Did The 26th Amendment Fail, Part 3: The Myths of 1968 and The Role The Student Left Played in Nixon's Election

 A large part of the reason for McGovern’s political motivations to run in 1972 very well may have been based in guilt. In the middle of 1967 Allard Lowenstein had come to run in the New Hampshire primary  with the intention of influencing the federal government – then controlled by the Democrats – to curtail its involvement in the Vietnam War. Lowenstein’s movement was titled Vietnam War Dump Johnson movement which shows just how civilly they considered the government.

McGovern already had a reputation of being against the war and demonstrating the leftist values the students would appreciate, making his first major address against the war in January of 1964. But the problem was he was running for reelection that year in a heavily Republican state. Indeed he’d only managed to win election the first time by a margin of 597 votes. And he knew that what was presumed to be a quixotic campaign for the Democratic nomination could only hurt his chances for reelection in his state and hurt his chance to lead the movement in the Senate. So for one of the few times in his political life McGovern chose pragmatism over idealism. Lowenstein then chose Eugene McCarthy who wasn’t running for reelection that year.

McCarthy was, in hindsight, absolutely the perfect choice not because he was known for his strong anti-war position but because he was and always would be a gadfly known far more for his contempt for politics, government and indeed even the electorate. The only person he seemed to hold in high esteem in his political life was Eugene McCarthy and he did everything possible his entire life to make sure that person was happy. In that sense he was absolutely everything the student movement could have hoped for.

McCarthy, unlike George McGovern or so many other anti-war opponents, didn’t have a major part in leadership in the Senate, never had ambition for higher office (or much respect for the one he held) and basically held the liberal establishment he was a member of in contempt. McCarthy had been elected to the House the same year that Humphrey was elected to the Senate – 1948 – and was part of the wave of Minnesota Democrats that had a major influence in so much of the Civil Rights legislation and indeed liberal legislation of the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike his eventual superior in the Senate Humphrey (McCarthy would be elected to the Senate in 1958) or his future colleague Walter Mondale (who was named as Humphrey’s replacement when his mento ascended to the Vice Presidency) and indeed so many of his liberal colleagues McCarthy was just part of many great liberal senators but never pushing anything forward. The one major act of legislation he sponsored – the Immigration Act of 1965 – he later regretted and would later become a member of a board for immigration reform.

What McCarthy was famous for by 1968 was lofty rhetoric and his nasty humor towards his colleagues and basically being something of a flake. As Mondale would relate in his memoir: “(McCarthy) had great confidence in his talent…but also had a way of fading when it came to the heavy lifting.”

And his sense of humor was both condescending and went against the realities of the time. During a nationally televised debate with Wisconsin’s Joe McCarthy he famously parodied the Senator’s arguments to ‘prove’ Douglas MacArthur had been a Communist pawn. Eisenhower swept to a landslide in 1952 and Minnesota went Republican even as Eugene McCarthy won reelection. In 1960 when not even Adlai Stevenson was willing to agree to it, he spent much of the campaign advocating a draft for him at the convention, giving one of the most famous nominating speeches in history right around the same time Stevenson was deciding that he would not run. Even at the time he was convinced who he ideal Democratic nominee was – himself. “I’m twice as liberal as Hubert Humphrey, twice as intelligent as Stuart Symington and twice as Catholic as Jack Kennedy.” This did not endear him to his colleagues in the Senate and it didn’t make him popular when Kennedy won the election that fall.

Indeed part of the reason he even agreed to run was because of Wayne Morse opposition to the war when he had been one of only two Senators to vote against the Gulf Of Tonkin Resolution. (Tellingly both Morse and Ernest Gruening, the other Senator, would lose reelection in 1968 in large part because of those votes.) Perhaps because Kennedy had been asked first and turned it down McCarthy got in fundamentally to have a dig at a man he basically despised.

McCarthy’s success in New Hampshire had more to do with outside events than his campaign. Had it not been for the Tet Offensive, which caused many Democrats to become dissatisfied with the war, McCarthy would not have done nearly as well as he did. Indeed his 42 percent showing opposed to LBJ’s 49 had little to do with many New Hampshire voters thinking the war was wrong rather than it was being badly fought. (Many voters surveyed later said that they favored escalation.)

There is no indication if the students even considered the consequences of their actions when they were getting clean for Gene. The thinking was that Lyndon Johnson was President; therefore he was responsible for Vietnam, therefore he had to be dropped. What happened after he agreed to step down – as he shockingly did on March 31^st  -  not just to the Democratic Party but how this would affect the Republicans or in fact the war, never seems to have been a consideration. That is particularly true considering that so many of the students were angry when Bobby Kennedy made the decision to run after McCarthy’s strong finish.

McCarthy himself should have been thinking that far ahead but there is no indication he did. Perhaps he was enjoying the attention of having Paul Newman explain why he campaigned for him, having Peter, Paul, and Mary write a record endorsing him. McCarthy’s actions throughout his campaign, both before and after Kennedy entered the race, demonstrates that his attitude was exactly the kind that the students would have appreciated: he berated his opponents and made sure that the people who voted for Kennedy were in fact dumber than him. When George Romney said he’d been ‘brainwashed’ about the Vietnam War McCarthy said, “a light rinse would have been sufficient in his case.” In Oregon he called Kennedy supporters less intelligent and belittled Indiana (which by then had gone for Kennedy) as being unworthy for having a touch of the poet ‘but not Shakespeare  but James Whitcomb Riley.”

And there’s an argument that so much of the Democratic troubles in 1968 were based on McCarthy’s ego more than anything else. Many of his early supporters had been loyalists to Kennedy and after Kennedy entered the race many joined his campaign. They urged McCarthy to drop out and endorse him, therefore giving the anti-war forces a candidate that they could unify behind in Chicago. But McCarthy thought Kennedy had let him do the dirty work and only entered when Johnson was vulnerable. That he was causing a fissure in the party that would likely cause the Republican nominee (likely Richard Nixon) to win in November was not McCarthy’s concern; he had taken the attitude “it is not enough for me to win, my opponent must also lose.” This kind of ‘all or nothing’  thinking was very much the argument of the student movement who could not vote in November of 1968. And it showed a spectacular level of ingratitude on the part of McCarthy when it came to Humphrey who had been as responsible for him winning elected office in the first place. This was an attitude of betrayal that we constantly find among so many leftists and it was true of McCarthy whose only interest was himself more than anything.

One of the myths of the Robert Kennedy campaign to the generation of the students was that he was their voice who they lost with his tragic assassination. That was not a universal feeling, certainly considering the reaction of one student who had campaigned for McCarthy who sends that “after New Hampshire it was Christmas morning. And then when Bobby got in, it was like someone had stolen all are presents.” Indeed while Kennedy was sensitive to the mood of the students, on more than one occasion on the campaign trail he chose to call them on their bullshit, arguing to their own selfishness.

Indeed as Theodore White reported Kennedy, unlike McCarthy, did have a platform and it was far more conservative then the students wanted. He wanted negotiation in Vietnam, but not surrender. He was for equality among all minorities – but not for them to have more authority then the working class voter. He wanted no exemptions in the draft laws rather than selective service – and he was as much for law-and-order as Nixon himself. Kennedy had a read on the reality of the nation something that irritated him when he was charged by being more conservative. He hadn’t changed, the country had and he was giving what his major constituencies wanted. Kennedy believed in listening to the voice of the people and he was concentrating on the present; the students who wanted Johnson gone believed only in an indistinct future.

There’s a belief that when Kennedy was assassinated, McCarthy lost the heart for the battle and basically abandoned the cause going forward. This belies the fact that while McCarthy suspended campaigning his aides said he spent much of the time essentially berating the recently departed, going so far as to argue that because of his views on Israel, Kennedy had all but been asking for a man like Sirhan Sirhan to shoot him.

The truth may be closer to Mondale’s interpretation: McCarthy had no desire for the heavy lifting. This is backed up by the fact that McCarthy made no effort in the lead-up to Chicago to do anything to unite the remainder of the Kennedy delegation into a unified force at Chicago. That is in large part why McGovern agreed to take up the mantle in the first place; the Kennedy delegates were tired of waiting for McCarthy to come to them. He met with Humphrey and admitted he should endorse him, knowing that he was the only person who could be Nixon. But he didn’t, not at the convention or indeed until very late in the campaign, and even then so tepidly that Mondale thought it may have done more harm then good. He certainly made no effort to make this clear to the demonstrators outside the convention at Chicago who thought McCarthy had been cheated of the nomination. He wouldn’t come up on the stage with Humphrey after he clinched the nomination there, Mondale would say later on that the left ‘knew they should support Humphrey over Nixon might well have been swayed by him. But he didn’t.” Indeed his biggest job during the fall was covering the World Series between Detroit and St. Louis for Sports Illustrated. And as a result, millions of people on the left chose to argue that when it came to  Humphrey – who had been fighting for liberal causes before many of his loudest opponents were born – ‘there wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference’ between him and Nixon.

The reference to George Wallace’s famous 1968 campaign slogan is deliberate, not only because it illustrates the maddening commonalities between the left and the right-wingers they abhor but because it fundamentally ignores a major flaw in those who argue the election was stolen from Humphrey because of the Nixon campaign dirty tricks involving the Paris negotiations. That belies something the left have chosen to ignore: even if Humphrey could have turned the tide that year, the Democratic Party would still have faced what was a complete repudiation of the previous election.

In 1964 LBJ had won one of the biggest landslides in electoral history: carrying 61 percent of the popular vote and 44 of the 50 states plus DC for 486 electoral votes compared to Goldwater’s 52. Just four years later, Hubert Humphrey received less than 43 percent of the popular vote while his two opponents combined carried 57 percent of the popular vote. Combined Nixon and George Wallace carried 347 electoral votes to Humphrey’s 191. As White accurately reported this was the greatest repudiation of a political party since FDR’s landslide victory over Herbert Hoover in 1932 in which the greatest electoral victory in the history of the Democratic Party came as a complete reversal of Hoover’s landslide victory four years earlier which had been the greatest electoral victory in the history of the Republican Party. The Great Depression had caused the repudiation of the Republicans in 1932; the Vietnam War had caused the repudiation of LBJ in 1968.

The main reason the election was as close as it was had far less to do with the fractures on the left than those on the right. One can and should accuse Richard Nixon of many things  but the one thing he definitely had in the leadup to the 1968 was the common sense that the student movement dumping LBJ didn’t have. He was aware of the dissatisfaction of the war in Vietnam was growing but he was just as aware that many white working-class voters – already having issues with the Democrats after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – were just as upset by the activism these students were causing in protest. Those students mostly could not vote in 1968; the people who were opposed to it could and did – and overwhelmingly in 1968, they made it very clear they were just as upset by the dissent as the war causing it.

Richard Nixon will never be mistaken for a unifier and certainly no one in 1968 thought he was, but it was very clear that there was no one at the head of the Democratic Party willing to take up that role. Had Kennedy survived it is conceivable he could have done so but in his absence there was no grand unifying force,  certainly not one the students were willing to hear. And the leftist movement was in no mood to understand or care about the position Humphrey was in and he spent too much time trying to find a way forward.

For all the arguments the left has made in the years following about Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy’, basically one gets the feeling that even the most pragmatic of them have the attitude of “we’re better without them’. The fact that those people had been until 1964 among the most loyal Democrat voters for nearly a century is something revisionist historians choose to argue is inconsequential; the fact that there are still minorities in these states who even they admit need help is basically irrelevant to the left’s own politics of exclusion.

The fact that the Constitution grants suffrage to all Americans – especially people that the left disagrees with – is something they can’t seem to come to terms with. In their minds there was something beneath the dignity of Richard Nixon to court these voters by appealing to their worst instincts – which the left loves to point out are not those of the kinds of people the Democrats should never have had in the party in the first place. This goes to the lack of common sense we see among the left: as they seem to think it is fine for the Democratic Party to go without the combined 113 electoral votes from the southern states Wallace and Nixon combined carried. The fact that they make up nearly half the necessary votes to elect a President – and that without them the Democrats would start every election in a big hole – is absent from the discussion.

Similarly it could be argued that the rather than failing the antiestablishment campaign waged by the left succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. In 1964, more than 43 million people voted for Lyndon Johnson. In 1968, roughly 31.2 million people voted for Hubert Humphrey. How many of those twelve million votes were subsequently cast for Nixon and Wallace will never be known but considering that both men were campaigning on ‘law and order’ – which dealt as much with the student movement as the race riots -   there is  a strong argument as to the effect the demonstrations on campuses had on the electorate.

Despite this Humphrey nearly did beat Nixon in 1968 and there is a very good chance that it was the fact that far more people associated the riots with the Democrats than the Republicans. Statistical evidence suggests that around two percent of the electorate were driven to vote for Nixon rather than Humphrey for that very reason. When one adds to this fact held by many so called liberal people truly believed that it didn’t matter one way or the other if Humphrey or Nixon would make a difference and chose to sit the election out – many of them members of the liberal coalition themselves – Nixon owes his victory as much to that movement as anything else.

Because Nixon’s margin of the popular vote was 43.4 percent, by far the smallest percentage a winning candidate had received for the Presidency since Woodrow Wilson had in 1912. And he entered the White House as the first President since Zachary Taylor in 1848 to have neither house of Congress controlled by his party. The Republicans gained a grand total of five seats in the House and five in the Senate but the Democrats still maintained overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress.

It is also clear that while the electorate had little use for Humphrey as President, they were basically still fine with the liberal order. Ernest Gruening and Wayne Morse did lose reelection but many Democrats associated with the anti-war movement held their seats. These included not just McGovern, but Frank Church of Idaho who had also been approached by Lowenstein but turned him down and Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut, who had nominated McGovern in Chicago. Other members of the liberal order such as Birch Bayh held their seats and new members of the anti-Vietnam voices such as Thomas Eagleton of Missouri and Harold Hughes of Iowa were elected to the Senate. If the Democratic Party had unified behind Humphrey there is a strong argument he would have won. But the left saw him not as the upholder of the liberal order but LBJ’s vice president and never accepted him.

McGovern’s run four years later was flawed in many ways, not the least of which is that he had always felt the war in Vietnam was a moral wrong more than anything else. Four years the mood was about bringing the war to an end but what McGovern – as well as the students who had their faith in them – was that many of them were just as upset that its end was going to signify an American defeat. Even those who were not convinced of ‘the domino theory’  still believed that the cause was justifiable and that the North Vietnamese had managed to keep fighting because it was a matter of time before America lost ‘the will’ to keep up the battle. Some also pointed out that the students morality only involved American lives lost and didn’t care what would happen to the North Vietnamese the minute America left. Those voters looked at McGovern’s decision to withdraw the troops as soon as he took office as an act of surrender, something McGovern never bothered to deny.

When Nixon chose to campaign on the idea of ‘Peace With Honor’, once again he hit on something that the left has fundamentally had a lot more trouble grasping than the right has. From the abolitionist movement to the civil rights movement, there was always a fringe element who believed that America was essentially a failed state because of the sins of white supremacy and was unworthy of respect. The anti-war movement basically made that fringe element mainstream among the left and its never really gone away. The student movement in particular, when it chose to burn flags, throw blood on draft cards, scream names at police and occupy campuses, made it very clear that they had no use for any part of ‘the system’ and thought that anyone who believed in such concepts as honor and patriotism were basically suckers. The fact that they chose to spit on soldiers who came back from Vietnam shows that they seemed to care about those who died in Vietnam rather than those who survived it.

And during this period one of the pillars of the conservative movement was formed about patriotism. The left has never accepted that old slogan of “My country, right or wrong” and there is no indication that changed in the half-century since the end of Vietnam. This has been another large part of the politics of exclusion that the left has always been guilty of and since then has only calcified. The left has more or less spent the last half-century focusing on the flaws of America and that whatever strengths it has are not real strengths, what freedoms they have are not really freedoms. And they have become increasingly unwilling to accept anyone who does not believe in their vision and seem proud about who they drive away. In the aftermath of his stunning electoral loss George McGovern joked that he had opened the doors wide during his campaign "and twenty million Democrats walked out.” There are no doubt members of the left who at the time didn’t think this was a bad thing; the fact that many of them have never chosen to return is something they still don’t seem to mind.

In the next article I will deal with how the left reacted to Watergate and Richard Nixon’s resignation – and how it may have well played a role in the conservative revolution that began not long after