In the Democratic Party, it seemed at first that incumbent President Lyndon Johnson would easily win the party’s nomination; but in March 1968, Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election.
After LBJ withdrew from the contest, four candidates seemed strong: Hubert Humphrey, Robert Kennedy, George Wallace, and Eugene McCarthy. It was not at all clear which of these would win the party’s nomination.
In June 1968, a Palestinian terrorist murdered Robert Kennedy. This created further confusion in the Democratic Party. George McGovern entered the race after Kennedy’s death, additionally complicating the situation.
Eugene McCarthy represented the anti-war radicals; Humphrey represented the labor unions and major urban political machines within the Democratic Party; Wallace represented the segregationists who opposed Nixon’s support of civil rights legislation.
At the Democratic Party’s national convention in Chicago in August 1968, the party ultimately chose Hubert Humphey as its candidate, but the ‘big story’ in the media was the major rioting in downtown Chicago in the area surrounding the convention. Radicals and revolutionaries of various stripes, beginning with anti-war activists but then spreading to all manner of troublemakers, caused damage and injury. Hundreds of rioters and hundreds of police were wounded.
When the dust settled, then, it was Nixon vs. Humphrey in 1968. Recalling the campaign, Donald Rumsfeld writes:
Amid anger and protest, Nixon offered himself as a source of reassurance and stability. For voters it was a welcome change from the anguished presidency of Lyndon Johnson. But because he had been defeated in two high-profile elections during the past decade, he had to battle the impression that he was a loser.
Humphrey suffered from the internal fractures within his Democratic Party. By contrast, the Republican Party was unified behind Nixon.
But Nixon had suffered a prominent defeat in the 1960 presidential election against Kennedy, and had further endured a loss in the 1962 California gubernatorial election. How could Nixon shake the reputation of being a loser?
Nixon gained much public sympathy after the 1962 election, when Howard Smith, a news broadcaster on the ABC network, invited Alger Hiss to comment on Nixon’s losses.
Alger Hiss was a convicted felon — a Soviet spy who’d been paid to reveal U.S. government secrets to the KGB in Moscow, and who’d been paid to give misleading advice to U.S. policymakers, including President Roosevelt — and the America public was not happy with the network for giving airtime to a Soviet Socialist espionage agent.
Rebounding from his political losses, and gaining public sympathy from Hiss’s TV appearance, Nixon emerged as a strong leader. Nixon eventually won the November 1968 election by a landslide.
