Fifty years ago next week, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota scored a near-upset in New Hampshire’s Democratic presidential primary, setting in motion Lyndon Johnson’s announcement, three weeks later, that he would “not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.” It was a jaw-dropping series of events, one that gave McCarthy a near-mythic status in American political history.
Just weeks earlier, the longtime campaign reporter Theodore White observed, it had been “unthinkable that a sitting president of the United States could be unhorsed within his own party either by primaries, conventions or riot in the streets.” But McCarthy galvanized popular opposition to Johnson’s foreign policy and, seemingly overnight, turned the election into a referendum on America’s continued involvement in the Vietnam War. At least that’s how it is popularly remembered.
In fact, commentators then and since have misinterpreted McCarthy’s upset performance in New Hampshire in a way that sharply misread public opinion and unfairly saddled Johnson with sole responsibility for a war that most Americans — and most American political leaders of both parties — still strongly supported on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. To understand how it happened, it’s helpful to wind the clock back to the fall of 1967.
At the time, the only person of consequence who saw an opportunity to “unhorse” the sitting president was Allard K. Lowenstein, a 38-year-old organizer and Yale-educated lawyer who had spent the better part of 15 years moving from one university teaching or administrative post to another, all the while insinuating himself into various civil rights and antiwar campaigns. Theodore White sized him up as a “permanent youth leader. Wiry yet frail, balding early, his eyes compelling behind their black horn-rimmed eyeglasses, a nonsmoker and nondrinker, Lowenstein was a one-man excitement wherever he moved.”
Throughout the late summer and fall, Lowenstein traveled the country, coalescing antiwar party activists and students at the local level into a loose coalition. “I said we’ll build the base first,” he explained, then “the candidate will come along.” He first approached Senator Robert Kennedy of New York, who took the meeting simply out of courtesy to his young staff members, then Senator George McGovern; both said no. He then went to James Gavin, a liberal, retired lieutenant general who had served briefly as ambassador to France and who now argued that America was squandering resources in Vietnam that could be put to better use in the urban communities. He likewise said no. Finally, Lowenstein approached McCarthy, the senior senator from Minnesota. It took several conversations, but when McCarthy asked, “How do you think we’d do in a Wisconsin primary?” Lowenstein knew he had found his candidate. “I was ecstatic,” he said. “It was like music, like an organ welling up in my ears.”
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Johnson’s advisers understood that the primaries were mostly of symbolic importance. In 1968 only 15 states selected their delegates by popular vote. Roughly 60 percent of convention delegates were chosen by party bosses, and the bosses almost always stood by the incumbent. Nevertheless, as one top White House aide, Harry McPherson, told the president in a memo, they were staring down the barrel of a change election, and as “the incumbent president you are (to some degree, at least) the natural defender of the status quo. You represent things as they are — the course we are following, the policies and programs we have chosen.” Standing against change, he added, “is a tough position today.”
At first, McCarthy did little to rattle the president’s campaign. There was a good reason he was Lowenstein’s last call. Though he had won election five times to the House and twice to the Senate, he was a cold, aloof character who preferred to hole up in his Senate office, reading poetry, rather than glad-hand in the cloakroom.
Unsurprisingly, he proved an uninspiring candidate. He refused to appear before the multitude of state organizing conferences that were desperate to meet their newly anointed opposition candidate. Disengaged from campaign strategy and unfamiliar with many of the staff members and local activists whom Lowenstein recruited for the effort, he had to be dragged into canvassing on his own behalf. During his two-week campaign swing through New Hampshire, he regularly failed to show up at his own events and declined to make appearances at factory gates (“I’m not really a morning person,” he demurred). When Johnny Carson, the host of NBC’s “Tonight Show,” asked what kind of president he might be, McCarthy offered simply, “I think I would be adequate.”
But then, on Jan. 30, 1968, the political winds shifted. Some 67,000 North Vietnamese troops and Vietcong attacked South Vietnamese cities and military facilities at the start of Tet, the celebration of the Vietnamese new year. They suffered crippling troop losses, but the offensive, which lasted several weeks, led many Americans to doubt the administration’s repeated assurances that the generals could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Support for the war plummeted, and antiwar activists who had long represented minority opinion now saw an opportunity to seize the political offensive. Suddenly the unthinkable seemed possible.
If McCarthy was disengaged, his young staff and volunteers were anything but. From their headquarters at the Sheraton-Wayfarer Hotel in Manchester, N.H., Richard Goodwin — a former Johnson aide turned fervent critic of the war — assumed day-to-day control over the ragtag, amateur operation. Suddenly there were professional and disciplined radio and television spots saturating New Hampshire’s airwaves and a robust field operation well suited to that state’s peculiar brand of retail politics.
Students from Harvard, Yale, Amherst, Smith, Mount Holyoke and other New England colleges flooded the state. “They came with sleeping bags and ski boots,” White wrote. “Bearded students had sacrificed their beards so as not to alarm the citizens on their rounds; bluejeans and sweatshirts were also proscribed.” They were, as the slogan went, “Clean for Gene.”
Sympathetic locals housed them in spare bedrooms, in church and synagogue basements, and on living room floors. “These college kids are fabulous,” the chairman of the Nashua Democratic City Committee crowed. “There are so many people who have kids of their own of the same age, and they can’t talk to their own kids, it’s another generation. These kids knock at the door, and come in politely, and actually want to talk to grown-ups, and people are delighted.”
On March 12, McCarthy won 42 percent of the vote to Johnson’s 49 percent; four days later, Robert Kennedy opportunistically announced his own candidacy. “We woke up after the New Hampshire primary, like it was Christmas Day,” said a young McCarthy volunteer. “And when we went down to the tree, we found Bobby Kennedy had stolen our Christmas presents.”
Over the next eight weeks, the two antiwar senators hurled more fire at each other than at the president, whom they had both grown to loathe and mistrust. The campaign season ended with Kennedy’s assassination that June and with the fractious, debilitating Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which delivered the nomination to Vice President Hubert Humphrey.
The myth of Eugene McCarthy’s New Hampshire crusade (and, somewhat related, the mystique of the New Hampshire presidential primary) has endured through the ages. To be sure, what his student army accomplished was remarkable. But did the results suggest a repudiation of the war in Vietnam? Not exactly. Exit polls suggested that a majority of McCarthy’s New Hampshire voters thought of themselves as hawks. They were unhappy with Johnson, but because he hadn’t escalated the war effort further, and they picked McCarthy to register their displeasure. The president’s private polling revealed that 55 percent of McCarthy’s supporters favored the bombing campaign against North Vietnam; only 29 percent opposed it.
“I don’t want to be known as a war president,” Johnson insisted in the summer of 1965. He vividly recalled how the exigencies of mobilization had forced his idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to transform himself from “Dr. New Deal” to “Dr. Win the War,” effectively drawing to a close a decade of liberal domestic reform. It was the story of every Democratic president in the 20th century, from Woodrow Wilson, who sidelined progressive economic and social reform after America entered the European conflict, to Harry Truman, who became bogged down in Korea and ultimately spent down his political capital to raise armies and manage a wartime economy rather than pursue his Fair Deal programs.
Yet, as he later rued, Johnson ultimately “left the woman I love — the Great Society — in order to fight that bitch of a war.”
He did so in large part out of realism and fear. “If I don’t go in now and they show later that I should have,” he worried, the Republicans would push “Vietnam up my ass every time.” This wasn’t an unreasonable concern. A majority of the electorate remained committed to Cold War ideology well into the last year of his presidency — an ideology that made withdrawal unthinkable. As easy as it was then, or is now, to blame the war on one man, in reality, a large portion of the country demanded it, including most of the experts.
The McCarthy myth has misled historians and the public into believing that the country reached a turning point on the war in 1968. But Richard Nixon’s victory that fall was of a piece with the votes that propelled an uninspiring Minnesota senator to a freak near-victory over the president earlier in the year — a frustration as much with the limits on the war as with its excesses.
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