The demonstrators' call at the Democratic national convention that the whole world was watching was more prescient than they even realized. The world indeed watched the civil unrest occurring on the streets of Chicago and within the convention halls, where the disorganized and fractured Democratic party struggled to maintain unity (the cameras also captured reporters Dan Rather and Mike Wallace being roughed up by party affiliates) and came to one conclusion: America was falling apart at the seams. Weary of the war and the continued civil unrest, American voters found a more soothing message from Republican candidate Richard Nixon, who purported to speak for the Silent Majority, whose voice wasn't being heard over the clamor of antiwar demonstrators and civil rights activists.
Nixon exploited Americans' need for a return to civil and social order and also employed the "southern strategy," which targeted white southern Democrats who were angered by Johnson's and Humphrey's support of the civil rights legislation. Though the deeply racist and cynical strategy proved to be a failure for Nixon since Alabama governor George Wallace had a lock on these voters, it would be used far more successfully in subsequent elections, effectively creating a division among Southern and Northern voters on hot-button issues such as school prayer and abortion that exist to this day.
Nixon benefited more from the disintegration of the Democratic party, whose base was barely holding together by the fall campaign. Young antiwar activists and black voters threatened to sit out the election, while the party's traditional blue-collar voters were more attracted to Wallace while liberals were disheartened about the continued engagement in Vietnam. This left Republican stalwarts and a large number of independents who voted for Nixon.
The election overall was close. Nixon won with 31.7 million votes with 43.4% of the electoral vote, while Humphrey captured 31.2 million voters, with 42.7% of the electoral votes. Wallace won 9.9 million votes with 13.5% of the electoral votes, making enough of a difference to cut into Nixon's lead. But when voter demographics are broken down, a shift in voter preferences becomes clear. In an NBC sample precincts, high income urban voters voted overwhelmingly for Nixon (63% to Humphrey's 29%). Middle income urban voters were evenly split (43% Humphrey; 44% Nixon). Low income urban and African American neighborhoods were solidly in Humphrey's corner at 69% and 94% respectively. But rural voters of all incomes gravitated toward Nixon with 46%. In the south, the numbers are even more striking and attest to the shifts in the democratic electoral process which dominates to this day. The combined votes of Nixon and Wallace in the South among middle income urban (40% and 32% respectively), low income urban (18% and 35%), and rural voters of all incomes (30% and 41%) demonstrate a clear majority toward Nixon and Wallace's political message. After the 1968 election, Southern white Democrats would leave the party in droves and join the Republican party, creating a seismic shift in Southern electoral votes which the party has exploited since. The blue and red states, so familiar to contemporary voters, has its precedent during the remarkable presidential election of 1968, with Southern states voting overwhelmingly for Republican candidates and Northern strongholds voting Democratic. While there have been exceptions (Clinton won his home state of Arkansas in 1992 and 1996), this divisive picture has held true since the 1970s.
Though Nixon also ran on a campaign to pull out of Vietnam, through what he termed the "Nixon Doctrine," or the "Vietnamization" of the conflict by pulling U.S. troops out of the war-torn region and replacing them with Vietnamese troops. Yet Nixon would also launch secret bombing campaigns in Cambodia which led to the rise of murderous Cambodian dictator Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge, both of which were responsible for the genocide of a third of that nation's population during the 1970s. Nixon also launched what would become the modern-day drug war and created Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), both lobbied for by consumer activist and future presidential candidate Ralph Nader. But Nixon's real legacy, which continues to affect us today, is his involvement in the cover-up of the Watergate break-in and burglary of the National Democratic offices and his administration staff, who included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George H.W. Bush, Henry Kissinger, among others. The stealthiness of the Nixon administration, its willingness to break rules of law and disregard Congress can be found in the way the Bush administration has been governed since George W. Bush won the White House in the 2000 election. In fact, Vice President Dick Cheney and former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld learned well at the feet of the Nixon administration. According to Joe Conason in his latest book
It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush, both Cheney and Rumsfeld were instrumental in turning then President Gerald Ford against signing the Freedom of Information Act. Though Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Antonin Scalia, who was then an attorney who directed the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, made arguments against the bill based on politically and legislatively weak merits, "Ford heeded their warnings about the supposed danger posed by the real freedom of information act. Foreshadowing the conflicts to come, the unelected president denounced the FOIA bill as an unconstitutional incursion on the privileges of the executive branch" (102). Though Congress overrode Ford's veto, Cheney and Rumsfeld's preoccupation with strengthening the executive branch to the exclusion of the legislative branch is a clear and direct legacy of Nixon's administration.
It is impossible to view 1968 in a vacuum of political and cultural change without noticing the long shadow that year casts on the decades that followed. While in many ways America of 2007 is vastly different from the 1960s, who we are as a nation today is directly influenced by the events and political changes of 1968. But the real question emerges about what the United States will become forty years from now. How will the changes that are occurring today electorally, legislatively, politically and culturally effect the future?
Sources:
Conason, Joe. It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush. Thomas Dunne Books: New York. 2007.
Wikipedia
Martin Luther King, Jr., National Historic Site Interpretive Staff:http://www.nps.gov/archive/malu/documents/kennedyr_king_assassination.htm
American Masters. PBS. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/brown_j.html
