Playing with fire The 1968 election and the transformation of American politics

Lawrence O'Donnell

Book - 2017

The celebrated host of MSNBC's The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell presents an account of the 1968 presidential election to evaluate its lasting influence on American politics and the Democratic party, exploring the pivotal roles of RFK and McCarthy, two high-profile assassinations and the Chicago riots.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Penguin Press 2017.
Language
English
Main Author
Lawrence O'Donnell (author)
Physical Description
484 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 431-470) and index.
ISBN
9780399563140
  • Seizing the Moment
  • 1. Declaring War
  • 2. "Why Isn't He a Priest?"
  • 3. Sleepy Hollow
  • 4. "A Hard and Harsh Moral Judgment"
  • 5. Dump Johnson
  • 6. The General
  • 7. "We Will Never Be Young Again"
  • 8. Old Politics
  • 9. "A Decent Interval"
  • 10. Peace with Honor
  • 11. Peter the Hermit
  • 12. "Clean for Gene"
  • 13. The New Nixon
  • 14. "Nixon's the One"
  • 15. "Abigail Said No"
  • 16. The Poor People's Campaign
  • 17. "Something Bad Is Going to Come of This"
  • 18. "Stand Up and Be Counted"
  • 19. "It's Not Important What Happens to Me"
  • 20. "I've Seen the Promised Land"
  • 21. The Happy Warrior
  • 22. Don't Lose
  • 23. "Everything's Going to Be Okay"
  • 24. Stop Nixon
  • 25. "Great Television"
  • 26. The Last Liberal Standing
  • 27. The Peace Plank
  • 28. "The Whole World's Watching"
  • 29. "The Government of the People in Exile"
  • 30. The Perfect Crime
  • Epilogue
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Bibliography
  • Index
Review by New York Times Review

the election of 1968 decided one thing: that Richard M. Nixon and not Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey would become president. It left nearly everything else unresolved. The course of the war in Vietnam, where more than half a million American servicemen were stationed and more than 30,000 had been killed; the fate of the poor in an affluent, but widely unequal, society; the ideological direction of both major political parties; the relationship between the generations and between black and white Americans - all these questions remained open and raw. An election that involved, by the cultural critic John Leonard's accounting, an "immense expenditure ... of money, bombast, blood and cretinism" ended, in effect, in a draw: a narrow victory by the candidate who had disclosed the least about his plans and beliefs, and a nation stuck somewhere along (or maybe off) the path from the old politics to the new. How that all happened is not an unfamiliar story, but it remains, nearly 50 years later, a gripping one. Lawrence O'Donnell, the host of a political talk show on MSNBC, tells that story with zeal in "Playing With Fire." O'Donnell was a high school student in 1968, and well remembers the feeling among many young men of draft age that life was "a short-term game." The presidential election, the young O'Donnell believed, "could end all that." Viewers of O'Donnell's show will recognize, in "Playing With Fire," his faith in the redemptive power of public service - for all its disappointments and foolishness. As a former Senate staffer, O'Donnell takes a practitioner's delight in the machinations of politics: He finds, and manages to convey, excitement in things like the movement of delegates from one camp to another. As a former producer and writer of the television drama "The West Wing," he also knows how to pace a story, and could not have dreamed up a more compelling cast of characters. On the Democratic side, in addition to Humphrey, there were Senators Robert F. Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, as well as President Lyndon B. Johnson, who left the race in March but then stalked the sidelines, hoping to be called back in. For the Republicans, a trio of governors - Ronald Reagan, Nelson A. Rockefeller and George Romney - threatened Nixon's ascension. And George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, ran as an independent and a spoiler. Never in the past century have so many heavyweights contended, all at once, for the White House. O'Donnell moves briskly and ably through these candidacies, their collisions and a dark bacchanal of events that still defies belief: McCarthy's messianic yet reluctant crusade to unseat Johnson; Kennedy's entry into the race; Johnson's sudden withdrawal, and Kennedy's assassination the night he won the California primary; Wallace's provocation of "the common folks" against blacks, elites and "little pinkos"; the frenzy of police batons and tear gas at the Democratic convention in Chicago; and Nixon's secret flirtation with treason, his effort to "monkey wrench" the president's attempts to start peace talks, lest a breakthrough in Vietnam benefit Humphrey's campaign. But "Playing With Fire" is a too-familiar retelling. Over the past decade or two, vast collections of the participants' papers have been opened, yet O'Donnell has done virtually no original research. Instead he relies heavily on "An American Melodrama," a masterpiece of eyewitness history written in 1969 by three British reporters, and a handful of other accounts. O'Donnell's own observations frequently recall the tossed-off hyperboles of cable news. "In New Hampshire in 1968," he writes, "the expectations game was born in American politics" - as if McCarthy, who made a surprisingly strong showing in that state's primary, was the first presidential candidate to gain by outperforming predictions. Similarly, in suggesting that the "crowd intensity" at Wallace rallies exceeded that of any other campaign in American history, O'Donnell overlooks, among other examples, the frenzy that followed William Jennings Bryan across the country in 1896. O'Donnell also asserts that in the 1950s, when Johnson was Senate majority leader, "legislating was child's play compared to what it became in the 1970 s," an idea belied, in great detail, by Robert Caro's books on Johnson. It is hard, too, to countenance O'Donnell's broad claim that in the years after World War II, people never doubted that the president of the United States was the "leader of the free world." This is the voice of the pundit, and in a work of history it sounds jarring - all the more so when it's discussing Donald Trump, as O'Donnell does repeatedly. In the opening chapter, he quips that Trump "should leave a thank-you note at Nelson Rockefeller's grave ... for paving the way in Republican presidential politics for the rich men of Fifth Avenue with complicated marital histories." O'Donnell goes on to say that "Reagan was the Donald Trump of the 1960 s"; that Wallace voters in 1968 "sounded like Trump voters in 2016"; and that Johnson's crudeness "would not be outdone until Donald Trump moved into the White House." Some of these parallels are legitimate enough, but they interrupt the narrative and give it, at times, a partisan casting. O'Donnell's program on MSNBC is called "The Last Word," and each night he closes the show with one. His last word in "Playing With Fire" is surprising: "The peace movement won." He attributes that victory mainly to McCarthy, because "no one did more to stop the killing in Vietnam." O'Donnell acknowledges that there was a lot more killing ahead - six years' worth, after Nixon's election, at a cost of more than 20,000 American lives, and an even greater number of Vietnamese. But he is certain that "if Gene McCarthy had not run for president in 1968, the draft would not have ended in 1973" and the United States would not have withdrawn its troops by 1975. That is a strangely speculative conclusion. It could just as easily be argued that McCarthy, for all the nobility of his cause, actually prolonged the war by widening the divisions among Democrats and helping to elect Nixon - who, upon taking office, began to escalate what he called his "war for peace." In 1968, America lost. JEFF shesol is the author of "Mutual Contempt: Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, and the Feud That Defined a Decade."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review

The well-known television host held an abundance of political positions earlier in his career and is well suited to write about the election year of 1968. Even before the events at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, it had been an astoundingly turbulent year, and O'Donnell capably sets the historical context, from the King and RFK assassinations through the urban (and university) riots, and including the roles in the campaign and election of George Wallace and dueling commentators William F. Buckley and Gore Vidal. O'Donnell's breezy style, an outgrowth of his broadcasting persona, makes the chaos easier to follow. Eventual nominee Richard Nixon's illegal approach to Vietnam his greatest crime was still to play out, but O'Donnell insightfully sets the table for what was to come. The Dump Johnson movement and the very active role of liberal Allard Lowenstein, which preceded the events at the convention, are treated in detail, and the positions of Hubert Humphrey, Bobby Kennedy, and the quixotic (and, according to O'Donnell, supremely influential) Eugene McCarthy are stressed as well, all leading up to what happened in Chicago. Satisfying popular history.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2017 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

O'Donnell, the host of MSNBC's The Last Word, turns to print with an in-depth examination of the tumultuous 1968 election year. Supporting his work with credible sources, O'Donnell argues that 1968 forever changed the direction of American politics. The year was marked by President Lyndon Johnson's extraordinary decision to decline a second term, the divisive and violent 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and bitter nomination fights at both parties' nominating conventions, all put into high relief by the Vietnam War and the assassinations of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. O'Donnell also posits that Nixon's defeat of the more liberal Nelson Rockefeller for the Republican nomination sounded the death knell of that party's liberal wing. Offering a unique thesis on what drove the year's events, O'Donnell advances the idea that Eugene McCarthy's decision to run against Johnson led to Johnson's decision not to run, which spurred R.F.K. into the race and earned Hubert Humphrey the Democratic nomination. O'Donnell further speculates that, had McCarthy not run and Johnson stood for a second term, regardless of who won the 1968 election, R.F.K. would have been elected president in 1972. Instead there was Nixon and Watergate. O'Donnell untangles the many forces that made 1968's election a watershed event. (Nov.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.


Review by Library Journal Review

Nearly a half century has passed since the 1968 election that put Richard Nixon in the White House, setting in motion waves of political forces that have yet to ebb. Here, O'Donnell, host of MSNBC'S The Last Word and former producer/writer for The West Wing, crafts a smoothly written history of the 1968 campaign, beginning with congressman Eugene McCarthy's shocking decision to challenge Lyndon B. Johnson for the nomination. O'Donnell provides background information on people such as presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy, businessman and politician Nelson Rockefeller, former vice president Hubert Humphrey, and Alabama governor George Wallace, among many others. The author also provides insight on debates between intellectuals Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, Jr., which shaped convention coverage in 1968. While O'Donnell covers familiar territory, he tells the story exceedingly well. Appropriately, there is nothing dull about this book, just as there was nothing dull about this specific election or period in American history. VERDICT Recent studies such as Michael Nelson's Resilient America or Michael A. Cohen's American Maelstrom offer more research, but O'Donnell writes accessibly for all readers, creating a beneficial work for anyone interested in modern political history.-Ed Goedeken, Iowa State Univ. Lib., Ames © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

An excellent account of the 1968 presidential race, a political season of spoilers, outsiders, and broken machines eerily like our own time.It makes for a fascinating thought experiment to imagine what might have become of America and the world had Robert F. Kennedy been elected president in 1968. He was, after all, the only Democrat who could "beat President Johnson, and then beat any Republican"good reason, as MSNBC political commentator O'Donnell (Deadly Force: The True Story of How a Badge Can Become a License to Kill, 1983) recounts in this sharp, nuanced account of the election cycle, for Democratic leaders to press an initially reluctant Kennedy to run. When they did, they effectively betrayed party stalwart Eugene McCarthy, whose "legions of antiwar student supporters were sounding angry at the possibility of Bobby trying to steal Gene's thunder" and who distinguished himself as an "antiwar candidate credibly challenging a war-making president." But Kennedy was assassinated, the Democratic Party splintered into liberal and conservative wings, and Richard Nixon maneuvered his way to the Republican candidacy past a green but definitely interested Ronald Reagan, who had "won the governorship [of California] by beating the man who beat Richard Nixon for the governorship." Nixon was helped along by an emerging TV executive named Roger Ailes, who would soon perfect a brand of yellow journalism that runs strong today and who recognized that "the most powerful force blocking Nixon's path to the White House was television," with its remorseless attention to darting eyes, mutters, and five o'clock shadows. Notes O'Donnell, "Ailes became more influential in Republican politics than Nixon ever was," giving the 1968 campaign a dimension of continuing influencefor if no Nixon, then no Trump, who shares with the disgraced president more than unprecedentedly huge armies of protestors at their respective inaugurations. A careful, circumstantial study that compares favorably to Theodore H. White's presidents series and that politics junkies will find irresistible. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.