The Vietnam War was the defining event of my much younger years. The U.S. presidential election of 1968—at the heart of the book at hand—was held during the fall semester of my junior year in college. Until reading Luke Nichter’s recent book, I didn’t remember much about that election beyond the contest’s main players. I was not yet twenty-one, was going to school far away from my parents’ Southern California home, and, after all, it was the end of the 1960s, a decade of “flower power,” civil violence, and campus unrest, although the protests largely bypassed College Station, Texas.

At that time, I could not have foreseen that Richard Nixon’s victory would, roughly one year later, lead to the elimination of draft deferments for graduate students and a notice from Washington’s Selective Service Board informing me that I had been one of the “winners” of the era’s first draft lottery. (For an analysis of the lottery’s bias favoring the selection of young men born in the second six months of their natal years, particularly those sharing my December birthday, see John Emery, “Analyzing the 1969 Vietnam War Lottery Using Tableau,” phData, January 1, 2022.) Soon afterward, my draft board in San Diego ordered me to report for an induction physical in Houston. (I was breathing, so I passed.) To avoid the prospect of carrying a rifle in the jungles of Southeast Asia, I enlisted in the U.S. Navy for four years upon returning to College Station. The rest is history, as the saying goes.

The Vietnam War, likewise, is a prominent backstory to The Year that Broke Politics. “The year 1968 was one of the most tumultuous in American history.... The nation was fractured” (p. x). Nichter’s book begins with four chapters focused on the main candidates running for the presidency in November’s general elections: Lyndon Baines Johnson (Chapter 1), the incumbent who had ascended to power as sitting Vice President following the assassination of John F. Kennedy; LBJ’s Vice President Hubert Horatio Humphrey (Chapter 2), who eventually captured the Democratic Party’s nomination for the White House at its Chicago convention, where violent confrontations between antiwar protesters and baton-swinging local police captured the attention of conventioneers and television viewers (“The whole world is watching!”); Richard Milhous Nixon (Chapter 3), who, despite trial balloons being floated for Nelson Rockefeller, easily became the Republican Party’s standard-bearer; and George Corley Wallace (Chapter 4), former Governor of Alabama, running as a third-party populist candidate under the banner of the short-lived American Independent Party (AIP).

The political maneuverings that unfolded during the spring and summer of 1968 were triggered by LBJ’s last-minute decision to announce that he would not seek reelection. On March 31, 1968, he shocked a television audience of 75 million Americans by ending an address to the nation—scheduled primarily to declare a unilateral halt to the bombing of Vietnam north of the twentieth parallel—with the now-famous proclamation: “Accordingly, I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President” (p. 10). (That sentence had not been included in the advance copy of the speech distributed to the press.) One of Nichter’s revelations (to me, at least) is that LBJ planned to renounce reelection during his 1968 State of the Union address, which was written into the speech but not delivered because “the timing did not feel right” (p. 8).

Faced with snowballing public opposition to American involvement in the quagmire of Vietnam, stung by Robert McNamara’s resignation as Defense Secretary in February, and the emergence of high-profile challengers for the Democrat Party’s nomination (Senators Eugene “Clean Gene” McCarthy and Robert Kennedy), Johnson pulled the trigger. The misunderstood Tet Offensive, launched on January 30 and falsely portrayed by the media as a major U.S. defeat, fueled popular misconceptions about the combatants’ relative strengths but perhaps not their strategies or resolves. (For details, see Mark Bowden, Huê 1968: The Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017.) LBJ’s approval rating plummeted from 48 percent at the year’s start to 36 percent in March (p. 8). “Unwilling to risk widening the war,” Johnson denied a request for 205,179 additional troops at a time “when the United States had the opportunity to capitalize on communist weakness” (p. 11). “In engagement after engagement, the Vietcong and North Vietnamese army had suffered terrible losses. The communists lost an estimated fifty-eight thousand men in three weeks, or as many as the U.S. lost during the entire Vietnam War” (p. 17). March 31 also coincided with news received at the White House that Chuck Robb, LBJ’s active-duty Marine son-in-law, was scheduled for assignment to Vietnam (p. 9). However, the president’s “health [may have] played a bigger role than most people realized” (p. 1).

LBJ’s withdrawal opened the Democrats’ nomination door for Hubert Humphrey. However, while Johnson may have taken himself off the November ballot, he did not withdraw from politics. Much of the drama leading up to Election Day reflected tensions in Humphrey’s campaign strategy. On the one hand, he wanted to remain loyal to the man who had elevated him to national prominence by choosing him as his No. 2. On the other hand, Humphrey wanted to differentiate himself from his predecessor, particularly regarding policies aimed at ending the Southeast Asian war. For his part, LBJ was eager to preserve his legacy by directing energy toward “key legislative and diplomatic achievements, including Vietnam”—hoping to be remembered as “an elder statesman interested in peace” (p. 16). Both believed that a temporary or permanent halt to American bombing would create an opportunity for opening formal peace talks, but North Vietnamese demands for seating a Vietcong delegation separately at the bargaining table, along with a broader cessation of hostilities, stalled negotiations for months.

On the domestic front, Martin Luther King, Jr. fell to an assassin’s bullet in Memphis on April 4. Washington, D.C., and other U.S. cities burned. “More than fifty thousand federal and National Guard troops were called in to restore order” in the nation’s capital. “[T]he bloodshed and violence continued in Washington for a week” (p. 19). Then, just after he had won California’s final Democratic primary election of the campaign season on June 4, RFK was assassinated in Los Angeles. Tumult and chaos, indeed.

VP Hubert Humphrey, the self-styled “happy warrior,” had, like LBJ, been a minor functionary during the New Deal. “He believed in the power of Government, with a capital G, to improve people’s lives” (p. 28). He also “believed that the most direct route to being president was by being loyal to Johnson” (p. 32), but the two “were oil and water in the sense that each functioned best with a minimum of the other. Johnson never trusted Humphrey ...” (p. 34). Foreshadowing the dilemma facing Kamala Harris in 2024,

A sitting vice president has the awkward task of defending the president’s agenda; otherwise[,] they (sic) will likely lose the president’s support and be criticized for accepting policies they (sic) did not believe in. Yet the same candidate must also argue [that] the president’s agenda was incomplete. It is difficult in such a campaign to organize around a meaningful theme. (p. 40)

In another parallel to 2024, dismissing primary elections as “nothing more than popularity contests,” Humphrey did not enter any. He thus left himself vulnerable “to charges that he could not win the nomination in an open contest and had to rely on backroom deals with Democratic power brokers.” Seen in some quarters “as Johnson’s willing accomplice in Vietnam,” Humphrey nevertheless sailed toward becoming his party’s standard-bearer because he “inherited Johnson’s delegate strength.... [H]e had an estimated 1,200 [of the 1,312 needed] without lifting a finger.” (Humphrey did win primaries “in Missouri, Maryland, New Jersey, and Alaska without appearing on any of those states’ ballots.”) But he never could square the circle of promises to continue “the Johnson legacy and [complete] the unfinished work of the Great Society while winding down the Vietnam War as quickly as possible” (pp. 42–43).

Nichter’s treatments of Richard Nixon and George Wallace are refreshingly more balanced than many readers might expect of a professor of history in a book published by Yale University. In 1968, both Watergate and Arthur Bremer’s five gunshots, paralyzing Wallace from the waist down, were roughly four years in the future.

Part II of The Year that Broke Politics opens with a chapter on the on-again, off-again informal peace talks in Paris between delegations from the United States and North Vietnam but not including at the outset representatives from South Vietnam (unrecognized by Hanoi) or the Popular Liberation Front (the Vietcong). “Not only were the North Vietnamese not in a hurry to end a war they had been fighting since the 1940s, the United States did not even have formal negotiating points or a specific outcome in mind.” Moreover, the American delegation “had little room to maneuver: Johnson insisted on approving everything they proposed and often used his veto power.... These were not peace talks but exploratory talks to set the terms for stopping U.S. bombing” (p. 96). Unsurprisingly, the negotiations went nowhere.

Part II continues with three chapters on the summer’s national political conventions: the Republicans met in Miami Beach (Chapter 6), the Democrats in Chicago (Chapter 7), and Wallace’s AIP in Pittsburgh (Chapter 8). Throughout his eventually successful campaign for the White House, Nixon wanted to avoid offending LBJ. As such, he also wanted to “avoid talking about Vietnam” in Miami. “Michigan Congressman Gerald Ford, the convention chairman, directed the agenda toward the increasingly popular issue of law and order” (p. 116). Nixon was nominated on the convention’s first ballot by a 25-vote margin. Ronald Reagan “moved that the nomination be made unanimous by acclimation” (p. 117). Flexing his muscles across party lines, “Johnson [had] told veteran diplomat Robert Murphy that if Eugene McCarthy were nominated in Chicago, he planned to publicly support Nixon, and if Humphry were nominated and did not stay strong on Vietnam, a win by Nixon would be better for the country” (p. 122).

LBJ also had his thumb on the scale in America’s Windy City: “Even after announcing he wouldn’t run, he remained almost completely in control of convention planning, and according to a Humphrey confidant, ‘totally emasculated the Democratic National Committee’” (p. 124). Humphrey selected Maine Senator Edmund Muskie as his running mate over other contenders such as outgoing Texas Governor John Connally and Edward Kennedy, “who would have been an obvious choice. But Kennedy refused to talk with him directly” (pp. 136–37). In hindsight—or at least until 1972, when Muskie broke down in tears during his own White House run—Humphrey’s No. 2 was more solid than the disastrous VP candidates of Nixon (Spiro Agnew) and Wallace (retired Air Force General Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay).

Part III of The Year that Broke Politics moves back and forth between the summer’s presidential election campaign and foreign affairs. Chapter 9 (“Messenger”) focuses on Reverand Billy Graham, a close friend of LBJ who also worked hard to “realize his [Graham’s] wish of seeing Nixon in the White House.” Doing so required “unifying the Republicans behind him” (p. 154). Nichter then returns to the events (or non-events) in the embryonic Vietnamese peace talks (Chapter 10): According to Johnson, “The formal sessions were sterile propaganda exercises. Informal talks during the breaks and elsewhere were of little more value” (p. 162). “Stalemate,” Chapter 10’s title, says it all. Chapter 11 dives deeply into the Democrat Party’s fissures within the White House and between LBJ and Humphrey. The latter rift was widened by a speech Humphrey delivered in Salt Lake City (not displaying the vice-presidential seal on the podium) in which he stated categorically that “[a]s president, I would stop the bombing of the North as an acceptable risk for peace.... Johnson was enraged” (pp. 176–78). But “having established Humphrey as his own man” (p. 177), the vice president’s campaign, almost always in perilous financial straits, saw an uptick in donations and in Humphrey’s popularity. At an earlier campaign stop in Seattle, “Hecklers almost drowned out his remarks.... ‘Hitler, Hubert, and Hirohito,’ a sign said” (p. 174).

“In one of the more bizarre moments of the campaign, even the Soviets offered support and money to Humphrey” after Salt Lake City. Although that moment “was hardly the first time the Soviets had taken a stance in an American presidential election, ... it is the first documented offer of cash.” While Nichter could find no evidence that Humphrey accepted the Soviets’ money or a separate offer from Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, “the fact that they were tendered is remarkable” (p. 179). Maybe not so remarkable considering the allegations of Russian interference during the 2020 U.S. presidential election. “One major repercussion from the Salt Lake City speech was that it probably created an irreconcilable break between Humphrey and Saigon” (p. 180).

Part III covers the campaign’s “home stretch” (Chapter 12), during which, owing to “turmoil on the political extremes, supporting Nixon became surprisingly mainstream” (p. 186); Johnson’s announcement of an unconditional bombing halt on October 31, interpreted by some commentators as LBJ’s “October surprise” (Chapter 13); the so-called Chennault Affair (Chapter 14), “in which Richard Nixon was accused of interfering in the Paris negotiations by encouraging Saigon to refuse to join the peace talks” (p. 202); and the presidential campaign’s “photo finish” (Chapter 15), which turned out not to be so close in the Electoral College, but certainly less than the landslide Nixon would record against George McGovern in 1972.

The Year that Broke Politics is a fine contribution to political science literature and the historiography of U.S. presidential elections. It suffers from the absence of context, particularly in not drawing parallels to future races for the White House (2020 and 2024), of which many can be found, including the ignominious and chaotic troop withdrawals from Saigon in 1973 and Kabul in 2023. Professor Nichter’s book (to be fair, published before 2024), is well worth reading, nevertheless, as a trip down memory lane for me and others on the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation and as a reminder that there really is nothing new under the sun when it comes to the politics of war and peace.