1968 Again

Everyone remembers Charles Dickens' famous description of the extreme contradictions at the heart of a revolutionary time: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way--in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

By common agreement, 1968 was such a year. For me, all of 20 years old at the time, liberated from the Bronx to live in Manhattan and a student at City College, it was, all things considered, a good year - in many ways for me, "the best of times." For America at large, however, it has to be remembered as one for the most cataclysmic years in American history and, without overstatement, in many ways "the worst of times." How like - or unlike - the present (to follow through with the Dickens' analogy) may well be debated. But certainly there is a lot about our apocalyptic-seeming present that invites comparison with that tumultuous time. So, I have been rereading one of the best books about 1968, An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 (NY: Viking, 1969) by British journalists Lewis Chester, Godfrey Hodgson, and Bruce Page.

To anyone who was alive and politically conscious back then, the story is a familiar one. Perhaps because these authors were British, they brought to its telling a particular sense of perspective that makes their account come alive even today, when the reader obviously  brings to the story not only one's multitude of personal and political memories from then but also an awareness of everything that has happened since.

Their story, the fury-filled tale of 1968, revolved around the two crises that defined that year, that in important respects have continued to define American society and politics ever since - Vietnam and race. Although it was Vietnam that produced the insurgent candidacies of Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy and brought an early end to the presidency of Lyndon Johnson (who only four years earlier had been elected in the greatest of landslides), and it was Vietnam which led inexorably to the riots at the Chicago convention and still haunts U.S. foreign policy daces later, race remained always our unhappy inheritance which divides us still as assuredly as it divided the country then. (I remember at the time writing an essay in my "Political Science 1" class highlighting race - rather than Vietnam - as the great issue unsettling American politics.)

Some of the authors' observations seem in retrospect even more prescient and worth recalling. Thus, they noted that the presidential primary system "for all its absurdities, does offer an opportunity for an insurgent candidate, with comparatively little money, to get into contention." While the authors rightly recognized 1968 as a triumph of regular over new politics, it did foreshadow (and help make inevitable) the triumph of our outsider-politics primary system over the regular politics reflected in the traditional party conventions. We also get yet another lesson in the terminal impotency of third-party type movements, the electoral mischief facilitated by the defects of the U.S. constitution, and how the personal and/or ideological intransigence of a certain segment of Democrats helped guarantee Nixon's elections - as it has continued to help Republicans repeatedly since then. Indeed, the authors bring to their coverage of the 1968 election a superb grasp of some of the enduring features of how American politics works. Thus, regarding campaigns, "the main thrust of the enterprise must be to rally support, working within a framework of definitions made earlier - more or less hazily. Resolution of questions must take second place to the consolidation of coalitions."

They also noted how "it was the men who were eliminated, not the men who were nominated, who told the American people frankly where they stood on the war, race, poverty, and crime." In a way barely perceptible amid the apparently revolutionary chaos of the time, the Nixon interlude that followed from 1968 served as precisely that - an interlude, while the racial resentments and related, realigning forces then transforming the Republican party gained strength triumphing finally in the era of Trump.

Considering the great insurgent candidates of 1968, one is struck by the authors' insight how RFK's support came from both those who supported LBJ's war policy and those who opposed it and how "the middle-class liberals who were turning away from Kennedy were turning away from the man who above all others could moderate the hostility between black and white which threatened the Democratic Party at is base in 1968." The authors did not doubt that Kennedy "looked more capable than anyone else of beginning the great task of reconciliation between black and white." Their coverage of Kennedy's unique connection with Mexican-Americans was also particularly insightful. To side with the grape pickers, they wrote, "does not require a radical or complex political philosophy. It requires compassion, some measure of courage, and a relish for direct action and plain loyalties." Their treatment of the Kennedy candidacy also occasioned a welcome refresher course in Weber's theories about charismatic (as opposed to traditional and bureaucratic) authority, which have acquired a renewed salience a century after Weber.

But it is perhaps the authors' perceptive analysis of the (now so little remembered) George Wallace candidacy that may be most prescient about where politics would be going in the decades after 1968. They note the importance of the massive population shifts which meant that by 1968 more than half the African-American population lived outside the South and Wallace's appreciation of how Northerners would react to the presence of large numbers of African-Americans "in their midst by adopting traditional Southern racial attitudes." George Wallace "had found a set of rhetorical keys which would open many political boxes in 1968" - and ever since. For the 1968 story of the final unraveling of the South's stranglehold over the Democratic party also presaged the coming stranglehold of the South over the Republican party.

As we anticipate another Chicago convention, their coverage of that great disaster of 1968 alone makes the book worth reading, along with their insight about the expressive politics that permeated the atmosphere that year: "when the might of a society cannot be challenged, strike at its myths."

Another thing we can even one safely anticipate is another close election - a consequence in part of the polarizing politics of subtraction. Close elections were less the norm then, but that reality was already evident in 1968.  Nixon "had calculated that he could be elected without significant help from the poor, the foreign, the black, the angry or the troubled, and he had been right. But it has been a desperately close thing."