by Joshua Zeitz
It was clear that the president’s allies would struggle to secure the sixty-seven votes needed to break a filibuster. Their odds grew narrower when the committee learned that Fortas had accepted a payment of $15,000—equal to 40 percent of his government salary—to teach a seminar at American University and that the funds associated with his lectureship had been provided by a private donor. Though not an explicit ethics violation, the revelation crystallized opposition to his appointment. The Judiciary Committee ultimately sent Fortas’s nomination to the full Senate by a vote of 11 to 6, but supporters failed to achieve cloture by a vote of 45 to 43. Fortas returned to the Court as an associate justice; Thornberry remained on the appellate court; and Earl Warren delayed his retirement until after Johnson’s successor took office.
The Fortas nomination was just one of LBJ’s many squabbles with Congress in his last months in the White House. Since 1967, when LBJ first requested a surcharge to help cover the costs of the Vietnam War, the administration had been locked in a quiet war with Wilbur Mills, the conservative Democrat who chaired the House Ways and Means Committee, which was responsible for all tax legislation. Mills refused to cooperate unless Johnson agreed to make steep cuts to domestic programs. When toward the end of the year LBJ offered to excise $2 billion from the budget in midyear—a concession that incensed liberals in his own party—Mills stiffened his position and also demanded limits to how many children in a single household could qualify for AFDC. The president patently refused this proposal, arguing in a private meeting at the White House that such limits would only hurt poor children. Unbeknownst to Mills, some of Johnson’s domestic policy aides had in fact begun contemplating a shift from the “service model” (AFDC) to family income maintenance—precisely the type of massive redistribution scheme that Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued would provide the real antidote to poverty. “Nobody likes the present system: liberals, conservatives, poor, rich, white, Negroes—and welfare workers,” the staff member Ben Wattenberg told Califano, Cater, and McPherson. But “opinion has not yet jelled as to an alternative program,” and family income maintenance represented a sharp break with the prevailing “opportunity theory” that formed the theoretical foundation of the Great Society. In the meantime, the administration would remain firm in its position. “Basically,” Wattenberg continued, “it is this: we are not talking about ‘relief chiselers,’ or ‘promiscuous mothers,’ or ‘slums,’ or ‘Negroes.’ We are talking about children. . . . There are 4 million American children living on AFDC payments today. They had no choice of their parentage. . . . The real question then is, are we prepared to help American children who can’t help themselves?” LBJ held the line, but he could not forestall Mills forever. After his speech on March 31, in which the president renewed his call for a tax surcharge, Mills demanded $6 billion in spending cuts. Califano recalled that LBJ was furious and accused Mills and the Republican leader, Gerald Ford, of “courting danger” by holding up “a tax bill until you can blackmail someone into getting your own personal viewpoint on reductions.” But an outgoing president had little negotiating power, and LBJ knew it. He swallowed the cuts and in turn won congressional approval of a 10 percent temporary surcharge.
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On the surface, the Democratic primary results suggested an emerging antiwar consensus. But the truth was more complicated. While many of McCarthy’s voters genuinely opposed the war in Vietnam, exit polls showed that a majority of his supporters in New Hampshire identified as hawks and voted against LBJ to register dissatisfaction with the slow pace of the war effort. Others were unhappy about rising inflation and urban unrest. In November, roughly 18 percent of McCarthy’s primary voters would cast ballots for George Wallace, an unabashed war hawk whose running mate supported the use of nuclear weapons against North Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson’s private pollster found that 55 percent of McCarthy voters supported the conventional bombing campaign against North Vietnam, while only 29 percent opposed it. Even by late fall, a majority of Americans still opposed a unilateral American bombing halt, and only 13 percent favored a complete and immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. To oppose the administration’s strategy in Vietnam was not synonymous with advocating peace at any cost. The political situation was fluid as Nixon and Humphrey looked to November. Many Americans were deeply dissatisfied with the war, but there was no clear consensus about how to win or get out of Vietnam. Moreover, the country was deeply divided over hot-button issues like school desegregation and busing, urban unrest, rising crime rates, inflation, and the student movement. In such a fractured environment, the candidate who could cobble together the most votes from otherwise competing groups would prevail in November.
Complicating matters for the Democratic nominee, throughout the fall Wallace tapped into a strong reserve of voter anger, peeling away many white working-class Democrats in the North and potential white Republican voters in the South. Running on a platform of sheer rage—against African Americans, against crime, against the administration’s failed Vietnam policy, against liberal intellectuals—Wallace whipped working-class audiences into a fury. He dubbed Nixon and Humphrey “Tweedledee and Tweedledum” and claimed there was not “a dime’s worth of difference” between them. He slammed the “over-educated, ivory-tower folks with pointed heads looking down their noses at us” and promised that “when we get to be President and some anarchist lies down in front of our car, it’ll be the last car he’ll ever lie down in front of.” Wallace thrived on his exchanges with the left-wing hecklers who attempted to disrupt his rallies, taunting them with lines like “You young people seem to know a lot of four-letter words. But I have two four-letter words you don’t know: S-O-A-P and W-O-R-K,” and “You just come up to the platform afterward, and I’ll autograph your sandals.”
Wallace made an easy target for liberals like Elizabeth Hardwick, a writer for the New York Review of Books, who mocked his “ill-cut suits, his greying drip-dry shirts . . . his sour, dark, unprepossessing look, carrying the scent of hurry and hair oil. . . . [His] natural home would seem to be a seedy hotel with a lot of people in the lobby, and his relaxation a cheap diner.” Garry Wills similarly described Wallace’s “gritty nimbus of piety, violence, sex. Picked-on and self-righteous, yet aggressive and darkly venturous, he has the dingy attractive air of a B-movie idol, the kind who plays a handsome garage attendant.” But such condescension only heightened the former governor’s appeal to working-class white voters who were angry at the world and needed a place to direct their rage.
Seeking to exploit the year’s turmoil and to capture some of Wallace’s appeal, Nixon walked a thin line between statesmanship and demagoguery, promising to speak for the “forgotten Americans . . . non-shouters, the non-demonstrators, that are not racists or sick, that are not guilty of crime that plagues the land. This I say to you tonight is the real voice of America in 1968.” By focusing incessantly on racially coded issues like crime and urban unrest, Nixon signaled to white voters that he offered a respectable alternative to Wallace. Campaigning throughout the upper South, he endorsed the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which banned segregation in public schools, but also assured white voters that he felt it was wrong for the federal government to “force a local community to carry out what a Federal administrator or bureaucrat may think is best for that local community.”
Even the conservative Wall Street Journal criticized Nixon’s “harsh and strident efforts to capitalize on deep-seated discontent and frustration. This is the Richard Nixon who tells a whistle-stop rally in Deshler, Ohio that in the 45 minutes since his train left Lima, one murder, two rapes and 45 major crimes of violence had occurred in this country—and that ‘Hubert Humphrey defends the policies under which we have seen crime rise to this point.’” It was also the same Nixon “who recalls, in Penn Square in Reading, the young girl with tears in her eyes who told him her fiancé had just been killed in Vietnam and asked, ‘Mr. Nixon, can you do something abou
t this war?’” The Wall Street Journal regretted that “gone almost entirely are the references of earlier days to the need for justice and action to ease the plight of Negroes and other poor people.” Instead, the former vice president was peddling a brand of “extremism [that] seems not only unnecessary but self-defeating. . . . In a society already deeply divided by fear and mistrust, Mr. Nixon’s hard line seems sure to deepen the divisions.”
Throughout September, Nixon clung to a wide lead in the polls. Humphrey tried to campaign on “the politics of happiness, the politics of purpose, and the politics of joy,” sounding traditional liberal themes and affirming that “for every jail Mr. Nixon wants to build I’d like to build a house for a family. And for every policeman he wants to hire I’d like to hire another good teacher.” But with his fortunes tied so strongly to the administration’s losing policy in Vietnam, and with the country riveted by urban violence and social unrest, he made little headway.
On the right, Humphrey was bleeding blue-collar supporters to Wallace. Reports came in from across the Midwest of Wallace rallies packed “wall-to-wall [with] Steelworkers” and of union locals whose memberships were breaking three to one for the former Alabama governor. In New Jersey, 62 percent of workers at a Lincoln-Mercury plant in Middlesex County, home to Rutgers University, and 73 percent of workers at the Ternstedt division of General Motors were backing Wallace. Labor officials were so concerned that Wallace might siphon off enough votes to deliver key industrial states to Nixon that they began circulating millions of pamphlets to their members, reminding workers that Alabama was a stringently anti-union fortress with antiquated wage and hours laws. A sixteen-page fact sheet titled “The Wallace Labor Record” claimed, “If you’re a carpenter it costs you more than $40 a week to work under George Wallace. If you’re a bus driver it costs you more than $30 a week to work under George Wallace.” For all these efforts, in late September it was still not clear that working-class white voters would come home to the Democratic Party.
Humphrey also faced trouble on the left. Wherever he went, antiwar protesters heckled him, shouting, “Stop the War,” “Sieg Heil,” and “Shame, Shame,” and hoisting signs that read WITH HUMPHREY AND FASCIST DALEY, WHO NEEDS ENEMIES? It hardly mattered that Richard Nixon’s position on Vietnam was totally inscrutable. Though he had told a New Hampshire audience, “Yes, I have a plan to end the war,” and though he promised that he would “end the war and win the peace in the Pacific,” Nixon stubbornly refused to reveal even the scantest details of his “plan,” which, to his chagrin, reporters took to calling a “secret plan.” “I don’t want to pull the rug out from under our negotiations in Paris” by giving away too much detail, he explained. Unlike Humphrey, he could afford to be vague. He was not a member of the current administration and stood for change, ipso facto.
With his campaign in a rut, Humphrey’s only hope was to break with Johnson and reverse course on Vietnam. On September 30, he did just that, announcing that his administration would unilaterally halt the bombing of all North Vietnamese targets and thus take a “risk for peace.” It helped that Wallace had tapped the retired air force general Curtis LeMay to be his running mate. LeMay, who famously called for “bomb[ing] the Vietnamese back to the stone age” and who spoke lyrically of the salutary environmental effects of nuclear testing on the Bikini atoll, terrified many Wallace voters into taking a second look at Humphrey. (For his part, Humphrey made good political fodder of the choice, dubbing Wallace and LeMay the “bombsy twins” and emphasizing his own program for peace.) The president, in turn, was furious and contemplated withholding further support for his vice president.
It was never realistic that Johnson would disavow his longtime friend. As an unpopular president, he was of limited use to the nominee anyway, but many of his aides provided critical support. Larry O’Brien had resigned from the cabinet following LBJ’s announcement on March 31 to work for Bobby Kennedy. Now he ran the Humphrey campaign’s national political operation. Doug Cater also resigned his White House post to coordinate domestic policy for the campaign. From the White House, Califano supplied Humphrey with a steady flow of talking points and legislative proposals, particularly aimed at turning back Wallace’s support among “lower and middle-income Americans.” Many of his suggestions anticipated a continuation and expansion of the Great Society in the coming administration, though with an expanded focus on the middle class: comprehensive health care and catastrophic hospital insurance (in effect, Medicare) for children under three years old and their mothers; Head Start for all children, ages three to five (“Why shouldn’t middle-class children receive the same benefits of nursery school as poor children?” Califano asked); an expansion of higher education grants to target middle-income families; an increase in ESEA funds to local schools; and a dedicated transportation construction program. Califano’s memorandums effectively came full circle to the debate between Horace Busby and Bill Moyers some three years earlier. By broadening its target audience to include Middle America, Humphrey could garner wide support for measures that would also materially improve the condition of poor people. The prevailing wisdom still held: quantitative measures, not qualitative initiatives, would suffice.
LBJ’s aides also believed that antiwar liberals could be won back if Humphrey drew a sharp contrast with Nixon on domestic policy. “Where would we be if Nixon had been elected in 1960?” they suggested as a talking point. “No Medicare, no Aid to Education, no War on Poverty, no Head Start, no Minimum Wage Bill, no Model Cities, no Civil Rights bills, no Social Security increases, etc.” Nixon was “straddling the fence and refusing to take a stand on the war, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, jobs, aid to education, crime, older Americans, and cities.” Rather than permit the GOP nominee to run as a vague change candidate, the campaign should challenge voters to consider whether they preferred a replay of the “Republican record of the fifties against the Democratic record of the sixties in the economy, jobs, education, health, housing, crime, cities, civil rights, consumer protection, quality of the environment, and agriculture.” In effect, the White House urged Humphrey to meet backlash head-on by making the election a referendum on the Great Society. It was easy advice for the vice president to follow. Liberal to his core—his staff increasingly drawn from LBJ’s orbit—he ran the race that Johnson had hoped to run himself. And it seemed to work.
As organized labor shifted into high gear for Humphrey, and as peace Democrats moved steadily into his column, Nixon’s lead shrank to 5 percent by October 20. Then, on October 30, Nixon’s advantage all but vanished as Johnson sprang a surprise, announcing to a prime-time television audience that Hanoi had agreed to a new round of four-way peace talks between North Vietnam and its ally, the National Liberation Front, and the United States and its ally, the Saigon-based Government of Vietnam. Johnson also told the nation that Hanoi had agreed to stop bombing South Vietnamese cities in return for a halt in America’s bombing campaign north of the demilitarized zone. With hopes for peace running high, Humphrey surged in the polls, leading Nixon by three points on November 2.
But Nixon had an October surprise of his own. In the three weeks leading up to the election, as a newly invigorated Hubert Humphrey barnstormed the nation, touting a platform of “human equality and human opportunity,” crying out for “a spirit of community,” visiting black churches and tearfully celebrating America, “the only country on the face of the earth that has ever dared to try to make what we call a biracial, pluralistic society work,” Nixon’s campaign was using back channels to scuttle the Johnson administration’s negotiations with the various parties in Vietnam. Nixon’s team met secretly with Anna Chan Chennault, a wealthy supporter of Chiang Kai-shek, co-chair of Republican Women for Nixon, and confidante of the South Vietnamese president, Nguyen Van Thieu. At Nixon’s behest, Chennault informed Thieu that Nixon would secure a better deal for his country than either Humphrey or Johnson and that the Democrats were effectively prepared to sell out Saigon i
n order to secure peace at any price. If Chennault could persuade Thieu to stay away from the negotiating table, the talks would collapse, LBJ would look foolish, and the Democrats’ eleventh-hour gambit would fail.
Johnson and Humphrey were well aware of these machinations—the FBI was tapping Chennault’s phone—but opted not to make them public. By one plausible, though unlikely, account, Humphrey was simply too honorable a man to reveal the GOP’s shenanigans, because he feared that doing so would make it all but impossible for Nixon to govern in the event of an election victory. By another, more likely account, neither LBJ nor Humphrey wanted to acknowledge the wiretaps on Anna Chennault, for fear they would reveal other FBI taps and bugs, many of them illegal.
