American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division

In January of 1965, Lyndon Baines Johnson delivered his inaugural address as president from the steps of the U.S. Capital and announced his vision for an America that would soon see "an end to poverty and racial injustice." Johnson had been elected by a landslide over the conservative Barry Goldwater and, bolstered by the "liberal consensus," economic prosperity, and a strong wave of nostalgia for his martyred predecessor, John Kennedy, the new president would usher in the most ambitious government agenda since the early days of the New Deal. However, by 1968, merely three years later, everything had changed. Johnson's approval ratings had plummeted; the liberal consensus was shattered; the war in Vietnam splintered the nation; and the politics of civil rights had created a fierce white backlash. A report from the National Committee for an Effective Congress warned of a "national nervous breakdown."

The 1968 presidential election was thus caught up in a swirl of powerful forces and the eight men who sought the nation's highest office attempted to ride them to victory--or merely survive them. Eugene McCarthy focused the youthful energy anti-war movement; George Wallace, the working-class white backlash; Robert Kennedy, the mantle of his slain brother. Entangled in Vietnam, Johnson, stunningly, opted not to run again, scrambling the odds. The assassinations of first Martin Luther King, Jr. and then Bobby Kennedy seemed to push the country to the brink of chaos, a chaos reflected in the Democratic Convention in Chicago, a televised horror show. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, finally liberating himself from Johnson's grip, waged a tardy campaign that nearly overcame the lead long enjoyed by Richard Nixon who, by exploiting division and channeling the yearning for order, was the last man standing.

In American Maelstrom, Michael A. Cohen captures the full drama of this watershed election, establishing 1968 as the hinge between the decline of political liberalism and the ascendancy of conservative populism and the anti-government attitudes that continue to dominate the nation's political discourse, taking us to the source of the politics of division.

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