The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion And Chaos In The Presidential Election Of 1968

>> Niall Ferguson: Hello, I'm Niall Ferguson, the Milbank Family Senior Fellow here at the Hoover Institution, where I chair the Hoover History Working Group. And we've been very fortunate indeed this week to have visiting us Professor Luke Nichter of Chapman University. Luke is one of the leading, if not the leading, scholar of 20th century American political history.

He has pioneered the editing and publication of transcripts of the Nixon tapes. That's when I first got to know his work. He's the author of four books, the most recent of which is the one we've been talking about this afternoon. It's The Year That Broke Politics, Chaos and Collusion in the 1968 Election.

Luke, it's been great to have you here. Let me start with a staringly obvious question. What is it that we used to think about the 1968 election that turns out to be completely wrong in your work?

>> Professor Luke Nichter: Well, I think that we're reminded of what the role of history is, that it's been 50 years and so many records, tapes, as you mentioned, have been declassified.

And what we learned for 50 years was that Lyndon Johnson, outgoing President Lyndon Johnson, favored, of course, as his successor, his Vice President, Hubert Humphrey. And his challenger, Humphrey's challenger, was former Vice President Richard Nixon, with George Wallace running very strong campaign as a third party candidate. And that we were told for 50 years that Johnson preferred Humphrey, that Humphrey had run an anti, largely on the issue of Vietnam, and that it was one of the nation's closest elections at that point.

And it turns out that almost none of that's true. That Johnson actually, based on new evidence, saw Richard Nixon as a better successor for his own political legacy. That Hubert Humphrey was really running on traditional Democratic issues of the economy, jobs, and labor, and really infiltrated, thanks to the AFL-CIO in mid-October, and to those traditional blue collar FDR Democrats.

And that the campaign was really much more about domestic issues after all, because both candidates, Nixon and Humphrey, had largely run on getting out of the war, as it was, on different timetables. And so that really shifted the attention of many voters to issues other than Vietnam.

>> Niall Ferguson: What was it that put you on the scent of new sources that would help us revise the accepted version of 1968?

>> Professor Luke Nichter: Well, I wish I had some brilliant story about how I anticipated these changes I've just described. It was really, in December of 2017, I had a meeting with former Vice President Walter Mondale, who was close to Humphrey in the 1970s, had co-chaired his campaign in 1968. And he challenged me to consider more deeply what Lyndon Johnson's role was during 1968.

He said to me very firmly, he said, if you wanna know what I think, Lyndon Johnson absolutely did not want Hubert Humphrey to win. And he said it twice. And that challenged, I mean, 50 years of the orthodoxy of the campaign. And I wasn't sure what to say in response.

I'd never heard anyone talk like that, especially someone close to Johnson, close to Humphrey, in an authoritative position to challenge yet. And I said, do you really think Johnson preferred Nixon? And he said, maybe. And so that set me down a path to really look for new evidence, and there's quite a bit of it.

And really, the starring of that was really the diary of Reverend Billy Graham. So talk a little bit about that document, which I just find utterly fascinating.

>> Niall Ferguson: Where is it? How voluminous is it? And why has nobody ever used it before?

>> Professor Luke Nichter: So two months after I met with Mondale, the Reverend Billy Graham died at age 99.

This is February of 2018. And that is, his death triggered a process of opening his massive 70 years of personal papers, I mean, almost a presidential library unto himself down in Charlotte, North Carolina. And what I was able to see was what he called his vip notebooks, or sometimes he called.

But the record collection is called The VIP Notebooks, and they document, Graham had deep contacts on both sides of the aisle, with presidents from Harry Truman all the way to Barack Obama. And so you have all these presidents. Graham actually recorded not everything, but he recorded conversations, including verbatim content.

He documented contact correspondence with presidents, their families and top staff. And because Graham lived to be so long, it was 52 volumes overall. And so we've only really seen, I've seen just the very tip of the iceberg that's out there. These records are gonna spawn so many books.

And it goes, if you think of Graham as just a religious or an evangelical figure, this is presidential history, it's political history. Graham never wanted to be seen as an elite figure whose friends were presidents, but he had friends who were presidents. And especially beginning with Eisenhower, he was influential.

There were a few less so, but beginning in the 1950s, and then by 68, Graham was really reaching the peak of his profession, to use that term, as the other contemporaries were reaching theirs. Humphrey, Nixon, even Johnson and Eisenhower, he'd known them an average of 20 years each.

So he might have been the only American alive in 1968 who could move in and out of these circles. He could talk to them, he could meet with them and pass messages between them.

>> Niall Ferguson: And why did Billy Graham take it upon himself to act as a kind of almost a marriage broker between Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon?

What motivated him?

>> Professor Luke Nichter: It's a good question. I would say the diary is not crystal clear about that. Graham believed the 1960s were a political crisis. He didn't use the word when politics was broken, but it leads you to believe that. He thought both parties were politically broken.

He thought they didn't have the answers. He thought the war in Vietnam was a terrible morass we were sinking more deeply into every day. He thought the domestic unrest at home, crime and racial unrest as a result of the civil rights movement, had gone too far. And no one in the political establishment on either side of the aisle had the answers.

And he also thought that perhaps even the decade was a spiritual crisis. And many Americans assume they're always the center of the world. But you look around the world, the Chinese cultural revolution, apartheid in South Africa, you have, of course, the war. You have all kinds of unrest around the world, student movements in Europe.

And Graham believed that something was going on, and we needed a fresh leader. And the diary documents that he really believed that of the options, that Nixon was the best one, mainly because whether you like Nixon or not, he wasn't tied to the chaos of the decade. He was out of office, so he wasn't committed to Vietnam, and he wasn't tied to unrest around the nation.

That voting for Nixon, for Graham, was a little bit like time travel. It could kind of take you back to a time period before the unrest. And if there's one thing that both sides agreed on in 1968, it's that they wanted to turn the noise level down. And so there's a chapter in the book called Messenger, where Graham is, you see the messages that Graham is passing back and forth.

And it documents to my satisfaction that Johnson ultimately came to prefer his longtime rival and political nemesis, Richard Nixon, as a way of turning that noise level down.

>> Niall Ferguson: And you show in the book that there was a deal, a specific five point deal that Richard Nixon committed himself to if Johnson would tacitly give his blessing to Nixon's campaign.

Tell us about the deal. What did it consist of?

>> Professor Luke Nichter: So among the messages that are passed back and forth, the most striking is just after Labor Day in September of 1968. And Graham brings in a multi-point pledge from Nixon to the Oval Office to see Lyndon Johnson.

And he promises a number of things. But remember, this is three months before Americans go to the polls. This is, to speak of a Nixon presidency is a little speculative at this point. And Graham makes this promise from Nixon to Johnson that he would, he thought Johnson was the hardest working president in 140 years, and there's no question about that.

That he believed Johnson deserved credit for Vietnam when it was all over and settled. He believed that, he would consult with Johnson actively during a Nixon presidency, would give him special assignments that would be prestigious to a recent former president. Show that he was still the nation's top Democrat and a relevant figure, not someone who was forgotten at the ranch in retirement.

And ultimately, that Nixon would do everything he could to give Johnson a good place in history. And when I first read that, I thought it was just stunning. I thought, what if this had leaked out? I mean, at that point, Nixon had given Johnson all the ammunition he needed to blow up the Nixon campaign, but he didn't.

And so suggests to me that he went along with it.

>> Niall Ferguson: You call it a kind of non-aggression pact between these two political titans, one of whom has opted out of the 1968 election, Johnson. And in a way, Nixon stuck to the deal. I was thinking, as you were making your seminar presentation, does this explain Nixon's response to the Pentagon Papers, for example, when actually the Pentagon Papers are full of stuff that is bad for Johnson, not Nixon?

>> Professor Luke Nichter: Well, I try as a writer not to get beyond the point in time that I'm writing about, cuz this is about 68. There is no Nixon presidency. But as readers now, we can't help but think about what comes later. And I think this is potentially not only a way of a vehicle for viewing the, call it the end of the Johnson presidency, but I feel like now you can then figure out, well, where were the seeds of this arrangement that were planted?

And I'm seeing evidence as early as early 66, when there was a big hit of a thawing between Johnson and Nixon. But then, more interestingly, moving forward into the Nixon White House, you potentially have a situation where Nixon is concerned as President about one voter on a ranch in Stonewall, Texas.

Because if you look at many of Nixon's policies in that first term, the people who are most upset weren't Democrats. They were conservative Republicans who felt he was too eager to make peace with China and the Soviet Union. Course, Nixon is the ultimate anti-communist for most of his career.

The way he ended the war, the way he did, taking four years, I think, was more or less on the timetable and the way that Johnson would have done that, domestic policy for a Republican president, surprisingly progressive. The EPA, clean air, clean water, Wilderness Act, and we could go on and on, OSHA.

And I think a lot of these policies, foreign and domestic, had roots in the Johnson administration. And I think in modern US history, it's difficult to point out two presidencies that are more connected, even though one's a Democrat and one's a Republican. That many of the ideas of the Nixon presidency had their origins in the Nixon presidency.

And I would argue this was in fulfillment of this non-aggression pact. That Nixon did these things because he wanted to govern in a way that at least was not at odds with what Lyndon Johnson would have done had he had four more years.

>> Niall Ferguson: History is full of ironies, and it can't have been in Billy Graham's mind that Richard Nixon would be the president who fell the furthest into the deepest abyss over Watergate.

That wasn't something Lyndon Johnson lived to see, of course. I can't resist asking you one final question, Luke, and that is, what does this all mean for us today? Your publisher encouraged you to pick a title that's provocative, The Year that Broke Politics. There are lots of people who think 2024 will break American politics all over again.

Are there some, I mean, we're an applied history group at Hoover. Are there some lessons from 1968 for 2024 that you might tentatively suggest?

>> Professor Luke Nichter: Well, and here I would say I have enough of a challenge trying to interpret the past. Interpreting the present goes beyond, is above my pay grade.

But I would say, at the same time, there's all kinds of lessons here from 68 to the present without making them overwrought or, I think, stretching too far. Whether you look at the extent to which Americans have abandoned faith in institutions, the media, higher education, organized religion, political parties, I think we're again seeing here, as I said at the seminar.

I mean, we're at a point now where we potentially have Robert Kennedy as a candidate. We have the Democrats going back to Chicago for what will be another chaotic convention. There's no more Mayor Daley, but there will be chaos in Chicago, political chaos. The Republicans are again concerned.

They're desperate to retake the White House, but also concerned about whether their nominee might actually bring them down next year. I think there are, and in the midst of all that, you have an older president. You can see how unpopular he is, especially in his own party. Who's being pressured by the left wing of his own party to either, who wonders whether he has it in him to run again or that he should stand aside and let someone younger run.

And the question I have is, are we talking about 1968 or 2024?

>> Niall Ferguson: Luke Nichter, it's an absolutely fascinating book. Your presentation was sensational. And there's more where that came from, because you plan now to write. A new and revisionist history of Lyndon Johnson's White House years. It's been a real pleasure to have Luke Nichter here at the Hoover Institution.

We hope he will be back again soon. The book is The Year That Broke Politics, Chaos and Collusion in the 1968 Election, just out with the Yale University Press. I couldn't recommend it too highly.