Wasn’t that a time? A time to try the soul of man.
—THE WEAVERS
Six years before Richard Milhous Nixon stood on the East Front of the Capitol to raise his hand on January 20, 1969, not one political observer in a thousand would have predicted he would be there taking the oath as the thirty-seventh President of the United States.
As I wrote in The Greatest Comeback, the political resurrection of Richard Nixon had astonished friends as well as enemies. It had seemed miraculous. Defeated by John F. Kennedy in 1960 in one of the closest races in US history, former vice president Nixon, in November 1962, in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis, had been beaten for governor of California by an uncharismatic incumbent named Pat Brown. The morning after, Nixon appeared before the press in Los Angeles and, in the eyes of politicians and journalists alike, committed public political suicide. Exhausted and bitter, Nixon told his tormentors he was through with politics: “Think of all the fun you’ll be missing,” he said. “You don’t have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.”
That weekend, Howard K. Smith anchored The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon, a documentary on ABC that invited Alger Hiss, the Stalinist spy whose treason Nixon had exposed as a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1948, to come spit on Nixon’s grave.
The backlash against Smith and ABC was ferocious. Many, like the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, where I was a new editorial writer, came to Nixon’s defense. But that did not change reality. If Nixon, a former congressman and senator from California, and for eight years Vice President to Dwight Eisenhower, could not beat Pat Brown in his own home state, he was not going to be President. His once-brilliant career, the second-youngest Vice President in history, was over. As a national candidate, Nixon was dead.
How, then, did this two-time loser, an Eisenhower Republican loathed by the liberal establishment and press, maneuver through the rapids of the most revolutionary decade of the twentieth century to become President of the United States? To answer the question, we must revisit the history of that most divisive decade since the Civil War.
The civil rights movement had begun in the mid-1950s, with Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott to desegregate public transit, after which came the national shock of Ike sending troops to Little Rock in 1957 to integrate Central High. It progressed through “sit-ins” at lunch counters and the Freedom Riders in the early 1960s, who sought to desegregate bus travel and bus terminals in the South. Then came the 1963 March on Washington and Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and the Freedom Summer of 1964 to register black voters in Mississippi. That summer the Civil Rights Act was signed by Lyndon Johnson and dedicated to JFK. From 1955 to 1965, America, outside of the South, stood behind the civil rights movement.
But the times they were a-changing. By 1964, Dr. King was being challenged for leadership by Malcolm X, who had split off from the Black Muslims of Elijah Muhammad and would be assassinated in Harlem in early 1965. The Black Power movement arose, and the Black Panthers with their “off the pigs” slogan. Governor George Wallace of Alabama, who stood in the schoolhouse door in Tuscaloosa, and then had stood aside to allow the university to be integrated, had by 1964 become a backlash candidate challenging Lyndon Johnson for the Democratic nomination and tearing up primaries in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Maryland. Black crime had begun to surge, and the black family to disintegrate. Black America and white America were no longer united. In the Watts area of Los Angeles in the summer of 1965 came the worst racial violence in an American city since the New York draft riots of 1863, when President Lincoln had to send in the veterans of Gettysburg. In July 1967, Newark and Detroit exploded. So extensive were the looting, shooting, and arson, the National Guard was called out and the 82nd Airborne sent in.
In the fall of 1962, after I began writing editorials for the Globe, I was urging US courts to cite segregationist Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi for contempt for refusing to admit James Meredith to Ole Miss. By 1965, I was writing editorials urging judges to jail civil rights leaders who were violating court orders and occupying a local bank. Protesters were burning our newspapers in trash baskets outside the Globe and chaining our doors shut.
Then there was Vietnam, the most divisive war since the Civil War. Three weeks before Kennedy’s assassination, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, the security chief, had been ousted in a military coup. While it may not have been part of the CIA-backed plot, the Diem brothers had been executed inside a US-provided armored personnel carrier. Having overthrown an ally, and put the generals in power, America now owned the war.
In August 1964, a US destroyer off the coast of North Vietnam was reportedly attacked by gunboats. To show toughness for the fall campaign, President Johnson asked Congress for authority to wage war on the North. Without a dissent, the House voted him the power. Two senators, Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening, voted no. As the months passed, US troop levels rose steadily, and American dead began to come home, in the tens, then the scores, then the hundreds, every week. By late 1967, with 500,000 US troops in Vietnam and General William Westmoreland requesting 200,000 more, the left wing of the Democratic Party was in open revolt against the President and against the war.
In 1964, the first great wave of baby boomers, the largest generation in US history, arrived on campus. The youth rebellion began at Berkeley that year, when thousands of students surrounded a police car in front of Sproul Hall and held it hostage for thirty hours, demanding control of university policy on free speech, then on filthy speech. Graduate student Mario Savio called on America’s young to throw themselves onto the gears of the machine running the country and shut the system down. For seven years, campuses would be in an upheaval. Classes were disrupted by protesters. University administrators and faculty saw their offices occupied and ransacked. Next came the demonstrations, the civil disobedience, and the riots against the draft and the war, featuring attacks on military offices, the blocking of troop trains, and the burning down of ROTC buildings.
While the civil rights movement was devolving into black revolution, and the war was tearing families, communities, campuses, and country apart, the sexual revolution and drug culture and feminist movement were winning converts and further fragmenting an angry and divided nation.
Where was Nixon, as the social, cultural, moral, and political revolution swept the campuses and country? After his defeat in California, he had packed his family up and moved to New York to practice law with a firm renamed Nixon, Mudge, Rose, Guthrie & Alexander, which occupied four floors at 20 Broad Street, next door to the New York Stock Exchange. Nixon’s apartment was the fifth floor of 810 Fifth Avenue, seven floors below that of Governor Nelson Rockefeller, who shunned Nixon and had the state party do the same.
The contest for the 1964 nomination was between Rockefeller, the leader of the liberal establishment, and Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, the champion of a rising and insurgent conservative movement to which I had belonged since college in the late 1950s.
On November 22, 1963, the course of American history changed. That Friday, as I was putting the finishing edits on a weekend feature of two thousand words contending that Goldwater would be the nominee and stood a good chance of becoming president, a bulletin came over the Associated Press wire: shots had been fired at the presidential motorcade in Dallas. Within an hour came word that President Kennedy was dead.
Jack Kennedy and Barry Goldwater, both veterans of World War II, had entered the Senate the same day in 1953, and were friends as well as colleagues. But when Lyndon Johnson took the oath on Air Force One, any hope Goldwater had of becoming president was gone. America was not going to change presidents again in eleven months. Moreover, the media swiftly indicted Dallas as the “City of Hate” and the conservative movement for having created the “atmosphere” in which JFK had been murdered. That the assassin was a self-professed Marxist who had defected to the Soviet Union, married a Russian woman, and returned to propagandize for Fidel Castro did not matter. Nor did it matter that Oswald had tried to assassinate right-wing General Edwin Walker. While some in the press liked Goldwater personally, the conservative movement he was leading was seen by many among the elites as quasi-fascist. Books were published warning of the “Danger on the Right” and documentaries run about the “Thunder on the Right.”
Less than four months after Kennedy’s burial at Arlington National Cemetery came the Republican primary in New Hampshire. Goldwater, the favorite, lost badly to a write-in campaign on behalf of Henry Cabot Lodge, Nixon’s running mate in 1960, whom JFK had named US ambassador to South Vietnam. Goldwater got 22 percent to Lodge’s 36. But he defeated his principal rival, Rockefeller. Nixon had won a respectable 17 percent as a write-in.
The Nixon and Lodge efforts soon fizzled as the campaign continued on to its climax in California. There, the birth of Rockefeller’s son, to the woman for whom he had divorced his wife, proved disastrous. Only days later, Goldwater won the primary, and the nomination. Watching into the early hours, I saw this victory as historic. Every conservative sensed that the fate of our cause depended on Goldwater’s winning California, if we were ever to overthrow the establishment that had dictated Republican nominees or had exercised veto power over them for decades.
After a clumsy attempt at the Cleveland Governors Conference that June to persuade Governor George Romney of Michigan to challenge Goldwater, Nixon made perhaps the crucial decision that would lead to his becoming President of the United States. He called Goldwater and offered, as 1960 nominee and thus titular leader of the party, to endorse him in a prime-time convention speech, to call on Republicans to unite behind him, and to travel the country—in a campaign Nixon knew would end in disaster. As of that June, Goldwater was 59 points behind LBJ in the Gallup poll.
Nixon made good on his commitment. In a speech that had the conservative faithful at the Cow Palace in San Francisco on their feet, Nixon declaimed, “Before this convention, we were Goldwater Republicans, Rockefeller Republicans, Scranton Republicans, Lodge Republicans, but now that this convention has met and made its decision, we are Republicans, period, working for Barry Goldwater.”
Nixon introduced the nominee as “Mr. Conservative” and “Mr. Republican…the man who, after the greatest campaign in history, will be Mr. President.” Goldwater then proceeded to redivide the convention, declaring, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Still, Nixon stayed true to his promise. He campaigned harder for the party nominee, said some, than did the nominee himself.
On November 3, 1964, the party was staring at a massacre unlike any seen since Alf Landon was wiped out by FDR in 1936. Party strength had been cut to less than a third of the House, less than a third of the Senate, and seventeen governors. Down-ballot losses in statewide offices and state legislatures were nothing short of a bloodbath. Lyndon Johnson, with 295 Democrats in the House and 68 in the Senate, moved swiftly to erect his Great Society, pass Medicare and Medicaid, and enact the Voting Rights Act after “Bloody Sunday” at the Selma bridge. But, fatally for him, he began to take us deeper into the war in Southeast Asia. In March 1965, US Marines went ashore at Danang. The sixties had begun.
As of that November, in 1964, Nixon was not only a two-time loser. He had been chief surrogate for a nominee who had split his party and led it to its worst debacle in decades. Yet, paradoxically, Richard Nixon was a new man. He had been a portrait in loyalty when others abandoned Goldwater. He wore battle stars in the first great ideological clash of the decade. He had been at that Pickett’s Charge of the American right and earned the gratitude of Goldwater and his support if Nixon chose to run in 1968. He had money in the bank with conservatives who had been suspicious of him. And the 1968 presidential field had been cleared of any rival to his right. “Winning by losing” is a concept the right understands. After losing two elections and being beside Goldwater in the worst party defeat in three decades, Richard Nixon was sitting on a lofty limb in what he liked to call “the catbird seat.”
I saw this, too, from my perch at the Globe-Democrat, where I had begun writing editorials at twenty-three in the summer of 1962, two months out of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. But while I had a secure job, good income, and excellent prospects, I was a spectator in that turbulent decade, and hungered to be in on the action.
In 1963, I had scheduled my vacation to coincide with the March on Washington and was on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, yards from Dr. King, when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. In July 1964, I had driven down to Neshoba County, Mississippi, before the bodies of the civil rights workers Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were retrieved from the earthen dam. I saw the American flag turned upside down at half-mast in Meridian, Mississippi, the day the Civil Rights Act became law. I drove to Birmingham to inspect the 16th St. Baptist Church, where the four black girls had been blown to bits by the Klan on a Sunday morning, and to the Anniston, Alabama, bus station, where the Freedom Riders had been beaten up. With my friend, future Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Denny Walsh, I would go out at night to cover radicals of the left and the right. By 1965, I was defending US war policy in Vietnam in raucous teach-ins at Washington University, where I discovered an ability to handle hostile questions and rouse crowds, especially unfriendly ones. But I was still a man of words, not a man of action, and ruefully agreed with that veteran of Antietam, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., that “it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived.”
My assessment in the aftermath of 1964 was that the nomination in 1968 would come down to Nixon or Romney and that, since Nixon had stood by Goldwater and his depth on foreign policy, my central concern, was far greater, I would try to enlist in his campaign. Opportunity appeared when Nixon was invited to fill in for Senator Everett Dirksen at a speech in Belleville, Illinois, across the river from St. Louis. An after party was to be held at the home of Don Hesse, the Globe cartoonist, a friend of Nixon. Don was happy to invite me and to introduce me to the former vice president.
When we met in the kitchen of Hesse’s home, it was not our first encounter. I related to Nixon how, ten years before, I had been the last one on the caddie log at Burning Tree when his golf bag was put out, and he and I had walked eighteen holes together. To show I was not faking this, I dropped the name of the golf pro and the assistant pro at Burning Tree and described his plaid bag. “If you are going to run in 1968,” I told Nixon, “I’d like to get aboard early.” Nixon was impressed. Hesse told me that in the hour-long ride to the Lambert–St. Louis airport the next morning, Nixon talked only of me.
In two weeks I was in his office at 20 Broad, where we talked from 3 to 6 p.m. Sitting formally at his desk, in a suit and tie, Nixon jumped from issue to issue. He was conducting an examination of what I knew and what I believed, but it was not a difficult exam. As we had only two editorial writers at the Globe, there was no subject that he raised on which I had not written. His concern was my conservatism. “You’re not as far right as Buckley, are you?” he asked. “I’m a great admirer of Bill Buckley,” I replied. Nixon was then in a nasty dispute with National Review over a comment he made in private, that “the Buckleyites are more dangerous than the Birchers.”
After the three hours, Nixon invited me to come work for him, for a year, at a salary of $13,500, half again what I was earning. He called my publisher, Richard H. Amberg, to ask if he would grant me a year’s leave. Amberg agreed. My eight and a half years as one of the aides closest to that most controversial politician and president of the twentieth century had begun.
Nixon had told me he would not decide about 1968 until after the returns from 1966 were in, and he would not run, unless the party made a dramatic comeback. For, as of December 1965, the GOP appeared dead. Political observers were writing it off for a generation. However, in taking that leave from the Globe, I had my own motives and ambitions. I thought Nixon, though written off as a loser, could be the next president. I wanted to help him reach that goal, and then to go into his White House and to be to President Nixon what Ted Sorensen had been to President Kennedy.
When I signed on, I had just turned twenty-seven. And when I arrived in late January 1966, Nixon put me in an office, right next to his corner office. My designated assignment was to do research for his speeches and articles, help him write a once-a-month column, and support the effort he planned that fall in the congressional elections. In my small office, along with the files, were two others: Rose Mary Woods, Nixon’s secretary since the Hiss case, and a lady who helped with the secretarial duties and identified herself to callers as “Miss Ryan.” Miss Ryan was Thelma Ryan (“Pat”) Nixon, the future First Lady of the United States, from whom I used to bum cigarettes.
Soon, every day when Nixon came to his office he would call me in to talk, often for hours. He was consumed with politics, policy, personalities, and had no other full-time aide. Back at my desk, I would mark up magazine articles and newspapers, write memos he would stuff in his briefcase and take home, and make calls. Often we would spend so much time in his office I had to stay late into the night to get my assignments done. As Nixon came to trust me, he opened up. About the profession that was providing him a munificent income, he said, “If I had to practice law for the rest of my life, I would be mentally dead in two years, and physically dead in four.” Nixon was in an upholstered penalty box, desperate to get back out on the ice.
He quizzed me constantly on what conservatives believed and why. While he wanted to keep a respectable distance—to be with them, but not of them—he understood the new power relationships in the party. As I told him, the Rockefeller wing may have been necessary to appease in 1960, but the new imperative was to unite the Republican centrists he represented with the conservatives who had captured the nomination for Goldwater. These forces together could be invincible. You did not need the establishment to win the nomination. The Goldwater legions had shown it to be hollow at its core. As for Rockefeller, Romney, and Scranton, they were “all chiefs and no Indians.”
Before the 1966 campaign began, Nixon predicted Republicans would gain forty seats in the House, half a dozen governors, three senators, and hundreds of state legislators—an historic comeback after the rout of 1964.
That fall, we traveled to thirty-five states in six weeks. When the returns came in on the night of November 8, Nixon had underestimated the victory. The Republicans had added 47 House seats, 8 governors, 3 senators, and 540 state legislators. Governors Rockefeller and Romney had won reelection, and ex-Hollywood star Ronald Reagan had been elected governor of California by a million votes, defeating Pat Brown.
This was the second critical decision that resulted in Richard Nixon’s nomination in 1968. In 1966, he had shoved his whole stack in, declared that Republicans would win in a great comeback, then gone out and campaigned across the country, and delivered it. Nixon the loser had led his party to a smashing victory. Even hostile reporters were impressed and, seeing Nixon as again a contender, began trooping to the law offices at 20 Broad to interview the former vice president.
At Nixon, Mudge, it was now a given that Nixon would run. Yet, in a stunning move, the Sunday before the election of 1966, Nixon announced a six-month “holiday” from politics. The reasons: After a rough campaign at the end of which he had questioned Johnson’s strategy in Vietnam, to which LBJ had responded in a tirade in an election eve press conference, Nixon felt he had won the face-off with the President and should move out of the line of fire. He had no desire to exhaust himself on the Lincoln Day dinner circuit, when the new year could be spent preparing for 1968 by studying, writing, traveling. Most crucially, Nixon had concluded that his main rival, Romney, who had taken the lead in the polls in November 1966, over all Republican rivals and the President as well, might not survive the Iroquois gauntlet that is a presidential campaign. With a malevolent media in mind, Nixon told me of Romney, “Let them chew on him for a little while.”
This was the third decision that would prove critical. Nixon stepped out of the public eye and let the party, press, and country see up close his rival. Nixon was betting that Romney, though a famed auto executive at American Motors who had modernized the Nash Rambler, a governor who had carried Michigan three times, and who looked more like a president than any man in politics, could not go the fifteen rounds.
In March, April, May, and June 1967, Nixon took four long trips abroad to burnish his foreign policy credentials and bring himself up to date on world affairs. He believed his knowledge and experience in foreign policy, the ascendant issue, would prove his trump card. For by now the Soviet Union was reaching for strategic parity in nuclear missiles with the United States, and the war in Vietnam was polarizing the nation.
On his trip to Africa and the Middle East, Nixon took me as his lone aide. The morning we arrived at our first stop in Morocco, Ambassador Henry Tasca came aboard our plane to tell us that war had broken out, that Israel had launched a surprise attack that destroyed Egypt’s air force on the ground, that Arab nations were accusing the United States of complicity in the Israeli attack.
With Arab nations breaking relations, and our visits canceled, Nixon and I flew to Paris, where President De Gaulle, who had ordered NATO to move its headquarters out of France, invited him to the Élysée Palace. Our new schedule took us to London, Germany, over Libya to Ethiopia and half a dozen nations of sub-Saharan Africa, back to London, then to Greece and Israel, where Israelis were exultant over their victory in the Six-Day War. A military aide told us that, when our four-seat spotter plane flew down from the Golan and Galilee to Jericho, then up to Jerusalem, we were the first Westerners to fly an Israeli aircraft into the Holy City from the east. Beneath me, I could see the burnt-out remnants of the Arab Legion, massacred by the Israeli air force on the open road. Meetings with Generals Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, and former prime minister David ben Gurion suggested the Israelis, too, had begun to see Nixon as potentially the next President of the United States.
When Nixon returned from his trips, the election of 1968 was almost upon us. Nixon now made his fourth crucial decision. To rid himself of the loser tag, he would enter all the contested primaries and take on all comers. Nixon had made a deal with Governor Reagan to let him have the first crack at defeating the establishment candidate, Governor Romney, who had slipped in the polls and shown himself inept in handling issues. At summer’s end, Romney made an historic gaffe. He told a TV interviewer that, during a recent visit to Vietnam, he had been “brainwashed” by US diplomats and the military.
Watching Romney spinning his wheels in the snows of New Hampshire, Nixon held off declaring his candidacy until the final day for filing. On our night flight to Boston on January 31, 1968, we got word of communist attacks across South Vietnam. The Tet Offensive, which would cost 1,000 US dead and 6,000 wounded and cause Walter Cronkite to call the war unwinnable, was under way. By the end of February, Romney had fallen so far behind in private polls that he dropped out and quit the race rather than suffer a humiliating defeat by Nixon on March 12.
Nixon won more votes than all the other candidates of both parties combined. But Senator Eugene McCarthy, an antiwar candidate, stunned the nation by winning 42 percent of the Democratic vote. Though LBJ’s name was not on the ballot, he had won New Hampshire as a write-in candidate. Yet his victory was portrayed as a crushing defeat.
There followed what came to be called “Crazy March.” Four days after McCarthy’s moral victory, Bobby Kennedy declared for president in the Senate Caucus Room, where his brother had declared eight years before. Days later, Governor Nelson Rockefeller announced to a shocked press and TV audience that he would not be a candidate, leaving his chief booster, Governor Spiro Agnew of Maryland, sitting in front of a TV with a host of reporters, egg all over his face, as no one had told him Rockefeller was not running.
On March 31, Nixon, campaigning that Sunday in Wisconsin, had me wait in his car on the tarmac at the private terminal at New York’s LaGuardia Airport, to brief him on what the President said in his speech on Vietnam that night. Before Nixon’s plane landed, Lyndon Johnson stunned the nation by declaring he would not be a candidate for reelection. I had to run to Nixon’s plane to get aboard ahead of the press and tell him of LBJ’s momentous decision.
Romney was out, Rockefeller was out, the President was out. Bobby Kennedy was in. Vice President Hubert Humphrey was jumping in. George Wallace was preparing a third-party run with the hope of throwing the election into the House of Representatives and trading his leverage there to negotiate an end to federal pressure to integrate the South.
On April 2, Nixon and McCarthy swept their primaries in Wisconsin. Two days later, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. Riots erupted in a hundred cities. National Guard and US Army troops patrolled the nation’s capital to stop the arson, looting, and shooting. Marines manned machine guns on the Capitol steps. America appeared to be coming apart. Rockefeller then entered the race, after the filing deadlines for the last primary had passed, for he knew Nixon was invincible among the party rank and file. The Republican Party was now, again, a Nixon party.
Nixon swept Oregon on May 28 with 70 percent, while Reagan, whose agents were active in the state and airing a biographical film on television, got 22 percent. Rockefeller got 5 percent. McCarthy defeated Senator Kennedy in Oregon, as Bobby’s campaign had been badly damaged by revelations that, as attorney general, he had approved FBI wiretaps on the now-martyred Dr. King.
I watched from a few feet away as the first Kennedy to lose a primary or election graciously congratulated Senator McCarthy at the Benson Hotel in Portland. A week later, around 3 a.m., I phoned Nixon from my apartment to tell him Bobby Kennedy had been shot in a Los Angeles hotel kitchen after winning the California primary. Nixon’s daughter, Julie, and future son-in-law, David Eisenhower, watching as the returns came in, had already awakened him.
An effort was mounted at Miami Beach by the Rockefeller and Reagan forces to deny Nixon nomination on the first ballot and break the convention open. But our support held. The reasons: Nixon’s sweep of all the contested primaries gave him a moral claim on the nomination. He had a lock on the conservative leadership of the party: Goldwater, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and Senator John Tower of Texas. His base within the party for which no Republican in the postwar era had sacrificed more was unshakable.
I asked Nixon to send me to the Democratic convention in Chicago, while he stayed in Key Biscayne. I had a room at the “Comrade Hilton” on Michigan Avenue, across from Grant Park, where radicals gathered to chant obscenities about Mayor Richard J. Daley, Vice President Humphrey, and Lyndon Johnson. That August evening when Chicago’s finest marched down Balbo to Michigan, and then charged through Grant Park delivering street justice to those who had been taunting and cursing and calling them pigs, Norman Mailer and I were observing from the nineteenth floor. Below us, the Democratic Party of FDR, JFK, and LBJ was coming apart. Having been down in Grant Park and gotten a taste of the abuse, I was for the home team. Nixon, watching on TV, would call several times a night to ask what was going on. He was as riveted as was I by the history unfolding in the streets of Chicago right in front of me.
Like an NFL game, the fall election was broken into halves. The first five weeks after he had emerged as the Democratic nominee from the most divisive convention in the twentieth century, Humphrey was tormented and harassed by antiwar protesters at every stop. Their chant to shout him down and drown him out was “Dump the Hump!” But on September 30, 1968, Humphrey delivered his Salt Lake City speech, breaking with the President and calling for a halt to all US bombing of North Vietnam. When Humphrey gave that speech and joined the doves on the war, he was at 28 percent in the Gallup poll, 15 points behind Nixon, and only 7 points ahead of Wallace.
Humphrey began ascending week by week. By the final week, when Lyndon Johnson declared a bombing halt, a breakthrough in peace talks appeared imminent. Humphrey had tied Nixon and, in one Lou Harris poll, had moved three points ahead. But when the Saigon government announced that it had not signed on to the deal and would not be going into the negotiations, Johnson’s peace initiative collapsed. Many Democrats believe Nixon aides torpedoed the peace talks by offering President Thieu a better deal, if he would declare he would not go to Paris. But Thieu was not naive. He did not need to be told that Nixon was more committed to an honorable outcome of the war than Humphrey, who had just promised an unconditional halt to the bombing of the North and had just joined the “Peace, Now!” camp.
On November 4, after two two-hour telethons Monday night, where I rewrote questions from callers across the country that Nixon answered, we flew from Los Angeles to New York, while the nation voted beneath us. When we got to the Waldorf-Astoria, we learned it would be a long night. Not until Wednesday morning did all three networks call it for Nixon. Humphrey was half a million votes behind in the raw vote total. His only hope was that Wallace would win enough states to deny Nixon the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency, and throw the election into the Democratic House, which would name Humphrey president. Wallace won five states of the Deep South, not enough. Richard Nixon was the thirty-seventh President of the United States.