America on the Brink of a Nervous
Breakdown
Boston Globe columnist Michael A. Cohen
has written a very engaging history of the 1968 presidential race and why it
matters today. To me it is very personal as I remember voting for Bobby Kennedy
in the California Democratic primary via absentee ballot while in the U.S. Army
and my wife to (unknown to me at the time) was a student volunteer for him
during the Indiana primary. America was under siege facing an unwinnable war in
Vietnam with casualties mounting, the cities ablaze as a consequence of the assassination
of Martin Luther King and ongoing campus demonstrations against the war which
were extended to the riots at the Democratic Convention. America was truly on the brink of a nervous
breakdown.
Into this milieu comes the presidential
campaign which is set afire by the unexpected withdrawal from the race by
President Lyndon Johnson. Cohen’s dramatis personae are on the Democratic side
Eugene McCarthy, Bobby Kennedy, George Wallace (running as an independent) and
Hubert Humphrey and on the Republican side Richard Nixon, George Romney, Ronald
Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller. Although Cohen is a liberal and is dismayed by
some of the failures of Johnson’s Great Society which were apparent as early as
1966, he by and large treats his subject even handedly. In fact of all of the
candidates the careful and calculating Richard Nixon comes off the best. He
quotes at length Nixon’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention which
if given today would be viewed as a breath of fresh air in a much polluted
political environment. Further the 1968 convention was another stop on the road
to the demise of what was once called liberal Republicanism.
We see in the Democratic primaries the
forerunner of today’s Democratic Party which is an amalgam of the elitist
liberals and students who backed Eugene McCarthy and the African American and Hispanic
voters who backed Bobby Kennedy. It was the white working class, which at the
time was the core of the Democratic Party, who were thrown under the bus. They
would at first be become Wallace voters as a weigh station on their way to the
Republican Party of Nixon and Reagan.
People tend to forget that Wallace
running as an independent with a coalition of southern segregationists and
white working class voters was running very strong in September 1968 garnering
over 20% of the preferences as measured by the pollsters, but his nomination of
General Curtis “Nuke” Lemay scared off planeloads of voters reducing his Election
Day share to 13.5%. It is important to note four years later, Wallace was on
the verge of winning the Democratic nomination. On the day he was shot he was
the big winner in both the Maryland and Michigan primaries. In many respects he
was the Donald Trump of his day with a brand of white working class populism.
Thus we see in 1968 the breakdown of the
New Deal coalition of southern segregationists, urban workers and liberal
intellectuals into ultimately a new party of liberal intellectuals, African
Americans, Hispanics and a menagerie of identity politics interests. Although
still there in name, the white working class voters have moved on. Where they
were once the core of the party, they are now on the periphery.
In contrast the Republicans picked up
the southern segregationists, much of the white working class and lost their
liberal bloc as typified by Nelson Rockefeller. Remember the classic “limousine
liberal” was the Republican mayor of New York, John Lindsay.
Cohen has very acute descriptions of the
arrogance of Eugene McCarthy, the hold Johnson had over Humphrey, George Romney’s
lack of depth, the ego of Nelson Rockefeller and the fact that Bobby Kennedy,
the sainted liberal hero of today, ran to the right of McCarthy. In fact Cohen
notes that Reagan spoke approvingly of Kennedy. Thus I view “American Maelstrom”
as a very readable and important work of history.
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