” politics. By allowing candidates to appeal directly to the people rather than through partisan machinery, Perry argued, the new politics destabilized the party system to a dangerous extent, and bestowed great advantages on candidates with the most money.22
Some of Perry’s insights were prophetic, including the rising importance of polling and the engagement of media professionals to sell candidates to the American public using the same techniques used to sell cars or ketchup. The use of increasingly more refined tools to slice, dice, and measure public interest all fed into candidates’ ability to use the medium of television to reach out to different blocs of voters as well as to reach millions of people at once. Although presidential contenders had been on television for two decades, political advertising lagged far behind Madison Avenue in its skill in crafting persuasive and sophisticated campaigns. 1968 was the year that politics caught up.
The other reason television mattered to this pivotal election was when the campaign went off script. Television could be the ultimate vehicle of political spin for a candidate, but it had as much, or more, power to derail the master narrative of a campaign or party. With television cameras on, groups that otherwise could not get their message out to a national audience could grab mass attention, co-opting media events on their own terms, beaming their message into American living rooms. These events were unscripted, they were raw, and they shaped the outcome of the campaign.
Exhibit number one was the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Since early in 1968, the antiwar left had been thinking and planning about how to use television to take on the Establishment. The activists’ flagship enterprise, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (or Mobe) identified the Democratic Convention in late August as a prime opportunity. Network producers and reporters would descend in a swarm on Chicago, setting up a complex network of live television feeds that provided a ripe opportunity for disruption. In a confidential memorandum, antiwar activists Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis outlined the Left’s strategic opportunity:
To the average Democrat who wants a say on the widening war, high taxes, and urban squalor, the “choice” will appear desperate. Many, for the first time, will wake up to the fact that in the wheeling and dealing of the democratic process the average person does not count…. His choices are limited to which of the stars he least dislikes. This summer, millions of anxious Democrats will ask, what now?23
Hayden and his compatriots seemed the sober, rule-abiding wing of the Left when compared to the other group planning to make mischief in Chicago, the Yippies. Led by two outsized personalities, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, the Yippies specialized in theatrical, outrageous, and made-for-television moments. Fueled by LSD and marijuana, propelled by the counterculture but drawing their understanding of political protest from their own personal histories in the civil rights and antiwar movements, Rubin and Hoffman made the alternate reality of hippiedom into a political act. At an antiwar march in 1967, Hoffman famously urged a group to sing and chant until the Pentagon levitated 300 feet in the air and turned orange. Another morning, Rubin and Hoffman sidled into the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and started dropping money down on the floor below. Traders scrambled over one another to
grab the cash, creating a scene that led the newscasts that evening.
In January, the Yippies issued their first manifesto and told their followers to mark their calendars for good times in Chicago: “Come all you rebels, youth spirits, rock minstrels, truth seekers, peacock freaks, poets, barricade jumpers, dancers, lovers, and artists. It is summer. It is the last week in August and the NATIONAL DEATH PARTY meets to bless Johnson. We are there!”24
Even though Johnson didn’t make it to the Convention, the Mobe and the Yippies did. As Democrats converged on Chicago, 10,000 college kids and peaceniks and lefties and hippies gathered on the streets outside. Meeting them there: 20,000 police officers and soldiers tasked with keeping the peace. Democratic Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley had twisted many arms to win the hosting rights for the Convention, and he didn’t want the longhaired kids disrupting it. Thus, Chicago refused to issue permits allowing protesters to march or sleep in city parks, and passed a new disorderly conduct ordinance that gave Daley’s police the power to stop “any unreasonable or offensive act, utterance, gesture, or display.” It provided an extraordinary amount of leeway for law enforcement to target anyone—protestor, reporter—who threatened to disrupt the proceedings or bring unrest to city streets. Daley called up nearly every possible officer at his disposal, from regular beat cops to riot police, and surrounded the convention hall with barbed wire-topped fencing.
Figure 22. Yippie holds up burning draft card, Chicago, 27 August 1968. As Democrats converged on Chicago for their nominating convention in 1968, so did antiwar activists. In response to night-long demonstrations and massive encampments in city parks, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley dispatched city police to curb the demonstrations with brute force, as reporters looked on. The nationally televised melee created a public relations debacle for a deeply divided Democratic Party. Bettman/Corbis/AP Images.
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