The Year That Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968

Nichter is one of the first historians to have access to the diaries of the influential evangelical preacher the Reverend Billy Graham, and this deeply researched volume overturns much of the conventional wisdom about the epochal election of 1968, in which Graham played an important role as a go-between and general adviser to both main candidates. With extensive evidence from Graham’s records and telling quotes from then U.S. Senator Walter Mondale, the campaign chair for the Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey, and Clark Clifford, the secretary of defense, Nichter convincingly demonstrates that U.S. President Lyndon Johnson favored the Republican candidate Richard Nixon over Humphrey, his own vice president, and acted accordingly. Johnson believed that Nixon’s policies in office on both the war in Vietnam and major domestic issues would be more aligned with his own than Humphrey’s would. Moreover, if Humphrey lost, Johnson would remain head of the Democratic Party, which, incredibly, in Clifford’s words “meant everything to him.” More tellingly for the future, Nichter argues that Alabama Governor George Wallace, whose third-party campaign garnered a hefty 13.5 percent of the vote, ran in 1968 not primarily as a racist segregationist but as a “New Deal–inspired Southern populist.” In that guise, he attracted white blue-collar workers who were the core of the Democratic electorate. His success began a steady movement that migrated into and “eventually came to dominate” the Republican Party. Wallace launched his campaign not in the South but in western Pennsylvania, where former U.S. President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden continue to battle for every vote half a century later.