Excerpt: ‘American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election And The Politics Of Division’

[DonViejo]

The 2016 campaign may look like the craziest campaign in modern political history. But we’ve been here before. Forty-eight years ago, another racist demagogue who “told it like it is”; played on white racial anxieties and pledged to bring law and order to America ran for president. Alabama governor George Wallace might have run on a third party ticket that year – and only ended up winning 13 percent of the popular vote – but he gave Republican politicians a blueprint for how to use racial and cultural fear and anti-government populism to their political benefit. Wallace’s rhetorical appeals in 1968 would become the template for a generation of Republicans and can be heard directly in the campaign musings of this year’s Wallace-like figure, Donald Trump. Indeed, by the fall of 1968 Wallace was running a strong third in the polls, nipping at the heels of Hubert Humphrey and seemed to poise to potentially win enough states to stop any candidate from winning a majority of electoral votes and thus throw the 1968 election into the House of Representatives.

Then he picked his vice presidential running mate, General Curtis Lemay, and practically overnight, the bottom fell out of his presidential campaign. This adapted excerpt from Michael A. Cohen’s recent book American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division tells the story of perhaps the most disastrous campaign press conference in modern American history – a story that will likely sound very familiar to those who have followed this year’s wacky and seemingly unending presidential campaign.

By the first days of October 1968, George Wallace had reached the apex of his political rise. Featured on the covers of Life, Time, and Newsweek, Wallace, according to the New York Times led in seven states versus only four for Humphrey. His campaign rallies remained as enthusiastic, well-attended, and unruly as ever — twenty thousand greeted him at Boston Commons (far more than Humphrey turned out), and thirteen thousand in Fort Worth. The overflow crowds lapped up his paeans to the policeman and the firefighter, the beautician and the truck driver and his harsh attacks on the anarchists, the hippies, and the meddling, liberal elite. Angry and bigoted taunting of reporters and demonstrators as well as fisticuffs between pro- and anti-Wallace forces was the norm.

As his poll numbers began topping 20 percent Wallace suddenly became a major political problem for both parties. Humphrey worried about Wallace eroding his support among blue-collar workers. Nixon feared losing the votes of disaffected and resentful whites –people who without Wallace in the race were likely to vote Republican. So Nixon soon followed Humphrey’s lead in attacking Wallace.

Nothing the two candidates did, however, could match Wallace’s own self-sabotage in his choice of a running mate. All else being equal, Wallace would have preferred to run alone, but many states required a vice presidential candidate to be on the ballot with him. Wallace’s close aides wanted a national figure, someone who might lend credibility to the ticket while also extending their electoral possibilities outside the Deep South and into places like Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, and Virginia. A. B. (Happy) Chandler, the one-time commissioner of Major League Baseball and former governor and senator from Kentucky, seemed like the perfect candidate.

Wallace, however, was unconvinced. “Well, you know, that fellow’s liberal now . . . . He’s the one . . . that integrated baseball.” Chandler’s tenure had indeed coincided with the breaking of the color barrier by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. As governor of Kentucky he had mobilized the National Guard to protect black students integrating previously segregated schools. Further complicating matters, Chandler was unrepentant in his pro–civil rights positions.

-snip-

http://www.nationalmemo.com/excerpt-american-maelstrom-1968-election-politics-division/

[MicaelS]

1. Lemay was a maniac.

Back when he was still in charge of SAC, he stated he wanted 10,000 -TEN THOUSAND Minuteman ICBMs. General Tommy Power wanted 20,000.