George Wallace arrived in Chicago late in the morning of September 30, 1968. From the airport his motorcade raced downtown, where his staffers had a sleek open-topped limousine waiting for him, perfect for a brilliant autumn day. He climbed into the back, planted himself between the driver and passenger seats, and braced for the car to start moving. It had been barely a month since the mayhem at the Democratic National Convention: masses of protesters in the park along the lake; a confrontation in front of the nominee’s hotel, the Chicago police wading into the throng, nightsticks drawn; brutality on Michigan Avenue. Now Wallace was ready to ride down State Street, two blocks to the west, waving to the 50,000 people who’d come out to catch a glimpse of him as he rolled by.
By all rights his political career should have been over after the Birmingham church bombing in September 1963, when Time put his scowling profile on its cover, superimposed over one of the church’s shattered stained-glass windows. Or in March 1965, when state troopers under his command charged up the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Or in August of that year, when the attorney general used the power vested in him by the newly passed Voting Rights Act to send federal officials to Alabama to register what would turn out to be 100,000 African American voters. Or in the gubernatorial election of 1966, when state law prohibited him from seeking a second term, and rather than stepping aside he arranged for his wife Lurleen to run in his place, though she was dying of cancer.
But Birmingham didn’t ruin him. After Selma his support in the white South spiked. He shrugged off the federal registrars by adding 110,000 white voters to the rolls. And in November 1966 Lurleen Wallace won the governorship in a landslide. It was only the beginning, warned one of Alabama’s rare white progressives. “I know you think I’m crazy when I say he expects to be president,” she wrote a colleague. “But he actually does. He . . . is going to arouse hatred all over the whole country, and then pose as their Savior.”1 She had it just right. On the day Lurleen took the oath of office, January 16, 1967, her husband’s most devoted supporters met at a Montgomery, Alabama, country club to begin planning his campaign for the White House. This time he wouldn’t dabble in the Democratic primaries, as he had in 1964. He’d form his own party, run as he wanted to run, on a slogan they carried over from his first venture north. In 1968 George Wallace would stand up for America.
When the State Street parade was done he held a news conference for the crush of reporters who’d trailed him into Chicago. Then his motorcade was on the road again, heading west, past the neighborhood where Martin Luther King had lived during his 1966 crusade, through the bungalow belt that had tried to beat his protests back, to the only rally of the day, an outdoor event less than a block beyond the city limits, on the far side of the line King hadn’t dared to cross. Of course Wallace would cross it. In the great sprawl of a city it was the most obvious place for him to be.
There were 8,000 people waiting to hear him, working-class folks mostly, a fair share of them from the giant General Electric plant down the street. He gave them his stump speech, a slashing attack on civil rights agitators and welfare cheats, radical longhairs and “silver-spooned” draft dodgers, closet Communists, government bureaucrats, “and some of these newspaper editors that look down their nose at every workingman . . . in the United States and calls them a group of rednecks or a group of punks because we want to defend America.” That’s exactly what he was going to do when he was president, he told them. Defend decent Americans’ right to send their kids to the schools of their choice rather than have judges telling them where they had to go; their right to keep their tax dollars at home rather than have them shipped off to Ghana or Guinea or some other godforsaken place in the name of foreign aid; their right to be free of marches and riots and the crime liberals weren’t willing to control; their right to live in neighborhoods filled with people like themselves because in America “a man’s home is still his castle,” no matter what Washington said.
“As he spoke the . . . crowd rocked with him,” wrote the veteran reporter Theodore White, a portion of it with the rage Wallace unleashed—around the press pen swirled racial slurs and threats of violence—the balance with raw political passion. “He was saying what was on their minds,” White decided, “saying it like it is, saying it in the way they said it to each other in the bars.”2 And they loved him for it, as Wallace knew they would, not just in Montgomery or Selma or the Alabama countryside but in the streets of Cicero, in the final weeks of an election year already drenched in bitterness and blood.
Gaping Wounds
BY THE AUTUMN of 1967 Lyndon Johnson had been through ten election campaigns, all but one a victory, with the most recent of mammoth proportions. That left him one last race to run. If he were reelected in 1968, as incumbent presidents generally were, he’d have four more years to extend the gains his sweeping reforms had secured—in the past two years alone the nation’s poverty rate had fallen by two points, the African American rate by seven—to find a way out of the war in Vietnam, and to bind the nation’s wounds. Then, in January 1973, after forty years in Washington, he’d hand the Oval Office to his successor and head back to his ranch, his place in history secured.
That was the plan, at least. The polls complicated the calculations. In June 1967, 52 percent of Americans approved of Johnson’s performance as president. After Newark, Detroit, and another summer’s violence in Vietnam, his approval rating tumbled to 38 percent, the lowest level recorded since 1952, when the public turned against Harry Truman’s handling of the Korean War. LBJ was too practical a politician not to face the truth the numbers made plain. He could still win in 1968, but he was heading into his final campaign a far more wounded candidate than he had ever been before.
The Republicans certainly smelled blood. In 1964 the party’s conservative wing had led it to crushing defeat. This time, its moderates were determined to grab hold of the nomination as quickly as they could. For a while in the autumn of 1967 the power brokers flirted with Michigan governor George Romney, until he showed an unsettling tendency to conduct his campaign with an openness and honesty they thought naive. So they began moving—slowly but inexorably—toward a man who wouldn’t make the same mistake.
Richard Nixon had followed his razor-thin loss to John Kennedy in 1960 with a disastrous run for the governorship of California in 1962. In the postelection humiliation he let the public see the demons he’d tried to hide with a surly, self-pitying press conference that ended with his declaring that he was done with politics. The press took him at his word. The next week ABC News ran a half-hour report subtly titled, “The Political Obituary of Richard M. Nixon.”3 A couple of his longtime supporters duly appeared. But the show’s star turn went to his most famous target, Alger Hiss, who calmly lacerated Nixon for the ruthless red-baiting he’d used to launch himself up the Republican ranks in the late 1940s: another reminder that now that his career was over there was no need to mourn it.
But Nixon wasn’t done. Over the next five years he worked his way back to prominence by methodically remaking his brand. Away went the sullen loser of 1960 and 1962. In his place rose Nixon the party loyalist, crisscrossing the country in the elections of 1964 and 1966 to support other Republicans, raising them money, speaking on their behalf, piling up debts they’d have to repay. Away went Hiss’s self-promoting McCarthyite, replaced by Nixon the statesman, writing about building ties to China in the prestigious pages of Foreign Affairs. Most importantly, away went the brooding loner who saw himself surrounded by enemies, replaced by a “New Nixon,” steady, sober, and mature; his demons exorcised by the former advertising men to whom he’d entrusted his image.
His remade reputation slotted perfectly into the race he planned to run. Teddy White saw the essence of it in a February 1968 meet-and-greet in Manchester, New Hampshire, when he noticed how many people in the crowd were wearing “Ike and Dick” buttons from 1952. They were “mementos of a safer past, of the promise and then the delivery of tranquility,” he wrote. “There is a nostalgia here, a reservoir of affection for [Nixon], for the Party, for his inheritance from Eisenhower.”4 That’s what the New Nixon wanted to be: Ike’s heir, the candidate of all those middling Americans who wanted to re-create the sense of security that the ’60s had stripped away.
From that premise he and his handlers prepared their pitch. On Vietnam he drew the connection to Ike as tightly as he could. He’d end Johnson’s mismanaged war, his stock speech promised, as he and Eisenhower had ended Truman’s Korean debacle, with a quick and honorable peace. For his domestic agenda he combined Ike’s commitment to preserving the Democrats’ popular programs—no one had to fear Nixon dismantling Medicare—with a pledge to restore law and order through the decisive leadership that LBJ clearly couldn’t provide. Precisely what form that leadership might take he didn’t say, because as every ad man knew, a product’s packaging was far more important than the list of ingredients on the side of the box.
George Wallace already had his image honed. What he needed was access. After its country club meeting in January 1967 his team set out to get their newly created American Independent Party onto the 1968 presidential ballot in fifty states, a prerequisite for a campaign premised on the national appeal of Wallace’s racial populism. It was painstaking work, made more difficult by the party’s lack of structure, a network of members it could call on, and even a slate of candidates for Congress: it was purely a vehicle for Wallace’s race, run from a suite of offices outside of Montgomery. But one by one the states fell into line, won over by Wallace’s relentless campaigning among “the little people”—the white waitresses, machinists, cops, and cabbies—whose votes he planned to claim.5 When California’s officials announced that he’d qualified there, on January 2, 1968, the most difficult part of the job was done.
While Wallace mobilized, the Democrats divided. As LBJ struggled through the summer of 1967, a tiny cadre of youngish liberals launched a campaign to “dump Johnson” from the ticket in 1968 and put in his place an anti-war candidate. At first it seemed a ludicrous idea: not since 1896 had a sitting president been denied his party’s nomination, in large part because the nominating system discouraged insurgencies. There were primaries, obviously, but they were showcases through which candidates could demonstrate their electability to the power brokers who would choose the nominee at the party’s convention. And power brokers weren’t generally given to turning their backs on incumbent presidents. But the more they talked to their fellow liberals, the greater the cadre’s confidence grew. “We can do it,” the group’s leading figure, thirty-eight-year-old Allard Lowenstein, told his colleagues. “No one wants [Johnson] out there and all that we have to do is have someone say it. Like, ‘The emperor has no clothes.’ There’s a movement inside the party that’s dying for leadership.”6
To move beyond talk, though, the insurgents had to find a candidate willing to challenge LBJ. They started with the obvious choice. Since his March speech on the Senate floor, Robert Kennedy had come to be seen as one of the nation’s leading doves. He was undoubtedly its most electable: asked by pollsters whom they preferred to be the Democratic nominee in 1968, voters favored RFK over LBJ by twenty points. When Lowenstein raised the possibility of his running against Johnson as an anti-war candidate in the primaries, Kennedy gave him a hearing. But in the end he wasn’t convinced that LBJ could be toppled. So Lowenstein had to turn elsewhere. He tried the Senate’s other leading doves, South Dakota’s George McGovern, Idaho’s Frank Church, Oregon’s Wayne Morse, piling up rejections as he went. Finally he reached the senior senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy. Arrogant, acerbic, and unremittingly judgmental—before entering politics he’d been a college professor—he wasn’t an easy man to love. Nor could he give the insurgency the cachet it needed, not when 58 percent of Americans had no clue who he was, much less what he stood for. But he was willing to run, and Lowenstein didn’t have any other options. McCarthy declared his candidacy on November 30, 1967, three and a half months before the election’s first primary, in New Hampshire, and almost nine months before the convention, set for Chicago at the end of August 1968.
Through the rest of the year and into the next the candidates did what they could to build their campaigns’ momentum, Nixon moving methodically through the thoroughly controlled events his handlers had scheduled; Wallace firing up his base across the South, an emaciated Lurleen at his side for his most important appearances; McCarthy plodding around New Hampshire giving lackluster speeches; Johnson hunkered down in the White House, watching his opponents run. That’s where he was on the afternoon of January 29, 1968—early the next morning in Vietnam—when the first bulletins came in from Saigon.
For months military intelligence had been picking up signs that the North Vietnamese were preparing for a major offensive in South Vietnam. But no one in the American command had expected it to start in the middle of a weeklong cease-fire meant to give Vietnam’s beleaguered people the chance to celebrate Tet—the New Year holiday—in peace. Nor had anyone anticipated an assault on such a massive scale. It started at midnight on January 30 with attacks on eight towns along the coast. The following night some 80,000 troops from the National Liberation Front and the North Vietnamese army struck almost every major city and other strategic sites in the South. By dawn on the 31st they’d pushed deep into the ancient capital of Hue, onto the US air base at Tan Son Nhut, across the Mekong Delta, even onto the grounds of the US embassy in central Saigon, in a symbolic assault on American soil.
Analysts would later say that the furious counterattack by the United States turned North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive into a rout. But that wasn’t clear at the time. Some of the NLF’s most audacious advances quickly crumbled: the marines reclaimed the embassy compound six hours after its walls had been breached. In much of the South, though, American forces met fierce resistance. It took twelve days of street fighting to drive the NLF out of Saigon’s Cholon district. The battle for Hue stretched over a month. And in Khe Sanh, up near the Laotian border, 6,000 American and South Vietnamese troops endured week after week of a siege that at times bore an alarming resemblance to the French catastrophe at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. In the worst of the fighting the NLF and the North Vietnamese suffered devastating losses. They also inflicted them. In the first four weeks after the offensive began, 2,124 Americans were killed in action, 200 more than in all of 1965.
From the killing fields the conflict swept across the United States. It burst into public view through the evening news’s Technicolor footage of the combat’s carnage, a month’s worth of mangled bodies and burning villages to share over supper. It also roiled through Washington. Johnson’s liberal critics seized on the violence as proof that the war wasn’t winnable and therefore had to be ended by negotiations, while the Right hammered away at his refusal to unleash the full force of American power and thus bring the war to a quick conclusion. The liberals had the more powerful voices, the Right the numbers: according to a mid-February Gallup poll 61 percent of Americans wanted the United States to escalate the fighting, almost three times the number who wanted to scale it back. Johnson tried to fend them off with assurances that all was well; the Communists’ offensive had been “a complete failure,” he told a packed press conference four days after the initial assault.7 But he didn’t believe it. Night after night he sat in the Situation Room poring over battle reports, sometimes to 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., for whatever reassurance he might find there.
Then the crisis intensified. It began on February 27, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff formally requested that the president increase the American military commitment to Vietnam by 40 percent, from the half million men already in-country to 700,000. It was a power play, the Joint Chiefs’ attempt to trade on LBJ’s fear of failure to dramatically increase the number of troops at their disposal, and it triggered a furious debate that raged for twelve days inside the White House. The military’s supporters argued that the war’s success hinged on the request, their opponents that the generals couldn’t ensure that such a massive call-up would tip the war’s balance, while there was no doubt that it would carry enormous costs, both economic and political. Johnson seemed genuinely torn, so unsure what to do that he ordered his speechwriter to prepare two major addresses to the nation, one announcing the escalation the military wanted, the other rejecting it.
On the thirteenth day, Sunday, March 10, the ground abruptly shifted. That morning the New York Times ran a front-page story detailing the Joint Chiefs’ proposal, apparently leaked by its opponents in hopes of building pressure against it. That it did. “This is the hour to decide whether it is futile to destroy Vietnam in an effort to save it,” NBC News’s anchorman told his audience on Sunday evening. The next morning the Times’s editorial board called the possibility of sending so many more men into Vietnam “a suicidal escalation.” In Congress the doves spent Monday in open revolt. Giving in to the generals’ request would be “nothing short of disastrous,” insisted Arkansas’ J. William Fulbright, while Oregon’s Wayne Morse warned of “an incipient uprising in this country in opposition to this war—and it’s going to get worse.”8 But the pivotal response came the following day, Tuesday, March 12, primary day in New Hampshire.
In early February the polls had put LBJ ahead of McCarthy by 53 points. Insiders knew that the race had tightened since then. Still, no one expected McCarthy to take 42 percent of the vote, just seven points behind the president’s total. Later studies would show that a substantial portion of McCarthy’s supporters didn’t know he was an anti-war candidate; they were just lodging protest votes against LBJ. But the next day’s papers saw in the returns unmistakable evidence that the doves’ critique of the war was surging through the Democratic Party. Robert Kennedy read the vote that way too. The previous Sunday he’d gone back to California’s Central Valley to attend Mass alongside Cesar Chavez, who’d be breaking a twenty-five day water-only fast by taking communion. In the subsequent speech he was too weak to deliver, Chavez spoke of courage and sacrifice, attributes that Kennedy in his caution hadn’t managed to find. On Tuesday night the primary results came in. On Wednesday morning, March 13, RFK told the reporters trailing him around the Senate Office Building that he was “reassessing” his decision not to seek the nomination, now that New Hampshire had shown that Johnson really could be toppled.9
The political turmoil caused a terrifying turn in the global financial markets. Its roots lay in the war’s spiraling expense. In 1965 the Defense Department had budgeted $47 billion for military outlays. The 1968 figure was $30 billion higher. Much of that spending went into the American economy, where it triggered the familiar cycle of war-induced inflation: in 1966 and 1967 the rate ticked up by a combined 6.5 percent. The war also sent a good deal of money abroad, to pay for the sprawling infrastructure the fighting required. As the cash flowed out, the nation’s deficit in its balance of payments widened, precisely the dynamic that Eisenhower had told Kennedy to avoid in 1960, for fear of the damage it would do to international investors’ faith in the dollar. Mid-March’s events—the Times’s revelation, the possibility that LBJ might markedly escalate the American commitment to Vietnam, the firestorm in the media and on Capitol Hill, the Democrats’ splintering—gave those investors every reason to abandon whatever faith they had left. So they mounted a run on gold.
On March 13 they drained $200 million from the United States’ gold reserves, more than on any previous day. On March 14 they doubled that amount. On Friday, March 15, the day before RFK made his entry into the race official, the losses threatened to reach a billion dollars. At that rate, experts said, the United States would soon be forced to shut off its gold exchange or drop the dollar’s value, in the process setting off shock waves so severe they were likely to topple the foundational economic structures of the Western world. “The world is lost,” a British economist told the press as the panic peaked. “. . . We’re in the first act of a world depression.”10
The White House spent the day frantically searching for some way to prevent that from happening. By Friday evening the secretary of the treasury had arranged a weekend summit with his counterparts in Western Europe, out of which came a set of modifications to the gold exchange that cut off investors’ ability to renew their run when the markets opened on Monday morning. But it was clear that more fundamental changes had to follow if the panic wasn’t going to flare again. “We are at a most important moment in postwar history,” LBJ’s national security advisor, himself an acclaimed economist, wrote the president on Tuesday, March 19. “The outcome—whether in Vietnam or the gold crisis—depends on how free men behave in the days and weeks ahead.”11
Thus began one of the most agonizing weeks of Johnson’s presidency. Around him the discussions moved, his political advisers running through the campaign’s course now that Kennedy was in the race, his foreign policy advisers trying to unravel the tangle of war and money that had created the crisis, the military still pushing for more. Those closest to him could the see the weight of it bearing down on him—the stoop in his walk, the sag of his face, the red-raw sties around his eyes—but they couldn’t be sure of his thinking until March 27, four days before he was scheduled to speak to the nation in a televised address, when he finally accepted one of the two drafts his speechwriter had prepared for him. Even then some of the specifics remained unresolved. For three more days his aides argued over particular passages, while LBJ drafted a closing he wanted almost no one to see. On Sunday evening, March 31, he brought the final version into the Oval Office, set his copy on the desk in front of him, waited for the network cameraman to signal that the feed had gone live, and told his fellow Americans of the decisions he’d made.
His delivery was flat, as it tended to be, much of his text wrapped in language so precisely phrased its significance was hard to see. He was sending 13,500 more troops to Vietnam, he said, without mentioning that the Joint Chiefs had requested fifteen times that number. He talked at length about the South Vietnamese army’s growing ability to assume control of the ground war, without making clear that he was doing so because he’d decided that once the latest increase was complete there’d be no more major American deployments. And he gave investors a detailed accounting of how he’d pay for his final increase—by raising taxes and cutting domestic spending—without a single reference to the contagion that had run through the markets two weeks before.
But two pieces of the night’s address were too stunning to miss. Since 1965 the entire American strategy had rested on the assumption that the continual bombing of North Vietnam would force the Communists to abandon their subversion of South Vietnam. Now LBJ announced that he’d ordered the bombing stopped over 75 percent of the North, even though the fighting was still raging in the South. All he asked in return was that the North’s representatives enter into peace talks wherever and whenever they wanted, “to discuss the means of bringing this ugly war to an end.” As for himself, that decision Johnson left for last. “With America’s sons in the fields far away,” he said, “with America’s future under challenge right here at home, with our hopes and the world’s hope for peace in the balance every day, I do not believe that I should devote an hour or a day . . . to any duties other than the awesome duties of this office. . . . Accordingly I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”12
When he was done they went up to the White House’s private quarters, LBJ and his wife Lady Bird, their two daughters, a son-in-law, and assorted insiders. “Nearly everybody just looked staggered and struck silent,” Lady Bird confided in her diary, “and then the phones began to ring.”13 Calls from the secretary of state, old Senate colleagues, Texas oil men, and, oddly enough, Eugene McCarthy’s wife, wanting to express her concern. LBJ handled them all with grace, even Abigail McCarthy’s. “No one man can stand in the way of history,” he told her, though that’s exactly what he’d tried to do that evening: to stand up to the twisted history of a war he’d never wanted and the politics that had defined his life, and in a remarkable demonstration of courage, cowardice, and naivete, to reverse their courses.14
The Pain Which Cannot Forget
JOHNSON’S DECISIONS THREW the race for the Democratic presidential nomination into utter confusion. After New Hampshire, McCarthy had headed to Wisconsin, where the next primary was to be held on April 2, for another round of cerebral campaigning against the war, while Kennedy—too late into the race to get on Wisconsin’s ballot—barnstormed the country, ruthlessly attacking the president. Neither had known that LBJ was going to withdraw, nor did they have any idea of how to react when he did. McCarthy went off to read some poetry, Kennedy to phone leading Democrats to see if he could win them over now that he was the only powerhouse candidate still standing.
He couldn’t. By the next day some of the party’s most influential figures were urging Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to announce his candidacy. Not that Humphrey needed much encouragement. He was a devoted liberal, a champion of civil rights, union rights, and government’s responsibility for the nation’s well-being. He was also the Democrats’ self-proclaimed Happy Warrior, the ebullient son of a small-town pharmacist who couldn’t imagine anything better than giving a stem-winding speech followed by an extended stretch of shaking hands along the rope line. Johnson had turned his vice presidency into an ordeal, dominating him, humbling him, and occasionally humiliating him as only LBJ could. Humphrey took it all, burying both his pride and his doubts—about Vietnam most of all—beneath effusive displays of devotion to the president’s agenda. So he’d enter the race as the administration’s man, a cheerful face for the policies Johnson had put in place.
For a few days that appeared to be a promising position to occupy. McCarthy easily won the Wisconsin primary. But LBJ took 36 percent of the vote, despite having dropped out of the race two days before: a clear indication that the administration still enjoyed solid support inside the party. On April 3 the North Vietnamese accepted Johnson’s offer of peace talks. It was a tentative agreement, circumscribed by Hanoi’s insistence that there’d be no meaningful discussions until the United States completely stopped its bombing and agreed to include the NLF in the talks, concessions LBJ had no intention of making. Still, McCarthy and Kennedy had to admit that the talks were a significant step toward the policies they’d entered the race to promote, a victory for the pressure they’d created but a blow to the necessity of their nomination. Or so it seemed until the following afternoon, April 4, when Martin Luther King stepped out onto the balcony of Memphis’ Lorraine Motel.
A year and a half had passed since he limped out of Chicago. In that time King had engaged in a fierce round of moral witness, speaking out against the destruction the United States had visited on Vietnam, Black Power’s provocations, the inequalities that plagued the nation, and the injustices that made its central cities burn. Only in late 1967 did he begin to move from condemnation to mobilization. He’d spend the first part of the new year organizing among the poor, he announced. In the spring of 1968 he’d bring his recruits to Washington, DC, a nonviolent army of the dispossessed camped on the Mall, demanding that the federal government take explicit action to ensure economic justice for all. When Congress refused, as King expected it would, the poor would take to the streets in a massive demonstration of civil disobedience—and shut the city down.
The winter didn’t go as King had hoped. Some of his long-standing allies refused to endorse his Poor People’s Campaign. Black Power’s most prominent spokesmen dismissed it. He had trouble rallying those grassroots organizations that could mobilize substantial numbers of poor people on his behalf. And he was repeatedly pulled away from his own organizing by the multiple demands the civil rights movement made on him. One of these was the call he received in February from the pastor of Memphis’ Centenary Methodist Church, the Reverend James Lawson, asking him to support a struggling strike by the city’s 1,300 sanitation workers. By all rights he should have declined. But almost all the strikers were African American. Their employer, Memphis’ white mayor, was refusing to bargain. And Lawson was one of the movement’s towering figures, the radical pacifist who’d taught SNCC’s founders to believe in the Beloved Community. King said he’d do what he could.
He came to Memphis three times that spring, on March 18 to preach, on March 28 to lead a demonstration down Beale Street that went disastrously wrong, and on April 3 to make amends. That night he spoke to a packed house at a church on the African American south side, a talk he didn’t want to give, building to a haunting evocation of Moses on Mount Nebo, looking longingly into the Promised Land. Much of the next day he spent with his brother A.D. and his closest friend, Rev. Ralph Abernathy, in his motel room, waiting to hear about his lawyers’ fight against a court order the mayor had secured to stop him from marching again. Late in the afternoon Andrew Young came back from the courthouse with encouraging news. They talked awhile, clowned a bit as they tended to do when A.D. was around, until their host for the evening, another Memphis minister, arrived to take them to supper. King took a little time to get dressed. When he was ready he came out onto the balcony, in full view of the flophouse across the street.
It took a single shot; one squeeze of the trigger on the high-powered rifle a white supremacist named James Earl Ray had sited through the flophouse’s bathroom window; another flash of the violence King had confronted again and again in the dozen years since he’d sat at his kitchen table late on a winter’s night and heard God’s only begotten Son. He died an hour later, at 7:05 p.m., on an operating table in a local hospital that was still struggling to set aside its segregated wards.
There was no controlling the anger that evening. It raced along with the news reports, flaming into the now-familiar rituals of urban rebellion—crowds on the streets, clashes with the police, shop windows smashed, stores looted, commercial strips torched—this time in more than a hundred cities and towns, most dramatically in Washington, DC, where the rage surged into the downtown shopping district, blocks from the Mall. The next day it flared again, in some cities more intensely than it had the night before. Lyndon Johnson went on national television to plead for calm, backed by a phalanx of civil rights leaders he’d rushed to the White House for moral support. But there were gaps in the line behind him. From Atlanta, King’s widow Coretta issued a scalding statement on white America’s complicity in her husband’s murder. He “knew . . . that this was a sick society,” she said, “totally infested with racism and violence, that questioned his integrity, maligned his motives and distorted his views which would ultimately lead to his death. . . .”15 And from the heart of Washington’s African American community Stokely Carmichael tossed aside the possibility of peace. “White America has declared war on black people,” he announced. “The only way to survive is to get some guns. Because that’s the only way white America keeps us in check, because she’s got guns.”16
The power clearly rested on the other side of the color line. Over the weekend state authorities sent 35,000 National Guardsmen into twenty-two cities. LBJ added almost 24,000 federal troops: 5,000 to Baltimore, another 5,000 to Chicago, and 13,600 to Washington, DC, where combat-ready units took up positions on the White House lawn and the Capitol steps for the first time since the Civil War. Within a few days the riots had been suppressed, though only through a stunning number of arrests—20,000 in all—and the occasional application of fatal force. Of the thirty-nine people who were killed in the week’s unrest, thirty-four were African American, among them the Black Panthers’ first recruit, seventeen-year-old Bobby Hutton, gunned down in a firefight with the Oakland police on April 6. He was shot twelve times.
King was buried three days later, on Tuesday, April 9; his memory honored in a searing service at his home church, followed by a long procession to Morehouse College, his casket carried by a mule-driven cart in solidarity with the poor he’d planned to organize. George Wallace didn’t attend. But the other candidates did, before filtering back onto the campaign trail to address the damage done by the week’s carnage. Polls showed a dramatic increase in the number of African Americans who felt alienated from American society, up twenty points—from 32 percent to 52 percent—since the previous sampling, while the violence seemed to play into whites’ most deeply rooted racial fears. Shortly after the April upheavals a Gallup poll asked respondents to explain the causes of urban unrest. Forty-one percent of whites said African Americans rioted because they hated white people, and another 25 percent because Blacks were prone to violence. Behind those numbers lay nightmarish visions. In early 1968 Detroit’s mayor set up a rumor-control center he hoped might prevent panics from gripping the city’s neighborhoods. In the three days following King’s murder the center was flooded with calls. The most common asked whether it was true that on Friday, April 12—Good Friday in the Christian calendar—Blacks were going to march into the suburbs to kill all the white children. A modern American Passover timed to coincide with the faithful’s commemoration of Christ’s crucifixion.
In those fears Wallace saw opportunity. The “shindigs” after King’s murder were sure to win him a larger share of the “little people” who “are tired of the pseudo-intellectuals telling them the reasons and causes of riots,” he told the Wall Street Journal. “There is no reason and cause for riots. . . . The people know that the way to stop a riot is to hit someone on the head.”17 Wallace couldn’t fully exploit the moment, since his wife’s collapsing health had pulled him off the trail; not until the end of April, a week before she died, did he start campaigning again. But his absence hardly seemed to matter. May’s polls put his share of the presidential vote at 14 percent, up five points since King’s assassination. He still hadn’t reached double digits outside the South. Inside it, though, he was polling at 27 percent.
Those weren’t the numbers Richard Nixon wanted to see. The Republicans had won the Upper South in three of the last four presidential elections and had taken the Deep South in 1964, the only bright spot in an otherwise disastrous year. Now Wallace was cutting into those states with a belligerent version of Nixon’s law-and-order appeal. If he added in just four or five percent of the vote in a couple of key northern states, like Michigan or Illinois, he could cut off Nixon’s path to the presidency. But Nixon couldn’t harden his position without soiling his image as the campaign’s voice of reason and moderation. So his speechwriters went to work, putting together a new pitch Nixon unveiled in a national radio address on May 16. He was running as the champion of “the silent center,” he said, “the millions of people in the middle of the political spectrum who do not demonstrate, do not picket or protest.”18 It was a marvelously conceived appeal, an invitation to Wallace’s waitresses and cabbies to join Detroit’s terrified suburbanites and reclaim their country through a nationwide coalition that wasn’t going to bash anybody over the head. Then the Supreme Court handed down an unexpected ruling, and a clever turn of phrase wasn’t enough anymore.
The ruling probably shouldn’t have been too surprising. In the spring of 1967 the justices had handed down two major civil rights decisions. First, they’d blocked the Georgia legislature’s attempt to prevent a young civil rights activist from taking the seat he’d won in a fair and open election. Then, in the landmark case of Loving v. Virginia, they’d struck at one of the defining fears of the nation’s racial order—the fusion of race and sex—by declaring unconstitutional a state’s right to outlaw interracial marriage. The day after Loving came down, LBJ announced that he was planning to fill the Court’s latest vacancy with its first African American nominee. To give the moment the weight it deserved, he chose Thurgood Marshall, whose brilliant work for the NAACP had shattered Jim Crow’s legal foundations. The Senate confirmed him in the midst of 1967’s racial rebellions, so he could be on the bench in time to hear the new term’s cases. If ever there was a Court likely to make a major move on racial justice, this was it.
Still, there was something shocking about how major a move it turned out to be. On the day before King’s murder the justices had heard oral arguments on another school desegregation case, this one out of New Kent County, Virginia, just east of Richmond. The district had long had two schools, one for Black kids and another for whites. In 1965—eleven years after the Brown decision—district officials finally announced a desegregation plan, built on what seemed like a reasonable arrangement: at the start of the year parents could petition to have their children assigned to either school, regardless of race. But everyone knew that no white parent was going to send his or her child to the Black school. And as long as the white kids stayed in place, there wouldn’t be room for African American kids to transfer should their parents want them to move. The NAACP filed suit, arguing that the plan was nothing more than a subterfuge, designed to create the illusion of integration.
The justices delivered their decision in Green v. County School Board of New Kent County on May 27. The district’s policy was in fact duplicitous, William Brennan wrote for a unanimous court, and therefore had to be set aside. But the ruling didn’t stop at New Kent County’s schoolhouse doors. “The burden on a school board today is to come forward with a plan that promises realistically to work,” the opinion read, “and promises realistically to work now.”19 The last word was the crucial one. No longer could southern officials hide behind Brown’s ambiguous order that they desegregate their schools “with all deliberate speed.” Six weeks after April’s violence the Court had told the white South that it had to end school segregation now.
African Americans rushed to bring the ruling home. Across the South families went to court to demand that their children’s schools put in place the required integration plans. The Johnson administration joined them with a vigor only a president not running for reelection would dare. The Department of Justice announced that it was reopening stalled suits against 193 southern school systems, while the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare said it would cut off federal funding to any southern district that hadn’t integrated by the beginning of the 1969–70 school year. If that order held, most districts couldn’t afford to defy it. So in a little more than a year’s time Black kids and white kids would be sitting side by side in the most sweeping act of integration the nation had ever seen.
This was a possibility George Wallace was happy to exploit. When he was in the White House, he took to saying in his stump speech, communities would run their schools as they saw fit, a promise that immediately became his biggest applause line. Nixon couldn’t match him, not publicly at least. But privacy had its purposes. Five days after the Court’s decision Nixon flew to Atlanta for an off-the-record meeting with the South’s most prominent Republicans. The Brown decision was settled law, he told them. With its new ruling, though, the justices had overstepped their constitutional limits. And the next president was duty bound to rein them in by filling any vacancies that opened with justices who believed that the Court shouldn’t engage in social engineering.
Three weeks later Earl Warren announced that after fifteen landmark years as chief justice he was retiring. It was an obviously political move, meant to give the president plenty of time to replace him with the sort of justice who’d maintain the court’s progressive bent. LBJ obliged by nominating one of Warren’s reliably liberal colleagues, Abe Fortas, to move up to the chief’s chair. No one could question Fortas’s qualifications: when Johnson had nominated him as associate justice in 1965, the Senate had approved him by a voice vote. But almost immediately some of the most powerful Republicans insisted that it wasn’t right for Johnson to nominate anyone in an election year: the seat should stay open, they said, so that whoever won the election could fill it. In the lead stood South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, leaning on a newly invented principle that—if the voting broke the right way—would give Nixon that change to live up to the off-the-record promises he’d made.
For the Democrats, race ran in different ways. Humphrey finally announced his candidacy on April 27. He brought with him deep connections to the older generation of civil rights activists, built over his two decades of commitment to the cause. But he had no intention of using those connections to reach a broad swath of Black voters. In fact he wouldn’t try to reach voters at all; rather than running in the seven remaining primaries he’d focus exclusively on caucuses and closed-door meetings, where he could appeal directly to the party insiders who would make up the vast majority of convention delegates. It was a perfectly reasonable strategy, completely within party rules. But it meant that in the course of the nominating process he’d never have to face the passions raging out on the streets.
McCarthy and Kennedy worked the caucuses and back rooms too. But they knew that they wouldn’t make much headway with the party’s power brokers unless they proved in the final primaries that they could mobilize the Democrats’ rank and file more effectively than Humphrey could. Through the rest of the spring they ran head-to-head, from Indiana through the District of Columbia, Nebraska, Oregon, and South Dakota to California on June 5. On the central issues they were barely distinguishable. Both insisted that Johnson ought to order an immediate end to the bombing of North Vietnam, a position made all the more urgent once the peace talks opened—in Paris on May 13—and the North Vietnamese followed through on their promise not to negotiate until the bombs stopped falling. And they both hammered away at the administration’s decision to strengthen its bargaining position by intensifying the war in South Vietnam with a massive search-and-destroy operation meant to obliterate the gains the NLF had made during Tet. From the field the bodies came flooding back: more Americans were killed in action in May 1968 than in any other month of the war. “Here while the sun shines, men are dying on the other side of the earth,” Kennedy told a crowd at a Sacramento shopping center. “. . . [T]hat is why I run for president of the United States.”20
They also agreed on the desperate need to confront the nation’s racial tensions. Both had built solid records in support of civil rights, Kennedy’s more visible and volatile than McCarthy’s, given his complex relationship with the movement as attorney general and the transformation he’d undergone in his Senate years. Both put together specific policy proposals meant to address the tangle of race, poverty, segregation, and oppression, McCarthy’s slightly to the left of Kennedy’s. But in one critical respect they couldn’t have been more different. McCarthy spoke of race as he did every other issue, with the studied detachment of the intellectual he knew himself to be, while RFK seemed to feel the injustice of the moment with a fierce immediacy.
The first sign came on the night King was murdered. Kennedy heard the news on his way to a street-corner rally in a Black neighborhood in Indianapolis. He could have canceled it. Instead he stood on the back of a flatbed truck and talked quietly of his brother’s assassination, of the rage he’d felt at the cruelty of such a brutal act, of the “pain which cannot forget”—an anguished admission, taken from the ancient Greeks—and of the country he wanted to lead. “What we need in this country is not division,” he said, “what we need in the United States is not hatred, what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness, but love and wisdom and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice towards those who suffer in our country, whether they be white or whether they be black,” a vision shaped by the gaping wounds the evening had opened, his and the nation’s both.21
He didn’t always live up to the standard he set that night. During the Indiana primary he made a pitch for the white working class with his own appeal to law and order. And in the spring’s only debate, on June 1, he claimed that McCarthy wanted to move African Americans from the cities to the suburbs, a moment of fearmongering that would have fit comfortably within the Wallace campaign. But he also tried again and again to reach across the racial divide: in Washington, DC, three days after King’s assassination, where he walked through the still-smoldering center city accompanied only by his wife, the pastor of a local Baptist church, and a gaggle of kids; at a bruising private meeting in Atlanta, where he sat silently while King’s grieving aides berated him for the limits of his liberalism; in an auditorium at the Indiana University medical school, where he lectured the almost-exclusively white student body on the obligations their privilege imposed; on the Oglala Lakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in western South Dakota, one of America’s most impoverished places, where he ducked into a one-room shanty to talk with the children living there; in California’s Central Valley, where he spent an emotional day with the Mexican-American and Filipino farmworkers whose cause he’d embraced; and in the motorcades that served as the high point of each of his primary campaigns, RFK standing in the back of his open-topped limousine as it crawled through the African American sections of Gary, Omaha, Oakland, and LA, throngs of people surging around him, grabbing his hands as he grabbed theirs, his bodyguards gripping him around the waist so he wouldn’t be pulled into the crowds, the passions so intense his advisers feared that the images would frighten away the whites who saw them on television. But RFK insisted that the motorcades run.
Maybe his advisers were right. Kennedy carried all but one of April and May’s primaries with overwhelming support in minority precincts and whatever share of white working-class wards he could claim. But he couldn’t win over the Democrats’ share of the middle- and upper-class doves who resented his having entered the race only after McCarthy had cleared the way, the liberal-leaning professionals who liked their politics calmer than Kennedy made them, and the indeterminate number of whites who might have been just a little scared seeing those crowds pressing in around RFK’s limo. So they kept slogging through the primary season, McCarthy’s chances of taking the nomination shrinking with each loss, Kennedy’s margins of victory too narrow to convince the party’s insiders that he deserved to be their nominee. Without a viable alternative to block him, Humphrey gradually consolidated his support. By the California primary, on June 5, he had preliminary pledges from over 1,000 of the 1,312 delegates necessary to secure the nomination.
Kennedy won California as he had the previous primaries, the returns from Oakland, Watts, and the Central Valley strong enough to offset his losses in the small towns and suburbs that had become McCarthy’s redoubt. Around midnight he came into the ballroom of Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel, where his campaign workers had gathered for the victory party. He took the stage—his wife standing behind him, aides and supporters circling around him, his sisters somewhere in the crowd—and said a few encouraging words, thanked some people, made fun of himself, and promised to take the fight on to the convention. When he was done the hotel’s maître d’ led his entourage out through the ballroom pantry.
This time it was four shots fired by a twenty-four-year-old Palestinian American enraged by Kennedy’s support for Israel, a troubled young man from Pasadena who’d squeezed himself in by the steam tables an hour before on the chance that his target might pass by. The moment they realized what was happening Kennedy’s bodyguards slammed the gunman into the table, but he kept firing wildly, four more shots, four more bodies down. Someone shouted at them to crush his fingers. There was so much screaming, though, it was impossible to sort out the noise, so many reporters and photographers and panicked aides pushing against each other the pantry had become a scrum—except around RFK, who lay splayed on the floor, a Mexican-American busboy kneeling beside him, cradling the senator’s head in his hands.
Law and Order
THE NETWORKS CARRIED Kennedy’s funeral live as they had King’s: another church full of dignitaries, another widow sitting with her children in the front pew, another wrenching eulogy, a second day of national mourning in two months’ time. Four days later pollster Louis Harris asked a representative sample of Americans whether they thought “something was deeply wrong” with the country.22 Two-thirds said they did. But that perception didn’t lead them to the politics King and Kennedy had preached. When Harris asked them to define the nation’s problems they didn’t talk about inequality, injustice, the weight of the war, or the plight of the poor but about violence, lawlessness, and the breakdown of social order, which they attributed by overwhelming margins to radicals, racial agitators, common criminals, and madmen with guns. Within a month George Wallace had moved up another two points in the polls, to 16 percent, the increase driven largely by his support outside the South, which had more than doubled in the weeks since RFK’s murder.
Wallace’s campaign had its limits, to be sure: 55 percent of Americans considered him an extremist, unfit to be president. But almost a third thought “he would keep law and order the way it ought to be kept.” When he swept up north in July—to Maryland, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island—he packed almost every appearance. In Cranston he drew a raucous crowd of three thousand, among them a contingent of protesters, Black and white. At first he let them heckle. But halfway through his speech he’d had enough. “These are the folks that people in our country are getting sick and tired of,” he growled. “You’d better have your day now because after November, I tell you, you’re through.” The rest of the crowd cheered. A few people shouted racial slurs. And somewhere in the hall they started to chant, “We want Wallace! We want Wallace!”23
A week later the Republicans met in Miami Beach to make Richard Nixon their nominee. By all accounts it was a dull four days: 1,333 delegates sitting in the air-conditioned comfort of a convention center cut off from the city by the Intracoastal, voting their way to a foregone conclusion. But there were moments when Wallace’s spirit haunted the hall: during Nixon’s quiet tour of the southern delegations, which he took as an opportunity to repeat his opposition to activist judges and the immediate integration of the region’s public schools; in his choice of Maryland governor Spiro Agnew as a running mate purely on the strength of his combative responses to protesters, rioters, civil rights advocates, and just about anyone else he thought disrupted the proper order of things; and in the convention’s culminating event, when Nixon finally accepted the nomination he’d spent five years working to secure.
He began with a telling tribute to Ike, who’d recently suffered a major heart attack. “General Eisenhower, as you know, lies critically ill in the Walter Reed Hospital tonight,” he said. “I have talked, however, with Mrs. Eisenhower. . . . And she says that there is nothing that he lives more for and there is nothing that would lift him more than for us to win in November and I say let’s win this one for Ike.” Then he moved to the text of his speech. It was a disciplined piece of work, built around the themes that had defined his campaign from the start, wrapped in a refined version of the pitch his team had developed to counter Wallace’s rise. “As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame,” he said. “We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad. We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home. And as we hear and see these things millions cry out in anguish. Did we come all the way for this? Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this? Listen to the answer to those questions. It is another voice. It is a 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. . . . This I say to you tonight is the real voice of America.”24 The impact wasn’t perfectly clear. Post-convention polls showed Nixon’s share of the vote up enough to give him a six-point lead. But Wallace ticked up another point too. And the Democrats had yet to hold their convention, with all its attendant publicity.
Lyndon Johnson had selected the timing and the site: late August so that the convention would be in place to celebrate his sixtieth birthday, Chicago to please Dick Daley. Plenty of people were saying that LBJ would pick the nominee too. It wasn’t true. Hubert Humphrey had piled up his lead in April and May without Johnson’s help. And it was the delegates’ calculations in the weeks after Kennedy’s murder and not the president’s intervention that turned the vice president into the party’s presumptive nominee. But Humphrey’s devotion to the administration made him look like Johnson’s proxy, which was exactly what LBJ wanted him to be.
There was a great deal of power and more than a share of pride at play: the once master politician clinging to his ability to dominate those around him; the president who’d passed the greatest wave of reforms since the New Deal insisting that his successor run on the record he’d built. But mostly there was Vietnam. Johnson wanted nothing more than to see the sacrifices he’d made at the end of March lead to the war’s conclusion. His scaling back of the bombing had gotten North Vietnam to the bargaining table but no further; after two months of talks they were still deadlocked. Johnson could break the impasse by giving in to North Vietnam’s demands that the United States end its bombing altogether and give the NLF a seat at the table. That’s what McCarthy, Kennedy, and the doves had said he should do, though. And the moment he did, they’d get the credit—not LBJ but the very people who’d haunted him, criticized him, defied him, and all but driven him from the Oval Office. That was an outcome Johnson simply couldn’t countenance. So the bombs kept falling and the talks stayed stalled, even as the Democrats lurched toward their convention.
Everyone knew a fight was coming. Kennedy’s primary victories had denied McCarthy any chance of taking the nomination. Still he insisted on carrying his campaign to the convention. For a while it seemed that the Kennedys might too, through the family’s last living son, Ted, the thirty-six-year-old senator from Massachusetts, who was said to be considering a run. Eventually he decided that it wasn’t his time. But that didn’t mean the delegates his brother had won would let the convention pass without challenging the president. Through July and early August the Democrats’ doves made it clear that, at a minimum, they’d press the party to formally endorse an immediate cessation of the bombing and the expansion of the peace talks. For his part, Johnson saw the threat as the affront it was meant to be, an explicit rejection of his leadership, delivered at an event he’d planned as a celebration of his achievements. To make matters worse, his vice president wanted to side with the doves.
Humphrey had started his campaign fully, volubly supportive of LBJ’s Vietnam policies. There he remained as the peace talks froze and the body count mounted. More and more, though, the press was hammering away at his obeisance to the president: Esquire ran a cover of him as a ventriloquist’s dummy, sitting on LBJ’s lap. Some of his closest advisers were pleading with him to stake out his own position, and almost everywhere he went he was hounded by the anti-war movement’s radical wing. It had been a militant spring, with dozens of protests and confrontations, the most dramatic coming at Columbia University, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where turmoil over race and war had led to a seven-day occupation of five campus buildings, broken finally through a frontal assault by 1,000 New York City policemen. In the aftermath the movement’s most celebrated militant, Tom Hayden, promised “two, three, many Columbias.” Humphrey saw his share. In New York 1,000 protesters tried to shut down the streets around his hotel; 300 were arrested. In San Francisco radicals disrupted his photo ops with chants of “Wash the blood off your hands.” And in Cleveland a young woman got close enough to call him a murderer to his face. Publicly he refused to be moved. But in private he rattled against the cage he’d locked himself into. “The president didn’t run because he knew he couldn’t make it, and he clothed me in nothing,” he told his aides in mid-June. “To pull ourselves up from these ashes and the humiliation . . . is the most difficult thing in the world.”25
At the end of July he finally tried. Humphrey’s foreign policy team had been working for weeks on a statement that delicately, cautiously, but unmistakably aligned him with the doves. When it was done, on the 25th, he brought it to the White House for the president to see. Johnson read it over and went for the jugular. The statement was playing politics with the lives of American soldiers, he said—among them LBJ’s two sons-in-law, both recently deployed—and undercutting the administration’s last, best hope for peace. He could do as he pleased, Johnson told him. But if Humphrey made this statement public, LBJ would do everything in his power to destroy his candidacy. After the meeting one of the vice president’s aides found him in his office bathroom furiously washing his hands, his breakout statement tossed aside.
The timing of Humphrey’s retreat couldn’t have been worse. For half a year the anti-war activists who’d hoped to re-create the Pentagon march at the Democratic convention had been struggling to hold the project together. First, most of the liberals had been pulled away by the McCarthy campaign. Then some of the most radical groups had dropped out too, for fear of being co-opted by mainstream politics. That left the protest in the hands of the pacifists, some of SDS’s most famous alumni—Hayden among them—and the hippie provocateurs who’d given the Pentagon protest its surreal edge. By coincidence they announced their plans just a few days after Humphrey’s emasculation. In keeping with the movement’s commitment to radical democracy, there’d be a swirl of events: for the hippies a “festival of life” in one of the city parks, with the requisite psychedelic shocks; for the pacifists and the SDSers a series of workshops and rallies leading to a mass march on the convention the evening Humphrey was nominated; and for anyone willing, acts of resistance scattered around the city, maybe peaceful, maybe not. Hayden thought not. “We are coming to Chicago to vomit on the politics of joy,” he declared, “to expose the secret decisions, upset the night club orgies, and face the Democratic Party with its illegitimacy and criminality.”26
To face down the Democrats, though, the protesters would have to get past Dick Daley. For most of the summer his city hall simply didn’t process the organizers’ requests for the permits they needed. Finally the hippies’ front men, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman, announced they’d hold their festival in Lincoln Park, a mile north of downtown, whether or not they had the required paperwork. The park was open to visitors, officials replied, but it closed at 11:00 p.m. each night, so they’d have to be out by then. The pacifists and the SDSers, meanwhile, took the city to court to demand that their right to assemble be honored. But somehow their case ended up before Daley’s former law partner, who ruled that while they could have their nomination-day rally in downtown Grant Park there’d be no march on the convention hall, about five miles away. The pacifists immediately announced that they’d march regardless, though it wasn’t clear how they’d get around the 11,900 policemen the mayor planned to have on duty during the convention—the entire force split into two twelve-hour shifts—or the 5,600 National Guardsmen he’d had the governor put on call just outside the city, or the 7,500 federal troops held in reserve. Not that he expected trouble, because as Daley explained to reporters, in Chicago people behaved themselves.
Some of them did, anyway. Humphrey bounded into his suite at downtown’s elegant Conrad Hilton hotel the day before the convention opened—Sunday, August 25—hoping to squeeze into an opening between Johnson and the doves. While he played the happy host to a stream of politicians, his aides worked both sides, one set huddled with the president’s men—Johnson himself having retreated to his ranch for a few days of swimming, eating, and politicking—another with the Kennedys at their compound on Cape Cod; yet another with the McCarthy team, camped in their own suite ten floors down. They were still talking that evening when 120 policemen lined up to clear Lincoln Park for the night. It was the festival of life’s opening day, and a couple thousand people turned out. Trouble started with skirmishes around the bathrooms as it was getting dark, kids taunting cops, cops swinging back, rumors flying around that there was going to be bloodshed come closing time. As 11:00 p.m. approached, SDS organizers roamed through the park, trying to get the crowd out before the curfew hit. The police gave them forty minutes’ grace. Then the line started moving, across the lawn and into the parking lot where most of those remaining had gathered. There it broke. Into the crowd the cops surged, nightsticks out, nameplates removed, a full-on police assault to get convention week underway.
In the morning the politicians’ talks collapsed. Fresh from a dip in the pool, Johnson sent word that he expected the convention to endorse his Vietnam policies fully. In response the doves demanded that the convention vote on their peace proposals, the president’s wishes be damned. And suddenly Humphrey the Happy Warrior had no opening to squeeze through. A few hours later the protests started swirling through the city center: an afternoon march toward police headquarters to protest the department’s arrest of Tom Hayden on charges no one cared to define; an impromptu rally in Grant Park, across the street from Humphrey’s hotel, the NLF flag waving above the crowd until the police ripped it down; a feverish evening in Lincoln Park, as militants and local kids stacked torn-up park benches, trash barrels, and tree branches into a makeshift barrier they thought might stop another assault. But the night brought street fighting, bloodshed on both sides this time, after 300 cops stormed the barricades.
On Tuesday, LBJ’s birthday, the bitterness flooded onto the convention floor. Most of the day was consumed by bruising battles over the racial makeup of southern delegations: Mississippi again, as in 1964, and this time Georgia and Texas too. But everyone knew that the fiercest combat was going to come in the evening, when the convention took up the party’s platform position on Vietnam. Humphrey couldn’t prevent it, but his supporters could push it off prime-time television. So they slowed the evening’s proceedings to a crawl, until even the most brain-addled political junkies had gone to bed. Finally, at 12:37 a.m.—1:37 on the East Coast—the chair put the war before the delegates. Immediately the doves revolted, shouting down the chair’s manipulation, calling for an immediate recess so that the issues could be debated in the light of day. For a while the Humphrey forces tried to block them, on the premise that Wednesday was supposed to be devoted to the nominating process, not party policy. But the uproar on the floor was too great. At 2:30 a.m. the chair closed the convention for the evening, with the Vietnam fight still pending.
That night the police choked Lincoln Park with tear gas.
The convention reconvened at 1:00 p.m. on Wednesday, August 28, with two hours set for debate, to be followed by the vote the doves demanded. Already Grant Park was filling with protesters—10,000, the police estimated—come for the nomination-day rally the court had granted the radicals. From 2:00 p.m. to somewhere around half past four they ran together—the doves in the amphitheater pleading with the party to endorse an end to the bombing and a diplomatic drive toward peace; the radicals at the park band shell, calling for moral witness, massive resistance, and revolutionary change, the crowd ringed by a cordon of cops and National Guardsmen sent to ensure that the organizers couldn’t turn the rally into the march they’d threatened to mount. Then the voting started, the rally ended, and everything unraveled.
The balloting followed the party’s fault lines: the McCarthy and Kennedy delegates on the dove side, Humphrey’s delegates under his agonized order to back the president’s position, as loyalty required. The moment the result was announced—the doves defeated by 526 votes—the protest started, hundreds of delegates up on their seats, singing chorus after chorus of “We Shall Overcome,” others snaking through the convention floor behind a banner reading “Stop the War,” some of them weeping, the chair desperately trying to gavel the convention back to order so that it could move on to Humphrey’s nomination.27
Up on the band-shell stage the pacifists called for volunteers to join them in marching on the convention amphitheater, down on the South Side. Gradually they pieced together a line of six or seven thousand. But the police and the guardsmen had them hemmed in. For almost two hours the organizers tried to negotiate an acceptable path, while their volunteers sat in the grass and waited. The cops had their orders, though, the pacifists their principles, and eventually the discussions stalemated, the march collapsed, and the crowd was on its own.
Some people shoved their way past the guardsmen and out of the park. About fifty managed to get through a minor breach in the line before the troops shut it down. Most streamed through an undefended street on the park’s northern edge. From there a solid share of the crowd drifted away. But a portion—maybe three or four thousand—swung a few blocks south, along downtown’s Michigan Avenue, toward Humphrey’s hotel. It was seven thirty, eight o’clock, darkness descending.
Later Humphrey said that he didn’t see it as it happened. Not the wall of policemen across Michigan Avenue directly below his suite or the crowd of protesters facing them, chanting the brutal slogans he’d heard all year: Dump the Hump, Fuck the Pigs, Fuck you LBJ. Not the bottles and stones hurled at the line. Not the cops charging forward, the sudden surge of blue helmets, the nightsticks, the mace, and the tear gas, though a trace of it filtered into his rooms. Not the kids retching on the sidewalk, the kids with their scalps lashed open, the kids being hauled away. But he saw it an hour later, when the networks broke into the middle of the nominating process to show the carnage. And he saw the chaos as the news reached the convention floor: already enraged delegates shouting at each other, pushing each other, occasionally swinging at each other; cops thundering down the aisle to eject three delegates who refused to show their credentials; newsmen knocked to the floor. The dovish senator from Connecticut, Abraham Ribicoff, up on the podium for a nominating speech, denounced “gestapo tactics on the streets of Chicago,” prompting the red-faced Richard Daley to growl back on live television, “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker, go home,” a string of obscenities to mark the pinnacle of Hubert Humphrey’s political career.28
A Riven Nation
IT TOOK TWO weeks for Chicago to register in the polls. The results were as devastating to Humphrey as his nominating night had been. He was hemorrhaging support inside the Democratic Party, primarily because of the massive defection of the doves, almost half of whom were refusing to line up behind him. Beyond the party his numbers were even worse. Only 26 percent of those polled thought he was the candidate best equipped to handle the Vietnam War. Only 25 percent thought him the most likely to maintain law and order. Only five percent thought he’d make an excellent president. And 51 percent said he was too close to LBJ to be president at all. Perceptions so debilitating drove his support down to 31 percent, eight points behind Richard Nixon’s in one poll, a catastrophic twelve points in another. The gap would have been even greater except for one small point in the polling. Nixon’s numbers had fallen too.
He’d come out of his own convention with the autumn perfectly planned. He would stop talking about Vietnam for fear, Nixon said, of undermining the peace process. And he’d say nothing at all about the September filibuster that Strom Thurmond and his fellow southerners mounted to block Abe Fortas’s ascension to chief justice, the first time in thirty-eight years that the Senate had rejected a president’s nominee. But there’d be plenty of rallies for folks to come out and cheer—one or two a day timed to appear on the nightly news—along with a series of televised town halls, a brand-new format designed by an up-and-coming young operative named Roger Ailes, in which the candidate would field unscripted questions from an audience handpicked by Nixon’s advance men. Mostly there’d be a barrage of arresting television commercials designed around a vertiginous rush of still images: shots of combat and weathered GIs for the Vietnam ad, concerned cops and an addict with a needle in his arm for the crime-in-the-streets ad, burning ghettos and raging protesters out on Michigan Avenue for the law-and-order ad, each spot ending with the campaign’s new catch phrase, “This time vote like your whole world depended on it.”29 But the plans didn’t work quite as his handlers had hoped. Between mid-August and mid-September Nixon lost two points in the polls, while George Wallace surged up four, to 21 percent of the vote.
The experts had been tracing Wallace’s ascent all summer. Still, it was a shock to see a leap that large less than two months from Election Day. He had a lock on the Deep South. He was gaining in the border states, his support spiking among small-town voters, independents, and the well-to-do. He was cutting deeper into the rest of the country than ever before, with 10 percent of the Northeast behind him, 11 percent of the West, and 16 percent of the Midwest. And there was every reason to believe he could do better still, given the huge crowds he was drawing, the passions that pulsed through his audiences—the populist pride, the barely disguised bigotry, the threat of retribution, the frisson of violence—and the ever-expanding pool of reporters come to see the spectacle.
Pollster Lou Harris ran the projections. If Wallace’s numbers continued to trend through October as they had since August, he was likely to carry about 30 percent of the electorate, enough to deny either Nixon or Humphrey an electoral majority. Were that to happen, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives, where the South’s congressional delegations would hold the balance of power. They wouldn’t give Wallace the presidency. But they would give him the leverage he needed to wring from the other candidates fundamental concessions on Supreme Court appointments, civil rights, voting rights, criminal justice, free speech, and foreign aid. The national agenda could be transformed, the white South rising again just three years after the last piece of Jim Crow had come crashing down, thanks to Wallace’s primal appeals.
For Humphrey, the break began the day Wallace swept into Cicero. As badly as the vice president had done in the first half of September, the second half was worse. Everywhere he went protesters followed. The pundits panned his speeches. His fundraising collapsed. And the late-September Gallup poll showed him down another three points, to 28 percent, a number so abysmal it set him free. “If the polls are really what they stand to be, I don’t stand a chance,” Humphrey said to his closest confidant the day the results were released. “I don’t give a shit anymore, I’m saying what I want to say.”30 His aides borrowed $100,000 to buy him a half-hour slot on NBC on Monday evening, September 30. He used it to make the commitment he’d wanted to make in July and August, the promise that turned him into a dove. If elected, Humphrey finally said, he’d stop the bombing of North Vietnam.
Three days later the Wallace campaign took up talk of bombing too. For almost a month Wallace had been trying to settle on a vice-presidential pick. It hadn’t gone well: his first choice, former Kentucky governor and onetime baseball commissioner A. B. “Happy” Chandler, was forced to withdraw after Wallace’s hard-core supporters objected that Chandler was too soft on race, as evidenced by his support back in ’47 of a promising second baseman named Jackie Robinson. Soft wasn’t an attribute anyone applied to Wallace’s next choice. On October 3 he presented to the press his new running mate, Curtis LeMay.
It had been six years almost to the day since LeMay had called John Kennedy a coward for his handling of the missile crisis in Cuba. After finishing out his term on the Joint Chiefs in 1965, LeMay entered a restless retirement. He lacerated LBJ for trying to restrain North Vietnamese aggression with precision bombing when only devastation would do. “There came a time when the Nazis threw the towel into the ring,” he wrote in 1965. “Same way with the Japanese. We didn’t bring about that day by sparring with sixteen-ounce gloves. My solution to the problem would be to tell them frankly that they’ve got to draw in their horns . . . or we’re going to bomb them back into the Stone Age.”31 So it was only natural for reporters to ask him whether he might consider using nuclear weapons in Vietnam.
LeMay didn’t have to give it a second thought. “I think there are many times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons,” he replied. “To me, if I had to go to Vietnam and get killed with a rusty knife or get killed with a nuclear weapon I would rather get killed with a nuclear weapon. . . . I don’t want to use them unless I have to. I don’t want to stick a rusty knife into anyone’s belly unless I have to.” Wallace cut in to insist that the general wasn’t saying that the quickest route out of Vietnam ran under a mushroom cloud. But LeMay wasn’t given to retreating. On he went, explaining that Americans had “a phobia” about nuclear weapons, that there was really nothing to fear, that even in nuclear test sites the vegetation eventually grew back, though some of the animal life remained a little hot, until Wallace finally managed to steer him off the stage.32
He hadn’t moved fast enough. The crowds kept coming after LeMay’s debut: 8,000 in downtown Baltimore; 10,000 in Flint, Michigan’s quintessential factory town; 20,000 on the Boston Common. But so did the stories about the general’s long history of inflammatory comments, the newspaper columns condemning Wallace’s recklessness for thinking that such a man ought to be anywhere near the Oval Office, and his opponents’ declarations of shock and outrage. Humphrey’s attacks were made all the stronger by his pledge to ground the bombers. The next round of polls showed how sharply sentiment had turned. In the first two weeks of October, Wallace’s share of the vote tumbled from 21 to 15 percent, while Humphrey’s shot up to 36 percent, eight points behind Nixon in one poll, just five points in another: a gap almost small enough, Lou Harris said, to make the race between them too close to call.
The race’s sudden flux, in turn, wrenched through the delicate politics of peace. On October 9 the White House heard through a back channel that LeMay’s selection had unnerved the North Vietnamese as much as it had a share of the American electorate. They understood that Wallace wasn’t going to win, the sources said. But they feared that Nixon might seal his election by striking a deal that would let Wallace and LeMay influence the next administration’s foreign policy in horrific ways. So North Vietnam was willing to make a deal of its own. If LBJ stopped his bombing, the North Vietnamese would welcome the South Vietnamese government into the Paris peace talks. There were no assurances of subsequent steps. Once Saigon was at the table, though, the negotiations might well move toward a comprehensive settlement.
The North Vietnamese made their offer official on October 11. At first LBJ hesitated, as he grappled with the thought of doing precisely what the doves had been demanding of him for three years. But this was his last chance to end the war that had destroyed his presidency, and he couldn’t let it go. Late on October 14 he told the US representatives in Paris to accept Hanoi’s terms. It took two weeks of haggling to set the schedule. Johnson would announce that he was ending the bombing of North Vietnam in a speech to the nation on October 31, with the South Vietnamese joining the talks two days later: the Paris negotiations finally prized open, a path to peace cleared three days before Election Day.
LBJ told the candidates of the agreement in a confidential conference call on the 16th, before the details were finalized. Each offered his support, Wallace his prayers. But Nixon had back channels too, his running from his old anti-Communist network to the presidential palace in Saigon. Sometime in the next few days he put them to use. Reject Johnson’s invitation to the peace talks, his emissaries quietly said to the South Vietnamese government. Let the negotiations fail. And when he was president Nixon would reach a settlement far more advantageous to South Vietnam than LBJ ever would.
The Gallup organization conducted its last poll as the peace agreement collapsed. It started its surveys on October 29, the day LBJ learned of Nixon’s intervention; carried them through the 30th and the 31st, when South Vietnam’s president officially informed the White House that his nation wouldn’t agree to the terms Johnson had set and then fought off LBJ’s ferocious efforts to force him into line; and ended on November 1 and 2, amid the ruins of Johnson’s last, best hope of peace. The newspapers released Gallup’s results on election eve, November 4. Fifteen percent for Wallace, 42 percent for Humphrey, 43 percent for Nixon: another razor-thin margin for a repackaged politician who’d always thought that nothing mattered more than winning.
LBJ spent election night tracking the vote from his ranch, Humphrey from a Minneapolis hotel room, Nixon from a suite at the Waldorf in New York, Wallace at the house in Montgomery Lurleen had begged him to buy so they’d have somewhere to go when his term was done. The early returns pointed toward an upset: an unexpectedly strong showing for Humphrey in the Northeast, the urban vote solid enough to win him both New York and Pennsylvania; a Wallace sweep in the Deep South, virtually all the states Goldwater had carried in 1964 gone his way, Nixon’s electoral path narrowing as they fell. But Wallace took only a third of the vote in the Upper South, not enough to stop Nixon from holding on to what was now clearly Republican territory. The industrial Midwest split: Michigan to Humphrey, Ohio to Nixon, Illinois too close to call. And the Plains went to the Republicans, as they almost always did. There the returns stalled until 8:00 the following morning, when the television networks gave Nixon California’s forty electoral votes, enough to bring him within striking distance of the 270 he needed. Immediately Dick Daley called Humphrey to say that he still had ballots to count, in the fine Chicago tradition. But the numbers out of the African American wards weren’t strong enough to offset the losses in neighborhoods like the Cahills’, where Humphrey’s vote tumbled to 37.6 percent, the Democrats’ worst showing since Eisenhower’s landslide reelection in 1956. At noon the networks gave Nixon Illinois too, and with it the presidency.
Shortly thereafter Humphrey went down to the hotel ballroom to concede. When he was finished LBJ had an aide phone the Waldorf to congratulate the president-elect on his behalf, his mood too dark to do the job himself. The final count put Humphrey within half a million votes of Nixon, a margin even tighter than the polls had predicted. But it wasn’t the narrowness of the loss that stung. It was the breadth of it. In four years the Democrats’ share of the vote had plunged from 61 to 42.7 percent. It had been pulled down partly by Humphrey’s inability to win over independents, partly by a dramatic decline in support from some of the party’s core constituencies. Humphrey barely carried the Catholic vote, the union vote, and the working-class vote, all of which LBJ had taken by at least forty points in 1964. And except for Texas, which Johnson refused to surrender, the Democrats lost every southern state, the first time that had happened in the party’s history. Beneath those changes lay a tectonic shift in the political order. In 1964 Johnson had won 59 percent of the white vote. Four years later—after the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the Cicero line, after three long hot summers and a single sickening moment at the Lorraine Motel, after the grief and the anger and the rumors of revenge, after all the talk of law and order and local control—Humphrey took 38 percent. That wasn’t a frustratingly slim defeat for a candidate making a late rush in the polls. It was a repudiation of the president and his policies.
Half an hour after Humphrey conceded, Nixon entered the Waldorf’s ballroom to make his victory speech. He followed the rules of the form, praising the opposing party for fighting the good fight, thanking his campaign workers for their tireless efforts, humbly acknowledging his family’s devotion. Toward the end he told a mawkish story of seeing a teenager at a rally in a small Ohio town, holding up a sign that said, “Bring Us Together.”33 That was the message he took from the campaign trail, he said, that Americans wanted their new president to bring them together again. It was the sort of thing he was supposed to say. But it wasn’t true. In the end Wallace carried 13.5 percent of the vote—almost 9 percent around Eddy Street—well below his peak but still the strongest showing by a third-party candidate in almost half a century, a testament to the appeal of division and the enduring power of deeply rooted injustice. As for Nixon, he’d come into the campaign committed to reclaiming Eisenhower’s middle ground and the electoral majorities it had produced. In pursuit of that goal he’d played on the country’s divisions too, albeit in softer, more sophisticated, and, in the race’s final days, unconscionably manipulative ways. With that cynical politics, he’d held off Humphrey’s October charge, pieced together the thinnest of pluralities, and won the right to govern a fiercely riven nation.