Early 1966

There's been something I've been meaning to ask my parents, and I'll throw it open here to anybody who was a teenager or adult in the 1960s. In a way it's kind of a hypothetical question, if you want to call it a question, and in a way it isn't.

Let me paint a picture, if you will. It's from a few years before I was born, so my information is secondhand and maybe it could stand to be corrected here and there; okay, so I was a history major in college and a big chunk of my focus was on the foreign policy of the era, but that was a long time ago: anyway, here we go--

Imagine it's early 1966, two years into Lyndon Johnson's first term as an elected President. He's had a good run so far: in 1964, he got Congress to pass the most important piece of liberal legislation since the New Deal, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and set the ground for massive reforms of the economy and healthcare--Medicare/Medicaid, Head Start, and the opening salvos of what would become the Great Society and War On Poverty. The other big thing that happened in 1964 was the Presidential election, in which he slaughtered Barry Goldwater (Goldwater managed to carry six states, including his home state of Arizona), leaving the Republican Party effectively leaderless.

And someone comes up to you, in early 1966, and says: "In, oh, let's say the next eighteen months give-or-take, Johnson's credibility is going to be completely shot. The brush war in Vietnam is going to destroy his administration, and he's going to be such damaged goods politically and so devastated personally by it, he's not even going to run for office in 1968. And the Democrats are going to undergo a complete meltdown. There are going to be riots at the Democratic National Convention, protests in the streets, and just when it looks like the Democrats are going to finally pull it together behind a possible dream candidate, that guy is going to get murdered in a hotel kitchen, of all places, and the whole election will pretty much be in the tubes for the Democrats at that point, if it wasn't already, and the Republicans are going to take the White House.

And what I'm wondering (I guess this is the question, or part of it) is if you're going to say, early in 1966, "Okay, ha-ha, that's stupid, but I'll bite: who are the Republicans going to find, they have nobody, the only guy they could come up with two years ago was Goldwater and thanks to LBJ, everybody thinks he's a psycho. Who are the Republicans going to pull out of their asses in '68?"

And your interlocutor says, "Richard Nixon is going to be the next President of the United States."

And I guess this is the second part of the question: are you going to laugh your ass off? Are you going to say, "Nixon? 'You won't have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore,' that guy? The 'Checkers speech' guy? What's he been doing lately, working for Pepsi or something, isn't it?"

And the person you're talking to says, "Pepsi is one of his firm's clients, yes, but he's also written a couple of books and some magazine articles and giving speeches."

And are you going to ask why Nixon, who has no credibility and is disliked and mistrusted by much of his own party, who can't seem to open his mouth without pissing people off, why is he going to come out of the hole he crawled into after embarrassing himself in the 1962 California governor's race when he's making all that money as a consultant, getting those book royalties, cashing in on his earlier time in the national spotlight? Nixon, why the hell would anybody vote for Richard Nixon? Are you going to point out that if he runs, he's going to take a pay cut just to have all this garbage from his past come up again, the charges of corruption and connections to McCarthyism, give up the money just so he can fend off attacks from within his own party before the Democrats even get to him?

And anyway, are you really going to believe that LBJ isn't going to run again and that LBJ isn't going to crush whomever the Republicans run--and there's no way it'll be Nixon? 1966, remember? There are hints of the credibility gap, for sure, but it isn't a chasm, not yet.

I guess I might have said "questions," not "question," but you get the idea, right?

And I guess maybe you can figure out why I keep thinking about this. There's a certain polarizing political figure on the right, and everybody keeps saying she won't run because she's so divisive in her party, and everybody keeps saying her political career is effectively over, and everybody keeps asking why she'd give up the money she's earning as a private citizen, and everybody keeps saying, anyway, if she did run, she'd be crushed in the general election.

So maybe you'll object that Sarah Palin is no Richard Nixon. Nixon had held national office, been a United States Representative and served in the Senate before becoming Vice-President under Eisenhower, and he'd seen a chunk of the Pacific beyond his own backyard during WWII as a Naval Lieutenant and he had a law degree from a fairly prestigious law school. The books and articles Nixon wrote during the years of exile before (and after) his presidency focused on policy issues and had a certain level of credibility and garnered some measure of respect, enough to be taken seriously even by Nixon's critics. But none of that's really the point.

The point is that look at some of the contingencies of those eighteen to twenty-four months between the beginning of 1966 to the election season of 1968. How many people thought the Johnson Administration would be torn apart by a faraway war in a tiny country, how many people would have guessed LBJ wouldn't even run for re-election? And it's too tragic to want to contemplate, but who would have expected the Democrats' last great hail Mary candidate to follow his older brother not as a President, but as a victim? There's tons of room to argue that Robert Kennedy's bid for the Presidency came too late to make a difference, that the Democrats were too fractured at that point to come together under anyone, and I'm not saying the election would have turned out differently if he'd lived: but we don't know those answers precisely because of an unpredictable act of violence committed by a lone wolf.

And Nixon? Nixon may have been more qualified in his pinkie finger than Sarah Palin for any job in government (and I am not a Nixon fan; it pains me to laud him even by comparison), but in 1966 he was a fucking joke, was he not? A walking punchline for practically everybody beyond a small, diehard corps of Republicans keeping the candles lit for him. At his last major public appearance, he actually, really said the words, "That's your right. But as I leave you I want you to know — just think how much you're going to be missing. You won't have Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference," which is about as whiny a political suicide note as anyone has ever delivered in the history of politics: I am taking my ball and going home, because I am tired of everyone being so mean to me.

And then he came back.

This is why my teeth ache whenever people write articles with headlines like, "OK, so it's not going to be Sarah Palin in '12..." or write Palin off for 2012; sure, in a rational and well-ordered universe, Sarah Palin has somewhere around a zero percent chance of being elected President in 2012. And in a rational, well-ordered universe, the progressive successor to Franklin Roosevelt doesn't impale himself on a stupid little war that destroys his legacy. And in a rational universe, schizophrenic gunmen don't walk up to politicians and shoot them at close range.

But in our universe?

Sometimes, in our universe, things get just a little fucked.

Sweet dreams.