The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  THE SUMMER CONVENTIONS

  The Republican delegates who streamed into sunny Miami Beach for their nominating convention displayed an air of controlled confidence. They were a clean-cut cross section of Middle America, small business, and middle-class values, a self-conscious counterexample to the plague of protests, violence, and chaos Americans had become accustomed to watching on their television sets. Inside the Miami Beach Convention Center they prepared to align themselves with Richard Nixon and his careful politics, in which passion was limited to two issues—ending the war in Vietnam and upholding law and order. “From the convention hall,” wrote the campaign chronicler Theodore White, “boredom spread all up and down the Beach.”1

  The Republican selection process promised to be straightforward. Governor George Romney of Michigan had been knocked out of the race a year earlier after telling reporters he had been “brainwashed” by the U.S. military during a visit to Vietnam. The New York governor Nelson Rockefeller’s flip-flopping on whether or not to run had damaged his image as badly as had his 1962 divorce, which always haunted him on the campaign trail. The GOP rank and file showed more enthusiasm for Ronald Reagan than for the liberal Rockefeller as an alternative to Nixon but not enough enthusiasm to block the former vice president, who had campaigned around the country for Republican candidates in 1966, reintroduced himself to a national audience, and picked up many IOUs from those he had supported in a big Republican year. In the 1968 primaries, he skillfully outmaneuvered his competitors by finding a center-right position that eluded all of them.

  Nixon’s resurgence shocked those who hoped the political exile that followed his electoral defeats would be permanent; he had positioned himself as a coalition builder who could appeal to the right wing and to moderates in both parties. He had transformed himself from the rabid anticommunist attack dog he had been in the 1940s and 1950s into the new statesman of his party.

  Ever cognizant of Barry Goldwater’s 1964 campaign as a paradigm for what not to do, the new Nixon held to the center, as Democrats had done for most of the time since the New Deal and as Dwight Eisenhower had done during his two terms in the White House. His campaign team calculated there were twenty-one solidly Republican states, from which Nixon could get 117 of the 270 electoral votes he would need to win. His campaign targets included the battleground states Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Wisconsin, Texas, and California and the peripheral southern states Florida, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina (some campaign staffers felt that South Carolina was up for grabs too).2 With polls indicating that Nixon might carry New York and New Jersey, his campaign manager, John Mitchell, predicted that because of discontent among many Democrats “the time is ripe for a great movement of Democrats and independents to active Nixon support.”3

  The candidate and his advisers believed that the immense turmoil of the last few years had created the possibility for them to build a new governing coalition by grafting onto the Republican Party some detached parts of the coalition FDR had built and Lyndon Johnson had expanded until it fractured under the stresses of the Vietnam War and urban riots. Southerners and working-class northern Democrats were his obvious targets. His acceptance speech in Miami Beach was addressed to them. “The long dark night for America is about to end,” he said. He urged Americans to listen to “the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting. It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, 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 black and they are white—they’re native born and foreign born—they’re young and they’re old . . . They give drive to the spirit of America. They give lift to the American dream. They give steel to the backbone of America. They are good people. They are decent people; they work and they save and they pay their taxes and they care.”

  Nixon’s choice of Spiro Agnew as his running mate was meant to appeal to disaffected Democrats and encourage Republicans who had abandoned the party in 1964 to return to the fold. On many policies, the Maryland governor had a moderate record. He had proposed the first fair housing law for Maryland; its prohibitions on racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing were weakly enforced but nevertheless a symbolic milestone, the first such law in a southern state. Vice President Humphrey admitted that Governor Agnew represented a “significant compromise in the Republican Party.”4

  But the tough-talking Agnew also appealed to hard-line conservative, working-class Democrats Nixon wanted to steal away from their party. Following a riot in Baltimore in the wake of Dr. King’s assassination, Agnew blamed civil rights leaders for stirring up trouble. Later he said, “It is deplorable and a sign of sickness in our society that the lunatic fringes of the black and white communities speak with wide publicity while we, the moderates, remain continuously mute. I cannot believe that the only alternative to white racism is black racism.”5 His presentation of himself—as a supporter of civil rights who had become a tough proponent of law and order in response to urban rioting—was intended to resonate with the experience of many white Democrats who had been dissatisfied since Watts with certain of their party’s positions.

  The Republican convention was an image of law and order. The Democratic convention, later in the summer in Chicago, was the spectacle of a coalition disintegrating.

  Angry activists gathered in Lincoln Park, a lakeside park three miles from the convention center where the city permitted protests to take place. In the three days leading up to the convention, a series of violent confrontations ensued between the protesters and the Chicago police, who had been instructed to maintain order at all costs. Most of the activists had traveled to Chicago to protest the party’s support of the Vietnam War and its refusal to include in its platform a plank calling for an immediate and unconditional cessation of the bombing against the North Vietnamese, a mutual withdrawal of military forces from South Vietnam, and the establishment of a unified national coalitional government. On August 28, several hundred protesters marched to Grant Park, which was located across the street from the Hilton hotel, the main headquarters for delegates and politicians. At the convention, delegates voted for a party platform that reiterated the official policy of the White House—a bombing halt only if it would “not endanger the lives of our troops in the field,” a withdrawal of forces only after the war ended, and free and open elections in South Vietnam. These positions made it clear to the protesters that the Democratic leadership had no determination whatsoever to end the war anytime soon.

  Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, believed the protesters in the park and in the streets were embarrassing the party at a moment when it was trying to sell its presidential candidate to the nation. He ordered the Chicago police to be tough with the protesters. What followed was shocking violence at a level Daley might not have intended. Hundreds of officers brutally attacked the unarmed protesters. They sprayed the protesters with tear gas, charged at them, and beat them with their nightsticks. Images of the violence were broadcast on national television. When Hubert Humphrey opened his hotel window to see what was happening on the streets, he could smell the tear gas. Senator Abraham Ribicoff, in his nominating speech for the antiwar South Dakota senator George McGovern, addressed Mayor Daley directly and decried the “Gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago.”6

  Inside the convention hall, chants of “Stop the War!” continually interrupted the proceedings. In agreeing to the hawkish Vietnam platform plank, Humphrey was defending a position he had always warned Johnson was disastrous. He told a reporter, “I think the policies the President has pursued are basically sound.” The candidate, who had been privately criticizing the Vietnam War since 1964 and warning Johnson that it would tarnish all the Democrats’ important domestic accomplishments, now refused to separate himself from the president’s policies, an act of personal loyalty that seemed certain to kill his chances of winning in November. At the moment Humphrey
secured the nomination, police were battering protesters just outside the convention hall; some inside the hall believed that Humphrey lost the election at the moment he was nominated.

  The wild card in the election campaign was George Wallace, the Alabama governor who had become famous for his racist opposition to civil rights. As the candidate of the right-wing American Independent Party, he aimed to take enough support away from both major-party candidates to block either from getting the 270 Electoral College votes necessary for election. The decision would then be made by the House of Representatives, where each state would have one vote.7 Such an outcome would demonstrate to the nation that Wallace was a formidable political force, and it would place pressure on the two mainstream candidates to court southern legislators by promising to back down on civil rights.

  Wallace sought to create a narrow coalition of southern Democrats and disaffected northern Democrats who detested the counterculture and felt that African Americans were threatening their jobs, homes, safety, schools, and communities. He was less interested than Nixon in winning over the moderate Republicans or business leaders who were usually sympathetic to the GOP. They were not his crowd. He spoke about law and order with a much tougher tone than Nixon or any other Republican. “The first anarchist who picks up a brick should get a bullet in the head,” Wallace snarled.8 He said his campaign would appeal to “the man in the textile mill, this man in the steel mill, this barber, this beautician, the policeman on the beat.”9 He questioned whether there was any real difference between Democrats and Republicans, and because he raised more than $9 million, he was a threat to both parties. Democrats feared he would capture northern votes in traditional Democratic territory; Nixon saw him undercutting his appeal to the restless white base of the Democratic Party.

  THE FALL CAMPAIGNS

  Nixon believed the best way to build a broad electoral coalition of essentially incompatible constituencies was to run a campaign vague on everything but the urgency of not having another Lyndon Johnson in the White House. Throughout the fall, he intentionally avoided any issue that could alienate any faction he might conceivably attract. The 1966 midterms provided him with a useful template for this kind of campaign.

  On Vietnam, Nixon’s primary message was that Johnson had gotten the nation into a huge military mess. He assured voters that he had a plan that would end the war and also preserve America’s strength overseas, but he gave no details of how he would accomplish either goal. To win over working-class northern white voters, he ridiculed those hippies who protested the war, got high on drugs, wore beads and headbands, and practiced free love. He called for a restoration of law and order in the cities and promised to provide federal support to the valiant police who went after the drug dealers and the rioters. He accused Johnson of initiating an inflationary spiral by his pursuit of reckless budgetary policies and by his deception about the costs of the war in Vietnam. Nixon connected these budgetary themes to his discovery of the “forgotten Americans,” who were struggling to support their families while irresponsible college students protested and disorderly city residents rioted. “In the last two years,” he pointed out, “the average American worker has been on a Government-operated treadmill. New taxes and rising prices have more than wiped out all the pay raises he has won since 1965.” He said, “The new taxes on income, requested publicly by this Administration, and the hidden tax of inflation, imposed clandestinely by this Administration, have together left the purchasing power of the American worker below what it was in December of 1965.”10

  Democrats, perfectly capable of understanding what they were hearing with their own ears, accused Nixon of running a campaign on empty platitudes. Humphrey taunted him: “Come out, wherever you are.” Nixon came out by supporting the idea that government could solve some domestic problems—in ways just a little bit different from the ways in which Democrats would solve them.

  Johnson, consumed by his travails in Vietnam, could still find one reason to smile: Nixon rarely targeted the Great Society in his campaign. His message was reorganization and reform rather than elimination. He voiced his support for Medicaid and suggested studies to find ways of putting the program on a sounder financial foundation; in New York and some other states, the costs were rising rapidly as state governments liberalized eligibility rules. He criticized the War on Poverty as wasteful, but he endorsed tax benefits for private businesses that developed plans for training the unemployed, creating new jobs, or participating in efforts to rebuild the cities. On a few occasions, Nixon even called for a bigger federal government. He said he would continue the Head Start program and perhaps even expand it. He said, “Compensatory education is the first step toward bringing equality of education to slum schools. Without it, the children of poverty will never catch up with the children of abundance.”11 He supported Medicare and proposed that seniors be allowed to take a full income tax deduction for their drug and medical expenses. On Social Security, Nixon tried to get ahead of Democrats, who had relied on Congress to raise benefits every two years to keep up with the rising cost of living, by proposing that the program be indexed to inflation so that benefits would rise automatically with consumer prices.

  Humphrey, the former “Happy Warrior,” had nothing at all to be happy about. Nixon’s campaign rolled smoothly through September, and his polls continued to rise. Humphrey’s rallies drew mostly hecklers who attended only to publicly condemn the candidate’s commitment to continue fighting in Vietnam. Shadowed relentlessly by the war, Humphrey could find little time to talk about the bread-and-butter domestic issues that had motivated him for most of his career.

  On September 30, with his campaign almost completely out of gas—and money—Humphrey made a dramatic move to save his candidacy. He announced on a paid national television broadcast that he supported an end to the bombing of North Vietnam, but hedged by adding that if the “government of North Vietnam were to show bad faith, [he] would reserve the right to resume the bombing.”

  Lyndon Johnson now viewed Hubert Humphrey as one more Democrat who didn’t appreciate everything he had done for the party and blamed him for undermining his chances of getting a peace deal in the final months of his presidency, but Johnson’s hurt feelings notwithstanding, the speech seemed to give the campaign some bounce and renewed spirit. When the candidate arrived at a Boston hotel, he recalled, “I found myself surrounded by hundreds of students carrying signs that read, ‘We’re for you, Hubert,’ or simply, ‘Hubert for President.’ This was the same Boston that only a few weeks earlier had been the scene of noisy demonstrators who heckled . . . me.”12 The speech had snatched away from the Republicans their biggest issue, and this enabled Humphrey to turn back to domestic issues, where he was most comfortable. Praising the civil rights accomplishments of the Johnson administration, Humphrey told one crowd in Detroit, “We are the only country on the face of the earth that has ever dared to try to make what we call a biracial, a pluralistic society work. We are going to see whether we can do it in a spirit of community, whether we can do it in a spirit of unity . . . or whether or not it has to be apartheid.”13

  Unions had mobilized against Wallace in battleground states; as the racist dropped precipitously in the polls, Humphrey picked up steam. As Wallace talked louder about law and order, the unions reminded voters of Alabama’s horrible record toward organized labor and of the many benefits already coming to workers through Great Society programs.14 Wallace also stumbled among Democrats and many moderate Republicans on October 3 by naming as his running mate the retired air force general Curtis LeMay, a former commander of the Strategic Air Command, whose view on the war was that the United States should bomb the North Vietnamese “back to the Stone Age.” Even for Democrats who were still on board with the war, this was a bridge too far when it came to winning at any cost.

  Meanwhile, Nixon was having trouble holding his coalition together. Wallace had considerable support in the South, where unions had little infl
uence and open appeals to racist sentiment were received with more enthusiasm. Nixon tried to counteract Wallace by being more vocal in his opposition to busing schoolchildren as a way to integrate schools, but the shift in tone didn’t work. When it came to appealing to racist sentiment in the electorate, Nixon couldn’t compete with Wallace.

  By the end of October, Humphrey had caught up to Nixon in the polls. According to Harris, the gap between them had narrowed; Gallup had reported it down from fifteen points in September to ten in the middle of October to eight points at the end of the month going into the election.15 Many of Nixon’s operatives feared that if Johnson announced a peace agreement in Vietnam, the election would belong to the Democrats.

  On October 31, Johnson announced that he was temporarily halting the bombing as part of ongoing peace negotiations with the North Vietnamese, but on November 2, the South Vietnamese announced they would not participate in any further negotiations. Johnson heard from his intelligence sources that Nixon’s foreign policy advisers, working through third-party channels, had contacted the South Vietnamese and assured them they would get a better deal with Nixon in office. Johnson called Nixon’s actions “despicable” and told Senator Dirksen that it would “rock the nation” if he revealed what had taken place.16 In the end, the president did not reveal what Nixon had done, in large measure because he thought it would dangerously subvert Nixon if he won.