Cohen Michael A. - American Maelstrom: the 1968 election and politics of division

Men want to be a part of a common enterprisea cause greater than themselves. Each of us must find a way to advance the purpose of the Nation, thus finding new purpose for ourselves. Without this, we shall become a nation of strangers.

President Lyndon Johnson, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1965

Its never stopped being 1968.

An unnamed White House aide in the George W. Bush administration, April 7, 2004

David Greenberg

When President Bill Clinton spoke at the 2000 Democratic National Conventiontaking a victory lap before passing the baton of a revitalized liberalism to Vice President Al Gorehe reminisced about the glory days of the 1960s, when he had just graduated from high school. Clinton recalled the progress America had made toward racial equality and the prosperity that allowed Lyndon Johnson to enact sweeping liberal legislation. But then came 1968, the year when his heroes Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed and the nation came apart. The next election, he cautioned, took America on a far different, more divisive course. The liberalism of the 1960s came screeching to a halt.

Many books make strained claims that this year or that year marked the turning point of the centurys most turbulent decade. But no one denies that 1968 upended American politics in a dramatic and lasting way. Michael Cohens American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division approaches the pivotal presidential race of that annus horribilis with a keen appreciation of how it unleashed a host of profound changes in our public life. The wild campaign was full of strong-willed, larger-than-life men with sharply divergent visions of their countrys future, and in battling one another for the presidency, they exposed the fissures that were forming. Using each contenders story to spotlight a different aspect of the times, American Maelstrom presents the momentous drama of 1968 as both a scholarly analysis of political culture and a distinctively personal tale.

The years before 1968 had testified to what a capacious liberal vision of government could achieve. But as the years election contest opened, there were signs that the New Deal orderthe skein of political attitudes and patterns of partisan loyalty that had sustained this vision since FDRs daywas crumbling. An angry backlash was mountinga bitterness, pronounced among working-class voters, about overreaching government, shifting cultural mores, and the liberals indulgence of chic radicalisms that preached violence or anti-Americanism.

The backlash came from many quarters. In California, Ronald Reagan honed a John Wayne conservatism that assailed the coddling of lawless protesters and the erosion of Americas global standing. From Alabama, George Wallace found followers far beyond Dixie with a hate-filled populism that reviled racial integrationists, Washington bureaucrats, the national news media, and pointy-headed intellectuals who cant park their bicycles straight. Most cannily, Richard Nixon, recovering from a string of supposedly career-ending failures, grabbed the issue of law and order to combine anxieties about rising crime, urban protests, and antiwar activists into one potent brew.

Equally consequential was the outcry against the Vietnam War. The intolerable body count and LBJs refusal to change course fed a simple demand that the United States get out of Southeast Asia, the sooner the better. The budding antiwar movement shattered the old Cold War consensus and birthed a critique of all American intervention abroad as counterproductive at best and imperialistic at worst. When no politician of high standing volunteered to challenge Johnson, the antiwar mantle fell to the shambling, headstrong Eugene McCarthya largely undistinguished junior senator from Minnesota who preferred writing poetry to reading policy papers. McCarthys shocking second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary forced President Johnson to quit the race and invited the more beguiling RFK to enter it.