Still, it required a number of intersecting developments to change the presidential election from a catastrophe for Democrats into a barnburner.
The Humphrey campaign itself made some important if overdue moves to restore party unity. The Nixon campaign played it safe and tried to run out the clock. And objective events, particularly those involving the Vietnam War, played a role in tightening the election as well.
At the very nadir of his campaign, on September 30, Humphrey finally broke from the president, making a nationally televised speech in Salt Lake City calling for a unilateral halt to U. LBJ was not pleased. More importantly, the candidate and his campaign were transformed, as historian Michael Schumacher noted in his book The Contest :. On that night, the onus of the war shifted to Nixon. And the impact on the campaign itself was just as great. And as historian Michael Cohen observed in his book American Maelstrom , the speech was also a turning point for a Democratic Party that had often been as or more hawkish than Republicans in the fight against communism.
For much of the previous year Democratic mandarins had sought to marginalize antiwar voices in the party by refusing to allow their views on Vietnam to shape policy or political decisions. By the fall of that position was no longer tenable. The antiwar faction had become too vocal, their advocacy too significant, and their influence in the party simply too potent to be ignored….
From that point forward, they, not the hawks, would dictate the foreign policy direction of the Democratic Party. It was much like the accommodation of Bernie Sanders supporters that the Hillary Clinton campaign executed in the general election.
In Wallace had proved that this backlash was not limited to the South by running in Democratic presidential primaries in three states north of the Mason-Dixon line and winning larger-than-expected minorities of the vote. He chose the independent route in , hoping to deny both major-party candidates an Electoral College majority and giving himself and other southern reactionaries leverage over future civil rights efforts. There was increasingly negative media coverage of his campaign events, and the incitement to violence he regularly offered.
House — was too abstract and fanciful to energize actual voters. And then there was an aggressive campaign by the labor movement — still very powerful 50 years ago — to convince their members that Wallace and his state were no friends of the working stiff. As late as September, polls of factories in the American heartland showed Wallace capturing healthy minorities and even pluralities of the union vote.
But, he went on, if a country was going to engage in war, the country had to be dedicated to ending it as soon as possible. So this means efficiency in the operation of the military establishment. I think there may be times when it would be most efficient to use nuclear weapons. It got worse, as a visibly dismayed Wallace fidgeted and occasionally tried to interrupt his freshly minted running mate:.
He spoke of a film he had seen, a documentary about the Bikini atoll, where many nuclear tests had been conducted. Life, he assured the astonished reporters, had returned to normal.
As a matter of fact, everything is about the same except the land crabs. While Wallace dropped from 21 percent in that late-September Gallup poll to He also exploited his close friendship with the Reverend Billy Graham to appeal to white Evangelical voters in the South and elsewhere.
He played to the political center as Wallace raged on the right and Humphrey tried to energize the left. But Nixon lost much of his lead down the stretch Gallup showed his lead shrinking from 15 points in late September to 8 points in late October and then just one point on election eve.
The Johnson administration had been engaged in preliminary negotiations with North Vietnam since April, with Hanoi insisting on an unconditional bombing halt among other concessions, and Washington requiring a sign-off from the South Vietnamese regime. Suddenly, in the autumn, the Soviet Union a major supplier for Hanoi began pushing both parties toward more serious negotiations.
And by late October the Johnson administration had worked out a complex formula where the U. This announcement, which was intended at least in part to give Humphrey a boost, was quickly torpedoed when the South Vietnamese government made it known it would not participate in the fresh negotiations the bombing halt had produced. But he chose not to publicly expose it before the election in part because the reason his administration knew about it in the first place was because it was illegally surveilling Chennault.
So in effect Johnson tried to pull an October Surprise and Nixon countered with his own. Spy machinations involving the 36th and 37th presidents until much later. According to Theodore White, pollsters were picking up a trend toward Humphrey among women, attributable, they thought, to the last-minute talk of a Democratic-negotiated peace in Vietnam.
So the Nixon campaign deployed a minute biographical ad that emphasized his sunnier characteristics — particularly the formative influence of his Quaker mother, Hannah:. He refused to debate Humphrey; he also raised and spent much more money than his opponent. Nevertheless, by Election Day, his lead had all but vanished. Humphrey was buoyed when the North Vietnamese accepted President Johnson's proposal for peace talks in Paris in return for a bombing halt.
Publicly, Nixon supported the bombing halt and the negotiations; privately, however, his campaign urged South Vietnam's government to refuse to take part in the talks. South Vietnam complied just days before Americans went to the polls and made Nixon their President. But before Nixon took office, he closed ranks with Johnson and insisted that South Vietnam take part in the peace talks.
Although it was an extremely close race with respect to the popular vote, Nixon won the electoral college by a 3 to 2 margin. Wallace's third party candidacy stole votes from both of the major parties, but hurt the Democrats more; many Southern Democrats defected and Nixon was able to win some Southern electoral votes.
Only 43 percent of voters supported Nixon, hardly a mandate. In fact, he defeated Humphrey by a margin of less than 1 percent of the vote. The Democrats nevertheless maintained control of the House and Senate, making Nixon the first President elected without his party winning either house of Congress since the nineteenth century.
In hindsight, the magnitude of Richard Nixon's reelection victory in —the largest Republican landslide of the Cold War—leads some to ask why the President ever got involved in the Watergate cover-up.
Nixon won 49 out of 50 states, taking all but Massachusetts. McGovern, on the other hand, stumbled early. He selected Thomas Eagleton as his running mate, only to learn later that the senator from Missouri had undergone treatment for mental illness. A political firestorm immediately erupted over whether a man with a history of mental illness should be next in line to become commander in chief in the nuclear age. McGovern hastily declared himself to be "1, percent" behind Eagleton.
He then dropped him from the ticket. If selecting a vice president is the first presidential decision that a nominee ever makes, McGovern, by choosing and then rejecting Eagleton, had in effect admitted he made the wrong decision.
Kennedy brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, an architect of John F. Kennedy's Peace Corps and Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty, replaced Eagleton, but the damage was already done. For Nixon, it was the best year of his political life. His diplomatic opening to China reached fruition with a widely televised trip to Beijing.
And Nixon's decision to bomb North Vietnam and mine Haiphong Harbor to stop a Communist offensive proved highly popular. When Henry Kissinger announced shortly before the election that he had resolved most major negotiating issues with North Vietnam and that therefore "Peace is at hand," it was only icing on the cake.
During most of this outwardly triumphant year, however, a scandal of epic proportions was quietly growing within the administration. Grant Rutherford B. Hayes James A. Garfield Chester A. Roosevelt Harry S. Truman Dwight D. On November 5, , 13 people are killed and more than 30 others are wounded, nearly all of them unarmed soldiers, when a U.
Army officer goes on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in central Texas. Fifty miles north of Delhi, a Mughal army defeats the forces of Hemu, a Hindu general who was trying to usurp the Mughal throne from year-old Akbar, the recently proclaimed emperor. The Mughals, whose culture blended Perso-Islamic and regional Indian elements, established an Marshall as vice president.
In a landslide Democratic victory, Wilson won electoral votes against the eight won by Republican incumbent William Howard Taft and the 88 won by third-party Early in the morning, King James I of England learns that a plot to explode the Parliament building has been foiled, hours before he was scheduled to sit with the rest of the British government in a general parliamentary session.
At about midnight on the night of November , Relations between the United States and Japan had been Sign up now to learn about This Day in History straight from your inbox. On November 5, , year-old future President George W.
Bush was the son of George H. Bush, the 41st president of the United States.
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