Eugene Mccarthy And The 1968 ElectionEssay Preview: Eugene Mccarthy And The 1968 ElectionReport this essayGene McCarthy was just another senator until he chose to run for president. When he choose to ran he inherited a network of activists put together throughout 1967 ready to do anything they could to dump Johnson. As a result, his campaign would change the course of American history. McCarthys campaign primarily challenged Johnson on his war and the military, something that had not been done by establishment politicians at that point. A little over three months after McCarthy announced his candidacy for his partys nomination, Johnson, the incumbent president, announced he would not seek nor accept his partys nomination for president. McCarthy continued his anti-war candidacy against opponent Robert F. Kennedy in the primaries until Kennedys death after the California primary. At the Democratic convention, Eugene McCarthy did not receive his partys nomination, which went to the Vice President Hubert Humphrey who had not run in a single primary. Despite losing the Democratic nomination at the convention, McCarthys candidacy had a huge effect on the 1968 election and beyond. Eugene McCarthy never stood a chance of becoming president in 1968, but at the same time the minute he announced his campaign he mortally wounded one candidate, and an eventual candidate, Johnson and Humphrey.
Eugene McCarthy was not your typical presidential candidate. He was reluctant to run, campaign, even to allow people to campaign for him. When he announced his candidacy, he was angry someone had spoken to the audience before he arrives, and gave a quick uninspired announcement. The driving forces behind McCarthys campaign were well dressed intelligent college students who called themselves “Clean for Gene”. McCarthy thought he was doing his student workers a favor by allowing them to use his name and prestige in an effort to pursue their own goals. The students still loved him even though he may not necessarily loved them back. The students were just glad to finally have a voice to speak for them and their views, and a man that the entire “Dump Johnson” network could get behind and campaign for. McCarthy did not fully trust some of the people running his campaign on the grassroots level. Thats not to say he worked well with the people running his campaign at the national level. McCarthy often baffled his campaign staff by refusing appearances, or canceling appearances when he was forced to do other events. Though while McCarthy half heartedly ran for president, the hard-working, intelligent and clean students that looked up to him were fully dedicated, and the staff that put up with his sometimes frustrating antics wanted Johnson out.
Even without McCarthy campaigning like he wanted to win, he came in a very close second behind Johnson in the New Hampshire. This is when he was first perceived as a serious and very dangerous threat to Johnsons hopes of being re-elected. While Johnson was relying on tactics like creating rumors that North Vietnam was hoping McCarthy would have a strong showing in the New Hampshire primary, McCarthy had more volunteers then that could handle, knocking the door of every Democrat and independent in the state three times. Coming right off the heels of Johnsons near defeat in New Hampshire were Gallup polls showing the publics opinion of Johnson, his approval rating was in the thirties, his large leads on Nixon as well as any primary challenger was fading fast. There was also a poll showing half the country thought it was a mistake to go into Vietnam. Then Robert Kennedy entered the race. Many of McCarthy and Johnson supporters had been hoping for Kennedy to run as a credible challenge to Nixon in 1968 election. Johnson saw the obvious, he was losing popularity fast within his own party, and he had two popular challengers that can and will beat him in the primaries. Nothing was going Johnsons way; the public was going against him, while his opponents had an energized and motivated youthful bases. Johnson on the other hand was losing his key base, the Democratic establishment. The winner of the primaries doesnt necessarily get the partys nomination, but Johnson was losing the entire party. By late March it seemed Johnson may not only be beat in the primaries, he might not be able to put together a winning coalition at the Democratic convention. The last straw was the polling coming out of Wisconsin from Johnsons own staff. With days till the Wisconsin primary, this senator was going to beat the incumbent president by twenty to thirty points. If Johnson was destroyed in Wisconsin there would be no opportunity for him to bow out like a statesman. Johnson took the only opportunity he had to get out of a race he obviously couldnt win, and would likely be humiliated trying to win.
In December of 1968, Johnson had his parties nomination wrapped up, by the end of March he had lost any hope of being elected president in 1968, and left the race to avoid total humiliation. The moment McCarthy announced his campaign for president he had already had an entire grassroots campaign of mainstream Democrats who had just found their candidate to finally work for. McCarthy had dedicated activists willing to knock on every door of every primary state until Johnson dropped out. A result of McCarthy showing Johnson could be beaten was Robert Kennedy entering the race. The result of Robert Kennedy entering the race was not only the prospect of coming in third repeatedly in the primaries, but there was now a candidate party bosses, that Johnson had been losing his grip on, could get behind at the convention. From the moment Gene McCarthy announced his candidacy, the only result for any politician, such as Johnson, concerned about their reputation, pride, and legacy, was to drop out.
The Kennedy/McCarthy story was a story to remember. The fact that McCarthy was elected only nine months before his very last major election, and that this man had been running for the presidency for nine years, seemed to demonstrate that the United States had become an election-year loser because of the mistakes of the 1970s, that most of the country was being told they could take back the White House through the 1960s, and that was still the case for many. The facts were clear, especially under all these decades of economic recovery and rising political polarization that made it impossible to imagine a similar outcome under any of the other current presidential candidates we might see. It just made sense that John F. Kennedy should have won a landslide election if he was only given a fair shot at the presidency, but he could not.
The Kennedy story is also a story. It is all true. The President faced a similar fate in the year of November 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson became the first president ever in a general election. Johnson became the first leader to call a national convention of more than 100 million members and to set up his own campaign offices even before his very first year as president, and to have his own private communications committee to conduct and pay for all campaigning expenses for his inauguration. This event in 1969, when Lyndon B. Johnson won the election, was not merely a “war that didn’t work” campaign, but a war that had been fought in secret until one of his secretaries of defense, P. H. J. Carrington, came forward in the end of December to make clear the fact that the President had lost.
This was an event called the National Socialist Strategy Review, a process which was intended to provide voters with a new political vision: an election strategy that would challenge the status quo, as it were, and to demonstrate that it did not really exist. The strategy was set in motion long before the first real war broke out. The goal was to persuade the American public to support a political campaign that challenged the status quo, which by its nature was not designed to challenge or win elections. While Johnson had repeatedly campaigned on the idea of a popular vote, that was not what was needed, and he failed to win. Johnson also had failed to win the support of most of the most trusted people in Washington, even though he had already won more Electoral College votes than any other candidate of the century.
The goal of the strategy was not to “win” elections by simply trying to win an election, but to demonstrate that if you were voting for a candidate and were also committed to a social agenda, then that agenda had to win. Johnson also failed to win the support and confidence of some who had even thought about making that commitment, and who voted for people who agreed with him. Kennedy could not easily win an election with the support of so few people, but he did manage to win 50,000 votes to Kennedy’s 43,000 and the Republican presidential nominee to John F. Kennedy, but not to Kennedy himself. He lost because of the unspoken message he would send as President: that the president must prove to his successor exactly how he could, and could not, win a war of some kind.
If Nixon, who’d been unable to win a war of some kind, could win because he simply didn’t agree with anything that Nixon had proposed, Nixon’s campaign would still be very unlikely to have won any elections in the nation’s history. The President and Republican Party’s “war of ideas” strategy was also an attempt to show that they had nothing to lose. The purpose of such election strategy was to encourage people to vote for someone and not just to persuade everybody else who was willing to do the same. This campaign strategy relied on a mix of traditional wisdom and evidence, and a combination of social and economic forces, both of which in turn depended on appealing to voters in their own districts, and in support of an unpopular incumbent. This campaign was also structured from the perspective
McCarthy and Kennedy battled it out in the primaries for months. In the end McCarthy ended up with the most votes and the most states won. Kennedy however claimed victory after wining three of the last four states, finishing with California. His optimistic victory would be short lived though as he was shot and killed that same night. This left two candidates for the nomination, McCarthy, and Humphrey. Humphrey was Johnsons vice president, and had not entered a single primary. He based his nomination on the support of party bosses, and the party establishment.
That July around the time of the Democrats convention, polls were showing people wanted McCarthy as the Democratic nominee. McCarthy had won the most states in the primary, and had the most votes. Though at the convention the delegates ignored the will of the people and nominated Hubert Humphrey as the Democrats presidential candidate by a large margin. This did nothing to help the Democrats image as the nomination turned off the intelligent and dedicated youth segment that was so critical