Review: An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968

An American Melodrama: The Presidential Campaign of 1968 by Lewis Chester
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

While this book has one author, it is actually the work of three English journalists covering the election. The "Melodrama" in the title plays on their structure of "XII" "acts" and a coda. I think they would have been better dropping that idea, but the depth of coverage makes this a revealing look at presidential politics from primaries to election. It is also interesting how much has changed. Primaries were not universal, yet, and two-party politics more so with George Wallace & Curtis LeMay
nabbing an electoral vote of 46 for the American Independent party and a vocal advocacy for racial segregation in public schools and a viable option for the hawks.

The Republican nominee, former Vice President Richard Nixon, won the election over the Democratic nominee, incumbent Vice President Hubert Humphrey. This made a winner out of Nixon the loser and showed Humphrey could not get out of Johnson's shadow.

The bulk of this book is on the primaries which is where the drama was, despite the October surprise of Paris peace talks shenanigans around Johnson and Nixon.

On the Democratic side, those primaries had the late entry of Senator Robert F. Kennedy, assassinated June 6, 1968 on the night of a California victory. Many of his follower threw in with Eugene McCarthy
as an anti-war candidate with others flocking to Senator George McGovern for his outspoken opposition to the growing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. These two became much more viable without RFK and with President Lyndon B. Johnson withdrawing Mar 31, 1968. This all came to a head at the 1968 Chicago convention and its hippy-bashing police riot.

On the Republican side we had primary contestants Governor Ronald Reagan of California, when that state was basically Republican and Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York trying to defeat his own image as plutocrat and Governor George Romney of Michigan on the scene until he withdrew Feb 28, 1968.

It makes me think our election year is even less about hawks and doves and spawning less violence and protests and, in a sense, less present and fierce.

Like Alexis de Tocqueville, these European correspondents over in their reportage much that was true then and rings true now, like

"...personal influence is probable the most effective means of persuading people who are uncertain about voting at all that they should vote. And voters of low motivation, once brought to the polls, are more likely than not to be Democrats. Similarly, the more people vote, the better for the Democrats, since there are more of them."

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