While the election of 1968 occurred as the culmination of perhaps the most singularly aberrant campaign season since 1860, in hindsight, the outcome seems to follow logically from the events that preceded it. The election of Richard Nixon, given the violence and social confusion driving the political currents of the time, in retrospect holds the weight of inevitability. By contrast, the outcome of the Campaign of 1972—one of the biggest landslide victories on record and an unequivocal reaffirmation of an incumbent’s successful administration—seems incongruous with the events that, again in retrospect, define that election. As President Nixon basked in his greatest electoral moment, unknown to the majority of Americans, a simmering scandal was about to break open in such a way that would, within a matter of months, bring the Nixon presidency to an abrupt and unexpected halt. Given the ease of Nixon’s reelection, the Watergate scandal that destroyed his political career is difficult to comprehend.
The first two years of the Nixon administration were buffeted by economic uncertainty and renewed protests over the war in Vietnam, a war that had been expanded across the border into Cambodia, spreading into Laos. The president’s promise to restore a mood of “law and order” throughout the country, and his appeal to the “great silent majority,” had been met with frustration. (The phrase “silent majority” was a variation of Nixon’s “forgotten majority,” so identified in his 1968 campaign; “silent majority” also can be attributed to Spiro Agnew, Nixon’s running mate, during that same campaign—interestingly, the phrase is also used by then senator John F. Kennedy in his Profiles in Courage, a copy of which he presented to Nixon as a gift in 1956; whether or not this influenced Nixon’s use of the phrase is unknown.) The antiwar protests became yet again violent, with the campus shootings of students by national guardsmen at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi. Nixon had promised voters that he had a “secret plan” to end the war in Vietnam, but by 1970, well into Nixon’s presidency, the American public saw no evident end in sight. The economy suffered both unemployment and inflation, or “stagflation,” and the administration seemed wanting for answers. As 1970 rolled into 1971, and as 1971 moved from winter into spring, Nixon’s approval rating dipped below 50 percent for the first time.
After floundering, Nixon finally found his bearings and instituted a set of economic policies that were well received and that coincided (whether or not there is a causal connection is a matter of debate among economists and other scholars) with an economic recovery as the 1972 campaign approached. Additionally, the president’s foreign policy was regarded as the most far-sighted since President Franklin Roosevelt. He had gone to great lengths to relieve tension between the United States and the Soviet Union through the implementation of the policy of détente; and, perhaps still more impressively, he initiated a stunning reconciliation with the People’s Republic of China, a major foreign policy triumph for the old Cold Warrior who had once lambasted President Harry Truman for having “lost China.” His foreign policy was also critical to managing tension in the Middle East, and under the Nixon White House, the prestige of the United States abroad was reasserted in spite of the onus of Vietnam. As the 1972 campaign season unfolded, the president enjoyed approval ratings ranging from around 50 percent in January of that year and climbing to just over 60 percent by mid-spring. Nixon seemed unbeatable, particularly when contrasted with the continuing divisions in the Democratic Party, the shockwaves of the disastrous 1968 campaign.
Why the Nixon administration then chose the “dirty tricks” strategy that led to the Watergate break-in and subsequent cover-up seems all the more puzzling. Some have argued that Nixon had himself been stung by rough treatment in previous campaigns, and, as the argument goes, the source of much of this came from the Kennedy camp in 1960. From that election forward, some have argued, Richard Nixon was resolved to fight dirty. Still others claim that Nixon was this kind of politician all along, and that his moniker “Tricky Dick,” which had been first used against him in 1948, was well deserved and had nothing to do with any reaction to similar dirty tricks by the Kennedys. One thing is for certain: Nixon, who had once been friendly with John Kennedy, had never forgotten his slender loss to JFK in the tough campaign of 1960.
In any event, wishing to maintain total control over his reelection effort, Nixon, even as president, let his own insecurities get the best of him, and so he established the Committee to Re-Elect the President (CREEP) to more closely manage the upcoming campaign. Despite having a huge lead over all potential candidates in all polls, Nixon worried incessantly about the competition and sincerely believed that the Democratic Party was no longer a moderate party, having been captured by the leftists since the 1968 election, perhaps even earlier. To fund the campaign, CREEP raised millions of dollars of illegal campaign contributions from corporations and individuals, and it used some of that money to fund dirty tricks and illegal activities such as the Watergate break-in. In reality, Nixon was so strong that he never needed such cloak-and-dagger methods to defeat his political opponents; more to the point, the Democrats at this time were so divisive they were doing the job of defeating themselves, while Nixon, using the power and prominence of his office, was seen everywhere, from Beijing to Middle America, “looking presidential” and carving a name for himself as the statesman of his generation, his reelection an inevitability.
Thus Nixon won renomination virtually unchallenged. Two candidates from within the GOP—a conservative representative from Ohio, John Ashbrook, who challenged Nixon’s policy of détente; and Representative Pete McCloskey from California, a liberal Republican (by 1972, a dying breed) who ran primarily against the war—opposed Nixon in the primaries, but the president won over 5,300,000 primary votes to fewer than 500,000 for McCloskey and Ashcroft combined. At the convention in Miami, the president and Vice President Agnew were renominated without serious opposition.
The Republican platform praised the accomplishments of the Nixon administration on the domestic and foreign fronts. “Now, four years later,” the platform proclaimed, “a new leadership with new policies and new programs has restored reason and order and hope. No longer buffeted by internal violence and division, we are on course in calmer seas with a sure, steady hand at the helm. A new spirit, buoyant and confident, is on the rise in our land, nourished by the changes we have made.” At the time, it was a credible message. With respect to Vietnam and other foreign policy issues, the platform stressed that the United States had “moved far toward peace: withdrawal of our fighting men from Vietnam, constructive new relationships with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, the nuclear arms race checked, the Mid-East crisis dampened, our alliances revitalized.” The platform declared that the new Nixon Doctrine would hopefully lead “the peace-loving nations to undertake an exhaustive, coordinated analysis of the root causes of war and the most promising paths of peace, so that those causes may in time be removed and the prospects for enduring peace strengthened year by year.” The Republican platform also continued to endorse the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment as it had been doing since 1940, but the political mood was such that intensified efforts in this area was expected of any serious political party or position. On the whole, Nixon looked impossible to beat. He had established himself as a moderate on domestic issues and a visionary in foreign policy. Even before the conventions, he enjoyed support from some Democrats and was well positioned for a major victory—all the more reason to wonder about the events that led to the Watergate scandal.
Once again, the Democrats struggled. The calamitous 1968 Democratic convention and the subsequent defeat of their candidate, the incumbent vice president Hubert Humphrey, had left deep divisions within the Democratic Party. Between 1969 and the beginning of the 1972 presidential campaign, changes in the rules governing the manner in which party delegates were selected shifted the focus to the primaries and significantly increased their importance, signaling the beginning of the end of the convention as a meaningful forum for the actual nomination of presidential candidates (this is not to say that the conventions are without merit; only to say that candidates are now selected prior to the conventions). These rules changes also significantly increased the number of women, African Americans, and other minority voters, raised the number of young people involved in the process, and significantly diminished the role of the old-style “party bosses” that had been central to past nominations. However, this is not to say that, as some have argued, political parties lost their effectiveness. Recently, political scientists Marty Cohen, John Zaller, et al., for example, have closely reexamined what has been called the “end-of-parties” argument in the wake of the strengthened primaries, and in their study, they found that political parties still played the critical role in nominating and directing candidates at all levels, and in particular, at the level of the presidency. The rules had changed, but with those changes, the parties continued to provide a framework and sustain continuity.
Between the end of Election Day 1968 and June 1969, the favorite candidate among the Democrats to challenge Nixon in 1972 was Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, the heir to the legacies of his slain brothers, President John Kennedy and Senator Robert Kennedy, the latter having recently run an inspired campaign in the spring and early summer of 1968 before losing his life to an assassin’s bullet. Ted Kennedy was widely regarded as the best hope for the Democrats in the next election, but all this ended when the senator was involved in an automobile accident that caused the drowning death of a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, a Kennedy loyalist and former worker for Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 campaign. Ted Kennedy’s behavior both before and especially after the accident was called into question by the press, and rumors were circulated about Kennedy’s overall character in the days and weeks that followed. As a result, the senator quietly maintained his distance from any discussion of the presidency, leaving the field once again wide open, at least among Democrats, for a number of competing candidates.
Early in the primary season, Maine senator Edmund Muskie, Humphrey’s running mate in 1968, appeared to be the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. Muskie managed to win the Iowa caucus, with Senator George McGovern, a late candidate for the presidential nomination in 1968, showing a strong second; but in the now ever-critical New Hampshire primary, events turned against Muskie. First, a strange document insulting to Canadians and purportedly written by Muskie, which soon came to be known as the “Canuck Letter,” raised concerns upon its publication in the Manchester Union-Leader. In truth, the letter was a forgery, and it was later revealed that Donald Segretti, a dirty trickster working for the Nixon campaign, was behind it. At the time, however, the letter was attributed to Muskie and caused considerable trouble for his efforts in New Hampshire. Second, and perhaps even more damaging, was Muskie’s public response to allegations that his wife was an alcoholic and given to spout vulgarities. While defending the honor of his wife against the press at a small gathering outdoors during a mild snowfall, Muskie suddenly appeared tearful to those present, his voice cracking, his eyes watering, and his face showing signs of emotional stress. Muskie later claimed that what had appeared to be tears in his eyes was actually caused by the melting snowfall and the cold air, but the impression held firm: Muskie had “cried,” even though by some accounts the evidence was thin at best, and his campaign was now in jeopardy.
That Muskie was a target of CREEP follows from President Nixon’s own fears of the Maine senator, who, after Ted Kennedy (who was now out of the picture, to Nixon’s relief), was the one candidate that the president did not want to face in 1972. CREEP’s dirty tricksters also went after Humphrey and Washington senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, but the damage to Muskie was the most significant. In 1972, if anyone could have challenged Nixon, it was Muskie; but his campaign had been literally sabotaged by the underhanded methods of dirty tricksters on the president’s behalf. Muskie’s collapse in the wake of the scandals caused by the sabotage was a stark and unexpected contrast to Muskie’s calm response to the heated campaign that he experienced as the vice presidential candidate four years earlier; in 1968, he seemed unflappable, but now he appeared to many as fragile. Even though Muskie did actually win the New Hampshire primary with 46 percent of the vote in spite of the “crying” incident, McGovern, who was emerging as his main challenger, did sufficiently well at 37 percent to infuse his campaign with the energy needed to stoke momentum. Humphrey; Alabama governor George Wallace, now back in the Democrats’ fold after running as the American Independent Party candidate in 1968; Minnesota senator Eugene McCarthy, the man who brought down President Lyndon Johnson in 1968; Senator Jackson, known for his past support of the Vietnam War; and Democratic representative Shirley Chisholm of New York, the first African American woman to run for president from within a major party, all participated as candidates within the Democratic primaries, along with a handful of additional candidates.
One week after the New Hampshire primary, Wallace scored an important victory by winning in Florida, taking 42 percent of the vote, far ahead of the rest of the field (Muskie, the erstwhile front-runner, slipped from his New Hampshire victory to a dismal 9 percent—and third place—in Florida). McCarthy scored high in Illinois, with Jackson a distant second; McGovern then won in Wisconsin with a plurality and, more impressively, in Massachusetts with a majority, thus tightening the race. Representative Walter Fauntroy, who ran only in the District of Columbia, winning there with 72 percent of the delegates, became the first African American in American campaign history to win a presidential primary. (Four years earlier, Delegate Channing E. Phillips was given the recently slain Senator Robert Kennedy’s delegates at the Chicago convention, making him the first African American to win nominating votes at a Democratic presidential convention.) Humphrey made it even more interesting, first by taking Pennsylvania with 35 percent of the primary vote (Wallace with 21% and Humphrey and Muskie both around 20%), and then winning two consecutive primaries in Indiana and Ohio, while McGovern maintained a close second (only 1 percent separated Humphrey and McGovern in Ohio). Wallace soundly won the next two primaries in Tennessee and North Carolina, McGovern won convincingly in Nebraska, and Humphrey took West Virginia, the state he lost to John Kennedy in the 1960 primary. With Muskie no longer a factor, the primaries had developed into a three-way race between Humphrey, McGovern, and Wallace (McCarthy’s big win in Illinois proved to be anomalous; he never finished with more than 2% of the vote in any given primary after his 63% in Illinois).
However, as in 1968, the campaign was abruptly changed by another act of violence, this time against Wallace, who was brutally shot five times in an attempted assassination in a Laurel, Maryland, shopping center. Wallace survived the shooting but was sadly left paralyzed, prompting him to eventually withdraw from the race. Nonetheless, he still won the Maryland primary and received another big primary win in Michigan on the same day; but because of the severe wounding from which he never fully recovered (he would remain bound to a wheelchair for the remainder of his life), Wallace’s campaign was over. Wallace’s campaign theme, “Send Them a Message,” appeared to have some traction with angry white voters, especially in the South, who were unlikely to turn to the liberal Humphrey or McGovern and more inclined to support the Republican president before anyone from the Democratic left. After the shooting of Wallace, Senator McGovern managed to win five of the remaining six primaries, beating Humphrey convincingly. Of historical note, New York’s Chisholm won primaries in New Jersey, Louisiana, and Mississippi, making her the first woman and the second African American (after Fauntroy) to have won a presidential primary. Arkansas congressman Wilbur Mills took the Arkansas primary as a favorite son. Eight years earlier, Republican Margaret Chase Smith won a handful of primary votes and was the first woman to receive support for nomination at a major party convention. Chisholm, a woman of high principles who enjoyed a reputation for being “unbought and unbossed,” was actually criticized by the intolerant for having the decency to pay a visit to Wallace, her ideological opposite, while he was in the hospital recovering from his wounds.
Even though Humphrey actually ended the primary season with the largest popular primary vote among all Democrats, with 4,121,375 total votes (or 25.8%) to McGovern’s 4,053,451 (or 25.3%), with Wallace showing at 3,755,424, McGovern succeeded in winning the largest number of primaries (winning 8 contests to 5 for Wallace, 4 for Humphrey, 3 for Chisholm, 2 for Muskie, along with the Iowa caucus, and 1 for Mills) and thereby enjoyed a significant lead in delegates going into the Democratic convention. Humphrey withdrew from the race after the first day of the convention (Muskie withdrew as well, but he had not actively campaigned since that awkward moment in New Hampshire), allowing George McGovern to enjoy a first-ballot victory, taking 1,864 delegates to 525 for Scoop Jackson, 381 for Wallace, and 151 for Chisholm, with the remaining votes distributed across 12 additional individuals. Besides calling for an immediate unconditional withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Vietnam, the Democratic platform included a long list of proposals directed at ending inequality in American society. The platform called for significantly increasing the income tax rate on high-income earners, the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, the end to discrimination against individuals with physical or mental disabilities, a system of universal national health insurance, handgun legislation to end the sale of “Saturday night specials,” the abolition of the draft, universal voter registration by mail, a constitutional amendment to end the Electoral College with the requirement of a runoff election if no candidate received more than 40 percent of the vote, and comprehensive campaign finance reform.
The outcome of the convention was largely the result of a new system, for which McGovern himself was partially responsible, instituting reforms shifting the selection process away from the actual convention to the primaries. Even though primaries had become increasingly important over the decades as a sign of political viability and general appeal, from the beginning of the national nominating conventions in the late 1820s through the recent Campaign of 1968, presidential nominations were mostly controlled by the party leadership at the convention, as well as by the powerful machine bosses, such as Tammany Hall in New York. With the Campaign of 1972, all of that changed, and the McGovern nomination became the first fruit of the new procedure. But many influential delegates who had benefited from the old system felt estranged, overlooked, and in some cases angry, refusing to actively support McGovern in the post-convention phase of the campaign, and some joining the “Democrats for Nixon” movement that drew considerable support from conservative and moderate Democrats. With the convention once again showing divisions within the party, a large field of over seventy names received votes for vice president (including one impish vote for Mao Zedong); but in the end, McGovern’s own preferred choice, liberal Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton, was selected to run on the bottom of the ticket.
But disaster soon befell the McGovern-Eagleton campaign, as it was leaked to the press that Senator Eagleton at one time had received electroshock therapy as a treatment for depression, prompting Eagleton to back out in reaction to concerns about his emotional stability. It was the first time in history that a candidate for either the vice presidency or the presidency was forced to withdraw from the race after having received a party’s official nomination. Perhaps more damaging to the campaign than Eagleton’s medical record was McGovern’s waffling in reaction to the crisis. When the news broke, over 77 percent of Americans polled indicated that Eagleton’s medical record would have no bearing on their vote; and McGovern himself declaimed, with no small degree of hyperbole, that he was behind Eagleton “1,000 percent.” But in a matter of days, McGovern had changed his mind, mostly due to a fixation in the press with Eagleton’s “shock therapy,” a new obsession that the media could not let go and that became increasingly distracting. Realizing the damage to the campaign, Eagleton fell on his sword and took himself out of the picture.
McGovern then tried to convince, in sequence, several prominent Democrats to join his ticket, to no avail. An old Kennedy loyalist, he finally turned once again to what for him was safer and more familiar territory, the Kennedy family, tapping Sergeant Shriver (who was married to Eunice Kennedy Shriver and thus the brother-in-law of Jack, Bobby, and Ted Kennedy) to run for the vice presidency. Shriver had actually at one time been considered as a possible running mate for President Johnson in 1964, but he had demurred so as not to draw away any future political attention that might otherwise be devoted to Bobby Kennedy. Shriver was a well-respected figure throughout the public arena, but the damage done to the campaign by the resignation of Eagleton was difficult to repair. As Nixon grew even stronger, the Democrats continued to lose confidence. The McGovern campaign seems to have unraveled even before it could tightly spool its forces together.
As he had in 1968, Nixon, still shy from the aftereffects of his first debate in the 1960 presidential campaign against JFK, refused to debate McGovern, which also served as part of a larger strategy to deny McGovern a national platform. Nixon’s ad campaign placed a heavy emphasis on his genuine diplomatic achievements, including withdrawing an increasing number of American troops from Vietnam as well as the improved relations with China and the Soviet Union for which he and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, were largely responsible. Nixon argued with conviction that his approach in the war had forced North Vietnam to the bargaining table in Paris. Slogans including “Peace with Honor” and “President Nixon, Now More Than Ever” sought to emphasize the importance of leaving Nixon and his foreign policy team in office. Equally important, the Nixon media campaign used attack ads to sharply criticize McGovern for proposing large reductions in the defense budget.
On Election Day, Nixon received just under 47,200,000 votes, or 60.7 percent of the popular vote, to McGovern’s total of slightly over 29,000,000, or 37.5 percent. The American Independent Party, which ran George Wallace in 1968, received over 1,000,000 votes with its new candidate, California representative John Schmitz, on the ticket; but this time, in terms of percentages, it barely registered. Nixon’s popular-vote landslide—which was and remains the third-highest percentage of the popular vote to date (behind only LBJ in 1964 and FDR in 1936, and slightly ahead of Harding in 1920) and was marked by a difference of 23.2 percent, still the fourth-largest gap between candidates in a presidential election—represented the zenith of his career and an enormous reassertion of the GOP’s newly recovered prominence in the White House. The numbers in the Electoral College were equally staggering: Nixon won 520 electoral votes to a mere 17 for McGovern, and more impressively, he won every state in the country with the lone exception of Massachusetts. It was an Electoral College victory exceeding every prior election except those of Washington and Monroe, and it was easily the most impressive win in the Electoral College since the institution of the modern party system in the late 1820s–early 1830s. This Electoral College landslide would only be surpassed by one other election twelve years later.
However, even before President Nixon had enjoyed this crowning achievement, his Shakespearian downfall had been set in motion by the mysterious June 23 arrest of five burglars at the Watergate Hotel. After the election, the Washington Post, the New York Times, congressional investigations, and the investigation of two Watergate special prosecutors soon uncovered direct White House involvement in the break-in and its cover-up, as well as other illegal campaign operations (which included the unseemly activities of Segretti). These investigations led to the criminal prosecution of a number of high-level officials within the Nixon administration, precipitating a serious constitutional crisis that was without historical precedent. After a long struggle, an embattled, embittered President Nixon was backed into an untenable legal and political corner, and he was forced to submit his resignation on August 9, 1974, thus becoming the first American president to ever resign from office, the final consequence of actions that, when analyzed through the lens of his landslide reelection, seem utterly inexplicable and, for the American people, painfully tragic.
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