1968 and all that

...On the other hand, 1968 shows us what happens when crises arise without great, or even good, men to meet them...

...Bring us together," Nixon said, as he won the prize he had longed for...

...Enter Robert F Kennedy, who saw Johnson much as Hamlet saw Claudius, a blowsy satyr on a martyr's throne...

...And he also thought Johnson could lead...

...To the personae of 1968, dark things would happen...

...He would arbitrarily cancel events on his schedule which had been painstakingly prepared by many people, or not make a promised speech...

...Worse, Lowenstein said, McCarthy "entertained what came to be seen as an obsessive hatred of [Robert] Kennedy," a "very profound hate for Kennedy, which was shared...

...Kennedy courted, or raided, McCarthy's forces, while the McCarthy people grew paranoid...

...He became both secretive and grandiose...

...And the nomination of Hubert Humphrey was assured...

...The Kennedy campaign took the position that everyone was welcome," said Lowenstein, who stayed with McCarthy, unwillingly...

...In the McCarthy campaign, conversely, anybody that had anything kind to say about Kennedy was excluded, and almost driven out...

...Harold Ickes, the activist of 1968, faces legal and ethical charges...

...He would shortly be tearing his hair...

...Twelve years later, Allard Lowenstein, the activist who recruited Eugene McCarthy to run for president and thereby drove Lyndon Johnson from office, was himself shot and killed...

...a bitter, brutal, civil war...

...Lowenstein said that he had wanted to "roll with joy" when McCarthy committed...

...In 1948, Humphrey had been a brave figure, battling for civil rights before it seemed prudent, or popular...

...Alan Brinkley puts it this way: "Wallace's vote, combined with Nixon's—a total of 56.7%—was the real measure of what happened . . . with the Democratic vote dropping from 61.1% for Johnson in 1964 to only 42.7% for Humphrey...

...He viewed it as a spontaneous happening...

...He had no more heart for it...

...McCarthy didn't throw cold water on the New York primary—he pissed on it," Harold Ickes, an organizer, said...

...The Democratic party, as crafted by Franklin Roosevelt...

...Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were murdered...

...Divisions continued...

...The pious protesters of 1968 and the years after are not the correctives to Johnson and Nixon, but their worthy successors...

...The temperamental opposite of both Johnson and the brothers Kennedy, McCarthy disdained both ambition and power, and was so far above pandering he could barely ask people for votes...

...Some other things were diminished too: The liberal consensus, as it existed...

...Every "leader" who emerged in that year either defaulted on his obligations to his country and people, or led opinion in the wrong direction...

...In New York for the primary there in June, McCarthy campaigned, Witcover says, "with an aloofness that crowded arrogance...

...Lead Johnson did, but the political skills that served him well as a congressional leader did not translate well into national leadership...

...Nineteen sixty-eight was the year the Democrats destroyed themselves...

...By 1968, he was a broken one, his public antennae decayed...

...And so, when he decided to run after McCarthy's good showing in New Hampshire, the shape of the year 1968 had been settled...

...Now was the chance for the ultimate gesture: the gracious hand out to the Kennedy people, the plea to make his cause their own...

...McCarthy, Lyndon Johnson, and Hubert Humphrey ended 1968 embittered, their reputations diminished...

...Four years later, George Wallace was shot, made a cripple...

...Now and then, a great man will appear without crisis—a Theodore Roosevelt, to his immense irrita-tion—or a man who is not great will rise to his moment, and in it still do some great things...

...He knew that he needed Johnson's home state of Texas...

...The real mark of 1968, as Witcover tells us, was the start of the rise of the Right...

...The day after Kennedy's death, he met Hubert Humphrey in a rudderless meeting and sought an egress: "It was clear that what Gene was doing was trying to find a reason to drop out," a Humphrey aide told Witcover later...

...No wonder the dream is still dead...

...country's belief in its nerve and its power...

...In fact, it is with the death of King and Robert Kennedy that the civil-rights movement and the liberal tradition began their long move from the mainstream to the fringe of the political culture from which they have not yet returned...

...It has not been remade to this day...

...Kennedy demurred, and Lowenstein tried several others before striking tin in Eugene McCarthy, a fey and chilly poet-priest...

...The Noemie Emery is a writer living in Fairfax, Va...

...It was these things that the Left began to demolish, fueled by their rage at the year, and their leaders...

...He seemed oddly detached from the crises about him, prating of "joy" in a season of murder and turbulence, unable to comprehend why voters were troubled by violence or by the smell of tear gas in the streets...

...He seemed to be paying no attention at all to his campaign," one backer wrote later...

...But his manner of conducting the war— the stealth and secrecy with which it was expanded, the imperiousness with which he treated dissent and discussion, the Credibility Gap that emerged on his watch—fed the deep sense that something was wrong in the country, and roused the dissent from Johnson's left...

...The "dream," of course, was different things to different people, but it was typical of 1968 that it should take a beating on all sides: the conservative values of order and discipline, the liberal faith in a state-induced justice, the belief of all sides in a rational order, in the logical process of life...

...As Brinkley says, "Very few people were willing to take literally what he [Wallace] was talking about, which was law and order, long-haired demonstrators, pointy-headed intellectuals, and bureaucrats...

...If the Right, misled by George Wallace, veered off into repression and mindless jingoism, the Left veered off to mindless nihilism and violence: confusing one war with all war, bad rules with all rules, and one administration they disliked and distrusted with all of American history...

...In 1968, the Democratic Party underwent a kind of cultural brain transplant," Witcover quotes William Bennett as saying...

...As for the "kids"—the protesters, who held them all up to judgment—they in their turn would prove equally tainted, equally untruthful and corrupt...

...By the August convention, he had become a spectral non-presence, appearing now and then to insult delegations...

...But it soon became clear, to those closer to him, that their hero was, shall we say, flawed...

...Kennedy won the big prize, California, and was shot on June 4. Kennedy's death from his wounds a day later left McCarthy unchallenged, in longed-for sole possession of the field...

...As a cultural stance, this had its attractions— as when it helped make a cult hero of the late Adlai Stevenson—but it could prove a drawback in national politics...

...The war in Vietnam, which had never been declared or even explained fully, would have been controversial in any case...

...It was this in the end that elected Nixon, and against which George Wallace campaigned...

...Kennedy's followers split, becoming essentially leaderless...

...But, with the man he despised in the seat of his brother, Bobby could not bear that another "unworthy" figure should lead the fight he thought of as his...

...The years 1789, 1860, 1941, even 1945 show us what occurs in these times—when men meet and master their moments...

...As the campaign progressed, Kennedy developed a messianic dimension, inheriting the cause of Martin Luther King after King's assassination on April 4. As Kennedy drove himself and his crowds to emotional frenzies, McCarthy became more remote and quixotic, talking poetry with Robert Lowell while political work went undone...

...By now, the anti-war forces were seeking yet a new leader...

...McCarthy's elites took over the party machinery...

...What reigned in the dream's stead was destruction both public and personal...

...Kennedy won Indiana and Nebraska...

...He helped to exploit them...

...The constituencies represented by the three primary candidates diverged, and never quite came back together...

...In Chicago, riots...

...If Harry Truman is known as the man who rose to meet his occasion, one may say safely that Humphrey, McCarthy, Nixon, Wallace, and Agnew all fell very far below theirs...

...In many places, they wooed people...

...But he did not...

...a vote against the counterculture, against violence, and for law and order...

...Bill Clinton has revived the Credibility Gap, and given it new stature and meaning...

...McCarthy won Wisconsin and Oregon...

...Race was certainly a part of that message, but it wasn't race alone...

...Another peculiar American fancy met its death in that terrible era: the belief that a crisis calls up a great leader, a Washington, a Lincoln, a Franklin Roosevelt, crafted to meet it...

...The political roots of 1968 can be found in part in 1960, when Lyndon Johnson was picked as vice-presidential running mate by John Kennedy for two different reasons...

...Washington burned...

...Had someone else challenged Johnson, Kennedy might have backed him, and the anti-war movement might have stayed unified...

...It would not be a "clean" war of McCarthy (or Kennedy) against Johnson (or Humphrey), but a grudge fight within the anti-war movement...

...Kennedy was courted by Allard K. Lowenstein, a professional architect of civilized protest who had begun to travel the country late in 1967, seeking a Democrat to challenge Johnson in the 1968 campaign...

...One forgets how corny these people had been in their instincts, how devout in reflexive American patriotism, how middle class in their cultural tastes and their fancies, how fond of the ethic of duty and effort, how sure that they knew Right and Wrong...

...Witcover quotes Barney Frank saying, "Cops used to vote Democratic, and then they heard the kids saying, 'You're the motherf—er, and your wife's a whore.'" This drove the stake through the heart of the FDR party...

...Before the primary, Lowenstein said, his behavior had become so peculiar that a serious Dump McCarthy movement had begun...

...He wanted Humphrey to do something that would give him such a reason...

...Law and order," which liberals took (and still take) as a code word for race, was really a code for them and their values...

...The point of the latter was missed at the time...

...Instead, McCarthy chose the opposite option: He caved...

...Nixon and Agnew would have theirs diminished as well, later on...

...Many Humphrey backers became Nixon's Silent Majority, then Reagan Democrats...

...It was the chance of the year, and of his life...

...McCarthy was a charm to the "Clean for Gene" armies, who flocked to New Hampshire in droves...

...Or, as Witcover has it, the "dream...

...about Spiro Agnew, Jules Witcover brings us back to the time of their convergence in his book The Year the Dream Died: Revisiting 1968 in America...

...In the end, he and his people proved as duplicitous as the regime they supplanted...

...Hillary Clinton may fancy herself another Eleanor Roosevelt, but the presidential figure she is linked to most often is none other than Richard M. Nixon...

...The word 'traditional' became synonymous with 'wrong.'" "Traditional" was not "wrong" to Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, to Harry Truman...